Not Out of Africa
Will believers in the Athenian conspiracy be persuaded by these and other historical arguments? Perhaps some, like my student, will realize that Elizabeth Taylor’s skin color was not the most unhistorical aspect of Cleopatra. But many others will continue to believe that the Greeks stole African culture or Egyptian culture, without wishing to inquire what exactly they mean by African culture or Egyptian culture (or Greek culture). For historical truth is not what they seek. They seek, instead, a kind of religious truth, an uplifting sacred history of their own.
When Marcus Garvey first spoke about the Greeks stealing from the Africans, he was not creating a new historiography, he was creating a new mythology. The reasons are not far to seek. For black Americans (many of whom now, indeed, wish to be known as African Americans), the African origin of Greece is a myth of self-identification and self-ennoblement, the kind of “noble lie” that Socrates suggests is needed for the utopian state he describes in Plato’s Republic. Surely it is the Afrocentric view that is, to use Bernal’s term, the fabrication; but such fabrications may build confidence, and encourage marginalized groups to quit the margins and participate in the common culture. In that sense, they may be useful and even “noble.”
But hope is not enough of a reason for illusion. What constructive purpose will the myth of African origins really serve? If it causes us to subvert or even to ignore the truth about the past, it damages our ability, the ability of all of us, black and white, to judge fairly and accurately, which is the best purpose of education. And even if it helps black people to gain confidence, it will teach them, and any other people who believe the myth, that facts can be manufactured or misreported to serve a political purpose; that origins are the only measure of value; that difference is either a glory or a danger, when in fact it is a common, challenging fact of life; that the true knowledge of customs, language, and literature is unimportant for understanding the nature of a culture.
The Greeks, of all peoples, deserve least the fate to which the Afrocentrists have subjected them. The great historian Arnaldo Momigliano observed that
what I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude toward the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography earlier than the Greek or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods.
Momigliano was not a Greek. He was an Italian Jew, and a refugee from one of the most terrible political myths of all time, the not very noble lie of Jewish inferiority that provided the justification for the Holocaust. But the rational legacy of Greece belonged to him, too — exactly as it belongs to people of African descent, whatever their skin color or their exact place of origin. Like everyone in the European diaspora, and like everyone in the American melting pot, they should take pride in the Egyptians, in the Phoenicians, and in the Greeks, and give them each their due for their actual achievements, as well as for their contributions to other civilizations. For all these civilizations, like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.
