Africa and Africans in Antiquity (review)

Edwin Yamauchi has produced a very telling book with the publication of Africa and Africans in Antiquity. It is at once the best re-statement of the traditionalist perspective on ancient Africa and at the same time a symbol of what happens when Eurocentric scholars talk among themselves. I do not believe that it is possible to discover a better overview of the traditional view of Africa in Antiquity than this collection of essays by quite distinguished scholars of ancient Africa. All of the writers for this volume have credentials that suggest their work in the field is long and credible in academic circles. To the credit of Edwin Yamauchi, he has collected the papers of this distinguished cadre of scholars in an attractive volume.

Often a reviewer is able to say that a book is uneven in the strength of its contributors; this is not really the situation in this case. Africa and Africans in Antiquity is consistent in both the quality of the writing and the perspective of the contributors. The book emerged from conference papers delivered 1-2 March 1991 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, under the auspices of the E. E. McClellan Lecture Fund and the Departments of Art, Classics, Geography, Sociology and Anthropology. The nine scholars whose papers were delivered at the conference and the two additional scholars added to the collection represent a formidable who's who in the field of African antiquity. In this sense, the book is a remarkable achievement of consistency.

Of course its beauty as an intellectual project covers a multitude of problems easily revealed when one scrapes the surface of many of the arguments made in the book. I am the first to admit that books often arrive long after their time has come and gone. The fact that the book appears ten years after the papers were presented, and new information emerges, is not the most compelling issue; authors and editors often cannot dictate the publication date of their works and many good publications cannot find a publisher.

However, the most compelling issues for me are in two general categories. In the first place, the book suffers from a lack of theoretical breadth and in the second place it lacks any commitment to the serious scholarship done by African and African American scholars, with the notable exception of the work by the Eurocentric Frank Snowden. Indeed, even Snowden fails to fully understand or grasp the paradigm shift in the thinking done about African antiquity by continental and diasporan Africans.

Snowden is the best example of the African scholar who cannot see beyond the Eurocentric worldview and thus is not able to disentangle himself from the web of Europe's suffocating racism toward Africa. Although Snowden has done meticulous work, unearthing details about Africa's past, he has done so from the standpoint of Africa as an object and Europe as a subject. Thus, his essay "Attitudes towards Blacks in the Greek and Roman World" sets us in the wrong direction. What about attitudes of Greeks in the Nubian and Kemetic World? But alas, this is much too deep for Snowden whose aim is to suggest that blacks were important to the Greeks and Romans as if ancient Egyptians and Nubians appeared when they were recognized in Greek literature. Most contemporary African scholars could care less about what the attitudes of Greeks and Romans were in regards to Africans. What they want to know is about the agency of Africans themselves in antiquity. I don't believe Snowden is able to detach himself from his Eurocentric training long enough to notice that he is asking the wrong question. When Yamauchi entitled his book Africa and Africans in Antiquity, it was an advance in thinking because he did not consciously tie it to the Greeks and Romans. Perhaps there is a place for such orientation but it...