The "Hamitic Hypothesis" in Indigenous West African Historical Thought

I

This paper explores the use of versions of the "Hamitic hypothesis" by West African historians, with principal reference to amateur scholars rather than to academic historiography. Although some reference is made to other areas, the main focus is on the Yoruba, of southwestern Nigeria, among whom an exceptionally prolific literature of local history developed from the 1880s onwards.¹ The most important and influential work in this tradition, which is therefore central to the argument of this paper, is the History of the Yorubas of the Rev. Samuel Johnson, which was written in 1897 although not published until 1921.²

II

The concept of the "Hamitic hypothesis" appears to have been coined by the historian St Clair Drake, in 1959.³ In the historiography of Africa, it has conventionally been employed as a label for the view that important elements in the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, and more especially elaborated state structures, were the creation of people called "Hamites," who were presumed to be immigrants/invaders from outside, often specifically from Egypt or the upper Nile valley, and racially Caucasian (or "white"), who conquered the indigenous black African populations. One of the most influential proponents of this interpretation was C.G. Seligman, in a book originally published in 1930, which was reprinted down to the 1960s, and still formed part of the background reading of the earliest generation of academic historians of Africa (including myself). Seligman declared baldly that "the civilisations of Africa are the civilisations of Hamites," and that these Hamites were "European" (i.e., racially "white") pastoralists, who were able to conquer the indigenous agriculturalists because they were not only "better armed" (with iron weapons, which they are suggested to have introduced into sub-Saharan Africa), but also supposedly "quicker witted."⁴ The idea thus incorporated an explicit assumption of "white" racial superiority, and denied historical creativity to black Africans by attributing their cultural achievements to the impact of outsiders.

Although the overt racism of the "Hamitic hypothesis" was repudiated by the academic historiography of Africa which developed from the 1950s, the model of state formation through invasion and/or cultural influences from outside continued to exercise a powerful influence. The early works of the pioneer historians John Fage and Roland Oliver in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, continued to posit diffusion of the institution of "divine kingship" from Egypt to the rest of Africa, and the formation of the earliest states in the West African Sahel through the conquest of the indigenous (black) agricultural peoples by Saharan (white) pastoralists—the military superiority of the latter being now attributed to their possession of horses, rather than (or as well as) iron technology.⁵ A more recent reflection of such views is the interpretation of Dierk Lange, who posits the pervasive influence of "Canaanite-Israelite" models of cosmology and political organization in several areas of western Africa, including Yorubaland.⁶

The classic racialist version of the "Hamitic hypothesis" propounded by Seligman was, in fact, not the only, or even the original, version, but only the last in a series of transformations. The historiographical evolution of the "Hamitic hypothesis" was traced by Edith Saunders in a study published in 1969, whose general framework (if not all of its details) remains persuasive.⁷ The origin and first version of the idea of the "Hamites" derives from the Jewish Old Testament, in the story of the dispersal of the sons of Noah after the Flood in Genesis 9-10. In this account, Noah had three sons called Shem, Japheth, and Ham, who were held to be the ancestors of the various peoples known to the ancient Israelites. The division among these three branches of humanity was evidently geographical rather than racial, with the descendants of Shem representing peoples of the center and east (including the Israelites themselves), those of Japheth those to the north (including the Javan, or Greeks), and those of Ham those to the west and south—or perhaps more specifically, Egypt, with neighboring countries within its sphere of influence. The sons of Ham thus include persons who stand for...