A Passage to Afrotopia

Book Discussed:
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1998. 313 pp.

[T]here is a strong possibility that Hyksos princes of Egypto-Semitic culture and language actually established colonies in Greece and set up long-lasting dynasties in the 18^th and 17^th centuries BC.

--Martin Bernal, Black Athena II

Other invasions were to come. [. . .] The Persians under Darius the Great took over, and their domination of Egypt lasted from 525 to 404 B.C. with the assistance of Greek mercenaries. [. . .] Toward the end of Greek domination, the expansion of the Roman Empire had transferred the real center of power to Rome. Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome--the continuing process of transforming a black civilization into a near-white civilization long before the Christian era.

--Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization

Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.

--Psalms 68:31

The Afrocentric intellectual tradition, both learned and popular, responsible for the historiographies of grandeur, decline, and redemption that have surfaced in the African American consciousness has been dedicated to the human task of promoting "a sense of collective worth despite a history of persistent oppression." African American historical consciousness is not only concerned with "African centered constructions of the past," it is also equally concerned with fashioning a vision of a better future (Moses 17). In Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, Wilson Jeremiah Moses argues that it is crucial to distinguish various strands of Afrocentrism from the Egyptomorphic variety that dominates the tradition, not for the more obvious reasons (occasional controversies), but in order to describe the "truly complex origins [of Afrocentric thought] in enlightenment Christianity, eighteenth-century progressivism, and black resistance to white supremacy" (15-16):

Americans and particularly African Americans, are reputed to be incurable optimists, and are said to view history as the unstoppable sweep of progress toward the social perfection of a new Jerusalem. The enlightenment belief in the power of science combined with the Protestant belief in the possibility of a perfect Christian state led to a belief that America could become the perfect society. But some historians do not accept the idea that the American perception of history has been so blissfully uncomplicated. They recognize that Americans have always entertained, simultaneously with their progressivism and perfectionism, a less optimistic teleology. Despite the optimism supposedly prevalent in both the American enlightenment and in evangelical Christianity, another, more somber, view of history had a currency in American thought at the end of the eighteenth century. (52-53)

The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectual environment that had been assimilated by black American men and women of letters was preoccupied with Jeffersonian notions of history and race mixing, notably, a mutability theory (based on Constantin-François Volney's historiography of decline) that associated slavery with cultural instability on the grounds that "[s]lavery violated both divine and natural law in two important respects: it kept human beings in a state of unnatural bondage, and it threatened the natural order by occasioning the mixing of two distinct races" (54).

From this line of thinking according to Moses's Afrotopia emerged two lines of reasoning/historicizing. One was the belief among black intellectuals (Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnett, and Maria Stewart) that slavery was a sin and it led to the demise of great civilizations, and therefore spelled the fate of the peculiar institution and American society. This historiography of decline echoed a belief in the fragility of civilization. The other suggested that since the infusion of Negro blood determined one's membership in the black race, the builders of ancient Egypt who introduced the arts and sciences to the world were indeed the ancestral legacy of African Americans, refuting racial amalgamation theories to the contrary.

The attraction of early African American intellectuals to Egypt did not take place without complications. The...