THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603210585
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
NOT OUT OF AFRICA
How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
MARY LEFKOWITZ
Basic Books. 222 pp. $24.
When George Orwell said, ``If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,'' he may have been warning against the 1990s. But he should've also said, ``Being an extremist means never having to footnote your sources.''
Take Afrocentrism, a romantically appealing but poorly substantiated school of thought claiming science, philosophy and democracy - the foundation garments of Western civilization - aren't Greek. They were actually stolen from Egypt by those ancient scoundrels, and European scholars covered up the crime for centuries.
Okay, it lacks the sleaze-allure of the Simpson case. But Not Out of Africa, a new book by classicist Mary Lefkowitz, makes clear she's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. She retaliates against Afrocentrism as thoroughly as a neutron bomb, initially targeting Martin Bernal, a Cornell Sinologist, and his multivolume Black Athena.
Bernal determined to take ``European cultural arrogance'' down a few pegs by reassigning the Greeks' achievements. Fine - except his research is loaded with errors and misstatements that a source-checking freshman could spot.
Bernal's work has been embraced on campuses eager to seem politically au courant, even bastions of pseudo-European stuffiness. Reviewing Black Athena for The New Republic was Lefkowitz's wake-up call.
But Bernal is mild compared to Dr. Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan, who gave Wellesley's Martin Luther King memorial lecture. He claims Aristotle came to Egypt with Alexander to loot the library at Alexandria, and stole his famous philosophy.
During a question period, Lefkowitz asked ben-Jochannan how that could be - the library wasn't built until after Aristotle's death. Consternation ensued; the resentful speaker was unable to answer the question. Students accused Lefkowitz of racism simply for asking the question. So much for the university as the marketplace of ideas and debate.
Lefkowitz saw what gives: ``A lecture at which serious questions could not be asked, and in fact were greeted with hostility . . . more like a political rally than an academic event . . . there was also the strange silence on the part of my colleagues.'' She believes it ``understandable'' that they feared being called racists, making today's academic atmosphere depressingly vivid, even to non-academics.
So Lefkowitz the loner went to war, systematically demolishing Afrocentric contentions. Her book could have been dull, but it is fascinating, even amusing reading.
The author traces Afrocentrism's conception from Freemasonry, a secret society whose convoluted ``Egyptian'' mysteries and rituals emanate from an old novel, Sethos, in which Abbe Terrasson described a complex system of religious rituals. Clueless about Egypt, he made up the details. The merits of Freemasonry aside, an 18th-century romance doesn't seem the soundest base for cultural history. Yet Afrocentrists often cite Terrasson as a factual source.
Lefkowitz explains why neither Socrates nor Cleopatra was black; why Plato did not go to Africa to crib philosophy and why we should care. Politically based movements like Afrocentrism teach untruths, encourage students to ignore the facts and evidence in favor of convenient omissions, half-truths, invented information. Nothing new, of course. Groups with similar tactics go under other names: ``white supremacists,'' ``neo-Nazis.''
Which illustrates the danger of teaching that human thought is motivated by race, instead of encouraging students to peer over the blindfolds of culture, race, nationality, religion, sex and ethnicity.
Well, sure - but what about black history? Exactly, says Lefkowitz. It took a knock-down fight for such history to enter curricula. Should it be replaced by a mythology based on an imaginary culture, the real achievements of sub-Saharan Africa, from Ghana to Great Zimbabwe, pushed aside in favor of the imaginings of a long-dead European?
Lefkowitz's unpopular assertions will mark her as a racist, in some circles. Her methods, orientation and goals are not those of Afrocentrists, whose operating procedures will allow them to brush off Not Out of Africa as a racist polemic. For extremists, evidence and history are clay to be molded into ``their'' version.
For all of Lefkowitz's research and scholarly chutzpah, if her book is aimed at Afrocentrists, she might as well shout into the wind. MEMO: Lenore Hart is a novelist who lives on the Eastern Shore. by CNB