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Saturday, 29 March 2008 |
| | Osteological Measurements | | | | Among the criteria accepted in physical anthropology for classifying races, the osteological measurements are perhaps the least misleading (in contrast to craniometry) for distinguishing a black man from a white man. By this criterion, also, the Egyptians belong among the black races. This study was made by the distinguished German savant Lepsius at the end of the nineteenth
century and his conclusions remain valid; subsequent methodological progress in the domain of physical anthropology in no way undermines what is called the 'Lepsius canon' which, in round figures, gives the bodily proportions of the ideal Egyptian, short-armed and of negroid or negrito physical type. | | | | Blood Groups | | | | It is a notable fact that even today Egyptians, particularly in Upper Egypt, belong to the same Group B as the populations of western Africa on the Atlantic seaboard and not the A2 group characteristic of the white race prior to any crossbreeding. It would be interesting to study the extent of Group A2 distribution in Egyptian mummies, which present-day techniques make possible.
| | | | The Egyptian Race According to the Classical Authors of
| | | | Antiquity | | | | To the Greek and Latin writers contemporary with the ancient Egyptians the latter's physical classification posed no problems: the Egyptians were negroes, thick-lipped, kinky-haired and thin-legged; the unanimity of the author's evidence on a physical fact as salient as a people's race will be difficult to minimize or pass over. Some of the following evidence drives home the point. (a) Herodotus, 'the father of history', -480(?) to -425. With regard to the origins of the Colchians he writes: | | | | it is in fact manifest that the Colchidians are
Egyptian by race ... several Egyptians told me
that in their opinion the Colchidians were
descended from soldiers of Sesostris. I had
conjectured as much myself from two pointers,
firstly because they have black skins and
kinky hair (to tell the truth this proves
nothing for other peoples have them too) and
secondly, and more reliably for the reason that
alone among mankind the Egyptians and the
Ethiopians have practiced circumcision since
time immemorial. The Phoenicians and Syrians
of Palestine themselves admit that they learnt
the practice from the Egyptians while the
Syrians in the river Thermodon and Pathenios
region and their neighbors the Macrons say
they learnt it recently from the Colchidians.
These are the only races which practice
circumcision and it is observable that they do
it in the same way as the Egyptians. As
between the Egyptians themselves and the
Ethiopians I could not say which taught the
other the practice for among them it is
quite clearly a custom of great antiquity.
As to the custom having been learnt through
their Egyptian connections, a further strong
proof to my mind is that all those Phoenicians
trading to Greece cease to treat the pudenda
after the Egyptian manner and do not subject
their offspring to circumcision.
Herodotus reverts several times to the negroid character of the Egyptians and each time uses it as a fact of observation to argue more or less complex theses. Thus to prove that the Greek oracle at Dondona in Epirus was of Egyptian origin, one of his arguments is the following: '. . . and when they add that the dove was black they give us to understand that the woman was Egyptian. The doves in question - actually there were two according to the text - symbolize two Egyptian women who are said to have BEEN carried off from the Egyptian Thebes to found the oracles in Greece at Dodona and in Libya (Oasis of Jupiter Amon) respectively. Herodotus did not share the opinion of Anaxagoras that the melting of the snows on the mountains of Ethiopia was the source of the Nile floods. He relied on the fact that it
neither rains or snows in Ethiopia 'and the heat there turns men black'.
(b) Aristotle, -389 to -332, scientist, philosopher and tutor of Alexander the Great. | | | | In one of his minor works, Aristotle attempts, with unexpected naivete', to establish a correlation between the physical and moral natures of living beings and leaves us evidence on the Egyptian-Ethiopian race which confirms what Herodotus says. According to him, 'Those who are too black are cowards,
like for instance, the Egyptians and Ethiopians. But those who are
excessively white are also cowards as we can see from the example of women, the complexion of courage is between the two. (c) Lucian, Greek writer, +125(?) to +190. The evidence of Lucian is as explicit as that of the two previous writers. He introduces two Greeks, Lycinus and Timolaus, who start a conversation. Lycinus (describing a young Egyptian):
'This boy is not merely black; he has
thick lips and his legs are too thin. . .
his hair worn in a plait behind shows
that he is not a freeman.'
Timolaus: 'But that is a sign of really
distinguished birth in Egypt, Lycinus.
All freeborn children plait their hair
until they reach manhood. It is the
exact opposite of the custom of our ances-
tors who thought it seemly for old men to
secure their hair with a gold brooch to
keep it in placed) Apollodorus, first century before our era, Greek philosopher.
'Aegyptos conquered the country of the black-footed ones and called it Egypt after himself. (e) Aeschylus, -525(?) to -456, tragic poet and creator of Greek tragedy. In The Suppliants, Danaos, fleeing with his daughters, the Danaids, and pursued by his brother Aegyptos with his sons, the Aegyptiads, who seek to wed their cousins by force, climbs a hillock, looks out to sea and describes the Aegyptiads at the oars afar off in these terms: 'I can see the crew with their black limbs and white tunics. A similar description of the Egyptian type of man recurs a few lines later
in verse 745.
(f) Achilles Tatius of Alexandria.
He compares the herdsmen of the Delta to the Ethiopians and explains that they are blackish, like half-castes.
(g) Strabo, -58 to about +25. Strabo visited Egypt and almost all the countries of the Roman empire. He concurs in the theory that the Egyptians and the Colchoi are of the same race but holds that the migrations to Ethiopia and Colchoi had been from Egypt only
'Egyptians settled in Ethiopia and in Colchoi.'34 There is no doubt whatever as to Strabo's notion of the Egyptian's race for he seeks elsewhere to explain why the Egyptians are darker than the Hindus, a circumstance which would permit the refutation, if needed, of any attempt at confusing 'the Hindu and Egyptian races'.
(h) Diodorus of Sicily, about -63 to +14, Greek historian and contemporary of Caesar Augustus. According to Diodorus it was probably Ethiopia which colonized Egypt (in the Athenian sense of the term, signifying that, with overpopulation, a proportion of the people emigrate to new territory). The Ethiopians say that the Egyptians
`are one of their colonies,35 which was
led into Egypt by Osiris. They claim that
at the beginning of the world Egypt was
simply a sea but that the Nile, carrying
down vast quantities of loam from Ethiopia
in its flood waters, finally filled it in
and made it part of the continent. . . They
add that the Egyptians have received from
them, as from authors and their ancestors,
the greater part of their laws. | | | | i) Diogenes Laertius. He wrote the following about Zeno, founder of the stoic School (-333 to -261): 'Zeno son of Mnaseas or Demeas was a native of Citium in Cyprus, a Greek city which has taken in some Phoenician colonists.' In his Lives, Timotheus of Athens describes Zeno as having a twisted neck. Apollonius of Tyre says of him that he was gaunt, very tall and black, hence the fact
that, according to Chrysippus in the First Book of his Proverbs, certain people called him an Egyptian vine-shoot. (j) Ammianus Marcellinus, about +33 to +100, Latin historian and friend of the Emperor Julian. With him we reach the sunset of the Roman empire and the end of classical antiquity. There are about nine centuries between the birth of Aeschylus and Herodotus and the death of Ammianus Marcellinus, nine centuries during which the Egyptians, amid a sea of white races, steadily crossbred. It can be said without exaggeration that in Egypt one household in ten included a white
Asiatic or Indo-European slave. | | | | It is remarkable that, despite its intensity, all this crossbreeding should not have succeeded in upsetting the racial constants. Indeed Ammianus Marcellinus writes: ". . .the men of Egypt are mostly brown and black with a skinny and desiccated look."39 He also confirms the evidence already cited about the Colchoi: 'Beyond these lands are the heartlands of the Camaritae and the Phasis with its swifter stream borders the country of the Colchoi, an ancient race of Egyptian origin. | | | | This cursory review of the evidence of the ancient Graeco-Latin writers on the Egyptians' race shows that the extent of agreement between them is impressive and is an objective fact difficult to minimize or conceal, the two alternatives between which present-day Egyptology constantly oscillates. An exception is the evidence of an honest savant. Volney, who travelled in Egypt between +1783 and +1785, i.e. at the peak period of negro slavery, and made the following observations on the true Egyptian race, the same which produced the Pharaohs, namely the Copts:
All of them are puffy-faced, heavy eyed and
thick-lipped, in a word, real mulatto faces.
I was tempted to attribute this to the climate
until, on visiting the Sphinx, the look of it
gave me the clue to the egnima. Beholding
that head characteristically Negro in all
its features, I recalled the well-known passage
of Herodotus which reads: 'For my part I
consider the Colchoi are a colony of the Egyptians
because, like them, they are black skinned
and kinky-haired.' In other words the
ancient Egyptians were true negroes of the same
stock as all the autochthonous peoples of Africa
and from that datum one sees how their race,
after some centuries of mixing with the blood
of Romans and Greeks, must have lost the full
blackness of its original colour but retained
the impress of its original mould. It is even
possible to apply this observation very widely
and posit in principle that physiognomy is a
kind of record usable in many cases for disputing
or elucidating the evidence of history on the
origins of the peoples . . .
| | | | | After illustrating this proposition citing the case of the Normans, who 900 years after the conquest of Normandy still look like Danes, Volney adds: |
| | | | but reverting to Egypt, its contributions
to history afford many subjects for philosophic reflection. What a
subject for meditation is the present-day barbarity and ignorance of the Copts who were considered, born of the alliance
of the deep genius of the Egyptians and the
brilliance of the Greeks, that this race of
blacks who nowadays are slaves and the objects
of our scorn is the very one to which we owe our
arts, our sciences, and even the use of spoken word;
and finally recollect that it is in the midst of the peoples
claiming to be the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that
the most barbarous of enslavements
has been sanctioned and the question raised whether
black men have brains of the same quality as those of white men | | | | To this testimony of Volney, Champollion-Figeac, brother of Champollion the Younger, was to reply in the following terms: 'The two physical traits of black skin and kinky hair are not enough to stamp a race as negro and Volney's conclusion as to the negro origin of the ancient population of Egypt is glaringly forced and inadmissible.Being black from head to foot and having kinky hair is not enough to make a man a negro! This shows us the kind of specious argumentation to which Egyptology has had to resort since its birth as a science. Some scholars maintain that Volney was seeking to shift the discussion to a philisophic plane. But we have only to re-read Volney: he is simply drawing the inferences from crude material facts forcing themselves on his eyes and his conscience as proofs.
"The Egyptians had only one term to designate themselves:
kmt=the negroes (literally)." | | | | The Egyptians as They Saw Themselves | | | | It is no waste of time to get the views of those principally concerned. How did the ancient Egyptians see themselves? Into which ethnic category did they put themselves? What did they call themselves? The language and literature left to us by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic epoch supply explicit answers to these questions which the scholars cannot refrain from minimizing, twisting or 'interpreting.'
The Egyptians had only one term to designate themselves:
[hieroglyphics]=kmt=the negroes (literally) This is the strongest term existing in the Pharaonic tongue to indicate blackness; it is accordingly written with a hieroglyph representing a length of wood charred at the end and not crocodile scales.45 This word is the etymological origin of the well-known root Kamit which has proliferated in modern anthropological literature. The biblical root kam is probably derived from it and it has therefore been necessary to distort the facts to enable this root today to mean 'white' in Egyptological terms whereas, in the Pharaonic mother tongue which gave it birth, it meant 'coal black.'
In the Egyptian language, a word of assembly is formed from an adjective or a noun by putting it in the feminine singular. 'kmt' from the adjective [hieroglyphics] =km=black; it therefore means strictly negroes or at the very least black men. The term is a collective noun which thus described the whole people of Pharaonic Egypt as a black people.
In other words, on the purely grammatical plane, if one wishes to indicate negroes in the Pharaonic tongue, one cannot use any other word than the very one which the Egyptians used of themselves. Furthermore, the language offers us another term, [hieroglyphics] kmtjw=the negroes, the black men (literally)=the Egyptians, as opposed to 'foreigners' which comes from the same root km and which the Egyptians also used to describe themselves as a people as distinguished from all foreign peoples. These are the only
adjectives of nationality used by the Egyptians to designate themselves and both mean 'negro' or 'black' in the Pharonic language. Scholars hardly ever mention them or when they do it is to translate them by euphemisms such as the 'Egyptians' while remaining completely silent about their etymological sense. They prefer the expression [hieroglyphics] Rmt kmt=the men of the
country of the black men or the men of the black country.
In Egyptian, words are normally followed by a determinative which indicates their exact sense, and for this particuar expression Egyptologists suggest that [heiroglyphics] km=black and that the colour qualifies the determinative which follows it and which signifies 'country'. Accordingly, they claim, the translation should be 'the black earth' from the colour of the loam, or the 'black country', and not 'the country of the black men' as we should be inclined to render it today with black Africa and white Africa in mind. Perhaps so, but if we apply this rule rigorously to [hieroglyphics] =kmit, we are forced to 'concede that here the adjective "black" qualifies the determinative which signifies the whole people of Egypt shown by the two
symbols for "man" and "woman" and the three strokes below them which indicate the plural'. Thus, if it is possible to voice a doubt as regards the expression [hieroglyphics] =Kme, it is not possible to do so in the case of the two adjectives of nationality [hieroglyphics] kmt and kmtjw unless one is picking one's arguments completely at random.
It is a remarkable circumstance that the ancient Egyptians should never have had the idea of applying these qualificatives to the Nubians and other populations of Africa to distinguish them from themselves; any more than a Roman at the apogee of the empire could use a 'colour' adjective to distinguish himself from the Germani on the other bank of the Danube, of the same stock but still in the prehistoric age of development.
In either case both sides were of the same world in terms of physical
anthropology, and accordingly the distinguishing terms used related to level of civilization or moral sense. For the civilized Romans, the Germans, of the same stock, were barbarians. The Egyptians used the expression [hieroglyphics] =na-has to designate the Nubians; and nahas48 is the name of a people, with no colour connotation in Egyptian. it is a deliberate mistranslation to render it as negro as is done in almost all present-day publications.
| | | | The Divine Epithets | | | | Finally, black or negro is the divine epithet invariably used for the chief beneficent gods of Egypt, whereas all the malevolent spirits are qualified as desret=red; we also know that to Africans this form
applies to the white nations; it is practically certain that this held good
for Egypt too but I want in this chapter to keep to the least debatable
facts. The surnames of the gods are these:
[hieroglyphics] =kmwr=the 'Great Negro' for Osiris [hieroglyphics] =km=the black + the name of the god [hieroglyphics] =kmt=the black + the name of the goddess The km (black) [hieroglyphics] qualificative is applied to Hathor, Apis,
Min, Thoth, etc [hieroglyphics] set kmt=the black woman=Isis On the other hand 'seth', the sterile desert, is qualified by the term desret=red.
The wild animals which Horus fought to create civilization are qualified
as desret=red, especially the hippopotamus. Similarly the maleficent
beings wiped out by Thoth are Des= [hieroglyphics] =desrtjw=thr red ones; this term is the grammatical converse of Kmtjw and its construction follows the same rule for the formation of 'nisbes'. | | | | Witness of the Bible | | | | The Bible tells us. ' . . .the sons of Ham [were] Cush, and Mizraim [i.e.
Egypt], and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtechah. Generally speaking all Semitic tradition (Jewish and Arab) classes ancient Egypt with the countries of the blacks.
The importance of these depositions cannot be ignored, for these are peoples (the Jews) which lived side by side with the ancient Egyptians and sometimes in symbiosis with them and have nothing to gain by presenting a false ethnic picture of them. Nor is the notion of an erroneous interpretation of the facts any more tenable. | | | | Cultural Data | | | | Among the innumerable identical cultural traits recorded in Egypt and in present-day black Africa, it is proposed to refer only to circumcision and totemism.
| | | | According to the extract from Herodotus quoted earlier, circumcision is of African origin. Archaeology has confirmed the judgment of the Father of History for Elliott-Smith was able to determine from the examination of well-preserved mummies that circumcision was the rule among the Egyptians as long ago as the protohistoric era, i.e. earlier than -4000.
Egyptian totemism retained its vitality down to the Roman period and
Plutarch also mentions it. The researches of Amelineau6,60 Loret, Moret and Adolphe Reinach have clearly demonstrated the existence of an Egyptian totemic system, in refutation of the champions of the zoolatric thesis.
| | | | If we reduce the notion of the totem to that
of a fetish, usually representing an animal
of a species with which the tribe believes
it has special ties formally renewed at
fixed intervals, and which is carried into
battle like a standard; if we accept this
minimal but adequate definition of a totem,
it can be said that there was no country
where totemism had a more brilliant reign
than in Egypt and certainly nowhere where
it could be better studied. | | | | Linguistic Affinity | | | | Walaf, a Senegalese language spoken in the extreme west of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, is perhaps as close to ancient Egyptian as Coptic. An exhaustive study of this question has recently been carried out.63 In this chapter enough is presented to show that the kinship between ancient Egyptian and the languages of Africa is not hypothetical but a demonstrable fact which it is impossible for modern scholarship to thrust aside. As we shall see, the kinship is genealogical in nature. | | | | Egyptian Coptic Walaf | | | | =kef=to grasp, (Saidique dialect) kef=seize a prey
to take a strip keh=to tame 65
(of something)64
| | | | PRESENT PRESENT PRESENT | | | | kef i keh kef na
kef ek keh ek kef nga
kef et keh ere kef na
kef ef kef ef
kef es keh es kef ef na
kef es
kef n keh en kef nanu
kef ton keh etetu kef ngen
kef sen keh ey kef nanu | | | | PAST PAST PAST | | | | kef ni keh nei kef (on) na
kef (o) nek keh nek kef (on) nga
kef (o) net keh nere kef (on) na
kef (o) nef keh nef kef (on) ef na
kef (o) nes keh nes kef (on) es
kef (o) nen keh nen kef (on) nanu
kef (o) n ten keh netsten kef (on) ngen
kef (o) n sen67 keh ney68 kef (on) nanu | | | | EGYPTIAN WALAF | | | | (symbol) =feh=go away feh=rush off | | | | We have the following correspondences between the verb forms,
with identity of similarity of meaning: all the Egyptian verb
forms, except for two, are also recorded in Walaf. | | | | EGYPTIAN WALAF | | | | feh-ef feh-ef
feh-es feh-es
feh-n-ef feh-on-ef
feh-n-es feh-ones
feh-w feh-w
feh-wef feh-w-ef
feh-w-es feh-w-es
feh-w-a-ef feh-il-ef
feh-w-n-es feh-w-on-es
feh-in-ef feh-il-ef
feh-in-es fen-il-es
feh-t-ef feh-t-ef
feh-t-es feh-es
feh-tyfy feh-ati-fy
feh-tysy feh-at-ef
feh-tw-ef mar-tw-ef
feh-tw-es mar-tw-es
feh-kw(i) fahi-kw
feh-n-tw-ef feh-an-tw-ef
feh-a-tw-es feh-an-tw-es
feh-y-ef feh-y-ef
feh-y-es fey-y-es
EGYPTIAN WALAF
[symbol] =mer=love mar=lick (symbol)
mer-ef mar-ef
mer-es mar-es
mer-n-el mar-on-ef
mer-n-es mar-on-es
mer-w mar-w
mer-w-ef mar-w-ef
mer-w-n-f mar-w-on-ef
mer-w-n-es mar-w-on-es
mer-in-ef mar-il-ef
mer-in-es mar-il-es
mer-t-ef mar-t-ef
mer-t-es mar-t-es
mer-tw-ef mar-tw-ef
mer-tw-es mar-tw-es
mer-tyfy mar-at-ef
mer-t-tysy mar-aty-es
mar-aty-s
mar-aty-sy
mar-kwi mari-kw
mer-y-ef mar-y-ef
mer-y-es mar-y-es
mer-n-tw-ef mar-an-tw-ef
mer-n-tw-es mar-antw-es
mar-tw-on-ef
mar-tw-on-es
| | | | Egyptian and Walaf Demonstratives | | | | There are the following phonetic correspondents between Egyptian and Walaf demonstratives;
[This section was omitted because of the difficulty of reproducing the
symbols on the Internet]
These phonetic correspondences are not ascriable either to elementary
affinity or to the general laws of the human mind for they are regular
correspondences on outstanding points extending through an entire system,
that of the demonstratives in the two languages and that of the verbal
languages. It is through the application of such laws that it was possible
to demonstrate the existence of the Indo-European linguistic family.
The comparison could be carried to show that the majority of the phonemes remain unchanged between the two languages. The few changes which are of great interest are the following:
[This section was omitted because of the difficulty of reproducing the
symbols on the Internet]
It is still early to talk with precision of the vocalic accompaniment of the Egyptian phonemes. But the way is open for the rediscovery of the vocalics of ancient Egyptian from comparative studies with the languages of Africa.
| | | | Conclusion | | | | The structure of African royalty, with the king put to death, either really
or symbolically, after a reign which varied in length but was in the region of eight years, recalls the ceremony of the Pharaoh's regeneration through the Sed feast. Also reminiscent of Egypt are the circumcision rites mentioned earlier and the totemism, cosmogonies, architecture, musical instruments, etc., of Africa.71 Egyptian antiquity is to African culture what Graceo-Roman antiquity is to Western culture. The building up of a corpus of African humanities should be based on this fact.
It will be understood how difficult it is to write such a chapter in a work
of this kind, where euphemism and compromise are the rule. In an attempt to avoid sacrificing scientific truth, therefore, we made a point of suggesting three preliminaries to the preparation of this volume, all of which were agreed to at the plenary session held in 1971. 72 The first two led to the holding of the Cairo Symposium from 28 January to 3 February 1974. 73 In this connection I should like to refer to certain passages in the report of that symposium. Professor Vercoutter, who had been commissioned by Unesco to write the introductory report, acknowledged after a thorough discussion that the conventional idea that the Egyptian population was equally divided between blacks, whites and half-castes could not be upheld.. 'Professor
Vercoutter agreed that no attempt should be made to estimate percentages, which meant nothing, as it was impossible to establish them without reliable statistical data'. On the subject of Egyptian culture: 'Professor Vercoutter remarked that, in his view, Egypt was African in its way of writing, in its cullture and in its way of thinking'.
Professor Lecant, for his part, 'recognized the same African character in the Egyptian temperament and way of thinking'.
In regard to linguistics, it is stated in the report that 'this item, in
contrast to those previously discussed, revealed a large measure of
agreement among the participants. The outline by Professor Diop and the report by Professor Obenga were regarded as being very constructive'.
Similarly, the symposium rejected the idea that Pharaonic Egyptian was a Semitic language. 'Turning to wider issues, Professor Sauneron drew attention to the interest of the method suggested by Professor Obenga following Professor Diop. Egyptian remained a stable language for a period of at least 4500 years. Egypt was situated at the point of convergence of outside influences and it was to be expected that borrowing had been made from foreign languages, but the Semitic roots numbered only a few hundred as compared with a total of several thousand words. The Egyptian language could not be isolated from its African context and its origin could not be fully explained in terms of Semitic, it was thus quite normal to expect to find
related languages in Africa'.
The genetic, that is, non-accidental relationship between Egyptian and the African languages was recognized: 'Professor Sauneron noted that the method which had been used was of considerable interest, since it could not be purely fortuitous that there was a similarity between the third person singular suffixed pronouns in Ancient Egyptian and in Wolof, he hoped that an attempt would be made to reconstitute a palaeo-African language, using present-day languages as a starting point'.
In the general conclusion to the report it was stated that: 'Although the
preparatory working paper sent out by Unesco gave particulars of what was desired, not all participants had prepared communications comparable with the painstakingly researched contributions of Professors Cheikh Anta Diop and Obenga. There was consequently a real lack of balance in the discussions'.
A new page of African historiography was accordingly written in Cairo. The symposium recommended that further studies be made on the concept of race. Such studies have since been carried out, but they have not contributed anything new to the historical discussion. They tell us that molecular biology and genetics recognize the existence of populations alone, the concept of race being no longer meaningful. Yet whenever there is any question of the transmission of a hereditary taint, the concept of race in the most classic sense of the term comes into its own again, for genetics tells us that 'sickle-cell anaemia occurs only in negroes'. The truth is that all these 'anthropologists' have already in their own minds drawn the conclusions deriving from the triumph of the monogenetic theory of mankind without venturing to put them into explicit terms, for if mankind originated in Africa, it was necessarily negroid becoming white through mutation and
adaptation at the end of the last glaciation in Europe in the Upper
Palaeolithic; and is not more understandable why the Grimaldian negroids first occupied Europe for 10,000 years before Cro-Magnon Man-the prototype of the white race-appeared (around -2,000).
The idealogical standpoint is also evident in apparently objective studies. In history and in social relations, it is the phenotype, that is, the individual or the people as that individual or people is perceived, which is the dominant factor, as opposed to the genotype. For present-day genetics, a Zulu with the 'same' genotype as Vorster is not impossible. Does this mean that the history we are witnessing will put the two phenotypes, that is, the two individuals, on the same footing in all their national and social activities? Certainly not -- the opposition will remain not social but ethnic.
This study makes it necessary to rewrite world history from a more
scientific standpoint, taking into account the Negro-African component which was for a long time preponderant. It means that it is now possible to build up a corpus of Negro-African humanities resting on a sound historical basis instead of being suspended in mid-air. Finally, if it is true that only truth is revolutionary, it may be added that only rapprochement brought about on a basis of truth can endure. The cause of human progress is not well served by casting a veil over the fact.
The rediscovery of the true past of the African peoples should not be a
divisive factor but should contribute to uniting them, each and all, binding them together from the north to the south of the continent so as to enable them to carry out together a new historical mission for the greater good of mankind; and that is in keeping with the ideal of Unesco.
"Footnotes to:
ORIGIN OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS"
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