It is February, the Black History Month, and I had the pleasure, on February 4, to attend this very daring and thought-provoking Zoom lecture, one of the many lectures offered by the Black History Nerds Saturday School.
What first comes to my mind, as a white person, as a white, non-American researcher, when hearing such a question, “what does it mean to be Black?”, is the expectation of a course or a conference revealing more and more instances of oppression and anti-African American discrimination in all walks of life. I was thus extremely surprised to see Dr Akua’s (Clark Atlanta University) totally different approach to this question: a lecture full of visuals (pictures, photos, and a video) which turned African slaves history into a truly empowering instrument – Egyptian kings, Empires, Pharaohs, and queens, instead of “niggers and bitches,” a pyramid and Egyptian statues inspiring the Lincoln Memorial and the Founding Fathers monuments on the Rushmore Mountain, intellectuals, and a famous university instead of slavery, illiteracy and ignorance.
To me, it came as an African-American 21st century response to François Bernier (1684), Carl Linnaeus (1735), Count Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc – mid-1700s), and Samuel Morton (1840 – Philadelphia – natural historian and professor at the Pennsylvania Medical College) theories of white race superiority. Dr Akua’s comparison between the heads of famous antic Egyptian personalities and contemporary African-American celebrities made me think precisely of Samuel Morton’s methods and his Crania Americana (1839), as described by Professor Edward Ball in his Life of a Clansman (2020). Samuel Morton was blond, with a high forehead, “a scientist who wishes to tell the story of human evolution,” doing his research on human heads, human skulls, more precisely, obtained from the U.S. Army, always at war with some Native tribes. To these he added African American skulls, “some of them taken from the death marches of enslaved people through the Appalachian range as they are sold ‘down the river’ to New Orleans.” And, yes, the skulls of whites, “borrowed from paupers’ graves and not returned.” What he compares are the shape, the jaw length, the skull capacity, and “how much tissue the brain case holds.” Thus, he obtains five races, among which the “Ethiopian” is “clearly joyous, flexible, and indolent,” while the “Caucasian” (Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, and the eastern horn of Africa) is certainly superior.
His conclusions are very welcome in the Deep South, in South Carolina, by the Charleston Medical Journal and Review: “We of the South should consider Samuel Morton as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.” And by zoology professor from Harvard, “Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born ethnographer who becomes Samuel Morton’s disciple,” who “writes and teaches for fifty years about the separation of the races in their origins.” As Professor Edward Ball concludes this chapter, “Samuel Morton sees himself as an impartial measurer of forms, a hunter who gathers evidence. In fact, he is among the early American philosophers of white supremacy. He is one of the first in this country to recruit the authority of science in praise of whiteness.”
Listening to Dr Akua’s Zoom lecture about “what does it mean to be Black?”, I see his comparisons as a well deserved response to such discriminating 19th century theories as Samuel Morton’s. And I will share some of his photos here.
For the dessert, I will put here the transcript of a most interesting video included in the lecture, and selected from his Reading Revolution Online:
Ahmed Baba and the University of Sankore
From the 1300s to the 1700s, Timbuktu was one of the greatest cities in all of Africa. Situated near the Niger River, this great center of learning was known throughout the land. It was also an important trading center for gold, salt, iron and books. Timbuktu had quite a reputation for educational excellence and wealth, so much so that students and scholars came from all over Africa, Asia and Europe to study at the famed University of Sankore. Being near the river gave people easy access to this thriving city of trade and education and attracted many people.
Ahmed Baba was the president of the University of Sankore for 30 years. During this time he upheld the African standard of excellence, running the university with great vision. Also during this time he authored 42 books. This means he wrote more than one book per year, in addition to his duties as president. Additionally, Ahmed Baba had over 1600 books that he owned in his personal library. This shows that he knew the power of books to transform the mind. To Africans who introduced the art of writing to the world, books were sacred and holy. Books were valued so much that people paid for books using only gold. The book a person desired to purchase would be placed on one side of a scale, and gold dust would be sprinkled on the other side of the scale, until the scales were balanced. Books in Timbuktu, and in the empires of Mali and Songhai, were literally their weight in gold. Because of this, the books industry was just as lucrative as the gold, salt and iron industries. People who studied at Timbuktu learned law, medicine and healing, writing and literature, astronomy, the study of the stars and agriculture, the study of farming and much more. They took their knowledge and understanding of what they learned back to other parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Some even came to America. History also shows us that virtually every home in Timbuktu had an extensive library of books and manuscripts.
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