Like relics from a bygone era, these figures with their colorful outfits and flamboyant theories still surface on university campuses, community centers, and social media. In Harlem, there is Leonard Jeffries, who taught Black Studies at the City University of New York before he was discharged for his rhetoric about “ice people,” “sun people,” and more recently “sand people.” Down the road at Columbia University, one can find Abdul Nanji, a piteous character, a tutor of Swahili language, who also spouts theories of Asian invasions of Africa. Further south in Philadelphia, Molefi Asante at Temple University holds forth on how the Islamic invasion of Africa destabilized the entire continent, though his more recent thesis is that it was a combination of Marxism and Islam that derailed “The Black Movement.” Asante made headlines in the early 1990s with his claims that Cleopatra was black (and not Greek Macedonian), and that the Greeks stole Egypt’s heritage. This argument would prompt Wellesley classics professor, Mary Lefkowitz, to publish her polemic Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth (1996), which would trigger more mudslinging and multiple lawsuits.
These were the culture wars of the early 1990s, as distant as Operation Desert Storm, or Public Enemy topping the charts. Today’s American youth are not particularly invested in North African antiquity or Cleopatra’s skin color. And yet a few weeks ago, Afrocentrism was trending, as were names and rhetoric last heard three decades ago. It was déjà vu, except now it was on Twitter with lots of DNA-talk.
The hashtag #stopafrocentricconference took off in late January. Amr el-Kady, a young Egyptian activist posted a thread, warning that “something dangerous” was going to happen in Aswan: a so-called “Afrocentrist University” was going to hold a conference in Upper Egypt, and the choice of Aswan was deliberate, because this movement exploits ethnic and cultural difference, and aims to “polarize” and separate Nubian youth from Egyptian society. El-Kady cautioned that the Afrocentric movement would use “counterfeit” history to destabilize the country, tear up its national fabric and create fitna (strife). He attached an ad for the “One Africa: Returning to the Source Conference” sponsored by the New York-based Akhet Tours and Hapi, to be held in Aswan in late February, in honor of Black History Month. The conference promised to bring together “some of the world’s eminent scholars of African history” who would “unpack the historical connectivity and confluence of African people as they migrated throughout the continent.” Soon Egyptian Twitter lit up with clips of Afrocentrists giving tours of the Pyramids and talking about Kemet (when Egypt was a “black land”). A quote by organizer Solange Ashby went viral, “What about the usurpation of African history in Egypt by the Arabs who only arrived in 642 CE?” A young woman working for the Ministry of Tourism put out a video decrying the Afrocentrists’ attempts to steal “our” history. Another activist said Egyptians should join forces with the Amazigh people, Native Americans, and Polynesians who were also having their history appropriated by Afrocentrists.
Then a clip began circulating of Zaki Hawas, the controversial former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, talking about how Afrocentrists had protested his lecture at a museum in Philadelphia because he refused to perform DNA tests on mummies, and questioned the right of Black Americans (who are largely of West and Central African descent) to lay claim to civilizations in northeast Africa or the Nile Valley. Hawas has in the past referred to Afrocentrists, (and their more recent iterations, Hoteps, Kemetists, and Foundationalists) as “Pyramidiots.” Ironically, when US president Barack Obama visited Egypt in June 2009, Hawass was tasked with giving him a tour of the pyramids. Memorably, inside the Tomb of Qar, Obama would spot the hieroglyph of a pharaoh and exclaim, “That looks like me! Look at those ears!” Soon thereafter a conspiracy theory emerged claiming that Obama was a reincarnation of the pharaoh Akhenaton, (though as the Libyan and Syrian civil wars dragged on Islamists responded that Obama was the Dajjal (the Deceitful Messiah), rather than a cloned pharaoh. Hawass the Egyptologist has since argued that the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is Mentuhotep II.
By mid-February, the One Africa conference was canceled. More racial vitriol ensued as Egyptian activists claimed victory, and American observers saw the entire brouhaha as evidence of an abiding Arab racism. At the heart of this imbroglio is a sense on both sides of the Atlantic of dashed expectations and solidarity betrayed, that the sacrifices and comradeship of past decades had not been reciprocated. Grand expectations were forged in the early 1960s when a number of African American intellectuals, such as Malcolm X, Shirley Graham DuBois, Julian Mayfield, and Maya Angelou spent time in Cairo. They supported the Nasserist revolution, and saw themselves and Egypt, as part of a rising Africa and third world. W. E. B. Du Bois would famously write a poem: “Beware, white world, that great black hand which Nasser’s power waves.” Malcolm X would declare “my heart is in Cairo,” and describe how an encounter with a “white” Algerian revolutionary led him to redefine his understanding of Africa and black nationalism.
By the early 1970s, however, this Islam-friendly black nationalism was being challenged by an Afrocentrist movement that was staunchly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Islam, according to this narrative, had done as much damage, if not more to Africa, as Christianity had, and the Arabs were “white invaders” on African soil, akin to European settlers, who conquered the New World. In 1971 Chancellor Williams published The Destruction of African Civilization, which would emerge as one of the founding texts of the Afrocentrist movement. Williams described how since the time of pharaonic Egypt, Arabs had attempted to conquer Africa while Nubians and Ethiopians heroically resisted the white “Arab-Asian” effort to destroy the single black kingdom that originally extended from the shores of the Mediterranean to the source of the Nile. Molefi Asante would write, “The Arabs, with their jihads, or holy wars, were thorough in their destruction of much of the ancient [Egyptian] culture,” but fleeing Egyptian priests dispersed across the continent spreading Egyptian knowledge.
Scholars have exhaustively refuted these claims showing North Africans have always been multi-hued, and there is no evidence of a black North Africa obliterated by invaders. One prominent geographer writes, “It was not that Arabs physically displaced Egyptians. Instead, the Egyptians were transformed by relatively small numbers of immigrants bringing in new ideas, which, when disseminated, created a wider ethnic identity.” Another historian argues that both skeletal and ancient pictorial evidence “show ancient Nubians as an African people fundamentally the same as modern ones” and that the advent of the Arabs “has had a powerful linguistic, religious and cultural impact but has … not had a great influence on the appearance of the people.” Even Cheikh Anta Diop, the great Senegalese thinker, has called the belief that Arab invasions caused mass racial displacement into sub-Saharan Africa a “figment of the imagination.”
Multiple scholars have covered these debates. More interesting for our purposes is why did Middle Easterners, almost overnight, go from being comrades-in-struggle to racial intruders in both Africa and American cities? Observers have noted that the decades-old Sudanese civil war drew African-American attention to anti-black racism in the Nile Valley. But the Sudanese conflict began in 1983—after the emergence of Afrocentrism—and the Afrocentrists have expressed little interest in state policy, or joining local coalitions to defend Nubian rights or counter anti-black racism. Others have noted that the increase of Middle Eastern grocers in American cities after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 created resentment, but Middle Eastern merchants have been peddling their wares in American cities since the 1930s (as the history of the Nation of Islam and W.D Fard attests.) Why did these immigrant grocers come to be seen as blood-sucking exploiters only in the early 1980s?
The shift in African-American opinion seems more likely linked to broader geopolitical shifts following the 1967 War. Starting in the mid-1950s, Egypt was clearly supporting the African- American struggle, offering scholarships to students in the segregated South, and providing diplomatic support in international institutions such as the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations. Similarly, Algeria offered diplomatic support and gave refuge to the Black Panthers. Through the 1960s, Cairo and Algiers supported liberation movements across the African continent. In the early 1970s, both Algeria and Egypt abandoned this position of support for black radical protest, as they joined the American camp in the Cold War (with Algeria expelling the Panthers in 1973 in exchange for a $1 billion natural gas agreement with the US). Ironically, in Egypt, the turn away from Africa happened under the leadership of Anwar Sadat, the Nubian president, who told American journalist Barbara Walters that he was tired of how the Soviet Union was treating Egypt like “a central African country.”
Equally important to understanding this shift in opinion is the role of domestic lobbies in the US—in particular evangelical and Zionist groups, aided by a loose coalition of liberal and conservative activists, writers and state officials,…
