Thomas Jefferson, president of the US from 1801 to 1809, should have known about Ethiopia, the Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui suggested in his keynote address to a conference held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 2007. I assisted Mazrui with research for that address, in which he grappled with the distorted Western images of Black people. The issue has assumed additional poignancy in the current global environment, and I present below an excerpt from Mazrui’s Cornell address, in his own words, with minimum adaptation.
For a long time, Ethiopia was in reality the one Black country, which could demonstrate to Europeans that it had a recorded history of many centuries, that it had a heritage of written as well as oral poetry, that it had centuries of recorded philosophy and theology, and that it had demonstrated feats of science and engineering in its monuments.
This is a remarkable story of cultural achievement in the context of the four intellectual charges, which Westerners had long levelled against the African people – lack of history, lack of poetry, lack of philosophy, and lack of science and technology.
Does Africa have history?
The charge that Africans were a people without history went back to W.G. Hegel and beyond. There was no room for the African continent in Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1821).
This belief that Black Africa was ahistorical continued well into the second half of the 20th century. As late as 1968, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, Hugh Trevor-Roper, proclaimed his infamous dogma: “Maybe in the future there will be African history. But at the moment there is none. There is only the history of the European in Africa . . .The rest is darkness – and darkness is not a subject of history.”
Anybody with the remotest familiarity with Ethiopian history would surely not have made such a remark. Even if Trevor-Roper knew nothing about Menelik I, or rejected the Solomonic credentials of the Royal Dynasty of Ethiopia, or accepted that the Queen of Sheba was part of Yemeni history rather than Ethiopian, Trevor-Roper should at least have known that the army of Menelik II defeated a European army from Italy at the Battle of Adowa in the year 1896. If Ethiopians were a people without history, would they have been strong enough to defeat a European army early in the 20th century?
Indeed, as an expert on European Nazism and fascism, Trevor-Roper should surely have been more familiar with the rich history of Ethiopia long before Italy invaded and occupied it from 1935 to 1941.
Are Africans capable of poetry?
With regard to the charge that Black people were incapable of great poetry, perhaps the most eloquent witness against the Black muse was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the phrase “all men are created equal” in the American Declaration of Independence, who later became the third president of the United States.
In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Paris, 1784), there occurs the following astonishing observation: “. . . never yet could I find that a black man had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration…”
Jefferson argued that: “…[Black] love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion has indeed produced a Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” He was referring to the enslaved woman who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry.
Again, Thomas Jefferson knew almost nothing about Abyssinia/Ethiopia. While he was proclaiming that Black people were a people without poetry, he seemed supremely ignorant of the historical fact that Ethiopians were writing poetry long before Jefferson’s ancestors in the British Isles were taught the Latin alphabet by their Roman conquerors.
Ethiopians have been dazzling each other with great poetic compositions even before some of them were Christianised in the fourth century of the Christian era. And when persecuted Arab Muslims sought asylum in Ethiopia in the seventh century, the refugees and their hosts probably recited to each other their respective sacred hymns. The Ethiopian legend of Solomon seducing Sheba was itself pure poetry.
What about African philosophy?
The third European allegation against the African people is that they were a race devoid of philosophers. Less candid than Hugh Trevor-Roper, there were Westerners who believed the following: “Maybe in the future there will be African philosophy, but at the moment there is none. We only have Europeans philosophizing about Africa – the rest is ethnology, and ethnology is not really philosophy.”
In reality, Ethiopians were philosophizing about nature, God, the Ark of the Covenant, love, sex, and family long before Western Europe was introduced to the ancient works of Plato and Aristotle. Ethiopia had been a source of great thinkers and great theologians across the centuries.
Technical innovations in Africa
The fourth basic European assumption was whether the African peoples were a pre-technological ethnicity, incapable of scientific feats. Indeed, Negritude as a modern philosophical and literary movement takes pride in Africa’s pre-technological innocence. As Aime Cesaire of Martinique put it: “… My negritude [my blackness] is no tower and no cathedral; it delves into the deep, red flesh of the soil.”
But, in reality, Ethiopia had built the equivalent of Cathedrals. It had carved out the sunken churches of Lalibela, a major engineering achievement. It had built the castles of Gondar. It had built impressive obelisks that were attractive enough to be stolen by conquerors like Italy and to have perhaps inspired the Washington monument in the American capital.
As compared with 19th-century European industrialization, Ethiopia was still technologically marginal. However, as compared with earlier estimates of what Black people were capable of achieving, Ethiopia had the credentials of a technological vanguard.
In short, Ethiopians were thus a Black people who could successfully refute racist allegations that Black people were fundamentally ahistoric, non-poetic, pre-philosophical, and pre-scientific.
Contributed by Seifudein Adem
