One cannot help agreeing with Howe’s (and Lefkowitz’s) identification of the deficiencies endemic to that genre: the poor scholarship; the amateurish, autodidactic approach to grand historical and comparative themes without systematic use of obvious sources and obvious methods; the Afrocentrist authors’ manifest and deliberate isolation from current debates and current advances in the fields of scholarship they touch on; and the occasional lapses into Black racism. On all these points Howe has very sensible things to say.

Howe asserts himself as one primarily interested in the politics of history writing, but he fails to elaborate on the formidable philosophical question of what constitutes truth in historical analysis.

(d) ‘Contemporary Africa is a patchwork quilt of numerous distinct local cultures, each supported by a distinct language and each giving rise to a distinct ethnic identity, in the light of which broad perspectives on continental cultural continuity going back to the remoter past much be relegated to the realm of ideology and illusion’

Phrased in this way, these paradigms, although largely taken for granted by the scholars working in their context, are in principle testable hypotheses. Although they are not intrinsically ideological, unmistakably they well attuned to a hegemonic North Atlantic perspective on the world. They postulate a world which is neatly compartmentalized; incomparably more so than would be suggested not only by the globalising experience of our own time, but also by the demonstrable spread of agricultural techniques, weaponry, musical instruments, languages, belief systems including world religions, formal systems such as board games, divination methods, myths and symbolism, across the African continent and in considerable (though painfully understudied) continuity with the rest of the Old World, and even the New World. Under such compartmentalisation, a whole mythical geopolitics comes into being: the mystery and mystique of Europe — more recently: of the North Atlantic in general — can be maintained as a solid ideological power base for colonialism and postcolonial hegemony; Egypt, Africa, African cultures, remain the ultimate other, to the North Atlantic, but also to one another; a conceptual and geopolitical ‘divide and rule’ keeps them in their subordinate place vis-à-vis the North Atlantic; and the basic flow of achievement is defined as going from north to south, while the hegemonically undesirable idea of counter-flows in a northerly direction is ruled out. These may be testable hypothesis, but they are very close to geopolitical myths.

If our four paradigms (a) through (d) can be demonstrated to have considerable hegemonic ideological potential (not to say that they are downright Eurocentric and racist), their inverses are likely to have a similar but opposite ideological charge. These inverses would stress historical cultural continuity:

(a inverse) between Greece and the ancient Near East including Ancient Egypt;

(b inverse) between prehistoric cultures situated on the Africa continent south of the Tropic of Cancer (23°27’ North), and Ancient Egypt;

(c inverse) between Ancient Egypt and latter-day African cultures;

(d inverse) between latter-day African cultures even regardless of the influence of Ancient Egypt.

Contrary to what Howe claims, the evidence on parallels between Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa is massive, though uneven.[6]

Howe’s good intentions have not prevented him from endorsing a view of world history which is potentially hegemonic, Eurocentric, and mythical, and which therefore is not preferable to the Afrocentrist alternative he fights.

I will overlook Howe’s occasional lapses into polemical overkill. More relevant is that scholarly reputations are readily sacrificed on the altar of Howe’s indignation vis-à-vis Afrocentrism, and the more readily, the less Howe knows of their specialist field: Clyde Ahmad Winters, Herodotus, Henry Frankfort, Frobenius, Sergi. These ancient and modern scholars have one thing in common which makes them unwelcome in the common-sense, main-steam paradigmatic world to whose authority Howe appeals. They all had the ability to think across established cultural and geopolitical boundaries, whether this meant explaining the origin of the Persian wars in a complex context encompassing the entire Ancient World, or lumping Egypt and Mesopotamia in one grand argument, or stressing the essential continuity between West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia, when it comes to somatic traits, kinship patterns, languages, and symbolism. Not surprisingly, Howe’s villains appear as intellectual heroes in one of my own books in progress.

The case of Frobenius is particularly instructive. The leading Africanist of his generation (early twentieth century), he became the major single inpiration of Afrocentrism. In addition to other allegations (some of which may be only too true but none of which should be treated anachronistically), Howe reproaches Frobenius (p. 116) for stressing outside influences on African cultures. Such alleged emphasis on Frobenius’s part (which amounts to a distortion of his work anyway) certainly does not fit in the Afrocentrist orientation, yet is the inescapable implication of global cultural exchanges percolating since at least the Upper Paleolithic. In fact, we encounter here a fifth main-stream paradigm:

(e) ‘There have been no substantial non-African influences on African cultures’.

Beyond the unmistakable defects of current Afrocentrism, glows the promise of a bright future, where thanks to Afrocentrism’s inspiring reversal of accepted hegemonic paradigms, we may hope to come much closer to the empirical, demonstrable truth concerning such contributions to mankind’s world-wide culture as have emerged, over the millennia, from the African continent.