1930–1967: (Seligman’s Races of Africa as Racist Pseudoscience Still in Print — Charles Gabriel Seligman’s The Races of Africa Published in 1930 Being Hardly…

1930–1967: (Seligman’s Races of Africa as Racist Pseudoscience Still in Print — Charles Gabriel Seligman’s The Races of Africa Published in 1930 Being Hardly More Than a Racist Tract Masquerading as Scholarship, Oxford University Press and the International African Institute to Their Mutual Great Discredit Having Reissued It in 1957 and Again in 1967 Well After Its Unscientific Nature Had Become Widely Recognized, the Book Unfortunately Still Being in Print and Available Online to the Unsuspecting, the “Hamitic Hypothesis” That Seligman Propagated — the Claim That Every Significant Cultural Achievement in Sub-Saharan Africa Was the Work of Lighter-Skinned “Hamitic” Invaders from the North — Having Poisoned African Studies for Decades and Contributed Directly to the Ideology of the Rwandan Genocide): Most notoriously, Charles Gabriel Seligman’s *The Races of Africa* (1930) is hardly more than a racist tract masquerading as scholarship. Oxford University Press and the International African Institute, to their mutual great discredit, reissued it in 1957 and again in 1967, well after its unscientific nature had become widely recognized. Unfortunately, it is still in print and available online to the unsuspecting. Ehret’s contempt is barely contained, and rightly so. Seligman’s book was the primary vehicle through which the “Hamitic hypothesis” — the claim that every significant cultural achievement in sub-Saharan Africa was the work of lighter-skinned “Hamitic” invaders from the north — entered the mainstream of Western scholarship. The hypothesis was not merely wrong. It was catastrophically destructive. In Rwanda, Belgian colonial administrators used the Hamitic hypothesis to construct an ethnic hierarchy between Tutsi (whom they classified as “Hamitic” and therefore racially superior) and Hutu (whom they classified as “Bantu” and therefore racially inferior), issuing identity cards that hardened fluid social categories into fixed racial ones. The ideology of the 1994 genocide — the Hutu Power movement’s characterization of Tutsis as alien invaders who must be expelled from Rwanda — drew directly on the racial categories that Seligman’s book had provided with the imprimatur of Oxford University Press. That this book remains in print in the twenty-first century is an indictment not only of the publishers who profit from it but of the scholarly establishment that has failed to insist on its definitive repudiation.