(Against the Egypt-Centered Narrative of African History — We Do No Service to the Project of Giving Africans Their Just Historical Due If We Continue to Pla…

(Against the Egypt-Centered Narrative of African History — We Do No Service to the Project of Giving Africans Their Just Historical Due If We Continue to Plant Our Feet in One Region of the Continent and Look Outward from There, to Privilege Egypt as the Source for Africa’s Acquisition of “Civilization” Differing Hardly at All from the Racialist Views of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — All One Has Done Is Plant One’s Feet a Little Farther Southward, to Glorify Egypt and Make It the Source for the Rest of Africa of Something Called Civilization Still Treating the Rest of Africa as Peripheral and Its Peoples’ Accomplishments as Derivative): In the case of Africa, we also do no service to the project of giving Africans their just historical due if we continue to plant our feet in one region of the continent and look outward from there. To privilege Egypt as the source for Africa’s acquisition of some intangible and subjective value judgment called “civilization” differs hardly at all from the racialist views of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All one has done is plant one’s feet a little farther southward — not in the Levant and Mesopotamia, or in southern Europe, but in Egypt. To glorify Egypt and to make it the source for the rest of Africa of something called civilization still treats the rest of Africa as peripheral to world history. If we do this, we continue still to view the accomplishments of the rest of its peoples as derivative. This passage strikes at the heart of the Afrocentric counter-narrative with the same precision that Ehret has deployed against the Eurocentric one. The Afrocentric tradition, in its laudable desire to claim Africa’s place in world history, has too often replaced one center with another — substituting Egypt for Greece, the Nile Valley for the Fertile Crescent, pharaohs for Roman emperors — while leaving intact the underlying assumption that history radiates outward from a single civilizational center. Ehret refuses both the Eurocentric and the Egypt-centered frameworks. His argument is not that Africa’s history begins with Egypt, nor that Egypt’s achievements should be attributed to sub-Saharan influences. His argument is that the entire framework of center and periphery is wrong — that history does not radiate outward from any single point, that every region of the continent was independently creative, and that the attempt to anoint Egypt as the fount of African civilization is merely a more generous version of the same hierarchical thinking that placed Greece at the center of Western history.