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I did not bother to challenge you a few years ago when you said that the phrase, "The real McCoy" did not, in fact refer to Elijah McCoy. whose twenty-five inventions of lubricators (1872-1898) made, among other advantages, train travel more efficient. I was taught about his gifts to humankind in my segregated Georgia school; perhaps you were not in segregated Kentucky schools.
However, I cannot stay silent when Grant Barnette refers to the pharaohs of Egypt/Kmt in antiquity as from the "Middle East."
The pharaohs were from dynasties in Egypt/Kmt, a country in the continent of Africa, a country whose culture was informed by Kush and other nations going toward the equator not toward the Mediterranean.
It is lamentable that in the 21st Century one would need to challenge supremacists views!
Mrs. Tchaiko Kwayana, National Board Certified 1995-2005, AVID & GATE Certified
torpeau said:
When I look up "Middle East," my dictionary says: "an extensive area of southwestern Asia and northern Africa, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to Pakistan and including the Arabian peninsula."
My geography is not strong, but my reference materials are. Egypt does, in fact, lie on the continent of Africa. Still, almost all of the reference materials I have consulted include Egypt in their definition of "Middle East." Interestingly, the same references also include Egypt in the definition of North Africa. Its unique position, it seems, allows for Egypt to be considered both at once.
My mind races to the great candy vs. breath mint debate. Or for us geeks, the great wave / particle paradox.
I'm neither a geographer nor an anthropologist, but I have always thought of the "Middle East" as the parts of Africa and Asia that are (with the exception of Israel) mostly Muslim, largely desert, and inhabited mostly by lighter-skinned people, such as the Arabs; an analogue of the ancient Caliphate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Age-of-caliphs.png) excepting the parts of Europe which were later re-conquered by the Catholic church (such as much of Spain). Of the African countries, I would include Lybia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. I often hear it contrasted in discussion with "Sub-Saharan" Africa, which is largely savanna and rain forest and largely inhabited by darker-skinned people.
Ancient Egypt pre-dated all of that, of course, so maybe it's better to say that Pharaohs ruled in "what is now considered the Middle East?" Is that level of specificity really necessary?
Anyway, I'm sure Grant wasn't being a "supremacist" of any kind.
I wouldn't reference Ancient Egypt with the contemporary Middle East due to cultural connotations contained in the Middle East. The Arabs didn't come to Egypt until several centuries after the pharaohs were gone. Islam and Christianity didn't even exist as religions for the vast part of Ancient Egyptian history. That being said, the first claim about the Black African roots of Egyptian culture are far from accepted in the scholarly community.
crestmere said:
I wouldn't reference Ancient Egypt with the contemporary Middle East due to cultural connotations contained in the Middle East. The Arabs didn't come to Egypt until several centuries after the pharaohs were gone. Islam and Christianity didn't even exist as religions for the vast part of Ancient Egyptian history. That being said, the first claim about the Black African roots of Egyptian culture are far from accepted in the scholarly community.
Ah, the "scholarly community!" That's the rub! Which apricots? Grown Where? (to steal a line from the late Adele Davis)
Read the works of the Senegalese Anthropologist and Linguist, the late Cheik Anta Diop, Ph.D., or those of the Congolese authority on languages of antiquity including the pharonic languages, Theophile Obenga, Ph.D. (Obenga, a historian as well, knows Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, and "practicing" Arabic and Syriac.), or Chinua Achebe's essay in Another Africa which traces the origins of the stereotyping of Africa. Should researchers of this topic about Egypt's look toward Kush/Nubia for influence and to re-confirm Egypt's geographical and cultural setting in Africa need the scholarship to come from a European scholar, then see the many works of Basil Davidson.
There are several relatively young African scholars whose writings on this topic are published. I would give the link of one but fear that I will lose this post if I switch to my desktop. So, again, "Which Apricots? Grown Where?" in a world without Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's "re-memory." May we reclaim that memory and begin, after a 500 year hiatus, to heal from the embedded racism bred from colonialism and enslavement.
Tchaiko Kwayana
(http://tinyurl.com/kog7ww)
I have to agree to that. In the historical framework, to describe Egypt as part of the middle east would be an over simplification. It would be like calling the Greek city states European. They were in the area we call Europe, but while most of the European were illiterate, semi-nomadic bands; the Greeks were debating logic and writing about it on vellum.
Calling ancient Egypt a part of the middle east would be wrong because the cultural exchanges between Egypt and Rome (and earlier Egypt and the Phoenicians) put them clearly in the Mediterranean sphere rather than the Indian Ocean. The Egyptian links to the middle east were not solidified until the expansion of Islam. The Egyptians of the empire were no more middle eastern than the Ethiops, or the Kushites.
But there is a distinction between referring to the Pharoahs as "middle eastern" and referring to the "Middle East." It is very common, unless talking to an academic community of experts on the topic at hand, to refer to locations based on the current geographic terms.
When Columbus or Leif Ericson sailed to the Americas, they were not then called "the Americas." Yet few, academics and laymen alike, would balk at such a statement. Such statements are made in lectures, classes, and textbooks without apology. It is not supremacism that is at the foundation, but communication.
And, interestingly enough, most people understand exactly what such a statement means.
For another example: "Saint Petersburg ceased being the capital in 1918 after the Russian Revolution of 1917." (Of course, in 1918, it was officially called Petrograd, and had been since 1914. But I'm sure you already knew that!)
The point is, there is NO academic, historical, or physical reason to take Egypt out of Africa/KMT as there is none to have its contacts initially facing the Mediterranean. The position has been borne in the disbelief that people who looked like the multi-genius, Imohotep, could have created and sustained such an advanced civilization without the help of Europeans. The Phaoroahs existed in a land called KMT/ Africa. People of the Academy must not rob a continent whose land, resources, and peoples were taken also of its geography and accomplishments long before the existence of a mass to be called Europe. It is just so very, very difficult to conceive that fact. STOLEN LEGACY (George M. James) and Egypt Child of Africa ( Van Sertima ed.) if read would give the historical perspective that racism has clouded.
Tchaiko Kwayana
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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