Hamitic Research Articles

Global Media and Local Verbal Art Representations of Northern Malian Tuareg

Abstract:This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of “race” onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial “Hamitic Myth” in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and welcoming crossroads, a country that both resists and absorbs intruders, and that also express concepts of identity based on language, culture, and flexible social affiliation. The article is based partly on interviews with internationally known local musicians who function as mediating “third voices,” and concludes with a discussion of wider implications of these findings for notions of voice, authority, and the mutual construction of ideas of Africa.

Who are Black Americans? A Primer for Educators <em>(Editor’s Commentary)</em>

Persons of Black African ancestry live as citizens, foreign nationals, and indigenous populations on every continent as a result of immigration, colonialism and slave trading. Today, most Black people in the Americas are the progeny of victims of the transatlantic slave trade. From 1619 to 1863, millions of Africans were involuntarily relocated from various regions of West Africa to newly established European colonies in the Americas. Many different African ethnic groups, including the Congo, Yoruba, Wolof, and Ibo, were casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. The Black American population is the aggregate of these groups, consolidated into one race, bound by a common struggle against racial oppression and distinguished by cultural dualism (Toldson, 1999).Importantly, the historic legacy of Black people in the Western Hemisphere is not limited to slavery. The Olmec heads found along the Mexican Gulf Coast is evidence of African colonies in the Americas centuries before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean (Van Sertima, 2003). Black people were also responsible for establishing the world's first free Black republic, and only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, with the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 2001). In the United States, almost 500,000 African Americans were free prior to the Civil War and were immensely instrumental in shaping U.S. policy throughout abolition and beyond. Post-Civil War, African Americans influenced U.S. arts, agriculture, foods, textile, language, and invented technological necessities such as the traffic light and elevators, and parts necessary to build the automobile and personal computer. All of these contributions were necessary for the U.S. to become a world power by the 20th century.Racism and oppression are forces that have shaped the experiences and development of Black people worldwide. Although European colonialists initially enslaved Black people because of their agricultural expertise and genetic resistance to diseases, they used racist propaganda to justify their inhumane practices. During periods of slavery and the Scramble for Africa, European institutions used pseudoscience and religion (e.g., the Hamitic myth) to dehumanize Black people (Toldson, 2008). The vestiges of racism and oppression survived centuries after propaganda campaigns ended and influence all human interactions today.Currently, racism is perpetuated most profoundly through the educational system (Loewen, 1996). Black students are taught to revere historians such as Columbus, who nearly committed genocide against the native population of the Dominican Republic; and Woodrow Wilson who openly praised the Ku Klux Klan. Although many of these facts are not well known and purposefully disguised in history texts, children often leave traditional elementary and secondary education with the sense that aside from a few isolated figures (e.g., Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman) Black people had a relatively small role in the development of modem nations (May, Willis, & Loewen, 2003).Survey data often indicate that African Americans have the highest incidence and mortality of any given mental or physical disorder, are more deeply impacted by social ills, and generally have the lowest economic standing. …

Akwansisi Cultural Heritage and the Creation of a National Identity: The Cross River Monoliths, Nigeria

In a small region of the Central Cross River, culturally and linguistically designated ‘Bakor’, lie columns of stone carvings (monoliths), in human forms. These carvings are referred to locally as Akwansisi (stones of the departed), by the Nta and Nde groups and Atal (stones), by other Bakor speaking groups. This stone culture stretches to parts of the Benue valley, Boki, Obubra, Ogoja and the Nigerian Cameroun border. The culture zone is historically the homeland of the great Bantu or semi Bantu people of African history. Anthropological and other scholarly surveys by foreign observers and commentators have attributed the origins of the Cross River monoliths to the creative ingenuity of wandering Hamites or alien occupants who are today not within the culture zone. This paper attempts not only to ward off the lingering appendage of Hamitic and outside-in interpretation of internal developments, but to show evidently that the artistic and impressive columns of stone carvings are the handiwork of the ancestors of the present occupants of the region stretching back to antiquity. Akwansisi are a heritage of African arts and culture with historical, religious and social significance to the groups who inhabit the region; they are a symbol of Bakor identity. The paper also decries the abysmal neglect of the nation’s cultural artifacts, antipathy for cultural heritage and the lack of a maintenance attitude even in this age of cultural tourism. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research , 9(2), 81-88, 2012

Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah's Son Ham and the So-Called ‘Hamitic Myth’

L'A. propose une analyse de l'exegese des passages relatifs a Ham en Genese 9-10 a travers les premieres sources rabbiniques, notamment Genese Rabbah et les deux Talmud, mais aussi la litterature Tanhuma Yelammdenu. L'A. tente de savoir quel a ete l'impact de cette litterature sur le developpement des ideologies juive et europeenne. Il definit ce qu'on appelle le mythe hamitique, analyse les sources bibliques qui soutiennent la controverse. Il semble que l'hermeneutique rabbinique soit a l'origine de conceptions erronees, notamment dans ses rapports avec l'ecriture de l'histoire

Essai d'Interprétation du Cliché de Kangere (dans la Région des Grands Lacs Africains)

The Kangere cliché is widespread in the Great Lakes region of Zaire (Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika), where the Bembe, Fulero, Havu, Lega, Nyindu, Shi, Vira and others live. This cliché has been collected since the 1910s by missionary and colonial administrator researchers. Later it has been heavily used and interpreted in different ways. Thus certain modern scholars have made Kangere the first ‘king’ of the region and the ‘father’ of allbami, that is, the ‘kings’ of various ancient kingdoms existing on the shores of the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi! Their single aim was to refute the ‘Hamitic myth’.In fact, the Kangere cliché is woven together from different elements taken from various ethnic groups of the region. Its elements were ordered at the same time that they were collected, in the course of the 1910s and the 1920s. They constitute an African response to the preoccupation of the colonial administration of those years: the creation of vast ethnic groups and politically and administratively viable entities. Whites wanted tribes, and blacks created them; whites wanted great chiefs, and blacks created them, thebami.In their interpretation of the Kangere cliché, these researchers quite simply confused, erroneously, the ‘bwamisymbol’ of personalized power (which existed in the area, and which chiefs of different ethnic groups possessed) with the ‘bwamistate’ or kingdom, of recent, colonial creation.

Traditional Myths and Historian's Myths: Variations on the Singwaya Theme of Mijikenda Origins

African myths of origin have long both fascinated and perplexed historians. Naively taken as fact, they have led historians to create their own myths, such as the Hamitic Myth and its corollary, Sudanic Civilization. The most radical corrective has been to dismiss origin myths altogether on the anthropologial rationale that all myths are simply cultural charters and bear little resemblance to historical fact. By so doing, however, quite frequently we uncritically dismiss our sole source for the history of African peoples prior to the nineteenth century. The task, then, is to try to sift the historical wheat from the mythical chaff in order to recover as much valid historical evidence as possible from origin myths without violating the canons of historical method.A case in point is the Singwaya tradition of Mijikenda and other Kenyan coastal peoples' origins. The Singwaya tradition is one of the most frequently cited and discussed myths of origin of African peoples. Most of the discussion, however, has taken place in a void, because the myth concerns peoples about whom we have known very little and whose traditions have been collected only fragmentarily at best. Its appeal has lain in the fact that this tradition has been collected dozens of times from the 1840s to the present from virtually all the coastal peoples, including the Bajun, the Pokomo along the Tana River, the nine different Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, the lowland Taita, and two Mombasa Swahili groups. Its widespread distribution has caused the tradition to have a fatal fascination for historians.The first collections of traditions of origin for the coastal peoples were made in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Krapf, Rebmann, Guillain, Burton, Wakefield, New, and Taylor, the earliest missionaries and travelers in the Mijikenda area. These collections were sketchy, and although they mentioned northerly origins they did not specifically mention Singwaya. Starting with Hollis' earliest collections in 1897, the traditions rapidly acquired greater detail. Collections by Johnstone, Platts, MacDougall, Champion, Pearson, Werner, Osborne, Sharpe, Weaving, Hobley, Griffiths, Dammann, Kayamba, and Prins among various coastal peoples all relate a common theme: that the Pokomo, the Taita, seven of the nine Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, and the Kilindini and Jomvu Swahili all shared common origins in a place called Singwaya located on the southern Somali coast; that they were driven from there by an invasion of the Galla; and that they migrated south in several groups to their present areas of settlement.

The responsibility of men of culture for destroying the “Hamitic myth”

The responsibility of men of culture for destroying the “Hamitic myth”