A Case of Eurocentrism or Reason Over Passion?

It’s a sun-dappled spring day on the leafy campus of Wellesley College, the sort of day that calls forth thoughts of commencement speeches and academic processions and the heady wine of intellect and purpose. Mary Lefkowitz, the philosophical scourge of Afrocentrism, is talking about truth.

The real issue in her ongoing war with those who challenge the primacy of traditional Western culture in America’s classrooms is not, she says, such spurious distractions as whether Aristotle ripped off the library of ancient Egypt or whether Cleopatra was black.

“The larger issue is what such outlandish claims convey about the process of analytic thinking. If we encourage students to believe things for which there is no supporting evidence--and, in fact, a great deal of evidence the other way--are we really helping them to ‘feel better about themselves’? Or are we encouraging them to discard the very process of deductive reasoning through which every individual in every society determines what is true?”

For the past few years Lefkowitz has been a central figure in a noisy academic battle over how much, if anything, the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome--and all Western thought--owe to the cultures of Africa, and particularly Egypt.

Her latest book, “Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History” (Basic Books, 1996), has become a lightning rod for racial conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, black nationalists and academic leftists. They accuse her of everything from right-wing pedagogy and racist discourse to being part of what black studies professor Tony Martin calls a “Jewish onslaught (that) has draped itself in the swaddling garments of European civilization and white supremacy.”

Lefkowitz, 61, is an improbable boogeyperson. With her short, dark hair, slight frame and granny glasses she looks exactly like what she is: a tenured classicist who fell in love with ancient languages as a girl and has spent her life exploring the worlds and ideas they reveal.

She came to Wellesley as a student from her native Manhattan in the “silent ‘50s” and has been here teaching and writing ever since, largely ignoring or rising above the conflicts roiling campuses and society. She comes from an ivory-tower academic tradition that is pointedly apolitical, and maintains a philosopher’s impatience with every sort of ideology except the employment of the rational mind.

“I never had--in grade school, high school or college--a course in which I didn’t find something exciting,” she says. “What I find mystifying today is this increasing notion that the primary function of education is to teach a student about his or her self . . . and about people of exactly the same background. To me the most exciting thing about learning was the exposure to the world outside the self . . . the more different the better. The ancient world for me was just the most fascinating of all.”

Though people have accused her of opposing black studies programs and courses about Africa, “I am very supportive,” she says, “of learning more about Africa and about African cultures, as I am of learning more about everything. I think there’s no doubt we haven’t paid enough attention in the past to these remarkable civilizations and such influence as they may have had on the better-known Mediterranean world.

“What I object to is Afrocentric ancient history as it is often taught, which seems to me to be a political agenda imposed upon the past--an agenda that doesn’t have much to do with factual reality.”

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Devotees of the concept of Afrocentrism, who range from Temple University professor Molefi K. Asante to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, assert that African Americans suffer from a “stolen legacy” of cultural riches, of which white European racists have conspired over the centuries to keep them unaware. Writers from Carter G. Woodson (“The Mis-Education of the Negro,” Winston-Derek, 1990) to Chancellor Williams (“The Destruction of Black Civilization,” Third World Press, 1987) have called for an African-based view of world history to bolster black self-esteem and foster black political unity.

Perhaps the most extreme of the Afrocentrists are “melanin theorists”--blacks who say darker-skinned people process information differently. Many melanists reject arguments based on logic and evidence as tools of Western white imperialist manipulation, and prefer instead what they see as a pigmental pipeline to truth via intuition and emotion.

Afrocentrism, says Wellesley’s director of African Studies, Tony Martin, “asserts that African people must interpret their own reality and see the world from their own perspective” in order to achieve a political end. Although Afrocentric theories have fueled the agendas of black nationalists at least since the time of Marcus Garvey, few academic scholars until recently considered them based on enough evidence to warrant serious discussion.

The major exception has been Martin Bernal, a white professor of government at Cornell, whose 1988 book “Black Athena” (Rutgers) endorses much of the racial-conspiracy argument, charging that ancient links between Greece and Egypt were obscured by 19th century German scholars seeking to justify colonialism in Africa. It was a New Republic assignment to review Bernal’s book, she says, that “changed my life. Until then I really had no notion how much craziness was out there.”

Bernal argues his case in a generally scholarly way. But his book, Lefkowitz says, has been “seized on by more extreme Afrocentric voices to legitimize the teaching as fact of things for which there is no evidence at all. That Cleopatra was black, for example. We know a great deal about Cleopatra’s family, and every bit of evidence shows conclusively that she was almost pure Macedonian Greek” in origin. While one of Cleopatra’s grandmothers was an unknown concubine of Ptolemy IX, she says, “Egypt’s rulers in those days usually married within their families and there is no suggestion anywhere--indeed it is highly improbable--that a black African would have been part of the mix.”

The tragic thing about such claims, which are being taught increasingly in the nation’s secondary schools, is not that classics scholars care one way or another about Cleopatra’s race, Lefkowitz says. “What we care about is evidence.” The system the Greeks devised, based on logic and the evaluation of evidence, was one that anyone could use. “And anyone still can,” she says.

In most ancient societies, she says, including Egypt, truth “was not what you determined yourself but what you were told by some authority. It was the province of mysticism, oracles and priests.” Obviously the Greeks had those, too, “but Socrates wasn’t into reading pigeon entrails. What he and the philosophers evolved was a process that liberated people from that sort of authoritarianism.”

Lefkowitz readily acknowledges the fascination of the ancient Greeks with Egypt. “They were impressed by the scale of things like the pyramids, by the piety of the people and the sophistication of the society. They loved to identify themselves with Egypt.”

And there is no doubt, she says, that the Egyptians were far ahead of the Greeks in certain things. The Egyptians, for example, used their careful observation of the heavens to perfect a genuine system of astronomy, she says, while the Greeks got sidetracked into astrology. The Egyptians were also ahead of the Greeks in basic mathematics.

Those who read the ancients in translation, or out of the larger context of their literature, frequently miss major truths about the ancient world, she says. Among those are that Greek historians--as opposed to philosophers--often made up as much as they actually heard or observed about Egypt.

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Scholars today have learned to be skeptical of such Greek reports in part because they often disagree with modern translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which the ancient Greeks could not read.

No myth is more widespread, says Lefkowitz, than the mystical picture of ancient Egypt incorporated in the lore of Freemasonry, most recently made famous by Farrakhan last fall in his speech at the Million Man March. The symbolism and numerology of Freemasonry tends to be looked on as gospel by the strongest adherents of Afrocentrism. But it has little or no foundation, Lefkowitz says, in the vast literature that Egyptologists have uncovered since they began reading hieroglyphics in the last century.

The real source of the Masonic portrait of Egypt, she says, is a three-volume French novel, “Sethos,” published in 1713 by the Abbe Jean Terrasson, who thought hieroglyphics were mystic symbols. Terrasson’s novel was widely read during the 18th century, and was so influential that it became the source for the libretto of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.”

Thus, Lefkowitz says, one of the many ironies of Afrocentrism is that it seeks to replace “Eurocentric” culture with a concept of Egypt that is demonstrably a product of 18th century France.

“Not Out of Africa” amounts to 222 pages of such scholarly detective work by an academic who has been reading Greek, Latin, German and “a little” Sanskrit and marinating in ancient texts for more than 40 years.

Yet she shies away in her book from some of the larger questions about Afrocentrism that trouble many other critics of the movement. Was ancient Egypt, for example, really a black nation? How much contact was there between Egypt and sub-Saharan west Africa, from which the ancestors of most black Americans came? Why do some Afrocentrists urge the teaching of Arabic and Swahili as the cultural heritage of American blacks when Arabs were the earliest and most persistent enslavers of black Africans, and when Swahili evolved as a language almost entirely to facilitate the slavers’ business among Africa’s myriad languages and tribes?

Lefkowitz says those questions don’t interest her very much. But she said there are some general truths. “The first is that race had little significance to ancient peoples--a fact from which I think we all might profit. Culture and nationality were far more important.” Second, from the many tomb paintings and other art, it’s clear Egyptians in the ancient world “came in all colors, much as they do today.”

Third, though there are “some distinctly African aspects to the religion” of ancient Egypt, the country itself is geographically far closer to the Middle East and the other Mediterranean countries, and “cultural influences flowed back and forth far more easily between Egypt and those regions, than between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Africa was and remains a very large and extremely diverse continent. Talking about pan-Africanism, from a cultural point of view, is even less defensible than talking about Pan-Europeanism.”

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“Not Out of Africa” has been praised for its scholarship by everyone from historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and columnist George Will to reviewers for the New York Times and the Village Voice. Last month Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., presented her an honorary doctorate in humane letters, citing her “deep concern for intellectual integrity.”

Yet Lefkowitz, who has written or edited nine other books, ruefully acknowledges being as targeted now as she once was obscure. A World Wide Web site on the Internet, set up by her publisher, HarperCollins, has logged more than 2,000 combative essays for and against her in the past few months. And an ugly current of anti-Semitism has been unleashed against her, most notably by Wellesley’s Martin, in a paperback called “The Jewish Onslaught” (Majority Press, 1993.

“The fanfare given ‘Not Out of Africa,’ ” Temple University’s Asante has written, “represents a glee . . . (over) what is viewed as white salvation from the irrationality of Afrocentrists. It originates in a historical anti-African bias. Contrary to any definitive dissection of Afrocentrism, what Lefkowitz has offered is a definitive exposure of the principal assumptions of a racial structure of classical knowledge.”

While there are clearly different perspectives over which people of goodwill can argue, Lefkowitz says, “some things are clearly not true.” To state, as many Afrocentrists have, that Aristotle stole his theories from the library at Alexandria is simply wrong, Lefkowitz says: There is enormous and irrefutable evidence that the city--not to mention the library--wasn’t even founded until after Aristotle’s death.

“That Afrocentrists should make so many mistakes is understandable,” replies Bernal in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. “Theirs is a sense of being embattled in a hostile world and of possessing an absolute truth that makes for less concern about factual details.”

To encourage students, as many Afrocentrists do, to disregard such evidence, Lefkowitz says, is to start them down a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie those who believe the Earth is flat, who deny the Holocaust, who believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites.

Standing against such myths, Lefkowitz says, has proven “the most constructive use for my education.” But she remains troubled by the silence of so many of her academic colleagues.

Years ago, she says, she faced a similar lonely debate when she found “radical feminists asserting there were all these matriarchal societies in the ancient world. It was total fantasy, of course, and I crossed swords with them. But then I decided the feminists weren’t all wrong--we really didn’t know much about women in those times. So I got busy and co-edited ‘Women’s Life in Greece and Rome,’ which is now a standard text in many courses.”