The Alluring Dream That Black America Needs to Wake Up From

Opinion|The Alluring Dream That Black America Needs to Wake Up From

Since the 19th century, a strain in Black American culture has claimed ancient Egypt as ancestor and inspiration. A fascination with that long-ago land has permeated Black art deeply enough to seem like one of its very foundations. In the early 20th century, the emblem of the N.A.A.C.P. house organ, “The Crisis,” looked like a sphinx, and many covers featured beautiful Egyptian motifs. In the 1990s, many thinkers warmly embraced the book “Black Athena” by the historian Martin Bernal, which made the claim — since rather roundly debunked — that the ancient Greeks had stolen much of the glory of their culture from “Black” Egypt. So strong has this current of thought been that it fills an exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now.”

Beautiful work, make no mistake. But I have always found something problematic about this focus on ancient Egypt as a historical precursor to American Blackness. I’m going to step aside from the controversies over just what color the ancient Egyptians were. The simple fact is that Black Americans are not on the whole their descendants. They are the descendants of all of Africa, a vast and endlessly varied continent. Its peoples have warred with and until not so very long ago even enslaved one another, as rampantly as humans worldwide always have. It is home to over 2,000 languages — almost every third language in the world. Preferring and massaging the single halcyon dream of ancient Egypt misses all of that rich diversity, misreading the historical record and depriving us of the true breadth of our heritage.

Most likely not a single enslaved Black person was brought to America from Cairo or Alexandria. They were brought to America from the West African coast, from what is now Senegal down to Angola. Senegal alone is over 3,000 miles across a desert to the southwest of Cairo as the crow flies — about as far as New York City is from Anchorage or Dublin. Black America tracing itself to Egypt makes as much historical sense as would Czechs deciding to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, seek out first editions of James Joyce and favor tartans as an expression of being European.

Sure, all cultures mythologize their past to an extent. Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, “The Message,” argues that as Black people, “we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharoahs.” But we also have a right to imagine ourselves as sultans, maharajahs or New Guinea hunter-gatherers. What was wrong with what we actually were?

This question is especially urgent as the abiding fondness for the Egypt idea tends to sideline the astonishing history of the empires that enslaved Americans actually emerged from and amid. In the 13th century, the Mali Empire produced a kind of Magna Carta called the Kouroukan Fouga. It was mindful of the rights of women to a degree surprising for any document before, roughly, Ms. magazine, counseling respect for “women, our mothers.” It stipulated that a man’s insanity or impotence was justification for a woman to seek divorce. European history teaches us to associate ancient empires with the ambition of overseas exploration, and the Mali Empire was no exception. Musa, the grandson of the empire’s founder, Sundiata Keita, sent out hundreds of ships to explore the great beyond.

South of Mali in what is today Angola was the kingdom of the Kongo, which was ruled in the mid-17th century by Manikongo Garcia II. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has described him as holding “court amid Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linens, eating with cutlery of American silver in the company of titled Kongo nobles and bishops in red sashes, while secretaries took dictation.” His rival was the queen of the neighboring Ndongo kingdom, Nzinga Mbande. She dressed in men’s clothes and excelled as a warrior; in off hours she enjoyed male concubines. Surely a ripe source for creative imagination.