“Anténor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question,’
and Afrocentric Imagination”
by
Celucien L. Joseph, Ph.D.
celucien_joseph@yahoo.com
Assistant Professor of English, Indian River State College
This essay examines Joseph Anténor Firmin’s engagement with the racial situation in
ancient Egypt. We are particularly interested in Firmin’s confrontational claim of the Black
African origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization. This analysis also considers Firmin’s thought
along the line of Afrocentric articulation of the historic contribution of the Kemetic culture to
classical Greece and world civilizations, as well as his plea for the “formal recognition” of the
achievement of the “Black race” in the intellectual development of the modern world.
In 1885, the nineteenth-century Haitian lawyer, statesman, anti-racist intellectual,
anthropologist, and Egyptologist, Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), published his magisterial
text, De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive) (The Equality of the Human
Races) in Paris 1 in the form of an impassioned “scientific rebuttal” to Arthur de Gobineau’s
scientific racism and, particularly, against his central thesis of the ontological superiority of the
Aryan-White race and the ontological inferiority of the Black race. Gobineau articulated his
ideas on the subject of racial hierarchy and racial essentialism of the human races, and
correspondingly the history and achievement of the white race in modernity in his controversial
and unfortunate text, Essai sur l’inégalité des races (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human
Races) (1853–1855). 2 For Gobineau, the history of the world in the strictest sense of the term is a
racial accomplishment, the accomplishment of whiteness. 3 On the contrary, Firmin argued that
the Aryan race does not name the conclusion of human history and the history of an
achievement, which the French anthropologist and other proponents of white ideology and white
supremacy celebrated. The Haitian intellectual also challenged Western racist attitudes towards
Blacks and the logic of nineteenth century’s scientific racism for ranking the Black race
discriminately and deliberately in the lowest racial ladder of the racial hierarchy of the human
races and in the metanarratives of human history. Ostensibly, Firmin anticipated Du Bois’ 1903
perennial question: “What does it mean to be a problem?” 4 In the same line of thought, Firmin
was deeply troubled about what Western Egyptologists had reformatted ancient EgyptianAfrican history to fit their ideological agenda and intellectual vision of world history.
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Firmin’s cogent response in his celebrated text not only interrogates Gobineau’s racist
biases but also the logic of other racists who had denied the intellectual and moral achievements
of the African and Black people in the foundations of modern civilization and Western
modernity. Firmin’s intellectual curiosity and rigor weights the veracity of Western
historiography, Western Egyptology, modernity’s racial imagination, and the scientific enterprise
of his time. 5 A major aspect of this present analysis is to explore precisely Firmin’s Afrocentric
imagination and sensibility championed by Molefi Kete Asante—the most vocal proponent and
poignant intellectual voice of Afrocentric thought in modern times—in regard to the Nile Valley
Civilizations. We will also study his argument about the African origin (or the Africaness) of the
ancient Egyptian in comparison with other Black Atlantic writers who seem to exhibit an
Afrocentric tendency and leaning. Consequently, this essay will apply some of the protocols of
Afrocentric inquiry as delineated in Asante’s theoretical and yet practical work, Kemet,
Afrocentricity and Knowledge, The Afrocentric Idea, and other cognate texts.
Firmin posits that the Kemetic-Egyptian civilization was a Black civilization and that the
Black race had made notable contributions to universal civilization, which are often undermined
in Western scholarship. His revisionist exposés were motivated by a genuine desire to correct
European perspective on African history and culture as well as to valorize Black achievement in
human history. In so doing, the Haitian anthropologist-intellectual was concurrently
deconstructing Western Egyptology and reshaping ancient Egyptian-African historical narrative.
The general outline of the essay offers a succinct narrative of scholarly reflections on Firmin’s
text (Part one) and analyses the Afrocentric discourse (and Afrocentricity and Egyptocentrism) in
order to situate Firmin’s Afrocentric sensibility (Part two). We close the essay with Firmin’s
thoughtful engagement with the “Egyptian question,” that is with the ideological interpretation of
the history, life, and culture of ancient Egypt by Western Egyptologists.
Firmin and His Text: A Brief Assessment
Firmin’s main objective in The Equality of the Human Races primary was first intended
to dismantle De Gobineau’s racist ideas—such as his doctrine of the innate inferiority of the
Black race and the innate superiority of the Aryan-White race—and to challenge the strident
racist voices, dangerous ideologies and scientific racism of the nineteenth century. 6 His second
objective was to underscore Black pride, the historic achievement and intellectual contributions
of ancient Egypt and the people of African ancestry across time and space—such as the symbolic
example of Haitians and African Americans 7 —in the meganarratives of human history. His
third objective was to demonstrate that “white reason” was delinquent and inadequate. His fourth
goal was to stress that “whiteness” was the central problem of modernity and the greatest threat
to human flourishing and solidarity. Firmin’s final goal was to challenge and destabilize Western
arrogance and its claim of ontological superiority.
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Hence, in the book Firmin portrays himself simultaneously as an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and
anti-imperial radical as well as an anti-white oppression and anti-white arrogance intellectual.
Most importantly, Joseph Anténor Firmin presents himself as the Apostle of the undivided
equality of all people.
In several chapters of The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin endeavors, with
intellectual rigor, commitment, and scrupulous research, to analyze and debunk European
construction of race and interrogate the logic of white supremacy. In the process, he attempts to
offer a different epistemology than what was provided by European men of letters by
highlighting the distinctive role Africa had played in the advancement of human civilizations as
well in the emergence of modernity, what we might phrase Black African particularity. 8
The Equality of the Human Races is an apologetic text that showcases with clear
arguments, intellectual meticulousness and lucidity the momentous contributions of ancient
Egyptian civilization in the early developmental stages of classical Greek life and thought and
ultimately in the birth of the Western world. 9 Yet, the reception of Anténor Firmin, his ideas,
and his magnum opus as a pioneer work in modern anthropology and in modern Western
intellectual history had been a disappointment. It was after sixty-three years after his death that
prominent Twentieth-century Haitian scholar and anthropologist, Jean Price-Mars, an intellectual
heir of Firmin, produced the first full biography on him in the French language. Price-Mars’s
posthumous Anténor Firmin was released in the French language in 1978. 10 In the same way, the
first English translation of The Equality of the Human Races was produced by the Haitian
literary scholar Asselin Charles in 2002, some eighty-three years after its original publication. 11
The gradually recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the Anglophone world indicates a
renewed appreciation of the significance of Firmin’s ideas in our postcolonial moment. It is
possible to group recent scholarship on The Equality of the Human Races in five interrelated
categories: the book’s relation to the discipline of modern anthropology, race studies,
Egyptology, history of ideas, and Africana studies. 12 According to Firmin’s biographer, PriceMars, Firmin “attacked without interruption the most diverse aspects of thorny problems of
anthropology and the related disciplines in the science of man.” 13 Afro-Jewish philosopher
Lewis R. Gordon names The Equality of the Human Races a “classic in Africana philosophy,
philosophical anthropology, and historical anthropology.” 14 Anthropologist Carolyn FluehrLobban claims that as a pioneering work on anthropology and a scientific project, The Equality
of the Human Races was “a positive assertion of the potential of the anthropology objectivity to
study human differences without the bias of biological and social ranking.” 15
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Current studies on Firmin delineate a clear connection between the science of modern
anthropology and the modern construction of race, as observed in The Equality of the Human
Races. Lamentably, Kevin A. Yelvington remarks that “The Haitian anthropologist Anténor
Firmin (1850-1911), whose writings on ‘race’ preceded those of Franz Boas and were in direct
opposition to contemporaneous racist theorists like Gobineau, placed himself and his work
squarely within a framework of diasporal exchanges but can nowhere be seen as an
anthropological ancestor.” 16 Faye V. Harrison, who has commented on the multiple legacies of
Firmin, remarks that Firmin’s robust anthroplogie positive contested the scientific racism of
Count Arthur de Gobineau (1853-55), whose ideas resonated with his contemporaries in
metropolitan France and Anglo-North America. 17 Fluehr-Lobban clarifies that Firmin
“developed a critical view of racial classifications and of race that foreshadowed much later
constructions of race… [and the text] lies historically at the foundations of the birth of the
disciplines of anthropology, yet it is unknown to the field.” 18 Similarily, Gordon states that the
absence of attention to Firmin’s work in Western academic studies “is perhaps one of the great
travesties of the impact of racism on the history of ideas.” 19
In his recent book on the relevance of Anténor Firmin for the twenty-first century,
Haitian scholar and public intellectual Leslie Péan declares that “Firmin’s powerful interventions
struck the prevalent racist ideology of Black inferiority evoked by anthropologist ‘scholars’ to
justify, on one hand, the enslavement of blacks, on the other hand, the division of Africa by
whites at the Berlin Conference of 1885.” 20 Complementarily, Watson R. Denis, in his
interpretation of the significance of Firmin’s work, reports that “Firmin arrived at the conclusion
that the idea of the inequality of the human races was a European strategy to maintain the racial
domination of Europe over the rest of the world, and by extension, to keep the political and
economic exploitation among peoples and races to justify the social domination within their
respective societies.” 21 Furthermore, historian Laurent Dubois writes:
Firmin’s work was largely ignored by European anthropology, which continued for
decades to focus on racial differences and hierarchy. It would take another generation
before a new set of thinkers, led by Frantz Boas in the United States, began to dismantle
the racist “science” that Firmin had lambasted. And it took much longer yet for Firmin to
begin to assume his rightful place in the history of anthropological thought…In Haiti,
however, Firmin’s powerful attack on European racism gained him many admirers and
established him as one of the country’s most revered intellectuals. 22
In the same line of reasoning, Fluehr-Lobban contends that Western scholars and
scientists had consciously marginalized and ignored Firmin’s work in its time because of its
“antiracist themes and the use of anthropology in the assertion of human equality…no doubt
because of its then revolutionary premise clearly stated in the title.” 23
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Scholars have also commented on the contours of Firmin’s ideas and the importance of
The Equality of the Human Races for the field of Africana critical studies and theory,
postcolonial studies, and cosmopolitanism. For example, Péan states that, in its publication in
1885, Firmin’s work had quickly become a response to the problem of colonialism and its
thinkers. 24 Fluehr-Lobban notes that Firmin’s book articulates “early Pan-Africanist ideas as
well as an analytical framework for what would become postcolonial studies.” 25 Prominent
African historian Theophile Obenga writes that Firmin “was a lawyer by profession, a PanAfricanist by political choice.” 26 Magloire-Danton substantiates that claim by affirming that
Firmin’s perspective methods encompass the three main elements of Pan-Africanist
thought identified by Immanuel Geiss, which makes Firmin an early theoretician of the
movement: the rejection of the postulate of race inequality, reference to the history of
ancient Africa as proof that Africans were capable of civilization, and examples of
illustrious individuals of African descent in diverse fields. 27
J. Michael Dash in a recent article on the Black internationalism of Firmin presents him
simultaneously as a universalist and cosmopolitan thinker. He also claims that not only Firmin
had made the case for “crosscultural negotiations” and “post-territorial theorizing,” he had also
anticipated prominent Caribbean thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon. 28 JeanElie Gilles sees the competitive ideas of universalism, humanism, and nationalism intrinsic to
Firmin’s thought and intellectual development. 29 Gordon contends that the book “challenged
what could be called colonial epistemology and intellectual dependency….the presupposition
was that black people could offer at most unreflective experience—data—for the proper
purveyors of reason to assess or offer resources for study.” 30 In other words, Firmin diagnosed
the problem of what we might call “the crisis of Western reason” as well as sought to
“demonstrate that Paul Broca and Arthur de Gobineau (among many others) were wrong and
how they were wrong.” 31
Moreover, current studies on Firmin do not publicly distinguish him as a “formal
Egyptologist” until a recent article was published in French by the African Egyptologist
Theophile Obenga. Obenga offers linguist and rhetorical evidence from a careful study of
Firmin’s text that substantiates his thesis. He concludes that Firmin was an “Egyptologist…one
of the first among the Blacks of Africa and the Diaspora.” 32 In addition, Obenga observes that
“Anténor Firmin was strongly critical of racist theories of physical anthropology. He also
defended the Africanness of Pharaonic Egypt. The Egyptian question was an interesting
historiography to know.” 33
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This present essay expands on Obenga’s thought by considering the relationship between
Firmin’s ideas to Afrocentricity as an intellectual project of revisionist history and his
engagement with the Egyptian question. I am particularly interested in Firmin’s Afrocentric
imagination and his daring thesis of the Black origin and Africaness of ancient Egyptian
civilization. In various ways, The Equality of the Human Races Firmin has clearly exhibited
early manifestations of Afrocentricity and pre-Negritudist ideas. As previously noted in the
valuable body of scholarship reviewed above, Firmin was a complex intellectual, whose ideas on
the human nature, race, Negritude, Black pride, Black nationalism, post-colonialism, and
cosmopolitanism can be interpreted as paradoxical and sometimes ambivalent. These ideas can
be very challenging to us; yet, we must learn to wrestle with them and read Firmin more closely.
While this current analysis is built upon current scholarship on Firmin, it seeks to fill many
intellectual voids on Firmin studies.
The Afrocentric Discourse
In a recent article, Molefi Kete Asante, the most representative figure of the Afrocentric
school of thought in the Anglophone world, pays homage to Firmin when he writes, “When the
Haitian intellectual Anténor Firmin in 1885 wrote his famous book, The Equality of the Human
Races, he was defending all black people, those in the United States, Brazil, United Kingdom,
and Nigeria, against racist assaults and bias commentary.” 34 Asante’s reflection on the meaning
of Firmin and his work is pan-Africanist in leaning; it situates the Haitian intellectual in the
tradition of Black Atlantic vindicationism and the anti-racist narrative in the history of ideas. The
passage below succinctly summarizes Firmin’s intellectual vision and bond between his ideas
and the Afrocentric discourse:
In examining the region of Ancient Kemet (currently referred to as “Ancient Egypt”—
another discussion for another time), Firmin presents incontrovertible historical evidence
supporting his and early writers’ accounts that the inhabitants of the region were black, a
term that over time has acquired greater social significance than in the past. In providing
copious research on the region, particularly the journal entries of early visitors, Herodotus
among them, Firmin soundly situates the origins of the peoples of the region in Upper
Kemet/Egypt, i.e. in the interior of black Africa. Interestingly, his argument regarding the
African/Black phenotype of the ancient Kemites/Egyptians predates assertions made by
Afrocentric scholars by nearly a century. Such a position by a scholar from the 19th
century, from Haiti no less, allows for the removal of defaming designations applied to
today’s Afrocentric scholars who are often viewed as scholarly extremists and historical
revisionists. 35
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Firmin’s affinity to and parallelism with Afrocentricity can be captured in five main ideas
or concerns: (1) The problem with Western Egyptology and historiography in constructing
African history and culture, (2) The conceptualization of an alternative epistemology grounded
on African-Egyptian phenomena and achievement, (3) The importance of ancient Egyptian
history for understanding modern African history and the history of the Black race across time
and space, (4) The intellectual role and significance of ancient Egypt in the birth of classical
Greece and Rome, and (5) The Black race had played a singular role in universal civilization by
bringing its distinct contributions. 36 What is then Afrocentricity? Where does it come from?
A critic has recently observed that Afrocentricity is “many things to many people.” 37 For
the sake of precision, we shall define Afrocentricity primarily as an ideology and a cultural,
intellectual, and educational movement that stresses the African agency and perspective in the
quest for values, knowledge, truth, and understanding. Like The Equality of the Human Races,
Afrocentricity is an intellectual orientation that seeks to decenter the Eurocentric paradigm by
shifting the geography of reason and the discourse of civilization to the significance of ancient
Egypt in the birth of the modern world. Firmin and Afrocentrists would argue for the putative
influence of ancient Egypt—which they contend was undeniably black—on the ancient Greek
civilization. The Afrocentric paradigm articulates the cultural uniformity thesis of continental
Africa and across the Black Diaspora; advocates of this school of thought valorize the African
heritage and the continuity of African cultural traditions and values in the African Diaspora as
well as the survivals of Egyptian civilization. The Afrocentric enterprise is chiefly concerned
with the vexed question of the Black African origin of civilization and the blackness of
Pharaonic Egypt. Yet, like Firmin their intellectual predecessor, Afrocentrists pursue the deEuropeanization of world history and the culture of modernity by promoting a wider openness to
cultural relativism, alternative histories and worldviews.
Ama Mazama, a fervent advocate of this school of thought, suggests that Afrocentricity
should be understood as a “paradigm.” 38 Mazama relies heavily on Kuhn’s work in her
conceptualizing of Afrocentricity as a “scientific paradigm.” While she subscribes to the
cognitive aspect and the structural aspect of a paradigm as defined by Kuhn, she adds a third one:
the functional aspect, which she describes as the notion that “knowledge can never be produced
for the sake of it but always for the sake of our liberation, a paradigm must activate our
consciousness to be of any use to us.” 39 By inference, Afrocentrists are intellectual-activists.
Mazama rejects Russell Adam’s fourfold classification of ‘Afrocentrism’ as defined below:
The “Nile Valley” Afrocentrists (the “hard-liners” identified as espousing “pure
Afrocentrism,” and gathered around Molefi Kete Asante); the Continental Afrocentrists,
who do not pay any special attention to Kemet (Egypt), and the Afrocentric Infusionists,
primarily concerned with making the African cultural and social experience a part of the
curriculum; and the Social Afrocentrists, for whom “African per se is more of a target of
interest than inspiration.” 40
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Accordingly, Firmin may be classified as a Nile Valley Afrocentrist. Firmin certainly
used the ancient Egyptian civilization as a symbol of Black pride and to rebuke the prevalent
doctrine of Black innate inferiority. For him, African achievement in history was a target for
Black inspiration in the Diaspora. Mazama goes on to demarcate that Afrocentricity views “the
European voice as just one among many and not necessarily the wisest one,” 41 acknowledging
the existence of alternative epistemologies in the market of ideas and the realm of
multiculturalism. The Africological methological principles underscore that “the African
experience must determine all inquiry, the spiritual is important and must be given its due place,
immersion in the subject is necessary, holism is a must, intuition must be relied on, not
everything is measurable because not everything that is significant is material, and the
knowledge generated by the Afrocentric methodology must be liberating.” 42 Mazama
acknowledges that the methods employed by Africologists may vary, as they are connected with
their particular subject of research; in the same line of thought, she avers the existence of a
multiplicity or variety of Afrocentric theories in the world of ideas.
Afrocentric moral philosopher Maulana Karenga does not affirm the paradigmatic status
to Afrocentricity but rather construes the school of thought as a category. He sustains that
Afrocentricity is “essentially a quality of perspective or approach rooted in the cultural image
and human interest of African people.” 43 Karenga insists that “the focus is on the cultural and
human quality of African thought and practice rather than on thought and practice as an
ideological conception and conduct.” Nonetheless, critics of Afrocentricity state that the
movement gives attention to the building pride in African American and Black diasporic
communities, and stops short in analyzing interaction and transformation; it stresses more on
race than on community, more on heritage than on exchange, and more unity than on variety. 44
As will be observed later in the essay, Firmin emphasizes direct links between Egypt and
Ethiopia, and the shared cultural traditions and common religious practices between the two
countries.
Critics of Afrocentricity also bring to the front the following challenges to the school of
thought: (1) Afrocentricity is presented as a dogma of authenticity rather than an orientation and
methodology, (2) It denies the reality and value of the diversity of perspectives and approaches
within the disciplines of Black Studies, (3) It promotes a static, monolithic and unreal concept of
African culture which denies or diminishes its dynamic and diverse character, (4) it
overemphasizes the continental African past at the expense of recognizing the African American
past and present as central to and constitutive of African culture and the Afrocentric enterprise,
and (5) finally, “Afrocentrism” is unable to prove its utility in intellectual production beyond
declaration of its presence and aspirations. 45
The origin of the term Afrocentric is unknown. African American historian William
Jeremiah Moses credited W.E.B. Du Bois as probably the first writer to have used the concept as
early as 1961 in a paper proposal entitled “Proposed plans for an Encyclopaedia Africana,”
whose objective was to be “unashamedly Afro-Centric, but not indifferent to the impact of the
outside world.” 46
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Nonetheless, the cultural critic and most influential Afrocentric scholar today is Molefi Kete
Asante of Temple University would popularize Afrocentricity as a distinctive worldview in
numerous path-breaking studies. 47 Asante defines Afrocentricity as a philosophy and program
for social change. In Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge, he writes, “The Afrocentric method
seeks to transform human reality by ushering in a human openness to cultural pluralism which
cannot exist without the unlocking of the minds for acceptance of an expansion of
consciousness.” 48 He continues by noting, “I seek to overthrow parochialism, provincialism, and
narrow Wotanic visions of the world by demonstrating the usefulness of an Afrocentric approach
to questions of knowledge.” 49 Asante’s objective is to inspire proponents of this school of
thought “to put African ideals and values at the center of inquiry” 50 as well as to “allow the
student of human culture investigating African phenomena to view the world from the standpoint
of the African.” 51 Both Asante and Firmin would construe the liberative project of Afrocentricity
is its clear emphasis on emancipative epistemology and on the African as subject (that is African
agency) rather than object in the overarching narrative of humanity. 52 Advocates of Africancentered though employ rigorously the African cultural image as a tool to increase the selfesteem and consciousness of the people of African ancestry in the United States and in the
African Diaspora.
In The Afrocentric Idea, Asante asserts that Afrocentricity “proposes a cultural
reconstruction that incorporates the African perspective as a part of an entire human
transformation, critical theory suggests a pathway.” 53 As he makes clearer, “The crystallization
of this critical perspective I have named Afrocentricity, which means, literally, placing African
ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior.” 54 While Mazama
is correct to affirm that “it is to Asante that we owe the making of African epistemological
relevance into an operational scientific,” 55 she only tells half of the truth when she also
enunciates, “much like we owe Cheikh Anta Diop the making of the Black-ness of the ancient
Egyptians into an operational scientific principle.” 56 The problem with Mazama’s assessment is
her failure to acknowledge our considerable debt to Firmin as the first Black Egyptologist who
revolutionized our understanding of the Black origin of the ancient Egypt and put the ancient
Kemetic civilization at the center of African epistemological inquiry, as early as in the nineteenth
century. Firmin was also among the first Black anthropologists and intellectuals to deconstruct
Western Egyptology and decolonize Eurocentric perspective on African historiography. He
reconstructed scientifically the African historical narrative from the source that is from classical
Egyptian civilization. Consequently, both Asante and Diop are intellectual heirs of Anténor
Firmin.
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Afrocentricity and Egyptocentrism
Echoes of the Afrocentric ideology can be traced in the writings of both Anglophone and
Francophone Black and non-Black writers in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. 57 To
various degrees, the works of these writers exhibit explicitly both Afrocentric and Egyptocentric
themes and ideologies. While the discourse of Afrocentricity seeks to link the cultural traditions
and civilization of ancient Black Egypt to those of continental Black Africa and the Black
Diaspora, the discourse of Egyptocentrism puts forth the idea that ancient Egypt was
geographically and culturally African and that the flourishing civilization of Egypt was
unquestionably Negroid. The thesis of the black African creation of ancient Egyptian civilization
had been defended with intellectual force and brilliance relatively almost by all the
aforementioned writers.
Egyptian antiquities were first discovered by scholars and scientists who accompanied
Napoleon Bonaparte on a travelling campaign to Egypt in 1799. 58 These researchers described
the Egyptians as having Negroid features including the high-status individuals in the Egyptian
society and political order. 59 As Cheikh Anta Diop explains:
Egyptologists were dumfounded with admiration for the past grandeur and perfection
then discovered. They gradually recognized it as the most ancient civilization that had
engendered all others. But, imperialism being what it is, is became increasingly
“inadmissible to continue to accept the theory—evident until then—of a Negro Egypt.
The birth of Egyptology was thus marked by the need to destroy the memory of a Negro
Egypt at any cost and in all minds. 60
Proslavery interest in Western societies had discredited the Black African origin of the
ancient Egyptian civilization. In addition, Firmin had also reported that White racist scientists
had denied the historic contribution of Black Egypt to the intellectual development of humanity
to support the doctrine of racial inequality, the innate inferiority of the Black race and the
enslavement of Blacks. 61 St. Clair Drake informs us that while White racists in the United States
maintained that the extraordinary Egyptian civilization was debased by miscegenation with
Negroes, black intellectuals and antiracist writers used the Sphinx as a symbol of the Negro
presence in Egypt. 62 For example, Edward Wilmot Blyden who himself immigrated to Liberia in
1851 wrote about the emblematic Egyptian Sphinx in this manner:
Her [sic] features are decidedly that of the African or Negro type, with “expanded
nostrils.” If, then, the sphinx was placed here—looking out in majestic and mysterious
silence over the empty plain where once stood the great city of Memphis in all its pride
and glory, as an “emblematic representation of the King”—is not the inference clear as to
the peculiar type of race to which that King belonged? 63
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In The Negro, published in 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Egyptian civilization seems to
have been African in its beginnings and in its main line of development…Egyptian monuments
show distinctly Negro.” 64 Two decades later after much research on the subject of the ancient
Egypt, Du Bois published Black Folk Then and Now and stated that “In recent years, despite the
work of exploration and interpretation in Egypt and Ethiopia, almost nothing is said of the Negro
race. Yet that race was always prominent in the valley of the Nile.” 65 In 1946, Du Bois would
revisit the topic again and even included a Chapter on “Egypt” in The World and Africa. Du Bois
was more decisive to declare more strongly that “We conclude, therefore, that the Egyptians
were Negroids, and not only that, but by tradition they believed themselves descended not from
the whites or the yellows, but from the black peoples of the south.” 66 As Drake once again
remarks, “Egyptology thus became a crucial arena in the persisting struggle between antiblack
racists and those black intellectuals who considered themselves to be vindicationists.” 67
Furthermore, the debate over the Black genesis of civilization and over the character of
ancient Egypt and the idea that the ancient Greece had borrowed both cultural and intellectual
resources from the black people of Egypt had also appeared in the pages of several important
controversial texts. 68 It is noteworthy to underscore here it was the three-volume magisterial
work of the white British and Cornell University historian Martin Bernal, under the provocative
title Black Athena, that has gained the academic attention of the Afrocentric movement in the
United States. The multivolume work 69 was published by the Rutgers University Press, and, as
the author states, “essentially concerned with the Egyptian and Semitic roles in the formation of
Greece in the Middle and Late Bronze Age.” 70 In this historical revisionism project, Bernal also
sought to affirm Black agency in world history and in the making of world civilizations.
In these rigorous and learned studies, Bernal complemented and fortified the works of
previous Afrocentrists and especially the Firminian thesis of Black genesis as will be observed in
subsequent paragraphs, by establishing literary, archeological, and linguistic data of the
substantial influence of ancient Egypt and Phoenician on Greek civilization. His well-developed
thesis about the Egyptian question claimed for the African backgrounds of Attic civilization
resulting in his rejection of the notion that Greek civilization was original and autonomous.
Martin put forth the idea that Western historians “have not acknowledged the full extent of
Greece’s debt to Egypt and the Near East.” He explained that this silence in Western
historiography and modern intellectual history was chiefly due to eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries’ racism and anti-Semitism, and consequently, European scholars had dismissed the
Phoenician and Egyptian influence on Greece.
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Bernal declared that Greece had imported both Egyptian culture and language through the
exchange with the Semitic people known as the Hyksos in the seventeenth and sixteen centuries
B.C. He agreed with Firmin and other Afrocentrists in many points: (1) that the Egyptians
introduced civilization to Greeks, (2) the Hyksos brought to Greece Egyptian language and
culture during the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries B.C., (3) Classical Greek philosophers
borrowed from Egyptian philosophy, (4) the Egyptian origins of many of the Greek heroes such
as Socrates and Inachus, (5) the Roman poet and playwright Terrence was a Black African, and
(6) Cleopatra had African ancestors. 71
Firmin, the Egyptian Question or the “White Problem”
Exclusively in Chapter nine in The Equality of the Human Races, with intellectual force,
clarity, and brilliance, Firmin defends the Blackness of Pharaonic Egypt and the influence of
Kemetic civilization on ancient Greece as well as the contributions of ancient Egypt to world
civilizations. Foremost, Firmin indicates that the “Egyptian question” was both an intellectual
and psychological crisis of Western Egyptology and nineteenth century scholarship. This
predicament clearly had to do with two basic factors: the origin, and the cultural identity (i.e.
skin color) of the inhabitants of ancient Egypt. In turn, the Egyptian conundrum left an indelible
mark on the mind and intellect of Western cynics in regard to the creators of the ancient
Egyptian civilization. Subsequently, Firmin could write, “The Egyptian question…involves the
most complex interests and absorbs the attention of the Ottoman world, the Slavic world, and the
Germanic world, and the Latin world.” 72 The Egyptian phenomenon was inevitably tied to the
history and the achievement of a people in the history of ideas in the West in both eighteenth and
nineteenth century, respectively.
Quoting the Spanish republican politician Emilio Castelar (1832-1899) in full, Firmin
reiterates that the source of Egyptian civilization was the riddle of Western modernity, an
epistemological watershed among the nations in the West:
For the Turks, Egypt is but a part of their empire. For the Austrians, it is a line they
respect because of their own possessions in the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea. For the
Italians, concerned with the security of their beautiful Sicily and aspiring to claim Malta
and colonize Tripoli and Tunis, it is a border to be protected. For the great and powerful
Germany, whose pride could not withstand the loss of its hegemony in the European
world, Egypt is both a continental and extra-continental question. For Russia, which
dreams of a Greek Bizantium in Europe and of land route to India through Asia, Egypt is
a European question. For Spain, Portugal, and Holland, it is an important crossroads on
the itinerary to the various islands and archipelagos still under their respective flags. For
all of them, in this moment of horrible anxiety, Egypt is the preeminent question. All
events pertaining to it can lead either to peace, which fosters work, trade, and freedom, or
to implacable war, which spreads death, desolation, and sorrow in the world. But the
Egyptian question is essentially an Anglo-French question. 73
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Ultimately, for Firmin, the Egyptian question was inescapably a “White problem.” He
sought to provide a plausible scientific rejoinder to the popular belief among European men of
letters that “Blacks have no social history and so have never influenced the march of
humanity.” 74 Firmin professed that the white problem was the misrecognition that the Black
race had contributed “its stone to the construction of the edifice.” 75 Looking at the issue in a
grand scale, Firmin informed us that white prejudice and Western anti-Africanism were deeply
rooted in European racial solidarity and ethnic superiority, what he calls “Caucasian union” 76
and “the worst form of egocentrism.” 77 Firmin described the logic of European solidary. First, he
inferred that it was customary for Western scientists and scholars to scorn “everything that was
not European.” 78 In fact, he noted astutely, “all White European nations naturally tend to unite
in order to dominate the rest of the world and the other human races…It is more in order to
paralyze the progress of a feared or resented rival than to support that people, whom in any case
it only intends to exploit itself.” 79 There is a sense to infer here that Firmin connected the
Egyptian question with European “civilizing mission” and imperial hegemony and colonialism.
Firmin moves on to address Western construction of the ancient Egypt and the central
claims (or the major tenets) of anthropologists and Egyptologists of his time: (1) That the ancient
populations of Egypt belonged to the White race, 80 (2) Westerners had severed the ancient
Egyptians from the Ethiopian race and turned them into a branch of the Caucasian race, 81 (3)
They also claimed that Egyptians felt great contempt for the other Black peoples of Africa, 82 (4)
The Black African race did not create the ancient civilization that flourished on the shores of the
Nile Valley, 83 (5) The Egyptians were not originated from Ethiopia, 84 (6) Egypt was all
Asiatic, 85 (7) Gobineau claimed that a White people from Asia civilized the Egyptians, 86 (8)
Egyptologists and anthropologists denied that the people living in the Nile banks were not
Black, 87 and (9), finally, the Egyptians were gifted dark-skinned Caucasians descended from
Ham, the son of Noah. 88 Firmin attempts to expose the various ways that European scholars
had reformatted ancient Egyptian history for their own gain.
In the subsequent paragraphs, we allow Firmin to respond to those objections and directly
engage the major tenets and assumptions of scholars and scientists of his time.
The Case for the Black Civilization in the Nile Valley
Firmin opens Chapter nine (“Egypt and Civilization”) of the book with an excellent
illustration, an elaborate syllogism:
Truth is eternal. It must remain whole through time and space, otherwise it cannot be
validated by logic…When one asserts that the Black race is inferior to all others, one
must prove that the fact is true now and was true in the past, that is, that not only is this
the case today, but that things were never different in past history and that nothing
happened in the past which could be in flagrant contradiction with the dogmatic views of
the anthropologists or with the pretentiously self-assured conclusions of the scholars. 89
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To express the matter a different way, the historical record of the past and the experience
of Black people across time and space do not validate nor justify the position of white racists that
blacks are inferior to whites. In the passage above, Firmin intends to surface historical
accomplishments of the Black race in order to bear witness and dismiss white arrogance. Yet,
his ultimate goal is concurrently to critique white supremacist ideology, challenge pseudoscientific claims that are presented and proliferated as exclusive truth claims, and reconstruct
African history and culture from the standpoint of classical Egypt and Black agency.
He pursues forward to articulate his major arguments. That the civilization of the ancient
people of Egypt, which he calls by the original name “Kemet,” “precedes all the others.” 90 He
advances the idea that the Black Egyptians “were unquestionably the initiators of the White
nations of the West in science and the arts, had created alone, on the shores of the Nile…the
most impressive social organization that a human population had ever built.” 91 The Nile Valley
civilization theory best explains the rise of the ancient Egyptian civilization, an idea that is
relatively supported by all modern Egyptologists. 92 For example, Diop posits that “the Nile
Valley was peopled by a progressive descent of the Black peoples from the region of the Great
Lakes, the cradle of Homo sapiens sapiens.” 93 J.D. Walker proclaims that, “the northern Nile
Valley owes much to development in the Sahara and probably the Sudan…Nilotic flora and
fauna were well integrated into the belief and cultural systems, including writing.” 94 Firmin
identifies precisely the Hamites, “the inventors of geometry,” as the people who lived on the
shores of the Nile. He exclaims that they existed “more than three thousand years before the
Christian era, when the European nations were still in a barbarous state, the Hamites who lived
on the shores of the Nile had already been doing geometric computations, calculating the area of
different types of surfaces.” 95 Other powerful African kingdoms and civilizations such as the
Kushitic or Ethiopian emerged around the Nile Valley. 96
The majority of Egyptologists in Firmin’s era maintained that the people inhabited within
the precincts of the Nile bank were not black and a people of different ethnic group and culture.
Firmin strikes back by countering the prerogative of the ethnography of Egyptologists of the
ancient peoples of the Region is not historically reliable. He thus points out that “the further back
in antiquity we go the more we become convinced that all the peoples living on the shores of the
Nile were of the same ethnological type.” 97 To justify his position, the Haitian intellectual
references an authoritative text in classical Greek literature, Aeschylus’s drama, Prometheus
Bound. He hence cites these famous lines:
On the coast of Egypt, near the mouth and flood region of the Nile, there stands the city
of Canope. There, by the sole touch of his caressing hand, Jupiter will restore your sanity.
You will give birth to a son whose name will remind you of the god’s touch, black
Epaphus who will harvest his crops on all the plains irrigated by the Nile during its long
journey. 98
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Admittedly, Firmin avers that scholars of his time often misread and debated the real
meaning of the passage above. In his careful exegesis of the text, he interprets that the poet
Aeschylus seeks to convey the message of the exodus of the Egyptian people who, according to
Greek tradition, had journeyed from the farthest regions of equatorial African to the mouth of the
Nile where they lay the first foundations of ancient civilization. 99 Accordingly, the “Black
Epaphus,” as mentioned in the text is the personification of the Egyptian people, was the bearer
of civilization who would bring the light to all humanity. Pondering further upon these words, he
makes the following pronouncement: “Should my interpretation of Prometheus Bound to be
considered adequate proof that the Egyptians were a black race represented by Black Ephaphus
who was to harvest all the plains irrigated by the Nile.” 100 Asante remarks trenchantly that the
Afrocentric discourse recognizes the cultural complex of the Nile Valley as “points of reference
for an African perspective much the same way as Greece and Rome serve as reference points for
the European world.” 101
Firmin continues with the conversation by asking a rhetorical question, how can “a race
Europeans consider radically inferior, could produce a nation to which today’s Europe owes
everything, for Egypt is responsible for the original intellectual and moral achievements which
constitute the foundations of modern civilization.” 102 Firmin maintains that the vestiges of
antiquity do testify that there was a period of history that Black people “were holding up the
flame of early civilization.” 103 Accordingly, if this first premise is attested as a truth claim, then,
the theory of the inequality of the races is dismissed or rejected.
The Egyptians Called their Land Kemet
We already referenced in the previous section that Firmin used the original name
“Kemet,” to identity the ancient Pharaonic Egypt. He continues by reporting that the Egyptians
themselves called their land Kemet, meaning “the Black land of Egypt,” or simply the “Black
land.” 104 He also adds, “As for their national name, the Egyptians called themselves Khemi, a
word that means “burnt face,” just like AEthiopes.” 105 Firmin deploys the word Retou to denote
the indigenous people of Egypt; as he notes, “We know, in fact, that the word Retou means
nothing more than indigenous, a “native of Egypt.” 106 As a result, he could assert, “That the
ancient Egyptians, the true Retous, were Black Africans, just like the other Negroes,” and that
“they called themselves Retou… which seemed to distinguish them from the Nahasi or
Na’hasiou (Negroes).” 107 At this point, Firmin does not give the impression that the Egyptians
undermine their own Blackness and Africaness. In fact, before this particular observation, he
clarifies the seemingly confusion this might bring to the readers:
The ancient Egyptians grouped together the Asiastics (Aamou) and the white-skinned
peoples of the North (Tamahou or Tahennou). Isn’t this division significant? Does it not
suggest that they claimed for themselves the same origin as the other Black peoples of
Africa and that, rightly or wrongly, they attributed a common origin of the White peoples
of both Asia and Europe? 108
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Firmin expounds on his argument for the Black beginning of ancient Egypt by engaging
another dimension in the Egyptian life and experience. He turns to the visual culture and the
aesthetic character of Egyptian art, monuments, and paintings. He posits that “Egyptians artists
seem to have taken particular care to distinguish themselves from Whites,” 109 and significantly,
the Egyptians used the “black color to represent the principal deities as well as the Pharaohs.” 110
By citing a quote from Champollion that “Egypt is all African and not in the least Asiatic,” 111
Firmin was dismissing the idea that external influences from Asia are the sole basis for the
successes of Egyptian civilization and its intellectual development.
The Haitian Egyptologist strengthens his linguistic argument by appealing to an ancient
authority in the Medieval era, Eustathius of Constantinople. He observes:
Until the last years of the Middle Ages, then, scholars generally believed in the Negro
origin of the Retou (In his Commentaries on The Odyssey, Eustathius of Constantinople
comments on a well-now phrase asserting that the expression was used to mean “to be
burnt by the sun,” that it, “to turn black, to turn brown.” 112
Firmin’s extrapolation based on linguistic data is confirmed by Obenga in the article we
referenced earlier in the essay. Obenga shows systematically, through his close reading of
Firmin’s text and Firmin’s usage of the Egyptian language, that the Haitian anthropologist was
one of the earliest Black Egyptologists in the nineteenth century. Felicitously, he specifies that
Firmin transcribes innerantly Egyptian proper names—very close to the Egyptian language—a
clear indication of his knowledge of ancient Egypt and familiarity with the Egyptian language. 113
For example, Firmin writes authentically the selected following Egyptian names:
1) Ramses II or Ramesses II (Ri mīsisu) 114
2) Nahasi/Na’hasiou (Negroes) 115
3) Tamahou or Tahennou (White-skinned peoples of the North) 116
4) Aamou (Asiatics) 117
5) Khemi 118
6) Retous 119
7) Kha-f-Ra (Cheops) 120
8) Sheikh-el-Balad (Ka-aper) 121
9) Rahotpou 122
10) Nofrit 123
11) Nofritari 124
12) Medinat-Habu 125
13) Ahmes 126
14) Psamethik 127
15) Piankhy Meri Amoun 128
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In Civilization or Barbarianism, originally published in French in 1981, Cheikh Anta
Diop would substantiate Firmin’s position that Kemet was in fact an “African land” and
connected with the rest of “Black Africa;” and that “Kemet gave birth to subsequent Black
African societies such as Nubia, Kush, Meroe, and ancient Ghana.” 129 In addition, Asante
complements both Firmin and Diop when he writes, “The Africans called their land Kemet and it
was designated ‘the land of the Blacks.’ This was quite appropriate inasmuch as the country had
found its life from the emergence of civilization in Upper, that is, southern Egypt, where the
people were often as black as the fertile soil that extended, on either side, the length of the
Nile.” 130 Troy D. Allen also observes, “Kemet provides us with a record of how Africans
constructed their society before foreign influences had taken hold in Africa.” 131 This same
specialist on ancient Egyptian history sustains that the relationship between Kemet and Nubia
(Ethiopia) is significant in studying the social organization of ancient Kemet. Nubia was
egyptianized in all aspects of culture and that there had been uninterrupted contacts between the
two nations and that both ancient Kemites and ancient Nubians-Ethiopians were of the same
race. 132
We have already seen that temples were built all over Nubia by the Kings of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. Then towns important as religious, commercial and
administrative centers grew around those temples. Nubia was entirely reorganized on
purely Egyptian lines and a completely Egyptian system of administration was set up,
entailing the presence of a considerable number of Egyptian scribes, priests, soldiers and
artisans. 133
As observed, Firmin cogently defended the blackness of ancient Egypt and delineated
that there was a close relationship between ancient Kemet-Egypt and Ethiopia. Firmin
establishes that close links between Egyptians and Ethiopians are important signals in finding the
origin of the Egyptians. Firmin was particularly concerned to inquire about the skin color of the
Ethiopians. Were the Egyptians black like the Egyptians? What was the nature of the relationship
between the Egyptians and the Ethiopians? To what extent did the Egyptians and Ethiopians
share similar cultural traditions and practices? How significant are those common customs in
retracing the origin of the Egyptians?
The Egyptians are the Descendants of the Ethiopians
Firmin debunks the predominant thesis of nineteenth-century European social scientists
and anthropologists that the Egyptian people were a White race and that Egypt was not a part of
Africa. Firmin also counters a major tenet of Western Egyptology the notion that the Ethiopians
did not originate from Ethiopia. He does that by documenting scientific evidence ranging from
the material culture in anthropology, archeology, linguistic (to a certain degree) and to religious
practices as well as by offering the proof from the science of botany and fauna that links the
Egyptian and Ethiopian peoples.
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He contends that Egypt was one of the colonies of Ethiopia and that the Ethiopians who migrated
to Egypt created the great Pharaonic civilization. To express this idea another way, the Egyptians
were the direct descendants of Ethiopians, a historical fact that attests to the origin of ancient
Egyptian civilization. Consequently, in Chapter nine (“Egypt and Civilization”), Firmin’s inquiry
leads him to determine exactly the origin, cultural identity, and more importantly the “race” of
the Ethiopian people and the nature of their relationships to the Egyptians.
Firmin underscores that there is no substantial historical nor scientific evidence that
justifies classifying the ancient Egyptian race as Caucasian. 134 “Once we acknowledge the
Ethiopian origin of the ancient civilizers of Egypt, he declares, we will necessarily acknowledge
the innate capacity of all the races to develop their genius and their intelligence.” 135
Firmin remarks that the Egyptians had migrated from Ethiopia by following the flow of
the Nile is an established belief among scholars and is well attested by the French philologist and
man of letters Jean-Jacques Ampère in Voyage en Égypte et en Nubie. Ampère visited Egypt for
scientific research and was influenced by the works of the “Father of Egyptology” Jean Francois
Champollion. 136 In the referenced text, Ampère makes this striking observation about the
peoples of the Nile Valley: “The farther one goes up the Nile, the more one finds physical
similarities between the populations living today on the river’s shores and the ancient race as it is
portrayed on the old monuments and as its appearance has been preserved in the mummies.” 137
As early as 1830, Ampère in Heures de poésies or De l'Histoire de la poésie had sustained the
common racial identity and origin of the Egyptians and Ethiopians when he composed this poetic
stand, which Firmin reproduced in his book:
With their black tresses, the Nubian women
Drapped in their flowing dresses
Resemble the Egyptian maidens
Whose portraits decorate the monuments. 138
Ampère’s understanding of the Egyptian-Ethiopian phenomenon and the close
relationship between the two countries is communicated in his remarkable insight that the
Ethiopians of the Nile Valley were black just like the Egyptians. In this poetic note, he stresses
the material culture exhibited in the common dress and visual painting, which the Egyptians and
Ethiopians shared. Firmin also cites the French linguist Jean-François Champollion, who also
visited Egypt and penned several influential works on the Egyptian civilization and language. 139
Champollion is prominently known as the founding “Father of Egyptology” who deciphered
Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone and published the first Egyptian grammar in the
French language in 1822. From 1828 to 1830, he and a group of able scientists under the
leadership of Emperor Napoleon conducted a scientific expedition in Egypt. Champollion, who
had declared that the Egyptian and Ethiopian peoples were one and the same race and with
common cultural and linguistic characteristics, also penned the following words about them:
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The ancient Egyptians belonged to a race of humans who resembled in every way the
Kenuz or ‘Barabras,’ the current inhabitants of Nubia. The Copts found in Egypt today
have none of the characteristic traits of the ancient Egyptian population. The Copts are
the result of the anarchic métissage of all the different peoples that had successively
dominated Egypt. It is wrong headed to try to find in these people the physical traits of
the ancient race. 140
In Chapter four (“Monogenism and Pologyenism”) in The Equality of the Human Races,
Firmin like Diop rejects the theory of polygenism 141 but instead embraces the principle of
monogenism as a theory explaining the origin of humanity; he offers additional historical and
textual evidence from Roman literature supporting the long-standing tradition of the classical
records which identify the people of Ethiopia as Black, and that the Egyptians were the direct
descendants of the Ethiopians. He quotes a memorable line from the Roman poet Ovid in
Metamorphoses, a mythico-historical poetic narrative describing the history of the world from
the time of creation to the elevated divine status (that is his deification) of Julius Caesar of
Rome:
Ovid, however, simply repeats an opinion shared by all the Ancients. The word Ethiopian
itself (in Greek, Aethiop from Aethein, to burn, and op, face), which was already used by
Homer, says it all. Long before Ovid, we find the same idea in the work of Thodectis of
Phaselis, an ancient Greek tragedian who lived in the fourth century before Christ. Strabo
attributes the following lines to him: 142
Those to whom the burning sun comes too close in its course take on a soot-like
complexion and their hair curls up, swells, and dries up in the heat. 143
To continue, Firmin offers two basic reasons that explain the Ethiopian influence upon
the Egyptian civilization and his reason to contradict and reject the unscientific claims of
Egyptologists and anthropologists that the Ethiopians were uncivilized and barbarians. In other
words, the Ethiopianization of Egypt is a historical attestation of the momentous of the peoples
of Egypt and Ethiopia in world civilization. This position clearly affirms the dignity of the
Ethiopian people. These two historical facts, he contends, would also support his suggestion that
the Retous were a people of the same origin as the Ethiopians and the indigenous peoples of
Sudanese Africa. 144 First, he mentions the historical Hyksos—a white race or a group of mixed
Semitic-Asiatics —invasion of Egypt around 1720-1710 BCE. Second, he reports the mass
migration from Egypt to Ethiopia. 145 When the Hyksos of West Asia annexed the land of Egypt,
the Egyptians of the Delta region spontaneously withdrew themselves in the direction of Upper
Egypt. It is there at the borders of the Thebes province they received military assistance and
other substantial resources from the Ethiopians, their natural allies.
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Consequently, the Egyptians eventually overcame their invaders and removed them from
their land. In fact, the Ethiopian civilization was at its peak in this time period to the point that an
arranged marriage was performed between Princess Nofritari and Ahmes and in order to enact
the alliance between Egypt and the King of Ethiopia. 146 To express this another way, the Hyksos
were intruders whose cultural influence at the birth of the Egyptian civilization only came later
in the game. They were not the original architects or makers of the Black Pharaonic Egypt.
Firmin’s second historical reason to ascertain the common racial origin and identity of
the people of Egypt and Ethiopia and to establish the priority of Ethiopia attests to the great
migration already mentioned above. As he puts it, during the mass migration, “240,000 soldiers
of the Egyptian army walked away in compact groups from Egypt into Ethiopia when the
policies of the Sais Dynasty King Psamethik the First seemed to give too much access to the
Greeks.” 147 Firmin reinforces his position by referencing to an important historical period in
Egyptian-Ethiopian history, in which more than a century before the restoration of the Sais
Dynasty, King Piankhy Meri Amoun, the founder of the XXV Ethiopian dynasty, subjugated the
entire territory which extends from Thebes to the Nile Valley. Moreover, he invites his readers to
consider his judgment: “How else can we explain the destination of these Egyptian migrants if
not by the fact that they shared a common racial identity with the people under whose flags they
willingly gathered? Consciousness of race here superseded consciousness of nationality.” 148
Complementarily, Firmin showcases the shared cultural traditions and religious and
spiritual practices between the Ethiopians and the Egyptians. He indicates that when scholars
study African flora—including the papyrus and the lebka tree—and fauna—such as the ancient
greyhound (canis leporarius oegypticus)—of classical Egypt, they soon realize that “most of the
plants and animals the Egyptians used in their religious rituals or for their basic daily needs,
originated in Ethiopia.” 149 What did account for this common cultural tradition and shared
practices between Egypt and Ethiopia? Firmin explains that these plants and animals were first
used in Ethiopia and later transported to Egypt and raised there. He was convinced that the
Egyptians came from Ethiopia with their plants, livestock, and material and religious resources.
The Firminian logic is the sustaining argument that Egypt not only had close cultural
links and relationships with Ethiopia but with the rest of the African populations with which
Egypt shared thousands of similarities in terms of customs, popular religion, and language. 150
This judgment is further affirmed by Cesar Cantu and Ampere. Firmin quotes the latter below:
Some objects used in Egyptian religious rituals are originally from Nubia. Two such
items are the sweet marjoram (origanum majorama), a plant sacred to Isis, and the ibis, a
bird which comes down to these lands only at the time of the Nile’s flooding…It was
only in Nubia that Caillaud had seen the black ibis and the sacred scarab (scarabeus
ateuchus), which was worshipped b the ancient Egyptians. 151
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Firmin was also persuaded that “the further back in antiquity we go the more we become
convinced that all the peoples living on the shores of the Nile were of the same ethnological
type.” 152 He projected the idea of the cultural unity and shared identity and traditions 153 between
the Egyptians and Ethiopians by citing another authority, the distinguished Greek historian and
classical writer Diodorus of Sicily. By appealing to this canonical writer, Firmin was reiterating
the commonly-held belief in antiquity among Greek and Roman writers about the true origin of
the Egyptians:
The Ethiopians claim that Egypt is one of their colonies. There are striking similarities
between the customs and the laws of the two countries: kings are called gods; funerals are
very elaborate rituals; the same writing systems are in use in Ethiopia and Egypt, and the
knowledge of the sacred characters, which is the exclusive preserve of the Egyptian
priests to be familiar to all Ethiopians. 154
Classics scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr. concurs that the Greeks and Romans used the
generic term Ethiopian (Aithiops, Aethiops) to refer to “dark-and black-skinned people” who
lived south of Egypt and on the southern fringes of northwest Africa. 155 He makes the following
observation as depicted in the classical records as early as the second millennium:
The Greeks and Romans…in detailed descriptions and striking realistic portraits have
provided a very accurate and precise picture of the African peoples whom they described
as Ethiopians. Ethiopians were black and flat-nosed in Xenophanes; black with the
wooliest hair of all mankind in Herodotus; black, flat-nosed, and woolly-haired in
Diodorus; and in the Moretum described with the detail and accuracy of later
anthropological classifications of the so-called Negroid type. 156
Substantially, Firmin cites G. M. Ollivier-Beauregard in Des divinités égyptiennes, a text
that was published in 1866 before the rise of Egyptology and anthropology as academic
disciplines in the West, to accentuate ancient Egyptian attitude towards white people: “From the
most remote antiquity, the Egyptians customarily referred to the White nations by such
expressions as ‘cursed of Schet’ or ‘the plague of Schet.’” 157 This particular assertion is
exploited here as a supportive evidence that the Egyptian had rejected the white identity as a
people. As outlined in the preceding paragraphs, Firmin brilliantly offered strong opinions and
convincing arguments to dismiss the common belief of the day that the ancient Egyptians were a
White race. He also dismantled the traditional belief of his time that the ancient KemeticEgyptian civilization was the achievement of the White race, and the Egyptologist prerogative
that “the classical civilizations of the Nile Valley were not possible without European input.” 158
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Prominent Haitian intellectual-anthropologist Price-Mars reiterates in his 1928
masterpiece, Ainsi Parla l’Oncle, what Firmin had already established in 1885 that “Abyssinia
[Ethiopia] was a center of civilization in direct contact with Egypt? Its influence like that of
Egypt extended far to the West over the peoples of eastern Sudan.” 159 He accentuates that we
must connect the Ethiopians with the ancient Egyptians. 160 In the text, Price-Mars elaborates on
the wide-range spread and influence of ancient Ethiopian-Egyptian civilization upon the rest of
continental Africa, which included the cultural and imperial centers of Songhai in the sixteenth
century, the Askia dynasty, and that of Sudan in the domain of arts and sciences. For example, he
concludes that the land of Songhai “bore the seeds of ancient Egypt.” 161
In our previous analysis, we have noted that the Black origin thesis of the ancient
Egyptian civilization and the connection between Egypt and Ethiopia and their complementary
roles in the civilizing process is substantially supported by Black Atlantic writers and
intellectuals of the Vindicationist tradition, both in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds.
The Black presence in Egypt and the Ethiopian-Egyptian connection is also supported by Count
Constantin Volney (or Constantin François de Chassebœuf). Volney was an influential French
scholar, philosopher and historian who travelled to Egypt in 1782 and 1785 in the blossoming era
of slavery and the slave trade in Western societies. He wrote the excellent work entitled Voyage
en Egypte et en Syrie in 1787. It is to him that Firmin turns to confirm his provocative claim.
The Haitian Egyptologist reproduces Volney’s historic observation: “When I saw that
characteristically Negro head, I remembered this remarkable passage in Herodotus where he
sates, ‘I believe that the Colchis are a colony of Egyptians because, like the latter, they have a
black skin and wooly hair.’” 162 Firmin interprets the words of the French scholar to mean that
“the Egyptians were true Negroes, of the same race as the natives of Africa.” 163 Volney, who
denounces European hypocrisy and racism towards blacks, also makes this striking declaration
about white racism and Black slavery:
Just think that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the
very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech! Just imagine,
finally, that it is in the midst of peoples who call themselves the greatest friends and
humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery and questioned whether black
men have the same kind of intelligence as Whites! 164
148
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Firmin closes the pages of the chapter on “Egypt and Civilization” by restating his
underlying thesis:
It is time now to put an end to the dogma according to which the ancient Ethiopians were
a bunch of barbarians unable to attain civilization simply because they were Black…The
population of Egypt was Black like the Ethiopians, and the inhabitants of Ethiopia were
as civilized as the Egyptians…The population of Egypt was Black like the Ethiopians,
and the inhabitants of Ethiopia were as civilized as the Egyptians…Egypt was a country
of Negroes, of Black Africans. The Black race has preceded all other races in the
construction of civilization. It is in the Black race that thought first emerged and human
intelligence first awakened….The Greeks paid homage to the ancient Egyptians; the
Romans paid homage to the Greeks; and the whole of Europe salute them all! 165
The Indebtedness of Classical Greek to Ancient Egypt
In this division of the essay, we shall comment on Firmin’s unapologetic position for the
considerable impact of ancient Egypt on classical Greek. In Chapter six (“Artificial Ranking of
the Human Races”) in The Equality of the Human Races, the anti-racist intellectual crossexamines and hence rejects the logic of the “systematic hierarchy among the human races,” and
the scientifically-derived racial categories and criteria used both by anthropologists and
Egyptologists. In the opening words, he voices strong criticisms against the un-reasonability of
Gobineau’s judgment, “the idea of an innate, original, profound, and permanent inequality
among the races is one of the oldest and most widespread opinions in the world.” 166 For Firmin,
Gobineau’s exaggerated and unsustainable claim—his ethnographic division of humanity into
distinct races—cannot be justified or sustained on the basis of serious works of history and
plausible scientific reason. He explains that the basis in classifying humanity as such and as an
intellectual idea has its roots at the birth of ethnographic science and modernity’s racial
imagination.
Firmin contends that the concept of race assumed its definitive meaning only with the
works of eighteenth century naturalists, and race as a social construct is an invention of modern
science. 167 The Haitian anthropologist reasons, as a reply to Gobineau’s ideology of racial
superiority, that it is not absolutely accurate to suggest that the idea of original inequality of the
human races is one of the oldest and most widespread opinions. 168 The problem was not race but
patriotic zeal. He thus writes, “Through history, civilized peoples, self-centered and proud, have
always thought themselves superior to their neighbors. But there was been the least connection
between this sense of superiority, which results from a narrow but highly respectable
patriotism.” 169
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He explains further that scientists who have developed the doctrine of the inequality of the races
and the superiority of one race over another race base their judgment upon four possible factors
or criteria: intelligence, physical factors (physical anthropology)—which include height,
muscular strength, proportion of the limbs, etc.—beauty, and morality. 170 After a thorough
analysis of each individual proposal, Firmin bluntly dismisses all of those criteria of authenticity
for maintaining white supremacy and hegemony, and the racist culture of Western societies. He
judges that they do not have strong scientific foundation and that the arguments that sustain them
are curious, ambivalent, unstable, and even contradictory.
The claim that bothered Firmin the most was the idea that the Black race had no history,
as philosopher Georg Hegel had also reminded us that continental Africa was a place with no
history. Firmin was uncomfortable with white claim of history—that is, history is the
achievement of a race and a people, the Aryan myth and the triumph of white people in modern
history. Also, he could not tolerate the thought of white denial that a Black population in Egypt
could have produced the high intellectual culture and social development, which for him,
“constitutes crucial arguments against the doctrine of the inequality of the races” 171 and counters
the doctrine of “the innate inferiority of the Black race.” 172 To illustrate the pervasiveness of the
problem of whiteness and the preposterousness of white claim of black innate inferiority in
Western thought, Firmin reproduces a passage from the French naturalist Armand de
Quatrefages’s book, L'espèce humaine, 173 published in 1877:
The set of conditions that produced the different races has also brought about an actual
inequality which is impossible to deny. But such is the penchant of the professional
Negrophiles for hyperbole that they insist that the Negro was in the past, and much as he
is, equal to the White man.
Barth’s discoveries have a verified something which could be doubted until then: the
existence of a political history among Negroes. But this very fact serves to underscore
more the absence of an intellectual history, which consists of a general progressive
movement marked by literary, artistic, and architectural achievements. Left to tis own
devices, the Negro race has produced nothing of the sort. The Black people, which have
been classified among the Negro race in order to disguise the race’s too obvious
inferiority, are connected to it at best through crossbreeding cases in which the superior
blood predominates. 174
It is evident that both Gobineau and Quatrefage maintained a similar view on race and
white supremacy in particular. Both of them had overlooked and undermined the longestablished tradition of the Black origin of the Egyptians as maintained in the classical records
and the indebtedness of classical Greek to ancient Egypt.
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Firmin was convinced by bringing careful attention to the triumph of the ancient Egyptian
civilization in world history and by highlighting the manifold debt the Greco-Roman civilization,
and ultimately Western civilization owes to ancient Egypt, he would be able to prove that the
Black race was capable of grand and noble actions, capable especially of standing up to the
White race. 175 Hence, it suffices for the Haitian anthropologist to once again revisit the classical
records of ancient Greece and Rome in which prominent figures and writers of antiquity
acknowledge deliberately and pay homage to Egypt.
Firmin cogently reasons that classical Greek civilization and culture owes its intellectual
development to Africa and ancient Egypt. He presents forceful, sustainable, and systematic
arguments to validate all of his points. First of all, he declares that, “Besides the honor of having
invented the science of numbers and surface measurement does not belong to the White race.
The origin of mathematics goes back to Black Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs.” 176 Accordingly,
the intelligence of Black Egyptians in creating the science of geometry required high level
aptitude and critical thinking:
All the scientists who researched the history of the exact sciences unanimously recognize
the Egyptians as the inventors of geometry. More than three thousand years before the
Christian era, when the European nations were still in a barbarous state, the Hamites who
lived on the shores of the Nile had already been doing geometric computations,
calculating the area of different types of surfaces. 177
Secondly, he insists on Greece’s borrowing from Egypt when he writes:
Plato and Diogenes Laerces both recognize that arithmetic too originated in Egypt, which
is quite logical, given that arithmetic calculations are indispensable in the solution of
geometric problems. As with many other things, Greece, the first White Western nation
to have attained a considerable of civilization indisputably owes to Egypt the first notions
of mathematics. 178
Thirdly, Firmin denies Greek originality by attacking its intellectual foundations:
The first Greek scientist to have concerned himself with mathematics with some
brilliance was Thales of Miletus; he had acquired most of his knowledge in Egypt. In the
sixth century, before the decline of her culture, Greece produced, for her greater glory,
Pythagoras, who showed the most brilliant aptitudes for the sciences. We owe him the
discovery of several properties of numbers, the proof of the value of the square of the
hypotenuse, and several theorems. But are we not justified to ask whether he had
achieved all this on his own, or simply transmitted to us the notions he had learned from
the Egyptian priests, especially as he studied in their college in Thebes and lived in their
country for twenty years? 179
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Next, he advances the idea that Plato, one of the intellectual giants of the Greek culture and
thought, and Western civilization, studied in Egypt:
“Plato, who practiced mathematics with great success and who is mainly responsible for
giving them the prestige they continue to enjoy, was not satisfied with studying with the
Pythagoreans; he went to Egypt, to the very source of the light.” 180
Asante encapsulate the Firminian logic when pronounces these striking words: “Since Egypt
preceded the civilizations of Greece and Rome in antiquity it is only natural that it would be the
source of Greek knowledge, even names of towns and deities.” 181 In this sense, it is Africa, to
some extent, rather than Greece, that has made a lasting impact on Western societies. 182 By
emphasizing the achievement of Egypt in Greece and Rome respectively in the intellectual,
cultural, social, and historical sense, both Firmin and Asante came to a similar conclusion.
Some seventy-one years before Firmin would publish his groundbreaking and anti-racist
text, the first postcolonial writer of post-revolutionary Haiti Pompée Valentin baron de Vastey,
the secretary and publicist to King Henry Christophe, published Le système colonial dévoilé (The
Colonial System Unveiled) in 1814. Vastey, in many ways, echoes Afrocentric sensibility and
condemns the colonial system and slavery as an inhuman institution. In this manifesto,
anticipating Firmin’s work, the royal apologist articulates anti-racist, anti-colonial, and antiWestern oppression sentiments. Vastey brings to surface that “Danaus and Cecrops brought
agriculture, enlightenment (les lumières), and the arts of the Egyptians to Greece.” 183 Like
Firmin, he accentuates the tremendous impact of Egypt in the emergence of Greece and Rome as
nations, and insists that both countries “had received these goods/benefits from Egypt,” 184 that is
the Egyptians brought with them to Greece and Rome “the arts, the commerce, and the
navigation system.” 185
Finally, with his critical and brilliant mind, Firmin proposes two basic reasons why
Western scholars had failed to give credit to the Egyptians for all their accomplishments in world
history. The first reason is that the Egyptians “had a language with a rather sophisticated
grammar but also with a writing system that was so complicated and so difficult that scientific
and literary documents in the language remained incomprehensible for centuries.” 186 The second
reason he reports is that “Egyptian achievements in mathematics have not been recognized, one
which worsens the effects of the first, the exclusionary mindset of the priest, the principal
depositories of science.” 187 To express this concern another way, the second problem had to do
explicitly with what we might call the “epistemic apartheid” which explains the “epistemic
crisis” in Egyptian cultural and intellectual history.
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Egyptian priests who were supposed to teach the common people about the art of wisdom and
science limited their scientific knowledge and findings or discoveries to a limited few in the
population. As Firmin reports, “Egyptian priests made a mystery out of all their scientific
acquisitions and taught them only in a restricted milieu, to a small number of pupils, training a
close elite who would have the total monopoly of the esoteric doctrine.” 188 In spite of these
shortcomings in Egyptian history, Firmin find comfort as he ponders upon the enduring impact
of ancient Egyptian civilization upon the life and culture of classical Greece and Rome, and by
extension the entire Western civilization:
Nevertheless, Egypt was considered the fount of science, so much so that it was in
Alexandria that the Greeks went to develop their aptitudes for mathematics, producing
such famous figures as Euclid, Archimedes, Appollonius of Perga, and so many other
bright stars in the Alexandria Pleiades. Now that the human mind has entered a mature
stage, as indicated by the conscientiously critical approach to phenomena that has
become the norm, we wonder whether it is not possible that unknown scientists of the
ancient Egyptian race helped to light the first sparks of science in the immortal city
founded by Alexander the Great. Whether the answer is affirmative or not, it remains a
fact of history that the Black race of Egypt was the first to cultivate the abstract notions
of arithmetic and to formulate the first calculations. 189
Diop and Firmin: The Legacy Continues
In the final division of the essay, we shall briefly comment on the legacy of Diop in
relation to Firmin’s work. In his seminal text, Firmin has not succeeded o explore profoundly
the linguistic link between ancient Egypt and the rest of continental Black Africa. In 1954, the
brilliant and highly respected Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and philosopher
Cheik Anta Diop would fill the gap by establishing in his epoch-making book Nations nègres et
culture the decisive and impressive linguistic connection between Egypt and several countries in
Black Africa. Diop articulates a coherent theory of common linguistic roots of African
languages he studies as well as the theory of Black genesis of ancient Egypt, as his intellectual
predecessor had achieved.
Diop repudiates the racially-based scientific theories and dangerous ideologies
propagated by European Egyptologists, anthropologists, archeologists, linguistics, and historians.
In September 1956 at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Diop
pronounces these words to his predominantly Black audience:
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We have come to discover that the ancient Pharaonic Egyptian civilization was
undoubtedly a Negro civilization. To defend this thesis, anthropological, ethnological,
linguistic, historical, and cultural arguments have been provided. To judge their validity,
it suffices to refer to Nations nègres et culture. 190
Likewise, in the footsteps of Firmin, in the English translation of Civilization or
Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, Diop would rehearse and sustain the Firminian thesis
that “ancient Egypt was a distinct African nation and was not historically or culturally a part of
Asia or Europe” 191 as some scholars had traditionally maintained. The Black origin of ancient
Egypt, according to Diop, was critical for the reconstitution of African history and the future of
the whole continent. Consequently, he would write in The African Origin of Civilization:
“Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in
air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of
Egypt.” 192 Diop describes with more precision and clarity the significant contributions of the
Black race in the making of modernity:
The ancient Egyptians were Negroes. The moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted
among the assets of the Black world. Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent
debtor, the Black world is the very initiator of the “western” civilization flaunted before
our eyes today. Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of
Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science
are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science. One needs only to mediate on Osiris, the
redeemer-god, who sacrifices himself, dies, and is resurrected to save mankind, a figure
essentially identifiable with Christ. 193
Conclusion
The Significance of Firmin in the Twenty-first Century
The problem of scientific racism and the exclusion of Black people of ancient Egypt and
the people of African ancestry from the meganarratives of human history and world civilizations
are central points to the vindicationist discourse of Anténor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human
Races. As a result, Firmin attempted to shift the geography of reason—that was then
Eurocentric—and decenter the Westernization of epistemology and human history. He found
Western historiography and its treatment of African history and culture deficient, and assessed
the scientific enterprise and vision of Western scholarship as racist and unscientific. For Firmin,
the problem of whiteness (or the Aryan myth) was a major crisis of modernity, which was deeply
rooted in the racist culture in Western societies and white supremacist ideology.
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The second problem of modernity was Black recognition, and the fear and averseness of Western
scholars and scientists to acknowledge and valorize the substantial contributions of the Black
race in the intellectual development of world civilizations and cultures. As Asante has rightly
observed, European scholars and Egyptologists had tripped “Africa of its productive and
generative subjectivity.” 194 For Firmin, ancient Egypt, for a better word, the Kemetic civilization
was a master symbol of black achievement in world history. As he has also argued, by the virtue
of the Haitian Revolution, the Haitian people are a symbol of Black equality and intelligence in
human history.
Firmin’s book is significant in the twenty-first century for its direct and indirect
engagement with important and critical issues of our time, both academic and practical; these
include ethnic and postcolonial studies, critical race theory, the discipline of modern
anthropology and history of ideas, and the practical effects of racism and discrimination in
society . As long as whiteness remains a dominant problem in the modern world and our
postcolonial moment, the necessity to read Firmin will become inevitable. Firmin refused to
judge people based on their social rank, wealth, much less of the color of their skin; rather, he
championed the dignity of every individual. 195 As he himself writes at the end of his book, “All
men are brothers…once they acknowledge they are equal, the races will be able to support and
love one another….That human beings everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and
defects, without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape. The races are equal.” 196 It was
Jean Metellus who reminds us that “Firmin deserves to be included not only among the pantheon
of great Haitians, not only among the great Blacks of the world, but also among the first
representatives of universalism.” 197
The Equality of the Human Races will remain an important text to consult from time to
time as long as the onerous burden of race and white supremacy and arrogance, Western
hegemony, neocolonial imperialism, and racism continue to exist and threaten human existence,
and hinder the furtherance of peoples and nations in the twenty-first century culture.
In sum, for Firmin, the heritage of ancient Egypt belongs to all humanity regardless of
one’s geography, race, gender, culture, and ethnicity. The significance of Firmin in the twentyfirst century is what he exactly represents and what he does not represent in the history of ideas.
Joseph Anténor Firmin is the Haitian intellectual par excellence and the fervent defender of the
equality of the human races. Such a legacy will never die!
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Notes
1
Joseph Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive)
(Paris : Librairie Cotillon, Paris, 1885).
2
An excellent and more recent translation of Gobineau’s work in the English language is
by George L. Mosse, The Inequality of Human Races (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).
3
African American theologian and public intellectual J. Kameron Carter writes brilliantly
about the problem of European construction of history and the anthropos, and Western raciallymotivated theological discourse, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011). Carter cogently argues that race is a theological problem in modern Western
intellectual history.
4
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes and Noble Classic, 2003
[1903]).
5
Firmin anticipates Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations Negres et Culture (Paris: Editions
Africaine, 1954).
6
Firmin critically engaged a wide range of European anthropologists, philosophers,
scientists, and Egyptologists. Some of his most conversational partners were Paul Broca, Bulletin
de la Société d’Anthropologie (Paris, 1860), and Histoire des progrès des études
anthropologiques depuis la fondation de la société en 1859. Mémoires de la Société
d’anthropologie de Paris, III (Paris, 869); Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des
Races Humaines. 4 vols. (Paris : Belford, 1853-55) ; Julian J. Virey, Histoire naturelle du genre
humain (Paris, 1800) ; Paul Topinard, Eléments d’anthropologie générale (Paris, 1885) ;
Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris : Bachelier, 1835) ; Charles Darwin, On
Origin of Species (London : John Murray, 1859); Herbert Spencer, Classification des sciences
(Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière et Cie, 1872) ; Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François
Champollion, Jacques Ampère, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, etc.
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7
Firmin argues for the significant impact of the Haitian Revolution in world history as
well as appeals to Haiti’s national history, and the intellectual evolution of Haitians and African
Americans to refute the doctrine of the inequality of the races, 180-201, 203-224, 295-323. In a
recent review of Firmin’s work, Watson R. Denis states that “Firmin’s work extends the
nineteenth century Haitian political and historical thoughts, which defended the Haitian,
independence, the equality of races, and the pride of Black achievements in world history,”
“Review of The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology),” Caribbean Studies
34:1 (2006):327.
8
The idea of Black contributions to modernity and world civilizations is well
documented voluminously in the writings of other Black Atlantic writers such as W.E.B. Du
Bois, The Negro (Mineola: Dove Publications, Inc., 2001 [1915]), The Gift of Black Folk: The
Negroes in the Making of America (New York: Washington Square Press, 970 [1924]), and The
World and Africa: An Inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history (New York:
International Publishers, 1992 [1946]), Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'Oncle : Essais
d'ethnographie haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de Compiègne, 1928), Cheikh Anta Diop,
The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence
Hill Books, 1974). [1967]), and Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, trans.
Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991 [1981]).
9
In the final part of the essay, we will discuss Firmin’s argument for Greek borrowings
from Egyptian arts, mathematics, sciences, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, religion, and
architecture.
10
Previous short studies on Firmin and the present text in evaluation in French include
the following: Leonce Vivaud, La pesonnalite d’Anténor Firmin (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie
Valcin, 1948); Pradel Pompilus, Anténor Firmin par lui-même: le champion de la négritude et de
la démocratie haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Pegasus, 1990) ; Firmin’s biographer, PriceMars highlights two important studies on Firmin: the first is by historian H. P. Sannon which
appeared in the Haitian review Le Temps respectively on August 24 and 31, 1938; the second is
by Seymour Pradel which was also published in the pages of Le Temps.
11
Assselin Charles, the incredible translator, reproduced, as he himself remarks, “in
modern English Firmin’s modulate French style,” “Note on The Translation,” in Anténor Firmin,
The Equality of the Human Races (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 2002), ix;
Charles also mentions that Firmin’s style is “at once lyrically poetic, scientifically technical, and
passionately polemical,” ibid. In this present essay, I will often refer to Charles’ tour de force
translation.
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12
It is good to point out here the religious element of the book had not been studied by
scholars. Hence, religion is the sixth interrelated category.
13
Jean Price-Mars, Anténor Firmin (Port-au-Prince, 1978), 147-8.
14
Lewis R. Gordon, “Not Exactly Positivism: Firmin’s Critique of Transcendental
Idealism in His Philosophy of Race and Culture,” 1. Anténor Firmin was a complex intellectual,
whose ideas on race, (Black) nationalism, and cosmopolitanism are debatable among scholars.
Anthropologist Faye V. Harrison states that “Anténor’s legacy in the 20th century was a vibrant
school of ethnologie that documented and theorized the African-derived cultural heritage shaping
Haiti’s social-cultural landscape. This ethnological project aimed to vindicate Haiti and assert the
first Black Republic’s right to state and cultural sovereignty in the face of widespread
international hostility and, most immediately, U.S. hegemony,” “Dismantling Anthropology’s
Domestic and International Peripheries,” WAN E-JOURNAL 6 (2012):91; J. Michael Dash
declares that Haitian nationalists had mistaken Firmin “as a precursor to the negritude
movement” and that “The irony is that some elements of racial theorizing by the negritude
writers are closer to the conception of racial difference promoted Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau
whose ideas were famously contested by Firmin in his De l’égalité des races humaines (1885),”
“Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor’s Firmin Letters from
St. Thomas,” Research in African Literatures 35:2 (2004):47; contrary to Dash, David Nicholls
in his well-received book, underscores Firmin’s nationalism and asserts that “Firmin was a
formidable defender of Haitian independence and gathered around himself many young
disciples…,” From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti
(New York: Rutgers University Press, 1996 [1979]), 125. In a recent article that compares the
ideas of Jean Price-Mars and Anténor Firmin, Gerarde Magloire-Danton advances the idea that
“Firmin’s and Price-Mars’s scholarship of commitment served to promote national selfdefinition, self-understanding…,” “Anténor and Jean Price-Mars,” “Anténor and Jean PriceMars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism,” Small Axe 18:9 (2005): 152.
15
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, “Introduction,” in Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human
Races, trans. Asselin Charles (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 2002), xv. FluehrLobban wrote the most comprehensive and lucid introduction to the book in the English
language, xi-xlvi.
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16
Kevn A. Yelvington, “The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean:
Diasporic Dimensions,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2201):228; for excellent studies on
the relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the problem of race and racism in
American culture and in Western societies at large, see Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro:
Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1998), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982 [1968]), Ruth Benedict, Patterns
of Culture (New York: Mentor Books, 1959 [1934]); on the relationship between anthropology,
colonialism, and the Enlightenment, see Faye v. Harrison, ed., Decolonizing Anthropology:
Moving Further toward an Anthropology for liberation (Arlington: American Anthropological
Association, 1997 [1997]), Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), Michel Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire
au siècle des Lumieres (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, S.A., 1995).
17
Harrison, “Dismantling Anthropology’s Domestic and International Peripheries,” 91.
18
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology,”
American Anthropologist 102:3 (2000):449.
19
Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 58.
20
Leslie Péan, Comprendre Anténor Firmin: Une inspiration pour le XXIe siècle (Portau-Prince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haiti, 2012); the French original reads as follows :
“Les interventions de Firmin battent en brèche l’idéologie raciste de l’infériorité des Noirs
évoquée par des ‘savants’ anthropologues pour justifier, d’une part, l’esclavage des Noirs et,
d’autre part, le partage de l’Afrique par les Blancs lors de la Conférence de Berlin de 1885,”
15-18.
21
Deny, “Review of The Equality of the Human Races,” 331.
22
Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2012), 184.
23
Fluehr-Lobban, “Introduction,” xv.
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24
Péan, Anténor Firmin, 15. In this sense, The Equality of the Human Races anticipates
Aimé Césaire’s anticolonial and revolutionary text, Discours sur le colonialism (Discourse on
Colonialism) (Paris: Présence, 1955).
25
Fluehr-Lobban, “Anténor Firmin,” 449; it is my goal in this essay to demonstrate that
The Equality of the Human Races also demonstrates early Afrocentric imaginations, and the text
can be conceived as an expression of what we might call performative Afrocentricity.
26
Théophile Obenga, “Hommage à Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), égyptologue haïtien,”
ANKH 17 (2008), 133.
27
Magloire-Danton, “Anténor and Jean Price-Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism,”
156; Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, trans. Anne Keep (New York: African
Publishing, 1974), 96.
28
J. Michael Dash, “Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas:
Anténor’s Firmin Letters from St. Thomas,” Research in African Literatures 35:2 (2004):44-53.
29
Jean-Gille Elie, “Patriotism, humanism and modernity: Three European concepts as a
basis for the investigation and affirmation of the Negro soul in francophone literature of Haiti
from the nineteenth through the late twentieth century,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Washington,
2002).
30
Gordon, “Not Exactly Positivism,” 2.
31
Ibid., 2-3.
32
Théophile Obenga, “Hommage à Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), égyptologue haïtien,”
ANKH 17 (2008), 133
33
Ibid. The French original translation is as follows, “Anténor Firmin a vivement critiqué
les théories racistes de l’Anthropologie physique. Il a aussi défend l’africanité de l’Egypte
pharaonique. Cette question de l’Egypte pharaonique a toute une historiographie, intéressante à
connaitre.”
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34
Molefi Kete Asante, “Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African
Thought in the World,” http://www.asante.net/articles/5/afrocentricity-toward-a-newunderstanding-of-african-thought-in-the-world/ (accessed 19 January 2013).
35
Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, “Equality of the Human Races: A Review,” Radical Scholar,
http://www.radicalscholar.com/articles/publish/bkreviews/Equality_of_the_Human_Races_A_R
eview_printer.shtml (accessed 13 December 2012).
36
The last point is very important to understand Leopold Sedar Senghor’s theoretical
conceptualization of the Negritude (hence, “Senghorian Negritude”), Shireen K. Lewis has
written intelligently on Senghorian Negritude, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West
African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Negritude to Creolite (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 200), 50-54.
37
Ibrahim Sundiata, “Afrocentrism: The Argument We're Really Having,”
DISSONANCE (September 30, 1996), http://way.net/dis sonance/sundiata.html (accessed 10
December 2012).
38
Ama Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions,” Journal of
Black Studies 31:4 (2001):387-406; the concept of “scientific paradigm” is developed Thomas S.
Kuhn’s original work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1962). The notion of Afrocentricity as a paradigm is also affirmed by Asante, more
recently in his autobiography, As I Run toward Africa: A Memoir (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers,
2012), 274.
39
Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm,” 392.
40
Quoted in Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm,” 389-90l; also in Russell Adams,
“African-American Studies and the State of the Art,” in M. Azeveto, ed, Africana Studies: A
Survey of African and the African Diaspora (Durham: North Carolina Academic Press, 1993),
25-45. Mazama characterizes Adam’s definition of Afrocentricity as “intellectual bric-a-brac,
dumped under the label Afrocentricity, is bound to dilute the meaning and the power of the
Afrocentric idea as well as to create a great of confusion,” 390.
41
Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm,” 388.
42
Ibid., 399-400.
160
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
43
Maulana Karenga, “Black Studies and the Problematic of a paradigm: The
Philosophical dimension,” Journal of Black Studies 18:4 (1988): 404; Karenga sharply
differentiates the two terms: Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity. He notes notes that “Afrocentrism
appears more often in ideological discourse between Afrocentric advocates and
critics…Afrocentricity is sued in my work to stress its intellectual value as distinct from its
ideological use,” Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: The University of Sankore Press,
1993), 35.
44
Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 7; in contrast to the Afrocentricity, “The Black Atlantic”
model, popularized by Afro-British sociologist Paul Gilroy, puts greater emphasis on the nonessentialist, hybrid, and creolized nature or character of the African Diapora as well as
underscores the interaction and exchange between the people of the African ancestry and white
people in North America, The Black Atlantic: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
45
These remarks are documented in Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 38-9.
46
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2.
47
Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity, the Theory of Social Change (Trenton: Africa
World Press, 2003 [1980]), The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987),
and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990).
48
Asante, Kemet, v.
49
Ibid., v-vi.
50
Ibid., 5.
51
Asante, Kemet, vi.
52
While the word “Afrocentrism” does not appear anywhere in Firmin’s work,
nonetheless, several tenets of the school of thought can be observed in Firmin’s ideas and literary
corpus. Elsewhere in As I Run Toward Africa, Asante would write, “African agency is important
in interpretation and analysis of African and African American life situations,” 144.
161
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
53
Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, 5.
54
Ibid., 6.
55
Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm,” 394.
56
Ibid.
57
Anglophone writers include the following: Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell,
Edward Wilmot Blyden, David Walker,W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey,
Frantz Boas, Melville Herskovits, George G.M. James, John Henrik Clarke, Yosef A. A. benJochannan, Maulana Karenga, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Bernal, etc. Francophone writers
include the architects of the Negritude movement: Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, LeonDamas; and Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile Obenga, Hannibal Price, Louis Joseph Janvier.
58
Daniel Meyerson, The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest
to Decipher the Rosetta Stone (New York: Random House, 2005).
59
Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 132, 357.
60
Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, 45.
61
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 379-391, 399-402,
62
Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 131-2.
63
Quoted in Elliott P. Skinner, “The Restoration of African Identity for a New
Millennium,” in Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazurui, eds, African
Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001), 33. Skinner writes, “But Blyden was not content to assert that human civilization began in
Africa, that Africa civilized Greece, and that Greece civilized Europe,” 34.
64
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001 [1915]), 17.
65
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of
the Negro Race (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1939 [2007]), Xxxi; Drake, 135-6.
161
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
66
W .E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the part which Africa has
played in world history (New York: International Publishers, 1965 [1946]), 106.
67
Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 132.
68
For example, George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western
Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954); Yosef Ben-Jochanan, African Origins of
the Major “Western Religions” (New York: Black Classic Press, 1970), Man of the Nile and His
Family (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1972), and Africa: Mother of Western Civilization
(Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 11971).
69
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I:
The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1987), Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume II: The Archaeological
and Documentary Evidence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), and Black
Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); for counter responses to the Black Athena
thesis, see Mary Lefkowitz & Guy M. Rogers, M., eds., Black Athena Revisited (Durham:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The
Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1999); Bernal’s response to his critics is documented in this text,
David Chioni Moore, ed., Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
70
Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Vol. 1, 22.
71
In response to Afrocentrist claims and reconstruction of modern history, see Arthur
Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville:
Whittle Direct Books, 1991); Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes
(New York: Verso, 1998); Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became An
Excuse to Teach Myth As History (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Throughout the book,
Lefkowitz sustains the long standing tradition of the priority of Greece in the intellectual
development of world civilizations. For her, ‘Afrocentrism’ should be regarded as a mass of
invented histories and traditions of Black achievements in world history. As she comments, “The
Afrocentric myth of ancient history is a myth, and not history…The ancient Egypt described by
Afrocentrists is a fiction,” xvi. She also adds that Afrocentric theories of history and culture are
“based on false assumptions and faulty reasoning, and cannot be supported by time-tested
methods of intellectual inquiry,” xv.
162
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
Arguably, Lefkowitz is among the most powerful voices in the academia who longs to see the
end of liberal relativism and multicultural and pluralistic perspectives in American education. As
she observes, “Teaching the myth of the Stolen Legacy as if it were history robs the ancient
Greeks and their modern descendants of a heritage that rightly belongs to them,” 126. It is
interesting to note here in the last debate between Lefkowitz and Asante at the Smithsonian, the
Wellesley classics scholar professes admittedly, “Molefi, everyone knows now that the ancient
Egyptians were black;” in response, Asante said, “Mary, I wish you had read the accounts before
you wrote your book.” For more a detailed personal narrative of Afrocentricity and its reception
in the United States and beyond, see Asante, As I Run toward Africa, 159-60, 199-200, 241-242,
274-279, 302-310.
72
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 386.
73
Firmin, The Equality of The Human Races, 386; also in Emilio Castelar, Las guerras
de América y Egypto (Madrid, 1883), 120-21.
74
Firmin, 390.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 379.
77
Ibid., 383.
78
Ibid., 226.
79
Ibid., 382.
80
Ibid., 229.
81
Ibid., 228.
82
Ibid., 235.
83
Ibid., 237.
84
Ibid., 237.
163
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
85
Ibid., 244.
86
Ibid., 232.
87
Ibid., 286.
88
St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology,
Volume 1 (Los Angeles: University of California center For Afro-American Studies, 1987), 132.
89
Ibid., 225.
90
Ibid., 225-6.
91
Ibid., 226.
92
For a collection of fine essays on the topic, see Edwin M. Yamauchi, ed., Africa &
Africans in Antiquity (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001).
93
Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, 103.
94
J.D. Walker, “The Misrepresentation of Diop’s Views,” Journal of Black Studies 26:1
(1995): 81.
95
Firmin, 168; he also adds, “Besides the honor of having invented the science of
numbers and surface measurement does not belong to the White race. The origin of mathematics
goes back to Black Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs,” ibid.
96
Drake, Black Folks Here and Then, 129.
97
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 240.
98
Ibid., 247.
99
Ibid., 247-8.
100
Ibid., 248.
164
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
101
Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, 9.
102
Ibid., 227.
103
Ibid., 226.
104
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 226.
105
Ibid., 235.
106
Ibid. it is good to note here the prominent Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion
defines the Egyptian hieroglyphic word Retous as “real humans.”
107
Ibid., 237, 234.
108
Ibid., 234.
109
Ibid., 243; the famous monument of Sheikh-el-Balad is reproduced in Firmin, 242,
and the painting of the well-known Egyptian couple as well, 245.
110
Ibid., 243.
111
Ibid., 244.
112
Firmin, 250; also, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Kharyssa Rhodes, eds, Race and
Identity in the Nile Valley: Ancient and Modern Perspectives (New York: Red Sea Press, 2004),
108.
113
Obenga, “Hommage a Firmin,” 137.
114
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 230-1.
115
Ibid., 234.
116
Ibid.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid., 235.
165
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
119
Ibid., 234, 237, 240-1, 250.
120
This is one of the diorite statues of Cheops, a fourth Dynasty King, Firmin, 241.
121
Firmin, 242; Firmin includes the legendary wooden statue of a high dignitary,
Sheikh-el-Balad, which Egyptologists call dark red or brick red. Sheikh-el-Balad is an Arabic
title, which means "headman of the village." Nonetheless, his real and Egyptian name was Kaaper. It is observed that Ka-aper was a high priest and lector at a Memphite temple, serving
Menkaure (2490-2472); for more information on Ka-aper, see Margaret Bunson, ed., “Ka-aper
statue,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2002 [1991]), 189190.
122
Firmin, 244; Firmin includes the famous two painted statues of Rahotpou and Nofrit
from the Fifth or Sixth Dynasty era. They were discovered at Meidium. Firmin informs us that,
in his time, these paintings were on exhibit at the Boulaq Museum. Rahotpou, the husband, is
Black; his wife, Nofrit, is light-skinned.
123
Ibid. Nofrit was the wife of Rahotpou.
124
Ibid. Queen Nofritari was Ethiopian who is always portrayed as a black-skinned
woman. She was one of the great royal wives of Ramesses II the Great.
125
Ibid. The title was given to the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III.
126
Ibid., 249; Ahmes married Princess Nofritari.
127
Ibid. Psamethik was a King of the Sais Dynasty, the Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt
(664–525 BC) during the Late Period.
128
Ibid., 250; Piankhy Meri Amoun was an Ethiopian King of Napata who had conquered
the entire territory which extends from Thebes to the mouth of the Nile. He was also the founder
of the XXVe Ethiopian dynasty (747-657 B.C.E.); Obenga, 138.
129
Troy D. Allen, “Cheikh Anta Diop’s Two Cradle Theory: Revisited,” Journal of
Black Studies 38:6 (2008): 827.
166
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130
Asante, Kemet, 50; he also declares, “The Kemetic heritage penetrates the literature,
the orature, the pottery, the burial rituals, the procreative myths, and the modes of thought of
Africa. It is the classical African civilizations themselves that given us so much organic contact
with the history of ideas. The vivid example of the massive memorials to African genius,
Karnak, the temples of the Valley of the Kings, the Pyramids, the major shrines,” 47-8.
131
Allen, “Cheikh Anta Diop,” 814.
132
Ibid., 821-2; for further studies on the topic, see Troy D. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian
Family: Kinship and Social Structure (New York: Routledge, 2008).
133
Quoted in Allen; also, see G. Mokhtar, ed., General History of Africa, Volume II:
Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 58.
134
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 240.
135
Ibid., 237.
136
Ibid., 236 ; Jean Jacques Ampère, Voyage en Égypte et en Nubie (Paris: Michel Lévy
frères, 1868).
137
Cited in Firmin, 235; Ampère, 55.
138
Firmin, 226.
139
Jean-François Champollion Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens
(Paris, 1824), and Lettres écrites d'Égypte et de Nubie, (Paris, 1828 and 1829).
140
Firmin, 228; Champollion, Grammaire Egyptienne, Introduction.
141
Gordon K. Lewis in his acclaim intellectual history on the Caribbean contends that the
notion of “the monogenist principle….that is to say the unitary oneness of the human species”
recapitulates Firmin’s ideas, Main Currents In Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of
Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2004 [1983]), 318.
167
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142
Firmin, 52; for the Greco-Roman regard towards Africa and Blacks, I suggest these
excellent texts, V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994), and The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and The Order of Knowledge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and the exceptional works by Frank M.
Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970) and Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient
Views of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
143
This is the English translation of the Greek quote; cited in Firmin, 52.
144
Ibid., 249-50.
145
Ibid., 248-9; for detailed historical study and information about the Hyksos people, see
Bernal, Black Athena, Vol. 2; Howe, Afrocentrism, 202-203; Leftkowitz, 22-24.
146
Ibid., 249.
147
Ibid. Firmin writes the Greeks were “a white people with an incompatible culture, who
could not be integrated into the Retou national community.”
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid., 238.
150
Ibid., 239-240.
151
Ibid., 239.
152
Ibid., 239-240.
153
The thesis of cultural unity and shared cultural customs across continental Black
Africa is supported both by Diop and Afrocentrists like Asante.
154
Firmin, 236; Diodorus of Sicily, Book III, Chapter 8.
168
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
155
Frank M. Snowden, Jr., “Attitudes towards Blacks in the Greek and Roman World:
Misinterpretations of the Evidence,” in Edwin M. Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 246; for an excellent study on the
relationship between Africans, Greeks, and Romans and their view of Blacks in the classical
period and records, see Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity; Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 20-52.
156
Ibid., 246-7.
157
Firmin, 139 ; M. Ollivier-Beauregard, Les divinités égyptiennes: leur origine, leur
culte et son expansion dans le monde : à propos de la collection archéologique de feu le docteur
Ernest Godard (Paris : Librairie internationale, 1866).
158
Asante, Kemet, 46.
159
Jean Price-Mars, Thus Spoke the Uncle, trans. Magdaline W. Shannon (New York:
Three Continents Press, 983), 79.
160
Ibid., 63.
161
Ibid., 67.
162
Firmin, 228.
163
Ibid.
164
Quoted in Diop, African Origin, 27-8.
165
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 252.
166
Here, Firmin reproduces a quote by Gobineau, 139 ; Gobineau, De l’inégalité des
races humaines, 35.
167
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 140.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid., 139.
170
Ibid., 147.
169
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171
Ibid., 237.
172
Ibid., 402.
173
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, L'espèce humaine (Paris, G. Baillière et
cie, 1877).
174
Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 154.
175
Ibid., 399.
176
Ibid., 168.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid., 168-9.
180
Ibid., 169.
181
Asante, Kemet, 100.
182
Ibid., 47.
183
Baron de Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry : Chez P. Roux, 1814), 19 ;
the French text reads as such “Danaus et Cécrops apportèrent l’agriculture, les lumières
et les arts des égyptiens dans la Grèce.”
184
Ibid. Greece and Rome “avaient reçus ces bienfaits de l’Egypte.”
185
Ibid. The Egyptians “apportent avec eux les lumières, les arts, le commerce et la
navigation.”
170
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186
Firmin, 169; he also remarks, “We may assume that during all the long period when
the meaning of the hieroglyphs remained obscure, as mysterious as the Sphinx in this mysterious
Egypt, most of these documents disappeared forever with the secrets the contained.”
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid.
189
Ibid., 170.
190
Diop, Nations nègres et culture, ix.
191
Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, xvi.
192
Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, xiv.
193
Ibid.
194
Asante, Kemet, 116.
195
Pean, Comprendre Anténor Firmin, 303.
196
Firmin, 448-450.
197
Quoted in Pean, Anténor Firmin, 19. The French original reads : “Firmin mérite de figurer
non seulement parmi la panoplie des grands haïtiens, non seulement parmi les grands negres du
monde, mais parmi les premiers représentants de l'universalisme.”
170
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.7, no.2, August 2014
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