EGYPT AND EGYPTOLOGY IN THE PAN-AFRICAN DISCOURSE OF
AMY JACQUES GARVEY AND MARCUS GARVEY
Vanessa Davies1
ABSTRACT
Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey argued for the Africanity of
ancient Nile Valley cultures, in direct opposition to some academics. In
early 20th-century United States, incorrect narratives alleged that Africa had
no history. The Garveys, and other Black intellectuals, looked to the Nile
Valley to show the absurdity of that claim. The pan-Africanism of
Garveyism instilled pride in African descended communities and united
them against colonial structures. Pan-Africanism factored strongly in
President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s conception of the modern nation-state of
Egypt. Egyptian scholars from a variety of fields, including Nile Valley
studies, continue to understand ancient Egypt as part of a network of African
cultures.
KEYWORDS
Amy Jacques Garvey; Marcus Garvey; Gamal Abdel Nasser; pan-Africanism;
Egyptology; Egypt.
1
Nile Valley Collective, Philadelphia, USA. Email: davies68588@gmail.com.
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1. Introduction
In July 1926, when Amy Jacques Garvey wanted to talk about African history, she
turned to a newly discovered piece of evidence: the gold mask of Tutankhamun that had
been unearthed only nine months earlier (Figure 1).2 Howard Carter’s team had first
discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922. The story
of the young king and the trove of artifacts that the excavation turned up caused an
international sensation. Because of the amount of artifacts contained in the tomb and the
laborious process of carefully removing and recording them, the king’s coffin was not
opened until three years after archaeologists first entered the tomb. Carter’s journal entry
for Wednesday, October 28, 1925, describes the moment that he opened the final of four
nested coffins, revealing, “a very neatly wrapped mummy of the young king, with golden
mask of sad but tranquil expression, symbolizing Osiris. The similitude of the youthful
Tut.Ankh.Amen, until now known only by name, amid that sepulchral silence, made us
realize the past” (Carter, 1925, 1926). Carter’s words read like a fantasy, with the silence
of the tomb, the previously unknown king, and a contemporary present that only at that
moment comes into contact with the king’s past. Amy Jacques Garvey tapped into
something much more vibrant and alive in her contemporary present: a realization of the
past that directly affected people in the present. She saw in scholarly discussions of
Tutankhamun evidence of Egyptology’s Western, Eurocentric, and colonialist
underpinnings, and she instead located there a basis for pride in African history.
Figure 1. Amy Jacques Garvey opened her essay on the Africanity of Egypt with a discussion of
this photograph of Tutankhamun’s mask, published in The New York Times on July 25, 1926.
2
Many thanks to Fábio Frizzo and his colleagues for the invitation to contribute to this volume, and I
appreciate Fábio introducing me to the work of Abdias do Nascimento. I am grateful to Solange Ashby and
S.O.Y. Keita for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Egypt’s multifaceted role on the world stage has resulted in it frequently balancing
competing interests. This liminality has been described as a result of Western powers
having “disembod[ied] Egypt’s geography . . . as Europeans made it an artificial
extension of Europe, a material passage to Arab and African frontiers. Consequently,
Egypt, not only Cairo, became a colonized/Europeanized geography, disembedded from
its Africanness” (Kosba, 2021, p. 8). The dislodging of Egypt and its people, both ancient
and modern, from Africanness lies at the core of the issues addressed in this paper. The
discipline of Egyptology participated in and contributed to that dislocation. This paper
addresses the ways in which Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey recognized
Egyptology’s role in this process, wrote critiques of it, including a criticism of
Egyptologist George Reisner, and also constructed counterarguments that resituated
ancient Nile Valley cultures in their African contexts.
2. Amy Jacques Garvey
Amy Jacques Garvey was the second wife of the social activist and businessman
Marcus Garvey. Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey were born in Jamaica and came
separately to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Amy for health-related reasons
and Marcus for economic opportunity (Taylor, 2002, pp. 16–17). In Jamaica, Garvey had
founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, whose membership spanned the
United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa, and whose goal was to instill a sense
of pride in Black people linked to their identity and to help Black communities thrive. He
was a vocal advocate of the idea that African people, on the continent and in the diaspora,
should ban together for mutual benefit (for a recent discussion of a particular example of
cultural complexity in Africa, see Malki, 2017). While living in the United States, Marcus
Garvey started a newspaper, two international shipping lines, and an association of
factories.
Initially, Amy Jacques Garvey was one of Garvey’s private secretaries. After their
marriage, she regularly wrote for the newspaper, gave public lectures, and took a
leadership role in the organization, especially during the three years when her husband
was incarcerated in a federal penitentiary on charges of mail fraud (on the circumstances
surrounding his incarceration, see Pierce, 2016). During that time, Amy Jacques Garvey
collected and edited some of Marcus Garvey’s writing and published them in two
volumes, in 1923 and 1925. Her role transitioned from her early days as his secretary,
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where she was “perpetuating her husband’s ideas” to later being the person responsible
for “shaping and disseminating the philosophy of Garveyism” (Taylor, 2002, p. 3, pp.
46–47). She clearly delineates her role as keeper of Garveyism in the titles of the volumes
she compiled: The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Her point in publishing
his speeches and newspaper articles was to enable readers to learn about Garveyism
directly from the source, as opposed to hearing secondhand, usually disparaging, reports
(M. Garvey, 1923/1967, pp. viii, xi; M. Garvey 1923/1978, preface p. 1). Due to the
ephemeral nature of newspapers, much of Marcus Garvey’s philosophy would have been
unavailable to later audiences without her efforts. Only in recent years have issues of The
Negro World been accessible online in digitized format, thanks to the efforts of Harlem’s
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
3. The mask of Tutankhamun
A large part of Garveyism was encouraging a pride in people of African descent
that had been long denied by racist societies. One way this was achieved was to educate
people about African history and culture, which at that time was virtually unknown in the
United States. Rather, for decades in the United States, an incorrect and dehumanizing
strain of thought perpetrated the idea that Africa had no history and that as a result people
of African descent did not share in the human experience of history. Because the history
of ancient Egypt was widely and popularly known, it offered a simple corrective to that
misinformed view. In July 1926, Amy Jacques Garvey seized on that corrective.
In an article she wrote for The Negro World, Amy Jacques Garvey referenced the
mask of Tutankhamun as a relic of African history. The gold mask featuring the head of
the king wearing a striped royal headdress has become such a famous image that it may
be difficult for us to put ourselves in the shoes of people in her day. Tutankhamun’s mask
had been discovered just nine months prior to the publication of her article. The artifacts
that were slowly extracted from the tomb since its discovery in 1922 provided the public
with a royal procession of sorts. The Negro World regularly reported on recently removed
objects, as well as the opinions of all sorts of scholars on topics related to the artifacts
themselves and the culture in general (e.g., Bust of Pharaoh’s Wife, 1923). The images
of the mask published in The New York Times were perhaps the first glimpse that many
members of the public had of this now ubiquitous object. In The Negro World, Amy
Jacques Garvey described the mask according to its phenotype, or observable physical
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characteristics. To appreciate why she would turn to phenotype, one must understand that
phenotype was, and some would say still is, the major determinant of one’s race, which
in turn defines nearly every other aspect of a person’s life in the United States.
4. Racial categorization in the United States
In the United States, skin color was and is a primary determinant of assigning race
to people. Other physical factors, such as hair color and texture and width of the nose,
contribute to that classification. Because physical features vary widely across population
groups, the assignment of race can be ambiguous. Some people of African descent with
lighter skin color or other attributes determined to be “White” might “pass” as White in
order to have access to the economic and social benefits awarded to White people and
denied of people deemed not White. For example, some of Amy Jacques Garvey’s
relatives through her mother were passing in the United States. So when she moved to
New York in 1917, she could not rely on them for social or economic support lest her
presence in their lives force them to admit that they were not completely White and were
instead, by the legal and cultural norms of the day, “Negro” (Taylor, 2002, pp. 17–19).
Modern Egyptians might similarly “pass.” An Egyptian person who attended Florida
State University in the late 1950s described her experience with being granted the ability
to pass: “While affiliation with a ‘white’ university endowed Egyptian students with this
honorary racial status, it did not always shield us from the racism of the surrounding
community” (Morsy, 1996, p. 184).
Because of the ambiguity in assigning race, the racial identity of the ancient
Egyptians within the carefully delineated colorized classifications of the United States
was frequently addressed on the pages of The Negro World. A February 1923 article
concludes that because of the brownish-yellow color of statues removed from
Tutankhamun’s tomb “there was a decided strain of Negro blood in the ancient Egyptians,
who were a mixed race, some with one-fourth Negro, others one-half Negro, others threefourths Negro, others seven-eighths Negro. According to the modern view of one drop of
Negro blood claiming everything it touches, the Egyptians were Negroes” (Were the
Egyptians, 1923). The specificity of language here that quantifies a so-called
“measurement” of African ancestry was prevalent in US society at that time (for more,
see Kendi, 2016; Williams, 2018; Crawford, 2021).
For decades, the categories that classified people’s race on the United States census
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designated a person’s African ancestry in terms of amounts, as if heritage could be
counted by means of fractions of ancestors’ physical features. The terms that the US
census used changed over time and reflected the prevalent conceptualizations of race and
ethnicity in society in the United States. For example, in 1890, certain terms were used to
classify people that are no longer used and are considered offensive. By 1920, many of
those terms had fallen out of official census use. At the next census, in 1930, the racial
categories were informed by a new arbitrary way of categorizing people: the “one-drop
rule” (hypodescent). According to that “rule,” a person having multiple ethnic or racial
identities was automatically assigned to the group perceived to have the lower status. The
1930 US census classified Black people according to the one-drop rule, as seen in the
instructions for census-takers: “A person of mixed white and Negro blood should be
returned [classified] as a Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood. Both
black and mulatto persons are to be returned as Negroes, without distinction. A person of
mixed Indian [Native American] and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, unless
the Indian blood predominates and the status of an Indian is generally accepted in the
community” (Nobles, 2000, p. 72, also pp. 44, 58). From these instructions, we see that
the government assigned official racial status according to regulations that were both rigid
(“no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood”) and nonsensical (For starters, why
should a person “of mixed . . . blood” be classified one way versus the other?). Census
workers were given the authority to determine a person’s race regardless of one’s selfidentification.
5. Amy Jacques Garvey on the importance of history
In March 1923, The Negro World reported on a story in The Boston Globe that
posed the question of the ancient Egyptians’ racial heritage to three scholars:
anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain, historian George Rawlinson, and
biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (Was King Tut, 1923). Answers ranged from “in some
respects,” to “true Egyptian . . . with perhaps an admixture of more Southern blood,” to
“an unknown quantity . . . neither a white nor a black race.” The following week’s issue
ran a follow-up from The Boston Globe that noted the opinion of Flinders Petrie, whose
racist and eugenicist views about both the ancient people of the Nile Valley and the
modern people of Egypt are now well known in Egyptology (Challis, 2013). Amy Jacques
Garvey directly countered the claims of these academics in her analysis of
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Tutankhamun’s gold mask. In her estimation, given the obviousness of the racializing
characteristics visible on the mask, “the exponents of white superiority cannot claim him
as their own, [so] they make no comment as to his racial stock” (A. J. Garvey, 1926).
Amy Jacques Garvey lingers not only on the racialized identity of the Egyptian
king, but she also points to the artifacts found in tombs like his, the tombs of “rulers of
Egyptian Africa,” as evidence of the “culture and progress” of Egypt and of the
advancement of that African culture at a time when European societies were not as
advanced. With that evidence, she constructs for readers a message of hope. “The cycle
of civilization will again shift to Africa—the east will once more be the center of
civilization, and knowing this, the Negroes of the world prepare themselves to hasten the
day” (A. J. Garvey, 1926). The cyclical rotation of world cultures that she describes is a
theme that she repeats in an article the following year.
Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall in the same manner as the sun gives light to one
part of the earth, while the other half is in darkness. So those who now enjoy the
noonday hour of progress and power will in the natural process of evolution return
to darkness in order to give way to others who are now in darkness. What has been
will be again, and the East is beginning to see the peep of a new day. . . . It is the
vision of this new day that causes the scattered sons and daughters of Ethiopia to
turn their faces toward the motherland of Africa. (A. J. Garvey, 1927)
The concept that different cultures wax and wane brings the past in conversation
with the present and future. For Amy Jacques Garvey, the present condition is
impermanent. People of African descent can find in their cultural histories reassurance
that the future will be brighter than the present.
The contrast between the historiographical interpretations of Amy Jacques Garvey
and Howard Carter can now be undersood. Carter’s fantasy-like narrative of disinterring
King Tutankhamun shows his perceived disconnect between the past and present (as well
as, perhaps, a self-commentary by the middle-aged Carter), where the “youthful” king’s
face “made us realize the past.” Amy Jacques Garvey’s “vision of this new day” brought
the past directly to bear on the present.
This hope for a better day, and faith in the fulfilment of [Biblical] prophecy buoys
them [“black folks”], and makes them survive under the greatest pressure and
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brutality of alien oppressors. It is the spirit of the East to bear and forbear, and we
who have long ago been transplanted to alien shores still retain this characteristic.
That is why we have survived the rigors of slavery, and have adapted ourselves to
almost any surroundings, always hoping for a better day, and finding comfort in
the hoping. (A. J. Garvey, 1927)
Against a backdrop of the realities of colonialism and enslavement, Amy Jacques
Garvey shows the work that history does: comforting, healing, and providing hope to
people who have endured hardships and trauma. That is the particular vibrancy of African
history in communities where the history of Africa had been ignored or denied.
Like other Black intellectuals in the United States who brought the history of Africa
to public attention, Amy Jacques Garvey drew on historical sources to make her
arguments. Black intellectuals were largely excluded from the predominantly White
academic system of higher education in the United States. Two results of this exclusion
are pertinent to this discussion. One is that White writers of history omitted Black people
from and misrepresented their roles in historical events. Carter Woodson’s book The Miseducation of the Negro (1933/2005) corrected shortcomings in the way that Africandescended people’s history and culture was taught in the United States. Many of the
essays in his book he had earlier published on the pages of The Negro World (Martin,
1983/1985, pp. 104–105). The second result is that White academics were unaware of
most intellectual work occurring in African-descended communities in the United States.
But those Black intellectuals were knowledgeable about the writings and opinions of
White intellectuals, and they drew on their published writings to construct their own
arguments. For example, African American editor, novelist, singer, and playwright,
Pauline Hopkins, brought the history of Africa to public attention in a novel she published
in 1902. Her novel, Of One Blood, borrows directly from history books, travelogues, and
novels and uses those sources to teach readers about the historicity of African cultures in
the Nile Valley (Davies, 2021).
Similarly, Amy Jacques Garvey engaged with the academics of her time and
constructed arguments against the incorrect theories that Africa had no history. In
November 1927, she quotes William Johnson Sollas, a British academic and author of a
book on early hominids (A. J. Garvey, 1927, November; for another example of her
research, see A. J. Garvey, 1927, May). Sollas saw human history as comprised of waves
of migration and conquest where “more advanced” population groups replaced “less
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advanced” population groups, either annihilating them or driving them to the margins of
the environment (Sommer, 2005). Amy Jacques Garvey criticized Sollas’s view, which
was rooted in the White Western imperialistic world in which he operated. Her critique,
which called attention to this type of racist discourse that circulated in some scientific
circles at that time, still resonates today. In two recent works, anthropologist Jonathan
Marks denounced the exact same sentiments of Sollas (Marks, 2017a, p. 38; 2017b, p.
260).
Many of Amy Jacques Garvey’s writings for The Negro World were geared
specifically toward women. For more than three years, she edited a regular feature in the
newspaper entitled “Our Women and What They Think.” UNIA members were to occupy
gender-specific roles, and she promoted the idea that women were ideally confined to the
domestic sphere and could nonetheless exercise leadership from that space (Taylor, 2002,
pp. 44–45, 74–76). She frequently wrote about women’s leadership and educational
needs, and the ancient Nile Valley cultures were a part of that education. She engaged
with academic arguments, calling out the racism and inaccurate arguments that she saw
in White scholars. She also showed the power and relevance of history to Black people
in the United States who at that time were threatened both with physical violence and
with fewer social and economic advantages than other people. She sought to bring unity
to the wide diversity of African-descended people in the United States who were
classified in constantly varying and denigrating ways (Taylor, 2002, pp. 69–70). In this,
she echoed the message of Garveyism.
6. Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey arrived in the United States in 1916 after having lived and worked
in a variety of countries. He had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association
and African Communities League (UNIA) a few years prior in Jamaica. After traveling
through the United States, he settled in New York, established a branch of the UNIA
there, and in 1918 founded The Negro World, a weekly publication that ran for fifteen
years.
With the masthead of The Negro World, Marcus Garvey definitively linked his
readership with ancient Nile Valley cultures. Front and center was the head of a man
wearing the nemes headdress of an Egyptian king (fig. 2). The Negro World declared itself
“A Newspaper Devoted Solely to the Interests of the Negro Race.” With this masthead,
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Garvey applied the term “Negro” to the ancient Nile cultures, aligning them within the
world of segregation based on skin color that pervaded the United States at that time. No
doubt in Garvey’s day, the vast majority of people from the Nile Valley, whether ancient
or modern, would have similarly been assigned to that category unless they were able to
and chose to “pass” as White. For example, the Egyptian person mentioned above who
lived in the southern United States in the 1950s and ’60s was often judged to be Black or
“Negro” based on the types of injustices she experienced, including being told to sit at
the back of a bus and being refused service in White-only restaurants (Morsy, 1996, pp.
184–185). The Negro World’s reading audience were people with a range of darker skin
tones and also a range of language fluency. Sections of every issue were written in
Spanish for “the advancement of the Negro [Black] race” (el adelanto de la raza negra).
The masthead united all members of this diverse, multicultural group of “Negro” people
with a message of solidarity printed on a banner that visually ties together the figures:
“One God, One Aim, One Destiny.”
Figure 2. Masthead of The Negro World
Using imagery in the masthead to identify the ancient Nile Valley cultures with a
Black readership was not a unique move. In November 1911, after W. E. B. Du Bois had
become editor of The Crisis, he had its masthead incorporate similar iconography
(Davies, in press, Figure 2). The Crisis depicted the head of a man wearing the nemes
headdress and with closely drawn lines on his face and neck indicating that his skin is of
a dark color. The slogan underneath “The Record of the Darker Races” stated, as The
Negro World did, that the people of that ancient culture would be—in the colorizing
system of the United States—one and the same as the readers. The Crisis used that
masthead frequently in 1911 and 1912 and then only sporadically through 1914. By the
time Garvey started The Negro World in 1918, The Crisis had ceased using imagery in its
masthead.
The masthead was not the only way that Marcus Garvey engaged with ancient Nile
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Valley cultures. As mentioned above, The Negro World frequently ran articles addressing
those cultures, especially after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922.3
Some of the articles addressed the race of the ancient Egyptians in general or
Tutankhamun specifically. These discussions were happening alongside broader
questions of race and Africa that also occurred on the pages of The Negro World. The
discussions often centered on the so-called one-drop rule, described above, that was—
and is still largely—the way that people in the United States conceived of racializing
identifications.
7. “Who, and What is a Negro?”
Garvey’s editorial in January 1923 posed the question “Who, and what is a Negro?”
in response to a statement by the French government claiming that the Moroccans and
Algerians who were serving in the French military should not be considered “Negroes”
(M. Garvey, 1925/1967, pp. 2:18–21). He argued that the term was not universally used
to refer to people with darker skin tones, as the official ideology in the United States, seen
in the census, might pretend (Jackson Lears, 1985; also Drake, 1987/1991, pp. 17–18).
Instead, the dominant White society might choose to remove from that category particular
population groups with darker skin tones. Marcus Garvey determined that the people
removed from the category were those who had done things that the White culture in
power viewed as worthwhile. “A Negro is a person of dark complexion or race, who has
not accomplished anything and to whom others are not obligated for any useful service”
(M. Garvey, 1923, January 20). In the context of the statement about Moroccan and
Algerian soldiers serving under the French, Garvey addressed the question of why the
French would claim that those soldiers were “not Negro.” Why? Because those soldiers
had done something that White society saw as useful.
Marcus Garvey called out those who bent the racializing rules, effectively breaking
the code of the one-drop rule to bring certain population groups deemed “desirable” into
the realm of “Whiteness.” Academics, including anthropologists Franz Boas and Clark
Wissler, were among the people criticized on the pages of The Negro World for “trying
to say that the Moroccans are not really Negroes, but ‘Negroid,’ being but ‘a blend of
3
Given the Jamaican heritage of Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey, it is especially relevant to
mention the recent work by Adodo (2021) on Afrocentric translation, which analyzes Egyptian and
Jamaican languages.
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Arab, Jew and Berber’” (Maynard Keynes was right, 1923). Garvey realized that
supposedly fixed categories of racial identity were being modified to suit particular
interests. Moroccans could be distanced from Blackness by being described as blended
or “Negroid,” essentially “Negro-like,” but no longer “Negro” (for these terms used in
early osteological studies of Nile Valley populations, see Keita, 1993). The idea of middle
ground, though, contradicts the conception prevalent in the US referred to as the one-drop
rule.
It is the white race that legislates that one drop of black blood makes a man a
Negro. It is this same white race that is contradicting itself when it says that “50
per cent Negroid” does not make “Negro.” This decision, come to think of it,
might result in a complete revolution of the statutes of the South. It might put a
half-million “blacks” on the other side of the fence. Let us hope so! (Maynard
Keynes was right, 1923)
Articles like this one noted the divisiveness of racializing terms, that the term
“Negro” was not invoked by White voices in a positive way. When convenient for White
Western interests, that negative label might be relaxed for certain groups, such as
Moroccans in this example, due to inconsistent enforcement of the so-called one-drop
rule.4
A major theme of Garveyism was reclaiming the word “Negro” as a label of pride.
The practice of removing a racializing label from a group of people and making them
“White” in the United States has been documented with regard to many populations (e.g.,
Ignatiev, 1995; Jacobson, 1999; Roediger, 2005; also Drake, 1987/1991, p. xx). Marcus
Garvey refused to allow groups that had been included under the umbrella of “Negro” to
be removed from its purview by White interests. “Let us not be flattered by
anthropologists and statesmen who from time to time because of our successes here, there
or anywhere try to make out that we are no longer members of the Negro race. . . . When
it is to their interest they make us Negroes or something else, but if we were Negroes
yesterday surely we are satisfied to be Negroes today” (M. Garvey, 1923, January 20).
Marcus Garvey realized that White voices completely controlled the application of
racializing terms to different population groups. He encouraged readers to resist the
On racial categorization in the US as a “fluid system that never succeeded in maintaining the borders”,
see Bernasconi, “Crossed Lines,” p. 226.
4
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whims of White-dominated culture that was appropriating groups of people whom that
culture had formerly excluded.
8. The compilation of the essay
When Amy Jacques Garvey compiled the second volume of The Philosophy and
Opinions of Marcus Garvey, she included an essay entitled “Who and What is a Negro?”
The essay was sourced from multiple editorials. The bulk of the material appeared in
Marcus Garvey’s editorial of January 20, 1923, discussed above. 5 The essay’s two
paragraphs that contain Garvey’s thoughts on scholars’ discussions of ancient Nile Valley
cultures appeared in print later that spring.
The first of the two paragraphs was printed in May under the heading “The Things
in History.” That piece appeared just days after the second of two free lectures offered in
Harlem by Egyptologist Lorenzo Dow Covington (M. Garvey, 1923, May 5).
Covington’s lectures were advertised in The Negro World in this way: “Was Tut-ankhAmen a Negro? Learn the truth about the ancient Egyptians” (King Tut, 1923). The first
lecture disappointed journalist John E. Bruce who reported on it the following week.
Covington’s inability to correctly name people and places left knowledgeable audience
members in doubt about his Egyptological credentials. Furthermore, whenever he was
asked about “to what ethnic stock the Egyptians belonged,” he “cleverly and skillfully
avoided and evaded a direct answer” (Bruce, 1923). Bruce wrote this about Egyptologists:
“The fruitful imagination of the modern Egyptologist, who can see nothing great in the
black man, but finds unlimited wisdom in the white man, delights to robe all ancient
Egypt in white” (Bruce, 1923).
The second paragraph contains Garvey’s criticism of US professor of Egyptology,
George Reisner. Parts of that paragraph were sourced from an article originally reported
through the Pacific News Bureau and republished in The Negro World in April
(Ethiopians, 1923). Other parts of the paragraph perhaps derive from speeches of
Garvey’s. His writing style often contained rhetorical flourishes reminiscent of his style
of public speaking. The second paragraph contains such a sentence, beginning “Imagine
5
The first edition of the book (1925) dates the essay to January 16, 1923, and most of the material in the
essay appeared in Marcus Garvey’s editorial of January 20, 1923. Subsequent editions of the book push
ahead the date of the essay by a few months, to April 16, 1923, perhaps because two of the paragraphs
included in the essay in Philosophy and Opinions appeared in print in the spring of 1923, each paragraph
in a separate issue. In M. Garvey (2004), the piece is dated April 23, 1923.
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a dark colored man,” which will be discussed below (M. Garvey, 2004, pp. 119–122).
9. Marcus Garvey on George Reisner
The Egyptological subject of Marcus Garvey’s writing in the spring of 1923 was
Harvard University professor George Reisner (for more on Reisner, see Manuelian,
2022). Reisner received his undergraduate degree at Harvard and subsequently earned a
Ph.D. there in 1893, a few years after W. E. B. Du Bois received his undergraduate degree
there. In 1896, Reisner was hired as an instructor at Harvard, something that would not
have been possible for Du Bois, being a Black man, and Reisner spent the later part of his
career employed there. When Marcus Garvey criticized Reisner’s views, in early 1923,
Harvard had frequently been in the news because of a racist decision made by the
administration. Caving to the White supremacist attitudes of Harvard-related individuals,
college president A. Lawrence Lowell barred Black students from living in the first-year
dormitories with White students (e.g., Bowser, 1923). Because of this injustice, the
connection between George Reisner and Harvard was especially significant for Garvey
(Ethiopians, 1923).
Marcus Garvey’s Egyptological critique revolved around a question at the forefront
of the minds of both scholars and interested members of the public. Formulated according
to the language of the day, the question centered on whether the ancient Egyptians in
general, or Tutankhamun specifically, were “Negroes.” As Garvey recognized in his
writings quoted above, scholars and thinkers fluctuated on who comprised the group of
humans they were calling “Negro.” Reisner was no different. For example, in 1910,
Reisner felt that the predynastic burials in Egypt contained the same population group as
a particular cemetery in Nubia because of similar artifacts found in both sets of burials.
“In other words, at the earliest period in which human remains have been recovered,
Egypt and Lower Nubia appear to have formed culturally and racially one land” (Reisner,
1910, p. 319). His subsequent writing does not evidence such unity. For example, an
Egyptian statue head is referred to as “Negro,” but then Nubians are referred to as “not
negro.” A newspaper reports Reisner saying that a particular piece of Dynasty 4 statuary
found at Giza depicted “the wife of the prince [who] is, curiously enough, of a distinctly
negroid type. The head is, I believe, the earliest known portrait of a Negro” (The Crisis,
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1915, p. 229).6 In a 1923 publication of his excavations in Kush, Reisner writes, “The
Nubian race was negroid, but not negro” (Reisner, 1923, p. 8; also Crowfoot, 1924, p.
113). Reisner incorrectly, though not surprisingly, interpreted the results of his excavation
work through the racializing lens of the early twentieth century United States (see
likewise Minor, 2018). Included in his mistaken views were contemporary Africandescended people, as evidenced by his comment to his African American student,
Egyptologist William Leo Hansberry: “I do not believe that Negroes founded these great
civilizations. You are a brilliant student Hansberry, but you are a product of our
civilization” (Keita, 2000, p. 100). Marcus Garvey’s clear understanding of how the
hegemonic culture used the term “Negro” is repeated here when Hansberry, “a brilliant
student” who is useful to his White professor in the context of a college classroom, is
contrasted with “Negroes” whom Reisner, because of his bigotry, cannot accept as
originators of ancient Nile Valley cultures (for more, see Kingstone, 2019; Hefny, 2018).
In his discussion of the ancient history of the Nile Valley, Garvey shows how the
concept of race is used to divide groups. He described Nile Valley history as being the
history of people with darker skin tones whose history has been taken from them and
appropriated by White people as their own history. The two-paragraph section “Negroes
Robbed of Their History” begins, “The white world has always tried to rob and discredit
us of our history. They tell us that Tut-Ankh-Amen . . . was not a Negro, that the ancient
civilization of Egypt and the Pharaohs was not of our race, but that does not make the
truth unreal” (M. Garvey, 1925/1967, p. 2:19). Garvey goes on, discussing the history of
ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and Rome. He then calls out George Reisner, although
a typographical error renders his name as Kersnor, for his opinions on the “Ethiopians.”
At that time, Ethiopia referred to the southern part of modern Egypt and northern Sudan,
following the Greek historian Herodotus who used that term to refer to that area.
Garvey wrote that Reisner “after discussing the genius of the Ethiopians [i.e., the
ancient people of modern Sudan] and their high culture . . . declared the Ethiopians were
not African Negroes. He described them as dark colored races . . . showing a mixture of
black blood” (M. Garvey, 1925/1967, p. 2:19). Then Garvey interjects a thought that cuts
to the heart of the racializing labels common in the United States: “Imagine a dark colored
man in middle Africa being anything else but a Negro” (M. Garvey, 1925/1967, 2:19).
His comment again calls attention to use of the term “Negro” by the dominant White
6
Peter Der Manuelian kindly informed me that the statuary mentioned here is a reserve head from Giza
(MFA 14.719), and he recognized that the quote is taken from Reisner (1915, p. 32).
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culture, here represented by Egyptologist George Reisner.
Reisner could not say that the ancient people of Sudan had not accomplished
something. His excavations continually produced proof of their accomplishments from
their tombs, temples, and settlement sites and in the beautiful artifacts admired by
collectors and museum-going crowds. They were “useful” to him in his work as an
archaeologist. But Reisner also could not admit that those ancient people were of the same
race as the Black people whom Reisner knew and saw in the United States. So he had to
“remove” those ancient people from the category of “Negro” and assign them a different
identity. This is where Reisner and others applied the idea of a “mixture” of Black and
White that is communicated through the label “negroid.” Like other Egyptologists had
done before him, Reisner willfully separated the ancient people of the Nile Valley from
Africa and denied that their history was related to people of African descent in the United
States.
Marcus Garvey pointed out the discrepancy in the formula of assigning different
racializing terms to groups of people. When a person designated by the society of his day
as “Negro” did something deemed worthwhile to the dominant White culture—such as
fight on behalf of a Western power, as Moroccan and Algerian soldiers did, or produce
great works of art and architecture, as did the people of ancient Sudan—then they were
no longer considered “Negro.” They would then be edged closer to “Whiteness” so that
a White Western culture could lay claim to and make use of their accomplishments.
Garvey challenged these views propagated by scholars, and he restored the historical past
of the Nile Valley to African descended people.
10. Maud Cuney Hare
Marcus Garvey’s challenge to the narrative that Nile Valley cultures were part of
African history was not the first or the only such challenge. Since the nineteenth century,
African American intellectuals had been challenging the incorrect view that Africa had
no history (e.g., Beatty & Davies, in press). For example, in 1912, African American
historian Leila Amos Pendleton wrote, “Some historians tell us very plainly that the
Egyptians were not Africans at all and so Negroes need not be proud of what they did”
(Pendleton, 1912, p. 15). She and other Black thought leaders continually challenged that
sentiment in their efforts to overturn incorrect and racist ideas.
Another person who objected to Reisner’s description of the ancient people of
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Egypt and Nubia was Bostonian Maud Cuney Hare. Maud Cuney Hare was a musician
and writer and the former fiancée of the Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (Du Bois,
2001, p. 10). In April 1925, she attended a lecture of George Reisner’s where he repeated
the claim that Garvey had rejected. She recounted the event in a letter to Du Bois,
expressing her anger over Reisner’s statements in clear terms. She said that Reisner
claimed that the Ethiopians “were not at all Negro Africans, and then he proceeded to
show a statue on the screen of a Negro Prince and Princess. Evidently, the Negro royalty
had no children!” (Cuney-Hare, 1925)
Maud Cuney Hare’s letter points out the racism in Reisner’s interpretation of the
ancient people of the southern Nile Valley (“Ethiopian”). Her surprise and outrage, which
echoes Garvey’s exclamation about “a dark colored man in middle Africa,” shows how
ludricrous she views Reisner’s attempt to claim that those people were not—in modern
terminology—Black people. Egyptological opinions like Reisner’s were not based on
facts but rather were falsehoods drawing on an ideology of White supremacy. Because
intellectuals like Maud Cuney Hare and Marcus Garvey were Black, their opinions alone
were not enough. Unlike their White counterparts, they could not just have baseless
opinions. Instead, Black scholars carefully communicated their responses according to
the scientific language of the dominant White culture.
Reisner was seemingly unaware that his claims about the identity of the ancient
people were at odds with his evidence. Reisner was among the first archaeologists
working in the Nile Valley, along with Flinders Petrie, to use scientific method in the
field. But as scientifically minded as Reisner’s archaeological methods were, he was so
embedded in a White Western culture that when he stated that the ancient people of these
complex societies that produced such great works of art and architecture were not—as
Maud Cuney Hare wrote—“Negro Africans,” he did not realize that the images of the
ancient people that he showed to his audiences appeared to belie his very own argument.
Maud Cuney Hare recounted the incident to Du Bois because she knew of Du Bois’s
interest in educating people in the United States about the history of Africa. Amy Jacques
and Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Leila Amos Pendleton, and Pauline Hopkins wrote
about the ancient histories of Africa. Except for Du Bois, those authors did not write for
a White Western academic audience. Nonetheless, they all directly addressed the
scholarly theories of their day, which largely derived from White Western academics.
They found sources to bolster their arguments and called out those who, like George
Reisner, made arguments that were factually incorrect and mired in modern racist
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terminology. In doing so, they educated their readers about the nonsensical statements
being made about race in academic circles and addressed the statements’ absurdities with
reasoning and evidence-based arguments.
11. Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanism
Following in the tradition of the historian Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey would
turn to the longevity of cultures in Africa to argue for the humanity of African descended
people and to argue for the independence of colonized people in Africa. “Yes, honest
students of history can recall the day when Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuctoo towered in
their civilizations, towered above Europe, towered above Asia” (M. Garvey, 1923/1967,
p. 1:57). Like many other African descended scholars, he turned to the Bible to show that
Africans, too, were included in the vision of a Christian God who would bring divinely
ordained leaders from Africa (M. Garvey, 1923/1967, pp. 1:61, 73). He predicted that
change rooted in Africa would alter the colonialist landscape and would reinstate a
glorious present for Africans similar to their impressive past (M. Garvey, 1923/1967, pp.
1:39–40; 1925/1967, 2:60–61, 107, 119, 324–326). Garveyism took the very aspect that
White Western societies denigrated—Africanity—and made it a point of pride. As
Brazilian intellectual Abdias do Nascimento put it, even in the face of domination and
oppression, the “rejection of Africa . . . [helps] to maintain the Black nation as a
community above and beyond difficulties in time and space” (Nascimento, 1980, p. 142).
Garvey’s focus was not limited to Africa’s history. He also wrote about the struggle
for independence in modern Egypt, no doubt learned firsthand from his mentor, the
Egyptian Dusé Mohamed Ali. In London, Ali promoted pan-Africanism through the
African Times and Orient Review, his influential journal that grew out of the Universal
Races Congress, where, incidentally, Egyptologist Flinders Petrie and W. E. B. Du Bois
met one another (Ewing, 2014, p. 39; Davies 2019–2020). When Marcus Garvey lived in
London, many Egyptians were championing independence from the United Kingdom.
Through his association with Ali and by living and working among a diverse African
descended community in London, Garvey developed an anti-colonialist stance (M.
Garvey, 1923/1967, p. xiii). Along with Edward Blyden and Booker T. Washington, Ali
was a key influence on Garvey’s ideas of pan-Africanism and his efforts to determine
ways to govern that would benefit Black people (Ewing, 2014, pp. 38–41).
Marcus Garvey’s championing of the rights of contemporary Africans to have self164
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rule was an unwelcome stance in the eyes of White Western colonial powers and their
allies. Western powers’ refusal to recognize such claims can be seen in US President
Theodore Roosevelt’s expression of disdain for the “uncivilized Egyptians” who wanted
independence (Grant, 2008, p. 39). Garvey took up the Egyptians’ cause. “The war of
1914–18 has created a new sentiment throughout the world. Once upon a time weaker
peoples were afraid of expressing themselves, of giving vent to their feelings, but today
no oppressed race or nation is afraid of speaking out in the cause of liberty. Egypt has
spoken . . . Egypt is free” (M. Garvey, 1923/1967, p. 1:32). Amy Jacques Garvey and
Marcus Garvey focused on both historical and modern populations because they knew
that Western colonial powers applied the modern conception of race to both ancient and
modern contexts to divide population groups for the benefit of the Western system.
12. African intellectuals on racialized identities
Racializing identification was one way that White Western powers separated Egypt
from Africa. Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan anthropologist, discusses colonialism’s
“political legacy,” that is, the political identities that took shape under and as a result of
colonialism and continue today to wield power in areas that have thrown off colonial
powers (Mamdani, 2001, p. 20). Certain physical markers, as outlined above, are
commonly attributed to different “races,” but on a biological level, those differences are
not substantive enough to warrant the separation that the word “race” connotes in a
scientific context. All humans belong to the same subspecies, and “modern human genetic
variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies (‘races’)” (Keita et al., 2004, S18).
On a socio-cultural level, however, race has been “animated” and has come to acquire
meaning because “the law breathed political life” into it (Mamdani, 2001, pp. 20–22).7
As a socially constructed reality, race may change depending on the social environment
that a person inhabits.
Egyptian anthropologist Soheir Morsy, quoted above as being assigned both Black
and White racial identities in the US, described how racializing differences factored into
7
As Mamdani (2001, p. 27) put it, race is a consequence of state formation, is inscribed in and enforced by
law, and then is used as the basis for assigning a host of social and cultural benefits. Colonizers in Africa
“tried to naturalize political differences” between colonizer and colonized and between indigenous
colonized and non-indigenous colonized. “Ethnicity was said to mark an internal difference among those
constructed by colonial law as indigenous to the land. Race marked an external difference, a difference
with others, those legally constructed as nonindigenous.”
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the Egyptian struggle against Turkish colonial powers. When Turkish heritage was valued
socially over Egyptian heritage, physical standards of beauty aligned with so-called
Turkish attributes, such as lighter skin tone. Despite Egyptian opposition to the devaluing
of their heritage, nonetheless “many Egyptians themselves came to aspire and acquiesce
to the culture of the hegemonic groups, sometimes referring to indigenous products and
customs by contemptuous terms such as baladi, which literally means ‘my country’”
(Morsy, 1996, p. 180). In denigrating Egyptian goods and identity, the disempowered
segment of the population, in this case Egyptians, reinforced their own lack of
empowerment even while simultaneously trying to defy it.
In the case of ancient Nile cultures, some scholars invoked the concept of race to
separate the ancient culture from its African context. In Garvey’s day, ancient Egyptian
culture was the only African culture known and valued by White Eurocentric cultures. To
use his conceptual framework, the culture and the people affiliated with ancient Egypt
were useful to a White Eurocentric narrative because Egyptian culture could be folded
into that narrative as proof of a grand and powerful past. Some scholars then used race as
a way to separate the ancient culture from Africa so that the culture could be fully
subsumed into a White, Western construct of history (e.g., Davies, 2018, p. 8). The
discourses of Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey, and many others critiqued that
practice and pointed out inconsistencies in how people applied racial classifications.
Egyptology was one thread that bound together the gold mask of Tutankhamun and
the burgeoning movement to establish indigenous rule in Africa. According to colonial
powers, Africans were not able to rule themselves. For those who took a long historical
view, such as George Reisner and some other Egyptologists, darker-skinned Africans
never could rule over themselves. For that reason, those Egyptologists conceptualized
kings like Tutankhamun as “White” rulers of the northern Nile Valley. When Amy
Jacques Garvey wrote about the mask of Tutankhamun as an artifact of an African culture,
her argument addressed the historical past with full awareness of the implications her
understanding of the past had on present populations. In a broad sense, she gave
sovereignty to an African population, specifically to an Egyptian population that would
have been considered—in the racializing formulation of US society in the 1920s—part of
the “darker races.” On a global scale, members of those so-called darker races had so
often been made to suffer under the yoke of colonialism. Like other proponents of panAfricanism, Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey called for unity among those
groups, for pride in their histories and heritages, and for a global movement centered
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around those people. Strains of Garvey’s pan-Africanism are also found in Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s conception of Egypt.
13. Nasser and pan-Africanism
Pan-Africanism was not conceived of by Marcus Garvey nor did the global push
for pan-Africanism dissipate when he was incarcerated or after he died in 1940. As
mentioned above, Marcus Garvey encountered pan-Africanism through his Egyptian
mentor Dusé Mohamed Ali. Pan-Africanism was promoted again by Egyptian president
Gamal Abdel Nasser, where it played a key role, alongside pan-Arabism, in his vision for
Egypt that he laid out in The Philosophy of the Revolution. Nasser described the three
circles in which he felt Egyptians “must revolve and attempt to move as much as we
possibly can” (Abdel Nasser, 1954, p. 69). Those circles are Arab, African, and Muslim.
(Notably excluded from this formulation are Christian and Jewish Egyptians.) He
contended that Egypt cannot turn away from Africa because “we are in Africa” and
because “the Nile is the artery of life of our country. It draws its supply of water from the
heart of the continent” (Abdel Nasser, 1954, p. 69). Nasser’s conception of identity calls
to mind the contemporary idea of intersectionality that acknowledges the interplay of the
various circles that people inhabit (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability,
ethnicity, and age) and how those circles may impart to the person more or less power in
certain circumstances (Hill Collins and Bilge p. 2; also, Crenshaw, 2022). In Nasser’s
model, one can imagine circumstances where, for example, an identification as Arab
versus African or Muslim could afford a person certain power that would in turn affect
social relationships.
Nasser’s description of the Nile, Egypt’s “artery of life” that is sourced from “the
heart of the continent,” signals his understanding of Egypt’s reliance on other parts of
Africa and also Egypt’s precarity. He valued dialogue between Egypt and other parts of
Africa, as shown in Radio Cairo that created a clear and easy network of communications
among African populations, and provided the means to attempt to influence popular
opinion in Sudan to support unification with Egypt (Pendegraft, 2017; Ismael, 1971, p.
177). His sometimes patronizing language toward parts of Africa has been described as
“a later-day version of the ‘white man’s burden’” (Akinsanya, 1976, p. 512). But Nasser’s
choice of words can be viewed through the lens of precarity: as the language of a ruling
official affected (perhaps unconsciously) both by the colonial outlook present in Egypt
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for so long and by his unstable position contending with the competing interests of various
world powers. Nasser wrote about “the most violent struggle between white colonisers
and black natives for the possession of [Africa’s] inexhaustible resources” (Abdel Nasser,
1954, p. 54). As much as he encouraged independence among nearby states, he was also
aware of the need to preserve and protect his own state from Western powers aligned
against independence efforts.
As Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey did, Nasser strengthened Egypt’s
association with Africa by highlighting cultural, geographic, and political ties between
Egypt and other African populations. A basis for policy planning in Egypt in 1956 was
the phrase “Africa for the Africans,” which is closely associated with Garveyism (Ismael,
1971, p. 238; Ewing, 2014). Officials in Nasser’s government looked to the ancient
cultures of the Nile Valley in discussing a shared African heritage. They invoked
movements of ancient populations through the Nile Valley to explain genetic admixture
among geographically diverse population groups, and they drew attention to the false
separation of the continent around the Sahara (Ismael, 1971, pp. 103–105). Egyptian
policy recognized that imperialist forces benefitted by imposing dichotomies among
people and thus inhibiting unity. Such an approach set up “Arab” in opposition to
“African” (as if those who lived in the northern part of the continent were somehow not
“of” the continent), and it set up “North” Africa in opposition to “Black” Africa and “SubSaharan” Africa (the qualifier “Sub-” now increasingly recognized as pejorative).
Nasser’s philosophy subverted those divisions. One public statement that reflected the
Egyptian government’s African-centered policy was an exclamation made at an
international conference by Egyptian Foreign Minister Hussein Zulficar Sabri, “The
Egyptian region of the United Arab Republic was freely intermixed with peoples all along
the River Nile, up to the innermost heart of Africa, in the Great Lake Region. We have
mixed blood in our veins. I shout it to the world, and I am proud of it” (Ismael, 1971, p.
104).
Nasser’s formulation of the three circles of Arab, African, and Muslim allowed for
some movement. That movement, the ability to dance between different identities,
provided Nasser with flexibility in balancing competing concerns on a global stage.
Security for Egypt was also provided in solidarity alliances with other African nations,
such as the Non-Aligned Movement that Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah founded for
nations that wished to maintain their sovereignty in the face of the new colonial powers
of the Cold War (Pendegraft, 2017; Akinsanya, 1976; for CIA involvement in the
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overthrow of democratically elected leaders in post-colonial Africa, see Williams, 2021).
Embracing the multifaceted nature of modern Egyptian society—at least parts of it, since,
again, the Christian and Jewish populations are not referenced—kept Nasser’s
government in power for nearly two decades. In terms of Egyptology, however, a shifting
identity (e.g., the views of Reisner described above, Petrie [Challis, 2013], and Frankfort
[1965, p. 24]) has allowed continued circulation of incorrect colonialist-inspired
conceptions of ancient Egypt as a non-African entity.
14. Contemporary Egyptian intellectuals and pan-Africanism
With regard to the modern nation-state of Egypt, a pan-Africanism similar to the
Garveys’ was a part of national self-conception under Nasser, as described above, and the
history of the Nile Valley factored strongly into pan-African narratives. Boutros BoutrosGhali, Egypt’s expert on the Organization of African Unity, called attention to the
longevity of connections between the northern Nile Valley and elsewhere in Africa in
defiance of attempts to, as he put it, “isolate Egypt from its ancient and precious African
context” (Boutros-Ghali, 1997, pp. 103–104). Current diplomatic, military, trade, and
educational relationships attest to Egypt’s strong ties with other African countries, where
“Egypt’s affiliation with its African surroundings goes beyond the traditional
geographical and historical dimensions, as this affiliation has been a major component of
Egyptian identity throughout the ages” (Sharaf Eldin, 2022). Egyptian scholar May Kosba
also sees an African identity in the permanence of a population in the northern Nile Valley
despite cultural ruptures, for example, when ruled from power bases external to the area.
“The cutoff between antiquity, and medieval and modern history, does not disqualify
Egyptians from their Africanness because they were not physically diasporized” (Kosba,
2021, p. 10). A recognition of shared pasts, presents, and futures breaks down divisions
imposed by hegemonic powers, exposes the myth of cultural distinctiveness, and
reintegrates communities.
Pan-Africanism has been expressed in specifically Egyptological contexts by
Egyptians such as Gamal Mokhtar, Hany Rashwan, and Fekri Hassan. Gamal Mokhtar,
former head of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, chaired the critically important
UNESCO symposium of 1974 on the history of the Nile Valley. In the resulting
publication, he explained that the idea of race is a product of Enlightenment era-thinking
and debunked the idea of a “single, pure race” populating the area by pointing to gradual
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settlements by a variety of nomadic people over thousands of years (Mokhtar, 1981, p.
14).8 For Hany Rashwan, Egyptology’s removal of Egypt from Africa was part of the
colonial system, exerting control by taking ownership of the area’s narrative past:
“Egyptology and modern Western imperialism grew up together hand in hand. European
scholars created Egyptology as an academic discipline, and they kept watering its
branches of knowledge until they thought that this ancient African culture was appearing
to them as part of their own Eurocentric world heritage” (Rashwan, 2021, p. 172).
Egyptologist Fekri Hassan explained in some detail the settling of the Nile Valley and
made a plea for Africans to recognize both the connectedness of their histories and the
traumas experienced by people of African descent in the diaspora.
Peoples of Africa, including Egyptians, have to recognize the course of historical
events and how they contributed to the recent current cultural and political
differentiation of African peoples who share a common background going back
to the prehistoric past. Egyptians and fellow Africans have also to develop a
deeper understanding of the situations Americans of African descent face with the
painful memories of the forced abduction from their African homelands, cruel
mistreatment in plantations, and decades of struggle to reclaim their rights as equal
and free citizens in a hostile society still ridden with its fantasies of white
supremacy. (Hassan, 2021)
In the face of such fantasies, African descended people all over the world look to
the ancient past of Africa to disprove the incorrect claims that Africa had no history and
that by extension African descended people were not fully human.
15. Conclusion
Ancient Nile Valley cultures, with their impressive art, artifacts, and monuments,
provided effective counterarguments to the incorrect idea that Africa had no history
because those cultures translated into “civilized” society in a White Eurocentric
Cheikh Anta Diop’s contribution to the collected volume presented evidence for the African origin of the
people of ancient Nile Valley cultures. At the end of the chapter, Mokhtar, as editor, noted that Diop’s
arguments “have not been accepted by all the experts interested in the problem (cf. Introduction, above).”
I do not take Mokhtar’s comment as an indication that he disagreed substantively with the content, but just
that he pointed readers to the extensive discussions described in the introduction.
8
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framework. As the U.S.-American scholar and cultural critic Gerald Early put it:
European intervention denied the Africans the ability to determine for themselves
the worth of their memory. That this reconstruction could be done only through
running African history and African civilization through Egypt, the only African
civilization that impressed and that was widely known by European intellectuals,
is interesting. . . . In order to get respect for their humanity by having a distinct set
of memories, the Africans had to couch their setting of remembrance in terms that
Europeans could understand, could, in fact, be in awe of. (Early, 1998, p. 708)
The colonialist response to African cultures could not dismiss ancient Nile Valley
cultures as “uncivilized.” The result, as Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey noted, was to
simply remove those ancient populations from their African contexts.
Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey were only two of many voices who called
for unity and understanding among people of darker skin tones who have in so many
places and so many ways suffered under colonialist and racist structures. They were not
the first or the only African descended intellectuals in the United States to engage with
Egyptology. Their message was a particularly potent one though. As a woman, Amy
Jacques Garvey was less threatening than her husband to the hegemonic culture in the
United States. She was not charged along with her husband despite the FBI’s
understanding that they both engaged in the activities that formed the basis of the US
government’s accusations against him (Taylor, 2002, p. 49). What made Marcus Garvey
so dangerous—what made the FBI infiltrate his organization and what led the US
government to incarcerate him on the flimsy evidence of an empty envelope—is that he
had widespread popular support among African descended people in the United States
and elsewhere in the world (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2002). Those institutional
powers were correct in their assessment of the threat of the Garveys’ message to their
very existence. The vision and influence of Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey spread to
many groups in Africa and the African diaspora, and the positive effects of their work are
seen today (e.g., Ewing, 2014, pp. 238–241). Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey
were knowledgeable about the intellectual debates of their day, and they constructed
arguments to dismantle the nonsensical and racist claims of White scholars about Africa.
Received: 05/15/2022
Approved: 09/12/2022
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EGITO E EGIPTOLOGIA NO DISCURSO PAN-AFRICANISTA DE
AMY JACQUES GARVEY E MARCUS GARVEY
RESUMO
Amy Jacques Garvey e Marcus Garvey defenderam a africanidade das
culturas antigas do Vale do Nilo em oposição direta a alguns acadêmicos.
Nos Estados Unidos do início do século XX, narrativas incorretas alegavam
que a África não tinha história. Os Garveys e outros intelectuais pretos
olharam para o Vale do Nilo para mostrar o absurdo desta alegação. O panafricanismo
do
Garveyismo
incutiu
orgulho
nas
comunidades
afrodescendentes e as uniu contra as estruturas coloniais. O pan-africanismo
influenciou fortemente na concepção do presidente Gamal Abdel Nasser
sobre o moderno Estado-nação do Egito. Acadêmicos egípcios de vários
campos, incluindo os estudos sobre o Vale do Nilo, continuaram a entender
o antigo Egito como parte de uma rede de culturas africanas.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Amy Jacques Garvey; Marcus Garvey; Gamal Abdel Nasser; PanAfricanismo; Egiptologia; Egito.
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Mare Nostrum, ano 2022, v. 13, n. 1
L’ÉGYPTE ET L’ÉGYPTOLOGIE DANS LE DISCOURS PANAFRICAIN
D’AMY JACQUES GARVEY ET DE MARCUS GARVEY
RÉSUMÉ
Amy Jacques Garvey et Marcus Garvey ont plaidé pour l’africanité des
anciennes cultures de la vallée du Nil, en opposition directe avec certains
universitaires. Au début du XXe siècle aux États-Unis, des récits incorrects
alléguaient que l’Afrique n’avait pas d’histoire. Les Garveys et d’autres
intellectuels noirs se sont tournés vers la vallée du Nil pour montrer
l’absurdité de cette affirmation. Le panafricanisme du Garveyisme a inspiré
la fierté des communautés d’ascendance africaine et les a unies contre les
structures coloniales. Le panafricanisme a joué un rôle important dans la
conception du président Gamal Abdel Nasser de l’État-nation moderne de
l’Égypte. Les érudits égyptiens de divers domaines, y compris les études sur
la vallée du Nil, continuent de comprendre l’Égypte ancienne comme faisant
partie d’un réseau de cultures africaines.
MOTS CLÉS
Amy Jacques Garvey; Marcus Garvey; Gamal Abdel Nasser; panafricanisme;
égyptologie; Égypte.
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