By Paul T. Shipale
According to the Pan-African Magazine edition of April, 2014 – in 1994, more than 800 000 people (an estimated one million people, mainly Tutsis) were killed in 100 days in the Rwandan Genocide. The Hamite Hypothesis dreamed up by 19th and early 20th century European scholars and scientists, many believe, had a direct link with the sad events in Rwanda in April 1994, and by extension with the ongoing ethnic animosities in the Great Lakes Region.
According to Curtis Abraham, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in the summer of 1798, his motives were primarily geopolitical. Perhaps the greatest achievement was the impact on Europe of the discoveries that French scholars and scientists that accompanied Napoleon’s invasion forces made in Egypt. These discoveries led to the publication of “Description d’ Egypte”, which detailed the finding of the French scholars and scientists. The book not only became the foundation for the modern science of Egyptology, but it also led to the establishment of the great Egyptian museums we see around the world today. Fast-forward to 1994. The shocking and tragic events that began in Rwanda on 6 April 1994, which transpired over the next 100 days and whose consequences are still being felt in the Great Lakes Region two decades later, have, some say, a direct link to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.
Indeed, according to Abraham, it was the splendours of Egypt’s glorious past that helped to give rise to the racist philosophy of the Hamite Hypothesis, which helped trigger one of the most horrific pogroms of the 20th century – the transatlantic slave trade. The Hamite Hypothesis began as a Biblical tale. In Genesis 9:18-25, we read of Noah’s curse upon his grandson, Canaan, the youngest of Ham’s four boys. Thus, contrary to the Hamite Hypothesis, Ham himself was not cursed, but his son Canaan was. At the time, Ham had four sons (as the Bible tells at Genesis 10: 6-10). They were Cush (or Nubia/Sudan), Mizraim (or Egypt), Put and Canaan. Biblical historians generally agree that black people or Africans descended from Cush and Mizraim. (These names mean Black or the land of the black people, according to historians, as the Greeks called these people). Cush gave birth to six sons; the most famous was Nimrod who, according to the Bible, “grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth.”
But as it happened, the original notion of the Hamite Hypothesis was based on the false belief that the Hamites were blacks or ‘Negroes’. This was supposedly based on a collection of oral traditions of the Jews, called the Babylonian Talmud, which appeared in the 6th century AD. This earlier tradition, of the Hamites as blacks, continued into the European “Dark Ages”. Centuries later, Europeans and Americans of European decent would use this flawed hypothesis to their political and economic advantage. The so-called ’Curse of Ham’ was the religious rationale used in the USA (1830-1860) as a divine justification for the enslavement of blacks during the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, Ancient Egyptian civilisation towered over those found in the Near and Far East and in the Americas. And so it was reasoned that such a hallmark of civilisation, as Ancient Egypt, could only have arrived there by one means only, through a process of borrowing or copying from others, in other words diffusion. But the diffusionists were racists. They believed that anything regarding civilisation originated from Ancient Egypt, but to them, the Ancient Egyptians were not Africans. Biologically they were Europeans or from European descent. Dark-skinned Africans were incapable of such grandiose achievements.
This was despite the brave conclusions of a number of learned European men of the day, such as Count Constantin-Francois de Chasseboeuf de Volney (1757-1820), the French traveller who wrote Ruins of Empire (1793), and Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825), the French artist and scholar who was selected as one of the members of the ‘Committee of Arts and Sciences’ accompanying Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Denon and Volney were correct in concluding that the Ancient Egyptian was indeed the creation of ‘Negroids’. But this, of course, was too much for mainstream Europe and America to accept. In fact, when Ruins of Empires was published in an American edition, positive references to blacks were deleted from the text. Volney, however, later issued a corrected edition that restored those positive references.
In any event, a kind of compromise had to be invented by those who continued to see blacks as representing the lowest rank on the human ladder to give justification for their continued enslavement. A new interpretation of the meaning of the Scriptures was offered. Egyptians, it was now remembered, were descendants of Mizraim, a son of Ham. Thus, the civilisation that Napoleon’s scientists found in Egypt had to be the creation of Caucasians, which made the Ancient Egyptians a branch of the Caucasoid race. By the early part of the 20th century it was alleged that science had firmly established a separate Hamitic branch of the Caucasian race. This then gave rise to the creation of a linguistic group called the family of Hamitic languages. Members of this racial group comprise blonde, blue-eyed Berbers of North Africa and dark-skinned woolly-haired Ethiopians in the Horn of Africa. They were then divided into Northern and Eastern branches. The Eastern branch included ancient and modern Egyptians, Gallas or Oromos, Danakil, Maasai, Ethiopians, Somalis and the Tutsi and Hima of the Great Lakes Region. The majority of these groups were cattle-keepers and somehow these pastoralists were lauded as possessing a superior culture over the agricultural ‘Negro’. No one else during the 19th century, however, was a more influential proponent of the Hamite Hypothesis than the myth’s originator, John Hanning Speke, the Briton who claimed to have ‘discovered’ the source of River Nile. Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, the forum in which he dreamt up the new Hamite Myth, was published in December 1863. Speke thought that the Tutsi and Hima were a branch of the cattle-keeping (Hamitic) peoples he had encountered while with Burton in the Somali town of Harar in 1854. In chapter XI of his book, History of the Wahima (the Hima in Bunyoro in Uganda), Speke presents what he boldly called his ‘Theory of Conquest of the Inferior by Superior Races’. Simply stated Speke believed that the monarchic institutions, like the kingships of some of the Great Lakes communities, were brought to the region by a ‘conquering superior race’, carriers of a ‘superior civilisation’. These supposed highbrow Hamites, ancestors of Tutsi, Hima, etc, were the Galla of southern Ethiopia.
Here in Namibia, the early research work on the Ovawambo people reveals that the first attempt to study the past of the Ovawambo people was made by Heinrich Vedder, a German missionary who was appointed by the minority white South African regime as their own historian as a measure for ensuring complete control over historical writings and prove that the Eurocentric idea of whatever was called history in Africa began with the coming of the white man thus denying Africans a culture of their own. Vedder’s bias is elucidated by reference to his background as he was not only a colonial historian but also a Nazi sympathiser as he explained to his friend Rev. J. Olpp in 1933, by then inspector of Rhenish Missions in Namibia: “I am a Nazi of Hitler’s kind with all my heart…”(Lau, Brigitte (1981): “Thanks God the Germans Came – Dr. Vedder and the Namibian Historiography”, p. 16).
Another attempt to write the history of Owamboland was made by Erkki Laurma who devised his own theory linking the Owambo myths of origin with Biblical stories. A third study was compiled by Edwin M. Loeb, whose materials traced the origin of Owambo people by identifying the similarities he found between them and people of the Mediterranean communities and thus supported the long-standing hypothesis of the Hamitic theory of origin. A third study was conducted by a Roman Catholic missionary, Carlos Estermann who knew Oshiwambo language and collected folktales, songs, proverbs and riddles, was also dominated by the Hamitic theory of Bantu origin. However, unlike others, he explained that he accepted this theory not because of the assumption of a superior or advanced degree of cultural development but rather because of their physical features, which he thoughts seemed closer to those of the Ethiopians than those of the Central African Bantu, a similarity reinforced by a well-developed pastoral economy similar to that of the Horn of Africa where Hamitic speakers dwell (Estermann (1976), editor’s preface). It was bad enough that the explorer and missionary vanguards of European colonialism in Africa trumpeted such stereotypes to their audiences back home in metropolitan Europe. Worse still is when they failed to realise that western epistemology based on empiricism does not provide a conceptual framework in which traditional matters can be explained and which they quickly dismiss as superstitions. These scholars also fail to grasp the type of ideology behind the customary norms and practices, reducing them to simple mumbo jumbo.
If we look at the annals of what social anthropologists call live archives by Frieda-Nela Williams from her book Pre-Colonial History of the Wambos in South West Africa/Namibia, we will see that all groups in Africa are inter-related. Indeed, tribal divisions based on race were not known in Africa during the pre-colonial period, rather, the division that existed among these people was based on clan organisation and their blood relations were defined on the basis of clan or totem (Amunyela, Amutshila, ELC. 344;). To this day, many people in Africa are called and known by their clans’ lineage honorific names, used as a respectful and proper way to address elders.
In the wake of this week’s festival of totems, I fully concur with the idea echoed by Dr. Mbenzi of UNAM that totems act as a shield against tribalism and I may even add, xenophobia, because people from another tribe may belong to your clan. According to Nzim, the term Ethnic Community, referring to the linguistic community, which had hitherto been homogeneous where the clan was concerned, now included representatives from other clan thus becoming inter-clan. As a result of this process, brothers of the same clan were dispersed and became members of other communities, heterogeneous from the clan point of view but based on a language which was common to all members (Nzim, Ndaywel (1980) clan history and ethnical history, U N E S C O, v o l 7, no. 22, p. 66). For instance, the Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe use totems as cultural markers to identify a person and to show their origin, like mutupo in Shona – is Mhara/antelope. Male members of the Mhara totemic lineage go by the honorific name of Chikonamombe (mombe means cow in Shona). Like elsewhere in Africa, every totemic lineage has a praise poem that is associated with that lineage. Some lines from the Chikonan’ombe lineage praise-poem read; Mbuya Chikonamombe, chigumbu chinounye… ….Gusho…vemuto munyere…., the line “vemuto munyere” refers to their legendary love of meat just like Aakwanangombe of Aawambo.
If the Methodist missionary, Peter Jones, himself an Ojibwa who are credited with the term totem, which signifies a blood relationship between brothers and sisters from the same matrilineal line and who cannot marry each other, used totems why not Africans to avoid this Eurocentric inventions of tribes and xenophobia?
*Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer and this newspaper but solely reflect my personal views as a citizen.