It is a sign of the times that Mary Lefkowitz deserves great credit for writing Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Basic Books, 222 pages, $ 24.00) even though it is a book that, as she herself recognizes, should not have needed to be written. Lefkowitz is a distinguished classicist who teaches at Wellesley; she has written Not Out of Africa to challenge a series of claims (most prominently advanced in Martin Bernal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Black Athena) about the African (specifically Egyptian) provenance of Greek civilization.
These claims have been made to further an obvious political agenda: to instill pride in African Americans and to denounce Western civilization (whose origin supposedly lay in the plunder of a superior African civilization’s cultural riches). But as Lefkowitz reminds us, the motives behind an assertion are ultimately less important than the evidence supporting it: And the problem with the Afrocentrists claims about the origins of Greek civilization is that they are buttressed by wishes rather than facts. Lefkowitz’s book should not be necessary because the historical arguments of the Afrocentrists can be refuted simply by repeating “what has long been known and established”; but it proved necessary because classical scholars (fearful of the charge of racism) have generally been reluctant to criticize them.
