The Hamitic hypothesis is well-known to students of
Africa. It states that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought
there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race. Seligman
formulates it as follows:
Apart from relatively
late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of
the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction
with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this
influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider
pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali
...The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans'-arriving wave after
wave-better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.
On closer examination of
the history of the idea, there emerges a previous elaborate Hamitic theory, in
which the Hamites are believed to be Negroes. It becomes clear then that the
hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed
its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a
problem of epistemology. In the beginning there was the Bible. The word 'Ham'
appears there for the first time in Genesis, chapter five. Noah cursed Ham, his
youngest son, and said:
—
Cursed
be Canaan;
—
A
servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
—
And
he said,
—
Blessed
be Jehovah, the God of Shem;
—
And
let Canaan be his servant.
—
God
enlarge Japhet,
—
And
let him dwell in the tent of Shem;
—
And
let Canaan be his servant.
Then follows an
enumeration of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, Japhet, and their sons who were
born to them after the flood. The Bible makes no mention of racial differences
among the ancestors of mankind. It is much later that an idea of race appears
with reference to the sons of Noah; it concerns the descendants of Ham. The
Babylonian Talmud, a collection of oral traditions of the Jews, appeared in the
sixth century A.D.; it states that the descendants of Ham are cursed by being
black, and depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates. Thus,
early tradition identified the Hamites with Negroes and endowed them with both
certain physiognomic attributes and an undesirable character. This notion
persisted in the Middle Ages, when fanciful rabbinical expansions of the
Genesis stories were still being made. Ham, some of them said, was supposed to
have emasculated Noah, who cursed him thus:
'Now I cannot beget the
fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers!
Therefore, it must be Canaan, your firstborn, whom they enslave. And since you
have disabled me... doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan's children
shall be borne ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around
to see my nakedness, your grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks, and
their eyes red; again, because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall
swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their
male members shall be shamefully elongated! Men of this race are called
Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication,
to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never to tell the truth.'
Scholars who study the
Hebrew myths of the Genesis claim that these oral traditions grew out of a need
of the Israelites to rationalize their subjugation of Canaan, a historical fact
validated by the myth of Noah's curse. Talmudic or Midrashic explanations of the
myth of Ham were well known to Jewish writers in the Middle Ages, as seen in
this description by Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century merchant and traveler
south of Aswan:
There is a people... who,
like animals, eat of the herbs that grow on the banks of the Nile and in their
fields. They go about naked and have not the intelligence of ordinary men. They
cohabit with their sisters and anyone they can find... they are taken as slaves
and sold in Egypt and neighboring countries. These sons of Ham are black slaves.
Ideas have a way of being
accepted when they become useful as a rationalization of an economic fact of
life. As Graves and Patai put it: 'That Negroes are doomed to serve men of
lighter color was a view gratefully borrowed by Christians in the Middle Ages;
a severe shortage of cheap manual labor caused by the plague made the
reinstitution of slavery attractive'.
The notion of the
Negro-Hamite was generally accepted by the year 1600. In one of the earliest
post-medieval references found, Leo Africanus, the great Arab traveller and
one-time protege of Pope Leo X, wrote about Negro Africans as being descended
from Ham. His translator, the Englishman John Pory, followed the text with his
own commentary in which he stressed the punishment suffered by Ham's
descendants, thus reinforcing the myth in modern times.
Some seventeenth-century
writers acquaint us with notions current in their time by citing European
authors, known or unknown today, who wrote, directly or indirectly, about the
low position of Negro-Hamites in the world. This was further strengthened by
European travellers who went to Africa for reasons of trade or curiosity.
Concurrently, there existed another point of view, in which the term 'Hamite'
denoted a sinner of some sort, not necessarily a Negro, although the
characteristics of the Hamite were the same negative ones variously attributed
to the Negro.
The idea of a
Negro-Hamite was not universally accepted. Some individuals believed that the
blackness of the Negro was caused by the soil on which he lived together with
the extreme heat of the sun. Others doubted that either the climate theory or
the efficacy of Noah's curse were responsible for the Negro's physiognomy, but
reasoned that 'their color and wool are innate or seminal, from their first
beginning. '
By and large, however,
the Negro was seen as a descendant of Ham, bearing the stigma of Noah's curse.
This view was compatible with the various interests extant at that time. On the
one hand, it allowed exploitation of the Negro for economic gain to remain
undisturbed by any Christian doubts as to the moral issues involved. 'A servant
of servants shall he be' clearly meant that the Negro was preordained for
slavery. Neither individual nor collective guilt was to be borne for a state of
the world created by the Almighty. On the other hand, Christian cosmology could
remain at peace, because identifying the Negro as a Hamite-thus as a brother
kept him in the family of man in accordance with the biblical story of the
creation of mankind.
The eighteenth century
saw an efflorescence of scientific inquiry, which directed its efforts to the
understanding of man's place in the world. Modern science had developed a
century earlier and had attempted to establish order in the universe; the
nature of man, however, was not part of scientific investigation, but remained
in the province of theology. This state of affairs became unsatisfactory to the
later scholars, namely the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who tried to apply
scientific methods to the study of man and whose theories as to the origin of
the race often came into direct conflict with the Scriptures.
The Negro's place in
nature was the subject of great debate at that time. One of the crucial issues
of this debate was the question of unity in mankind, or monogenism, as opposed
to the separate creation of races or polygenism. The concept of the
Negro-Hamite was steadily losing ground because theological interpretation of
the peopling of the world did not satisfy the men of the Enlightenment. The
myth was now kept alive mainly by the clergy, who tried to keep their hold on
the laity by discrediting the savants as infidels.
The polygenist theories
led to a widespread belief that the Negro was sub-human and at the same time
de-emphasized his relationship to the accursed Ham. The monogenist theories
attempted to explain Negro physical characteristics by natural rather than
mythical causes. The conservative theologians still clung to the now classic
exegesis of the Old Testament and discouraged any attempt at a different
interpretation. At the end of the eighteenth century, many famous men espoused
and popularized one of two views regarding the Negro. One was that he was the
result of 'degeneration' due to various environmental conditions. The other and
more frequent view was that he was a separate creation, subhuman in
character."
The Western world, which
was growing increasingly rich on the institution of slavery, grew increasingly
reluctant to look at the Negro slave and see him as a brother under the skin.
Some writers feel that the image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion
to his value as a commodity, and the proudly rational and scientific white man
was impatient to find some definitive proof for the exclusion of the Negro from
the family of man and for ultimate denial of common ancestry.
The catalyst which made
this possible was an historical event, namely Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in
1798. Because Napoleon shared the passion for science and antiquities that was
the hallmark of the Enlightenment, he invited archaeologists and other
scientists to join him. The experts who had accompanied him discovered
treasures that led them to found the new science of Egyptology and an institute
on Egyptian soil. These discoveries were to revolutionize history's view of the
Egyptian and lay the basis for a new Hamitic myth.
Napoleon's scientists
made the revolutionary discovery that the beginnings of Western civilization
were earlier than the civilizations of the Romans and the Greeks. Mysterious
monuments, evidences of the beginnings of science, art, and well-preserved
mummies were uncovered. Attention was drawn to the population that lived among
these ancient splendors and was presumably descended from the people who had
created them. It was a well-mixed population, such as it is at the present
time, with physical types running from light to black and with many
physiognomic variations. The French scholars came to the conclusion that the
Egyptians were Negroids. Denon, one of Napoleon's original expedition,
describes them as such: '...a broad and flat nose, very short, a large
flattened mouth... thick lips, etc.'.
The view that the
Egyptians were 'Negroid' and highly civilized apparently existed before the
French expedition to Egypt. Count Volney, a French traveler to the Middle East,
spent four years in Egypt and Syria and wrote in a well-known book:
How are we astonished...
when we reflect that to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the
objects of our contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and... when we recollect
that, in the midst of these nations, who call themselves the friends of liberty
and humanity, the most barbarous of slaveries is justified; and that it is even
a problem whether the understandings of negroes be of the same species with
that of white men!
In spite of the deserved
respect which Volney enjoyed, his opinions on this subject were not accepted.
Nevertheless, the
Egyptian expedition made it impossible to hide that seeming paradox of a
population of Negroids who were, once upon a time, originators of the oldest
civilization of the West. The conflicting ideologies which existed in the West
made it difficult for the various proponents of these ideologies to deal with
the notion as it stood. Such a notion upset the main existing tenets; it could
not be internalized by those individuals on both sides of the Atlantic who were
convinced of the innate inferiority of the Negro, nor by those who adhered to
the biblical explanation of the origin of races. To the latter such an idea was
blasphemous, as Noah's curse condemned the Hamites to misery and precluded high
original achievement.
Egypt became the focus of
great interest among the scientists as well as among the lay public. The fruits
of this interest were not long in coming. A few short years after the Egyptian
expedition, there appeared a large number of publications dealing with Egypt
and Egyptians. Many of these works seemed to have had as their main purpose an
attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes. The arguments
which follow brought forth the questions of language, migration, ancient
writers, and the existence of mummies. The polygenist theories of race
postulated that as each race was created separately, so it was endowed with its
own language. Because the Coptic language was clearly related to Arabic, it was
convenient to draw the conclusion that the nations who spoke related languages
must have proceeded from one parental stock. Since the Ethiopians, Nubians and
other allied peoples were declared not to be Negro by European travelers, the
Egyptians could not be said to be of African (Negro) race, as all of these
peoples were colonists from Syria or Arabia Felix. Since ancient writers were
silent on the subject of the Negroid physiognomy of the Egyptian, it was
understood that in effect Egyptians were not Negroid, as such a fact would have
startled the ancients into a detailed description. Herodotus himself, ran the
argument, described them in comparative not absolute terms. Thus 'black and
woolly haired' meant black as compared to the Greeks and woolly haired as
compared to the Greeks. Some said that the existence of the mummies itself
constituted sufficient proof that these people were non-Negro; to W. G. Browne
the '... prescience of that people concerning errors into which posterity might
fall, exhibits irrefragable proof of their features and of the color of their
skin...,' clearly implying, therefore, that the ancient Egyptians knew they
could be mistaken for Negroes, and so left their bodies in evidence to refute
such an allegation.
Browne insisted that the
Egyptians were white. Although he himself did not call them 'Hamites', he paved
the way for his successors who were to identify the Egyptians as such.
Modern times showed their
influence on theological writings as well. The new Hamitic concept made its
appearance quite early in the nineteenth century, spearheaded by the clergy. If
the Negro was a descendant of Ham, and Ham was cursed, how could he be the
creator of a great civilization? It follows logically that the theologians had
to take another look, both at the Bible and at its explanation of the origin of
the races of man. The veracity of the Scriptures obviously could not be denied.
New interpretations of the meaning of Scriptures were offered. Egyptians, it
was now remembered, were descendants of Mizraim, a son of Ham. Noah had only
cursed Canaan-son-of-Ham, so that it was Canaan and his progeny alone who
suffered the malediction. Ham, his other sons, and their children were not
included in the curse.
For example, the Reverend
M. Russell took up the issue of the Hamites and the Egyptians:
In the sacred writings of
the Hebrews it [Egypt] is called Mizraim... the name which is applied to Egypt
by the Arabs of the present day. The Copts retain the native word 'Chemia'
which perhaps has some relation to Cham, the son of Noah; or as Plutarch insinuates,
may only denote that darkness of color which appears in a rich soil or in the
human eye.
He admits that there is a
peculiarity of feature common to all the Copts, but asserts that neither in
countenance nor personal form is there any resemblance to the Negro.
He and other scholars
re-read the Book of Genesis focusing on the genealogy of the three ancestors of
mankind, and especially Ham. The histories of the sons of Ham were discussed,
particularly those of Cush and Mizraim. The question was raised then whether it
was Ham who had been cursed after all, or was it only Canaan? It was indeed
Canaan who was cursed, but the rest of the progeny of Ham went on to prosper.
So, it came to pass that
the Egyptians emerged as Hamites, Caucasoid, uncursed and capable of high
civilization. This view became widely accepted and it is reflected in the
theological literature of that era. A survey of Biblical dictionaries of the
period is quite revealing as to the wide acceptance of the new Hamites.
Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, published in 1846 by John Kitto, D.D.,
F.S.A., has a long article under the name Ham. It is stressed that the curse of
Noah is directed only against Canaan. The general opinion is stated that all
southern nations derive from Ham. However, the article admits difficulties in
tracing the history of the most important Hamitic nations-the Cushites, the
Phoenicians and the Egyptians-due to their great intermixture with foreign
peoples. Thus, the early decades of the nineteenth century greeted a new
Hamitic myth, this time with a Caucasoid protagonist. At the same time the
scientific bases of the new Hamitic myth were being devised and, allegedly,
substantiated.
Perhaps because slavery
was both still legal and profitable in the United States, and because it was
deemed necessary and right to protect it, there arose an American school of
anthropology which attempted to prove scientifically that the Egyptian was a
Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro. As Mannheim said, each
intellectual stand is functionally dependent on the 'differentiated social
group reality standing behind it.' Such workers as Dr Morton, assisted in
various ways by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, collected, measured,
interpreted and described the human crania. The comparative studies made of
these crania led Morton to believe that the Egyptian osteological formation was
Caucasian, and that it was a race indigenous to the Nile Valley. He also
postulated fixity of species, considering it a primordial organic form,
permanent through time. Nott and Gliddon, who acted as Morton's apostles, also
bolstered his interpretation by explaining the Negroid admixture of the
Egyptians as being a population which descended from numerous Negro slaves kept
by Egyptians in ancient days. These theories attempted to include the Egyptians
in the branch of the Caucasoid race, to explain their accomplishments on the
basis of innate racial superiority, and to exclude the Negro from any
possibility of achievement by restating his alleged inferiority and his
position of 'natural slave'. The conclusions of American scholars found a
receptive audience in Europe, where craniology was considered to yield positive
and meaningful data, a point of view expressed by two scientists of world
renown, the Drs Retzius of Sweden and Broca of France. The intellectual vogue
of the day was the stress on 'facts', not abstract theories, in all
disciplines. Craniology provided a seemingly concrete 'fact', thus fitting in
neatly with the prevailing academic attitudes. Again, there was no complete
consensus among anthropologists. The most prominent opponent of the American
school of anthropology was James Prichard of England, who was not convinced
that the Egyptians belonged to the Caucasian race.
The science of philology
added weight to the new Hamitic theory. This young science was developing at a
time when language and race were considered to be inextricably bound together,
an approach which lent itself to polygenist theories. Bunsen, a philologist and
an Egyptologist, reported two branches of cognate languages, the Semitic and
what he called the Iranian. Khamitic or Egyptian he postulated to be anterior
to Semitic and antediluvian. Here was irrefutable proof, it seemed, that the
Hamitic language belonged to the Caucasoid peoples, and it was eagerly adopted
by scholars and theologians. The new Hamitic myth was gaining momentum.
The late nineteenth
century provided two new ideologies which utilized and expanded the concept of
the Caucasoid Hamite: colonialism and modem racism. Both shaped the European
attitude to Africa and Africans. The travelers found a variety of physical
types in Africa, and their ethnocentrism made them value those who looked more
like themselves. These were declared to be Hamitic, or of Hamitic descent, and
endowed with the myth of superior achievements and considerable beneficial
influence on their Negro brothers. John Hanning Speke was seminal to the
Hamitic hypothesis which we know today. Upon discovery of the kingdom of
Buganda with its complex political organization, he attributed its 'barbaric
civilization' to a nomadic pastoralist race related to the Hamitic Galla, thus
setting the tone for the interpreters to come. The Hamites were designated as
early culture-bearers in Africa owing to the natural superiority of intellect
and character of all Caucasoids. Such a viewpoint had dual merit for European
purposes: it maintained the image of the Negro as an inferior being, and
it pointed to the alleged fact that development could come to him only by
mediation of the white race. It also implied a self-appointed duty of the
'higher' races to civilize the 'lower' ones, a notion which was eventually
formulated as 'the white man's burden'. At this point in time the Hamite found
himself in an ambiguous position. On the one hand he was considered to be
Caucasoid, that is superior. On the other hand, he was a native, part of the
'burden', a man to benefit from European civilization. Here the Teutonic theory
of race showed its adaptability. Having devised a hierarchy within the
Caucasian race, the builders of the theory placed the Teutonic Anglo-Saxon on
top of the ladder with the Slavs on the lowest rung. But an even lower position
could always be added, and the Hamites filled the space admirably. 'Politics
and race theories seemed natural allies'; they provided a seemingly cogent
ideological framework for colonial expansion and exploitation.
The beginning of the
twentieth century saw the Caucasoid-Hamite solidly established. Science
supplanted theology as the alpha and omega of truth. Racial 'scientific'
classifications, which had to face the physical diversity of the various
'Hamites', established a separate Hamitic branch of the Caucasian race, closely
following the creation of a linguistic entity called a family of Hamitic
languages. Linguistic typologies were based on racial types and racial
classifications on linguistic definitions. The confusion surrounding the
'Hamite' was steadily compounded as the terms of reference became increasingly
overlapping and vague. The racial classification of 'Hamites' encompassed a
great variety of types from fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed (Berbers) to black
(Ethiopians). Two early racial typologies were devised by Sergi and Brinton.
Sergi called certain populations Hamitic chiefly on the basis of their
linguistic characteristics. Among these were the inhabitants of the Sahara, the
Berbers and even such people 'who have wholly, or partially, lost their
language', like the Egyptians, Watusi and Masai. They were divided into the
Eastern branch, and the Northern branch. The Eastern branch included the
ancient and modern Egyptians (excluding the Arabs), Nubians, Bejas,
Abyssinians, Gallas, Danakil, Somali, Masai and Watusi (or Wahuma). The
Northern branch included the Berbers, Tebus, Fulbes (Fulani) and the Gaunches
of the Canaries. Brinton denoted Lybians, Egyptians and the East African groups
as Hamitic, and remarked that each of these groups is distinguished by physical
and linguistic differences. He went on to state that 'the physical appearance
of the Libyan peoples distinctly marks them as members of the white race,
often of uncommonly pure blood. As the race elsewhere, they present the blonde
and brunette type, the latter predominant, but the former extremely well
marked'. Because Brinton also considered the Iberians to be Hamites, and not
Basques, his description of the Libyans seems to imply that the Libyans are a
sort of half-way house of the 'Hamitic' race, because they combine elements of
the blonde Hamites (of Europe) and the brunette Hamites (of East Africa). This
reasoning appears to be no more logical than that of Sergi, who first bases a
racial group on its linguistic characteristics and then includes in it people
who have 'wholly or partially' lost the language!
Linguistic classifications
were based on geography, racial characteristics and occupation, rather than on
rigorous methodology pertaining solely to language. Grammatical gender became
the main diagnostic of the so-called Hamitic languages. Although
grammatical gender exists in many unrelated languages of the world, it was not
found in the languages of the 'true' Negro (racial category
again). Thus, linguistic typologies had racial bases just as racial
typologies were based on linguistics.
Because the Hamites
discovered in Africa south of the Sahara were described as pastoralists and the
traditional occupation of the Negro was supposedly agriculture, pastoralism and
all its attributes became endowed with an aura of superiority of culture,
giving the Hamite a third dimension: cultural identity.
The historians who began
to compile histories of Africa wrote with an often-unconscious racial bias, and
accepted the dicta of the discoverers of that continent as indisputable proven
facts and presented them as historical explanations of the African past.
Much of anthropology gave
its support to the Hamitic myth. Seligman found a cultural substratum of supposedly
great influence in Africa. In 1930 he published his famous Races of Africa,
which went through several editions and which was reprinted in I966 still
basically unchanged. He refined the Sergi-devised classifications of Hamitic
peoples, adding the category of Nilotes or 'half-Hamites'. Every trace and/or
sign of what is usually termed 'civilized' in Africa was attributed to alien,
mainly Hamitic, origin. In such a way, iron-working was supposed to have been
introduced to the Negroes by pastoral Hamites, along with complex political
institutions, irrigation and age-grade systems. Archaeological findings of any magnitude
were also ascribed to outside influences, and kept the Negro African out of his
own culture history. In the eyes of the world the Negro stood stripped of any
intellectual or artistic genius and of any ability at all which would allow
him, now, in the past, or in the future, to be the master of his life and
country.
The confluence of modern
nationalism and the ensuing modern racism evolved from earlier
nineteenth-century national romanticism and developed through theories of de
Gobineau and adaptations of the Darwinian revolution. It was echoed in all
Western nations, culminating finally in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Because
that leading exponent of racism became the enemy of most of Europe and of the
United States during World War II, German-championed ideology seemed to have
lost some of its popularity. The Hamitic myth ceased to be useful with African
nations which have been gaining their independence one by one, and the growing
African nationalism drew scholarly attention to Africa's past. Many of the
scholars were unencumbered by colonial ties; some of them were themselves
African. They began to discover that Africa was not a tabula rasa, but that it
had a past, a history which could be reconstructed; that it was a continent
which knew empire builders at a time when large areas of Europe stagnated in
the Dark Ages; that it knew art and commerce.
Some writers started to
throw doubts on the Hamitic hypothesis by discovering indigenous Negro
achievement of the past, while others attempted to explode it. Still the myth
endures, is occasionally subverted by new terminology (such as 'Southern
Cushites',) and stubbornly refuses to give way and allow an unbiased look at
what can be validly ascertained from African culture history. It would be
well-nigh impossible to point to an individual and recognize in him a Hamite
according to racial, linguistic and cultural characteristics to fit the image that
has been presented to us for so long. Such an individual does not exist. The
word still exists, endowed with a mythical meaning; it endures through time and
history, and, like a chameleon, changes its color to reflect the changing
light. As the word became flesh, it engendered many problems of scholarship.
Reference
The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969),
pp. 521-532
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