Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly, to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire not even mentioned by Herskovits in The Myth of the Negro Past and barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more mystified than informed.)
In terms of enduring values—the kind of values respected wherever scholars gather, in the East no less than in the West—in terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind.
One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object, ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted tests of scholarship.
Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law, jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics, philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits, and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper. The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude, after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is the only one of the primary races “which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted, who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development of early civilization.”
Franz Boas, the father of “modern” social anthropology, posed the South’s question in this fashion in The Mind of Primitive Man: “Have not most races had the same chances for development? Why, then, did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to higher levels?”
Boas’ answer to his own rhetorical question, needless to say, is that most races have not had the same chances for development, that “the claim that achievement and aptitude go hand in hand is not convincing,” and that “the earlier rise of civilization in the old world ... is satisfactorily explained as due to chance.” He finds nothing to persuade him that “one race is more highly gifted than another,” and besides, he insists, Western critics ought not to judge other races by their own standards. For example, an “impression” exists that primitive men, and the less educated of our own race, have in common a lack of control of emotions; it is thought that they give way more readily to an impulse than civilized man and the highly educated. This impression, says Boas, is entirely unjustified. Too often the traveler or student measures fickleness by the importance he himself attributes to the actions or purposes in which primitive men do not persevere, and he weighs the impulse for outbursts of passion by his own standard. The white traveler, to whom time is valuable, is impatient and irritated at Negro porters, to whom time means nothing. The proper way to appraise the Negro, Boas tells us, is to consider his behavior in undertakings which he considers important from his own standpoint. So considered, the differences in attitude of civilized man and of primitive man tend to disappear.
This line of defense has a certain plausibility and merit; divorced from reality, it provides a fine topic for a sophomore’s term paper. But the American South is an inheritor of Western civilization; the South’s values are the values of the West, and it understandably must be concerned with the capacity of the Negro people for contributing to these values. The Ubangi’s mud huts may be the most artistic mud huts ever set out in the sun to bake; by tribal esthetics of the African bush, the Ashanti may be vastly more cultured than the Yorubas, and the Balubi superior to the Mogwandi. Or vice versa. These critical judgments are interesting. They are irrelevant, too.
The question that never seems to be convincingly answered is why the Negro race, in Toynbee’s phrase, is the only race that has failed to make a creative contribution to civilization. What can account for the singular failure of the Negro people, alone among the major divisions of man, to enter the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic history?
The first rationalization that is given is that the physical conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible. The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,” but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.
And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of Yucatán—out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place one would choose for developing a culture”—a civilization that can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment, a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare the crude phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon critical judgment.