Hi Everyone,
I recently bought a book on African history 'The History of Africa' by Molefi Ketr Asante with the aim of catching up with what was happening on this continent.
I thought the book should be legitimate, since the author seems to be a university profesor and the book itself comes from the Routledge publishing house which in my field (Physics) is considered a decent publisher.
Now alredy in the intro chapter there are some outlandish claims of man made stone circles in South Africa that are 200k years old (Adams Calendar).
Does anyone know if the remainder of the book is worth reading or is it all just pseudoscience garbage?
The book doesn't seem to be entirely pseudoscience; but there's certainly some of it. The author specializes in "Historical Afrocentrism" and while this isn't always a bad idea, he's obviously not a trained historian or archeologist because there are various facts and dates which are quickly mentioned without any skepticism or parsing of the details (which trained historians and archeologists love to do).
Not every fact in the book is distorted, but there are many issues - notably, the book attempts to flip the Euro-American historical narrative by re-writing African history from an Afrocentrist perspective. Yet in doing so, it begins most of the first 50+ pages with only brief mentions of the paleolithic and neolithic periods and quickly moves on to dense chapters on detailed Egyptian and Nubian history. Asante's attempt to invert the popular narrative ironically perpetuates it, beginning African history with Egyptian history has become the tradition of Euro-American antiquarians since the late 19th century.
The most glaring pseudoscience is found in the first 3 pages of the introduction where he talks about the "Mpumalanga megaliths" in southern Africa, which he says are the oldest in the world being at least 75kyo and up to 200kyo. He assumes that all of the "megaliths" in the region are all from the same or a similar ancient culture, when in reality there are many different cultural groups associated with monuments in the area made ca. 500-1800's CE. "Adam's Calendar" is actually called the Blaauboschkraal ruins. This the term for a series of settlements built by the Koni people on the Mpumalanga escarpment from the 1500's or early 1600's til the 1830's. Below the escarpment are early medieval settlements of other farming societies from the 500's CE onward.
M. K. Asante disparagingly cites Michael Tellinger, a pseudoscientific populizer of the site, because Tellinger suggests these were built via aliens. But ironically, he uses Tellinger's fantastical dates while rejecting the rest of his work! Instead, I'd suggest these sources for the area and time period:
The Lost African Metropolis Of Mapungubwe: Secrets Of The Sacred Hill, Timeline Documentaries
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, by Francois-Xavier Fauvelle
An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History 1000 BC to AD 400, Christopher Ehret
Bantu Africa: 3500 BE to Present, Fourshey & Gonzales
The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa, James Denbow
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Michael Gomez
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, Toby Green
Being a historian requires a lot of reading, examining, and thinking about historical sources. This leads to skepticism, particularly about ancient historians and their obsession with citing outrageous troop numbers for famous battles and detailing elaborate histories of wide-ranging migrations for then-present populations. Historians should push back against these presumptions, so it is shocking that M. K. Asante uncritically cites Herodotus (pg. 12) to say that the "...Phoenicians, who were also probably black according to their land of origin...[they] appeared in the 16th century BCE in the land that is today called Somalia." This is absurd, the Phoenicians are the iron age descendants of bronze age Canaanites in the Levant (basically what is now Lebanon), not "appearing" in the 1500's BCE nor coming from Somalia and regardless that wouldn't make them "black" either.
No trained historian would make such a ridiculous assertion, nor should anyone uncritically accept Herodotus' account of migrations (which he says he got from Persian historians, so he's hearing it second-hand). Actually, in the opening of his Histories, he says they migrated from the Erythraean Sea. This was a vague term which referred to anywhere from the southern half of the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, and to the northwestern Indian Ocean - a huge area covering the Horn of Africa, the southern and eastern coasts of Arabia, and even coastal Pakistan and Gujarat. Not simply from Somalia, it is obvious Asante omits these details for the sake of Afrocentrism.