Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a Liberating African History

Abstract

In the spring of 1998, I had the privilege of sitting in on William A. Brown’s undergraduate research seminar on the history of Ancient Egypt (Kemet). Although technically a seminar, all fifteen weekly class meetings began with a substantial lecture by Brown. This provided an unusual opportunity to see some of the results of a lesser-known phase of Brown’s career: the decades he spent training himself in Egyptology (including learning the Egyptian language) and staying current with that field. Brown’s lectures that year offered a timely hybrid of the interests and commitments of Afrocentric Egyptologists, the data and reconstructions of more traditional Egyptology, and the general approaches of longue durée Africanist history. The result was an example of how an engaged historicism can produce accounts that respond to a wide range of political projects. While it does not always come through clearly in his published work, those who knew him personally know that Brown was firmly and explicitly committed to what he called a ‘liberated or liberating African history’. In a 1972 talk at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, he told his audience, ‘the thing which concerns me very deeply indeed is what I call the mis-writing and mis-casting of American and generally European scholarship about Africa... and the implications of this kind of work for the Black liberation struggle in Africa and overseas, indeed for the world generally’. An analysis of this misleading scholarship had, he insisted, ‘real relevance to the struggle of Black and white peoples or other peoples of the world for various kinds liberation and self-determination’. The causal connection between scholarship and liberation passed through the representations of Africa produced in Europe and the US and their effect on global consciousness. ‘We’ve been conditioned’, he noted, ‘to expect bizarre or presumably barbaric behavior out of Africa and this is directly attributable to the scholarship on Africa which is available in the western world’. Africanist history was particularly to blame insofar as ‘the image that the world has of Africa is based upon the world’s understanding or misunderstanding of Africa’s past.... [P]olitical science, sociology, economics, all of the other disciplines adopt the assumptions which are provided by African history’. At the core of Brown’s idea of a liberating African history were two deceptively obvious convictions: that the motives and logics animating all historical agents could be approached via their