Authors duped by pseudo-history

Busani Ngcaweni and Wonderboy Peters’s article “Naledi is our spirit, not simply old bones” (October 2) may have the right overall message, but the facts given in the article, and the authors they name, are extremely dubious.

Ngcaweni and Peters themselves make some incorrect and inaccurate statements. First, the Piltdown Man was not created to “prove” that whites were in some way superior to other races at all; it was a hoax coming at a time when fossil discoveries were making big news around the world, and massive changes in the way people viewed biology, geology and the natural history of the world in general were occurring. The hoaxers latched on to this.

It was not an attempt to make black people seem inferior or for whites to feel superior; the article puts a spin on it that is absent from the historical record.

Second, the ancient Egyptians were not black. There were black people in the ancient Egyptian empire, but these were mostly Nubian mercenaries or slaves; the ancient Egyptians themselves were mostly of Middle Eastern appearance, with a lightly tanned skin, dark, straight hair, and fairly fine facial features. This has been shown beyond a doubt by examination of Egyptian mummies and Egyptian art.

Cheikh Anta Diop’s work has been shown to be completely wrong. Diop made a whole raft of claims that have been shown to have been fraudulent, such as claiming to have developed a method of measuring melanin levels in burnt and decomposed corpses.

It was this method he claimed to have used when assessing Egyptian mummies. But this is not how postmortem racial identification works. In real life, it is done by comparing bone structures generally associated with different racial groups.

Melanin does not survive burning and does not get deposited in bones. The “billions spent on the Caucasian superiority project” were not needed to disprove Diop’s claims.

As for Martin Bernal, his Black Athena books have been thoroughly discredited.

They have been shown to be nothing more than wishful thinking and shoddy scholarship. Likewise, Molefi Kete Asante’s writings are not accepted by most other scholars because they are really nothing more than pseudo-history.

The alleged Caucasian superiority project the authors invoke is a bygone part of the past. Nothing is going to change the facts.

Unfortunately, Ngcaweni and Peters’s article is not much better than Mathole Motshekga’s paranoid conspiracy theories. —