Martin Gardiner Bernal around 2000
Martin Gardiner Bernal around 2000
In memoriam Martin Gardiner Bernal (1937-2013), by Wim van Binsbergen
Over the years, extensive attention has been paid in this website, and in Wim van Binsbergen's academic work in general, to Martin Gardiner Bernal, one of the most remarkable intellectuals of our time. He died on 9 June 2013. After a long period of estrangement due to a combination of personal and academic issues, he had been in contact again with Wim van Binsbergen since the re-publication in book form of the latter's edited collection Black Athena Comes of Age (2011, see Topicalities under April 2011), and a new and fruitful exchange promised to develop when this process was interrupted by his untimely death.
Like Wim van Binsbergen himself, Martin was born as an illegitimate child: the son of the British writer Margareth Gardiner and the Irish-born, Communist cristallographer and historian of science John Bernal. Martin's maternal grandfather, millionnaire owner of a tea estate in Malawi, was the leading British Egyptologist of his time, knighted for his archievements, who published a long and many-sided series of authoritative studies including a major Egyptian Grammar, and who discovered, in the Sinai, the first alphabetic writing, based on acrophonic use of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Martin's mother took an active part in the literary and artistic circles of her time. Thus Martin grew up in what he himself called, in our extensive conversations in 1996-97, 'the Bohemian fringe of the British upper class' (unlike the urban slum where Wim van Binsbergen's make-shift cradle stood). Young Martin was surrounded and inspired (as well as he was intimidated for life, and -- against the background of his peripheral social position -- determined to surpass their achievements and fame) by some of the intellectual giants of his time, including the embryologist and subsequently Sinologist / historian of science Joseph Needham. As a student, Martin lived in the house of the leading British Africanist anthropologist Meyer Fortes, and he spent some time in Malawi where he learned to speak rudimentary Chewa. (However, one of the weaknesses of his work has remained that he never internalised the perspectives and achievements of modern social science, so that both his personally-invented 'sociology of knowledge', and his approach to historic societies of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Africa, remained unconvincing, socially lifeless, theoretically barren, and totally dependent on -- equally largely home-spun -- linguistic analysis). After his Sinological studies at Cambridge (UK) and Beijing he took a PhD in intellectual history on a brilliant study of early Chinese Socialism c. 1900 CE. This gained him a professorship in Government studies at the famous Cornell University, upstate New York, USA.
Soon however he began to engage in ambitious, long-range comparative linguistic studies (cf. Bernal, M., 1980, ‘Speculations on the disintegration of Afroasiatic’, paper presented at the 8th conference of the North American Conference of Afroasiatic Linguistics, San Francisco, April and to the 1st international Conference of Somali Studies, Mogadishu, July 1980). The desire to rediscover what he saw as the disconnected strands of his Jewish ancestry (his maternal grandmother had been a German Jewess, and his father's name Bernal [ 'of the Spring' ] goes back to Iberian Jews fleeing to Ireland and becoming Christianised after the fall of Granada, 1492), in combination with the virtually insurpassable examples set by his seniors, made him engage in a protracted personal research project, conceived as an attempt to retrieve 'the Afro-Asiatic roots of modern civilisation'. Here, Afro-Asiatic should be read as referring, not (as in his 1980 conference paper, and in current linguistic discourse) to the major linguistic macrophylum of that name which encompasses Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Omotic, Chadic etc., but simply as 'African and Asian'.) In other words, when approaching his 40th year of age Martin set out to explode the hegemonic myth (largely stemming from the period of European expansion and the foundation of German Alterthumswissenschaft / 'Science of Antiquity' in the early 19th c. CE) that Greek (subsequently European, subsequently North Atlantic, ultimately global) civilisation had simply emerged out of the blue without major indebtedness to the civilisations of the Ancient Near East and Egypt. The term Black Athena aptly summarises this challenging position: the iconic, virgin, motherless and formidable Greek goddess of science, weaponry, and artistic handicrafts being reinterpreted from the modern, USA (rather than British, let alone continental European) perspective where Blackness in the first place means, not (as modern genetics has it) a biologically rather insignificant somatic trait that is scarcely skin-deep, but a specific, entrenched political and social position based on historic deprivation, exclusion, exploitation, and finally conscientisation and revolt. Not for the first time would a scholar from the privileged classes vicariously adopt the sake of the underprivileged -- ready examples that come to mind include Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx and especially Friedrich Engels, the Manchester industrialist Lord Simon, Wim Wertheim, even Siddharta who became the Buddha.
In Martin's quest for recognition and truth, one occasionally stumbles over signs of an unscholarly eclectic approach to the facts -- an element much held against him by his critics, apparent both in his rendering of Ancient Egyptian history, his linguistic claims, and his analysis of European Enlightenment thought; in fact in a serious scholar this is a more serious shortcoming than the positive errors he also made and that were inevitable considering his original field and the enormous ground he covered in his research. The scholarly denunciations of the Black Athena project fill a book case, crowned by the 1996 book Black Athena Revisited, edited by the feminist classicist Mary Lefkowitz together with G. MacLean Rogers, and not exactly the exercise in scholarly objectivity it proclaimed to be. But for instance, Martin would often maintain that he had only reluctantly yielded to his publisher's suggestion to rename by the militant term of Black Athena, his multi-volume projected study, allegedly originally conceived under the more neutral and less programmatic name of 'African Athena'; however, this scarcely explains why the expression 'Black Athena' already occurs as the title of Martin's first published statement on his project, published two years before the first Black Athena volume appeared and in a context over which his publisher Rutgers University Press had no power (Bernal, M., 1985, ‘Black Athena: The African and Levantine Roots of Greece,’ in: African Presence in Early Europe, ed. Ivan Van Sertima, special issue of the Journal of African Civilizations, November 1985, vol. 7, no. 2: 66-82; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books). Also, among specialist scholars the idea of Greece's essential indebtedness to the much older, and economically and politically much more powerful, Bronze-Age civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia was already widely accepted by the mid-20th century (e.g. in the context of the Ex Oriente Lux / 'The Light comes from the East' movement), so Martin's overall message was nothing new. But new were the zeal and pathos with which he broadcast his message, the wide academic and non-academic audiences he addressed, the way he applied his knowledge-political analyses to both a rewriting of European intellectual history since Antiquity, and to the exposure of whosoever found fault with the details of his writings (which faults, I repeat, were often only too conspicuous but seldom or never so decisive and unforgiveable as his enemies pretended them to be). Soon Martin was also to discover that many of his findings had already been anticipated by African American and African, Afrocentrist writers such as Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop. This brought him to widen his scope, from the Bronze Age Mediterranean (where admittedly he became expert on the details of Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek protohistory, officially recognised by his appointment to an additional Associate Professorship in Ancient History at Cornell), to sub-Saharan Africa. In his hands, Greece may have been declared the child of Egypt (at the expense of the Mesopotamian, the otherwise West and Central Asian, and the European Neolithic strands in Greek history), but then again -- by a similar, eclectic myopia -- Egypt was in turn to be declared the exclusive child of sub-Saharan Africa. This position completely ignores the massive effect that Egypt's three millennia of being one of the most powerful and stable, literate, artistic and pious states in the world, with very extensive mercantile and military intrusions right into tropical Africa, must have left on the African continent as a whole, even to the extent that an Egyptian statuette could be excavated in Congo (Breuil, H., 1951, ‘Further details of rock-paintings and other discoveries. 1. The painted rock ‘Chez Tae’, Leribe, Basutoland, 2. A new type of rock-painting from the region of Aroab, South-West Africa, 3. Egyptian bronze found in Central Congo’, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 4: 46-50; Leclant, J., 1956, ‘Fouilles et travaux en Égypte, 1954-1955’, Orientalia, 25: 251-252; Shinnie however thinks the artefact is a chance intrusion: Shinnie, P.L., 1971, "The Legacy to Africa" In The Legacy of Egypt, 2d ed., edited by J. R. Harris, 434-55. Oxford: Clarendon Press), or that a Zambian myth reiterates the Ancient Egyptian royal title 'She of the Reed and the Bee' -- follow this hyperlink, and also see: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: General theoretical models, and detailed comparative discussion of the case of Nkoya mythology from Zambia, South Central Africa', in: Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux, eds., New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, pp. 143-225, also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/PIP/New_Perspectives_On_Myth_2010/New_Perspectives_on_Myth_Chapter9.pdf). Already in 1965 the Egyptologist Fairman formulated his dilemma: it is almost impossible to separate Egypt's influence upon Africa from Africa's influence upon Egypt (Fairman, H. W. , 1965, ‘ Ancient Egypt and Africa‘, African Affairs, Vol. 64, Special Issue: African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, Proceedings of the 1964 Conference. (1965), pp. 69-75). Martin's postion in regard of the relation between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa is based on modern-ideological considerations far more than on a profound, state-of-the-art and specialist knowledge of African ancient history, archaeology, linguistics, comparative ethnography, and comparative mythology; cf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, ‘Is there a future for Afrocentrism despite Stephen Howe’s dismissive 1998 study?’ in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ed., Black Athena comes of age: Towards a constructive reassessment, Berlin - Münster - Wien - Zürich-London, pp. 253-282.) At any rate, this position brought Martin to identify more and more closely with the Afrocentrist movement. However, this rapprochement was not always reciprocal; e.g. the leading Afrocentrist Clyde Winters was not impressed, and Martin came to be designated (Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena controvery and the responsibilities of American intellectuals, New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University Press) 'the academic Elvis' -- allegedly broadcasting, and cashing in, on Black ideas from his privileged position as an affluent White senior intellectual, somewhat like what Elvis Presley was reproached for having done with Black pop music. An expert at making enemies, and at 'going it alone' (Muhly, J.D., 1990, "Black Athena versus Traditional Scholarship", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3, 1: 83-110), hardly ever taking seriously, let alone yielding to, the massive criticism made of his writings by topical and regional specialists, Martin Bernal turned the quarter century after the publication of Black Athena I into one uninterrupted and global polemical campaign, in which the new installments (volumes II, 1991, and III, 2006) of the Black Athena series were being swamped amidst his own critical responses and conferences, and never were to reach the admittedly high and innovative level of vol. I, -- these later volumes mainly brought self-vindicating repetition (including repetition of the same old errors) instead of empirical, methodological and theoretical, self-critical deepening and innovation.
So much for the shortcomings of Martin Bernal's work. I can afford to point them out even in an obituary, for repeatedly, and for the last time as recently as 2011 (see below, and this website, Topicalities under April 2011) and 2012 (where I also benefited from Martin's specific Sinological knowledge), I have extensively and loyally set out the immense importance, despite all of the above, of Martin's work and defended him against the spate of unjustified criticism, often from the side of the political, social and academic establishment in the North Atlantic region. In a world involved in advanced globalisation, and locked in bitter and fatally destructive battles over identities and global birth rights, it is not enough if specialist scholars know at heart that the hegemonic superiority claims ingrained in common North Atlantic perceptions of the world, lack all historical foundation. This home truth needed to be articulated, argued, passionately defended, introduced to new, untutored and largely underprivileged audiences, even if this had to be done by someone with Martin's scholarly and personality handicaps -- someone who scarcely seemed to understand that a scholar's truth claims are supposed to be ephemeral, intersubjective, and self-defeating, and who prided himself on being habitually 'right for the wrong reasons'. Today, the debate on transcontinental continuities in the last handful of millennia of our cultural history as Anatomically Modern Humans, is conducted with better data, better and more self-critical theory, and better methods, and a greater awareness of the global politics of knowledge, than a quarter of a century ago. We no longer believe in uni-directional lines of transmission, ultimate origins, the saving grace of somatic arguments based on the alleged Blackness or Whiteness of, for instance, the Ancient Egyptians, nor in an historic truth that is automatically self-redeeming at the expense of all other possible readings of the evidence, or in arguments that must be right simply because they happen to be politically correct in this place and time, nor in arguments that must be wrong simply because the person propounding them wears a tie, drives a fine car, and has White ancestors. Population genetics, comparative linguistics, and comparative mythology have made progress beyond anything imaginable when Martin started out on his quest three decades ago. Among the many factors in this splendid global process, and despite Martin's own undeniable peccadilloes, his work has made an enormous difference, -- being original, imaginative, rich, indispensible, decisive, and bent on vindicating the intuitions of older writers (such as Eduard Meyer and Gordon Childe, or the ancient writers stressing Greece's indebtedness to Egypt) that happened to become counter-paradigmatic in the mid-20th century. The lasting value of Martin Bernal's work may still not equal that of the work of Joseph Needham or Meyer Fortes, yet its societal and political impact has been much greater, and is contributing to a better world with room, birthright even, for any identity and any cultural tradition from all continents. It has greatly inspired me. So even if ultimately I now reject his Black Athena thesis in favour of a West Asian / Pelasgian model, I could never have reached that point without intensive association and critical debate with Martin and his work. When at the 2008 Warwick conference on Bernal's work his Black Athena thesis was more or less canonised as a feasible paradigm for Ancient history (Orrells, Daniel, Bhambra, Guminder, & Roynon, Tessa, 2011, African Athena: New agendas, New York etc.: Oxford University Press), I regretted the fact that thus an erroneous theory was being positively sanctioned, but I wholly agreed with this gesture of respect and recognition vis-à-vis one of the most courageous and inspiring, if also controversial, intellectuals of our time.
papers by Wim van Binsbergen on Martin Bernal and the latter's Black Athena project: