Racism And Slavery: How The Hamitic Theory Began To Crumble
Obehi Ewanfoh
Helping Entrepreneurs to Own Their Stories and Transform them into Marketing Assets for Business Success. | Founder of AClasses Media | Host of The Obehi Podcast | Author of The Storytelling Mastery
This is part three in the series “Racism And Slavery: Reflection On Human Madness by Stefano Anselmo”. See part one to learn more.
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Here is a list of all the articles in the series – Racism And Slavery: Reflection On Human Madness by Stefano Anselmo:
What is The Hamitic Theory?
The Hamitic Theory was a now-discredited historical and anthropological theory that gained prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It proposed a racial hierarchy within the African continent, placing the Hamitic people at the top. According to this theory, the Hamites were believed to be a superior race, both culturally and intellectually, compared to other African groups.
The term “Hamitic” is derived from Ham, one of the sons of Noah in the biblical narrative. In the Old Testament, Ham is often associated with the biblical figure cursed by his father Noah, leading to interpretations that linked the descendants of Ham with servitude and inferiority.
Proponents of the Hamitic Theory believed that the Hamites were responsible for many of the advanced civilizations in Africa, including Ancient Egypt, Ethiopia, and other civilizations around the Nile River. They argued that these civilizations were too sophisticated to have been created by indigenous African peoples, and thus must have been the result of migration or influence from outside the continent.
This theory served to justify European colonialism and imperialism in Africa by portraying Africans as backward and in need of European “civilizing” influence. It was used to rationalize the exploitation and subjugation of African peoples, as well as to support policies of segregation and discrimination.
However, the Hamitic Theory has been widely discredited by modern scholarship. There is no evidence to support the notion of a distinct “Hamitic” race, and archaeological and genetic research has shown that many of Africa’s ancient civilizations were indeed indigenous developments.
The theory is now recognized as a product of racist ideologies and colonialist agendas, and its influence has largely faded in academic circles. With that clarified, let’s now continue with the series:
Continuation Of The Series
The invention of the Hamitic race For a long time, black people were discriminated against and considered incapable and inferior until, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt (1798), it was discovered that Africans had produced a great civilization, a stark contrast to previous claims.
The impressive findings sparked a lively scientific debate on the origin, the level of civilization reached by the Egyptians, and their potential contacts with other populations of the continent. Napoleon’s scientists agreed that the beginning of civilization could be traced to Egypt, before the Greek and Roman eras.
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The Hamitic theory began to crumble: how could black people have created such a high-level civilization? Exegetes got to work and, re-examining the Bible found the answer that reconciled science and religion.
In Genesis, it’s Canaan’s lineage, Cam’s youngest son, that is cursed, not Cush, Mizraym, and Put, who, not being cursed, could have produced civilizations. Thus, a new conception of the human category emerged: the Hamites, also called negroids or fake blacks; people who, in appearance and color, resembled black Africans but were “white” on the inside.
Therefore, the Egyptians, defined as “non-black,” were seen as relatives of white Europeans, and with the term Hamite, all scholars sought to create a demarcation line between Africans close to the European stock and the “true blacks.”
In other words, those black peoples who produced civilizations did so because they came into contact with foreign non-African cultures. Later, even the news of visitors venturing towards the Niger and the Upper Nile and reporting on peoples who had nothing to do with the image of the inept and limited African complicated matters even more.
It was also the undeniable ability of some people and, not least, their elegant appearance, different from other blacks, a fact to which Westerners could not provide a “scientific” answer that was not in conflict with biblical texts.
Without forgetting that by the mid-19th century, racial classification had already shown all its weaknesses: the number of races had increased exponentially, and no one could affirm with certainty how many or which ones there were because their boundaries were increasingly tangled.
The solution to the conflict between facts and imagination was easily found by sacrificing the former. In other words, if the congenitally inept “Blacks” at creating civilizations had devised such societies, it meant that, contrary to appearances, they were not “Blacks” in every respect.
Thus, the Hamitic myth was resumed, which effectively fulfilled the effort to persuade European intellectuals and African elites about the division into two categories of the inhabitants of the Great Lakes region: the first, that of “authentic Blacks,” indigenous, repositories of the most classic and widespread European prejudices among which were the Hutu and Twa, and the other, that of “fake Blacks,” foreign-origin civilizers, also known as “originally white Blacks” of Asian origin, those who dominated and civilized the Great Lakes region.
In this way, the legacy of 18th-century Natural Sciences, which imposed classification and labeling, was satisfied.
In his famous travel diary, John Hanning Speke tries to explain the level of civilization reached by the peoples of the Great Lakes by contributing to the spread of the Hamitic hypothesis in these areas: the societies of present-day Uganda, the western shore of Lake Victoria, Rwanda, and Burundi were more advanced thanks to foreign infiltrations of Asian origin.
Thus the Tutsis were recognized as people of Hamitic origin while the Hutu and Twa were considered Bantu, true Africans less human, and true Rwandans. The Tutsi aristocracy led a state so sophisticated that it could only be native to a geographically and culturally, and above all, racially, “close” region to Europe, such as Ethiopia, a country that had been “Christianized” for many centuries.
The French exegete August Knobel, for example, speaking of the Tutsis, explains that although they are dark-skinned, they belong, like the Japhetites and Semites, to the great Caucasian class: blacks are a completely different human race.
Particularly illustrative is the text by Charles Seligman reprinted several times from the ’30s to the ’60s: “The civilizations of Africa are Hamitic civilizations (…) The Hamitic invaders were Caucasian shepherds, arrived in waves, armed with better weapons and greater intelligence than the black farmers with dark skin (…)”. Read more at https://aclasses.org/hamitic-theory/