(Black Lovers' Quiz by Essence Corporation (http: / / www.essencc.com.lover-quiz.htm))
Overlooking a busy main road on the way to the university quarter of Reading, there is an impressive mural which stands out vividly from the nineteenth- century red-brick buildings surrounding it (see Plate 5.1). It is divided into five scenes, each with a montage of iconic figures from black history, who do not form a coherent political tradition but are of meaning to the mural's black British creators. This lineage of heroes begins in Egypt. A huge head of Akhenaten is placed against a backdrop of the desert and Pyramids at Giza, and identified by a cartouche with his name in hieroglyphs.5 Underneath the hieroglyphs of Akhenaten's name, the linear bands used by ancient Egyptian artists to divide up scenes in wall-paintings are given an extra African connection by being painted black, red, green and gold - the colours Marcus Garvey proposed to symbolise an independent Africa under black government, with the gold of the Jamaican flag added. To the left of Akhenaten's head there is a rendering of the Berlin painted bust of Nefertiti, whose face, like Akhenaten's, is shown here as blaek-skinned. The hieroglyphs above and below Nefertiti translate as something like: 'Rage is what God loves to hearken to: and you should live up to yourself in his name.'
On Akhenaten's other side, there is a figure in white Arab dress who I assume must be the prophet Mohammed. Behind him is a rising sun with an Amarna- style ray terminating in a hand, reaching out towards Akhenaten. Superimposed over this rising sun is a red crescent, symbol of Islam. The juxtaposition of Akhenaten and Mohammed, linked compositionally by the Pyramids and doc- trinally by the Aten-disc and red crescent, implies that Akhenaten is the religious precursor of Mohammed. Here in the mural they are the first representatives of a glorious line of black religious and political leaders, starting with Akhenaten, then Toussaint l'Ouverture, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Emperor Hailc Selassie, and ending with Bob Marley. To make the mural's message of pan- African cultural continuity even stronger, the artist has certainly researched Amarna art and cleverly resignified the ancient Egyptian elements. Following the Akhenaten-Mohammed scene, Nigerian Yoruba motifs frame the centre of the whole composition (a large window), and underneath this section there is a plaque inscribed:
Central Reading Youth Provision Black History Mural
Livicated on 16June 1990 to the memory of C. L. R.James (1901-1989) and
the peaceful anti-apartheid demonstrators who were massacred in Soweto.
Plate 5.1 Black Akhenaten and Mohammed. Detail from Central Reading Youth Provision Black History Mural, Reading, UK.
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Instead of being 'de(a)dicated', the mural is 'livicated'. The neologism shows how the past is still deeply relevant to contemporary black struggles like anti- apartheid, and to modern black heroes like C. L. R. James (the Marxist intellectual, historian of slavery and Third World nationalist, who had died a year before the 'livication'). The plaque goes on to list private benefactors who madecontributions, and adds that the mural was originally commissioned by Reading Borough Council. As an officially sponsored project, it reflects an official version of history in the same way as a war memorial does, through an emotive but not necessarily historically coherent collocation of symbols, images and texts. In one sense, the mural functions like an ancicnt Egyptian king list, invoking the great figures of the past and validating the present through association with that lineage. After being omitted from the official histories of his successors, who did not include him in their king lists, Akhenaten's reputation has been reclaimed as a link in the chain from the black past to the black future.
The Reading mural makes some significant statements about the importance of Akhenaten as a crucial figure in a particular version of black history. The portraits of Marley and Haile Selassie and the vocabulary of the plaque suggest that it is much influenced by Rastafarianism - Rastas like to rejig language (I was told in Reading that the pharaoh of the mural was called 'Blackhnatcn'). Significantly, the mural links Akhenaten with the prophet Mohammed as founder of Islam. New forms of Islam have had a central place in forming some modern black identities, especially in America, where the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) and now Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933) has thousands of followers. These forms of Islam gain an added clout by being given an implied ancestry in Egypt. The mural also illustrates the potent capacity of certain ancestors to function as cultural capital in a contemporary struggle, and how claiming back these ancestors can be an empowering act for those who feel that their history has been misrepresented or denied.5 Akhenaten is definitely one of those ancestors, and my intention is to look at how and why he has achieved this favoured status, rather than to comment on the historiographical questions raised by the relationship of ancient Egypt with modern Afrocentrism.7 Akhenaten's lack of any significant cultural presence in the west before the late nineteenth century makes him an interesting case here. Unlike Cleopatra, the other Egyptian ruler most frequently (rc)presented as black, images of Akhenaten have not previously been filtered through Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
Putting the pharaohs of Egypt back in their African context has been an issue sincc the beginnings, in the mid-nineteenth century, of political pan-Africanism, one of whose aims was to enable oppressed black people to regain their lost heritage and achieve greatness oncc again. As early as the 1840s, Egypt was being claimcd by black scholars and educators as an African civilisation already well advanced when the west was still in a state of barbarism, and whose monuments were symbols of great future possibilitcs rather than past glorious achievements. This idea became crystallised in the writings of the pan-African pioneer Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), who has provided Afrocentrism with its intellectual foundations. Advocating Liberia as an African homeland for freed slaves, in 1866 he went to Egypt and carved the word 'Liberia' on one of the Pyramids, establishing a link between the ancient Egyptians and contemporary black people. Black history being written on the Pyramids is still a common image of
Afroc.entrist discourse, as in my epigraph to this section. After visiting Egypt, Blydcn wrote an influential essay, 'The Negro in Ancient History', 'the first article in any Quarterly written by a hand claiming a pure Ethiopian lineage'. Here he argued fiercely against what would now be called Eurocentric views of history and for the blackness of the ancient Egyptians. 'But it may be said, The enterprising people who founded Babylon and Nineveh, settled in Egypt and built the Pyramids, though descendants of Ham, were not black — were not negroes; . . . well, let us see.'8
By the end of the nineteenth century, Blyden's arguments about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians had filtered down and become well established for some African Americans, including the novelist and journalist Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930). She developed Blyden's pan-African ideals in her novel Of One Blood. Or, the Hidden Face, published serially in the Colored American Magazine (of which she was editor) in 1902-3. Hopkins' reading of Blyden is evident, because in Of One Blood she quotes directly from his 'The Negro in Ancicnt History'.9 She also develops an anecdote Blyden mentions, from the first-century bce historian Diodorus Siculus, recounting how Ergamenes, a black man who had received a Greek education and studied philosophy, successfully siezed the throne of Meroe and maintained its independence from Egypt (Diodorus Siculus, Histories III 6). Meroe was a city which controlled Lower Nubia, the area corresponding to southern Egypt-northern Sudan; it had a long tradition of rebellion against Egypt, which constantly sought to annex it.