Their ostensible grounds for this reluctance was the relativist position that as all history is fiction, there was room for many different stories. Even worse, when she appealed to colleagues for help they often failed to support her. Furthermore, when she had attempted to question Afrocentric speakers on her own campus (Wellesley) she had been rudely rebuffed. If Mary Lefkowitz knew that this was all fantasy and did not conform to the facts as painstakingly assembled by modern classicists and ancient historians, why did she bother to confront it at all? She explains that it was because Afrocentric literature was widely read and that it was being taught, not merely in a number of school districts but also in some universities. In fact, of course, the library at Alexandria was founded by Macedonian Greeks at least 30 years after Aristotle’s death. She also discovered that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own massive philosophical and scientific writings. They maintained that Greece had been invaded from Africa in the Middle of the 2nd millennium, that Greek religion and mystery systems were based on Egyptian prototypes and that what was called “Greek” philosophy was in fact the secret wisdom of Egyptian lodges of a Masonic type. They were making claims that the Ancient Egyptians were black, as were Socrates, Cleopatra, and other important cultural figures in the Ancient World.

She discovered that there were people writing books and teaching that Greek civilization had derived from, or had even been “stolen” from Egypt. When Mary Lefkowitz first encountered Afrocentrism in 1991, she was appalled. Response to this review by Mary Lefkowitz

Black athena by martin bernal