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ISBN-10: 0199978484
ISBN-13: 9780199978489
Edition: 2016
List price: $31.99
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Description:
While exploring East Africa in 1876, five years after his famous encounter with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley encountered four Africans with light complexions and European features. They came from the slopes of Gambaragara, a snow-capped mountain west of Lake Victoria. That such a towering range existed in the heart of equatorial Africa was astonishing enough. "But what gives it peculiar interest," Stanley wrote, "is that on its cold and lonely top dwell a people of an entirely distinct race, being white, like Europeans." Stanley's story had the ring of the fantastic about it, but it was taken seriously by his readers, scientists and explorers, even Africans themselves. Rather… than an eccentric claim, they saw it as an important piece of evidence in a theory which asserted that whites had lived in Africa since antiquity.In The Lost White Tribe of Africa, Michael F. Robinson traces the rise and fall of this theory, known as the Hamitic Hypothesis, and the scientific expeditions that gave it life. The Hamitic Hypothesis was not simply a curiosity of anthropological science; for almost one hundred years, it held sway in Europe and Africa, from the corridors of science to the colonial offices of Nairobi and Kampala. Supporters pointed to a variety of sources: the kingship legends of African tribes, the migration stories of the Hebrew Bible, the discovery of ancient ruins in Egypt and Zimbabwe, and the physical differences observed--by Stanley and many others--among African peoples. European colonists relied upon the hypothesis to justify their presence in Africa; scientists used it to explain away the accomplishments of African civilizations; and Africans themselves linked it the idea to legends of the Bacwezi, a light-skinned people who were thought to have reigned over a vast kingdom in East Africa.Yet The Lost White Tribe of Africa is not only a story about Africa; it is also about the West. Americans and Europeans were captivated by these reports of mysterious white tribes. From Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, a novel that drew heavily on the discovery of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels, to Carl Jung's 1925 expedition locate the heart of primitivism itself, theories involving whites in Africa had profound effects upon Western culture and thought. Even after they fell out of favor in the 1960s, these theories remained popular in white-ruled nations such as South Africa and Rhodesia.Robinson carries his story to the present, probing current debates about racial identity and the concept of race as a biological category. Whether or not the Gambaragarans were white in the racial sense believed by Stanley, they touched something deep within the Western imagination. Were these tribes real, a fantasy, or some collective distortion of mind? Who they were and how they changed the world make up the subject of this illuminating work.