From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3378
Date: 2000-08-23
----- Original Message -----From: Håkan LindgrenTo: CybalistSent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 11:49 PMSubject: [tied] Re: BernalA very good point, though I don't think Bernal wanted to boost anyone's pride. Perhaps he simply wanted to disencumber himself of the White Man's Burden (his family used to have a tea plantation in Malawi).If anyone wants to take a quick look at the excesses of Afrocentric and Africalogical (sic!) linguistics, here are a couple of web addresses. But watch out! these pages prove, among other things, that Egyptian was a Bantu language and that Sumerian and the Dravidian languages are rather closely related to KiSwahili.Disclaimer: The links below lead to pages that contain really preposterous stuff. Its being preposterous has nothing to do with the colour of their authors' skin, their religion or nationality, but everything to do with their ignorance and chauvinism. Examples of ethnocentric megalomania can be found in any country, though extreme Afrocentrism is perhaps more influential than most such movements.PiotrIf Bernal wanted to boost black pride, he chose to do so in a strange way: by linking Africa to the Greek civilisation, as if the only cultural heritage worth having is the Greek and Western European one. One conclusion from Bernal's book is that Africa south of the pyramids must have been a dull void where nothing worth mentioning ever happened. What Bernal actually says is - you're either part of the Western history of civilisation, or you're nothing.