The Hamitic hypothesis is well-known to students of Africa. It states
that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the
Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race. Seligman formulates it
as follows:
Apart from relatively late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the
civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their
interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman,
whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such
wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali
...The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans'-arriving wave after
wave-better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.2
On closer examination of the history of the idea, there emerges a pre-
vious elaborate Hamitic theory, in which the Hamites are believed to be
Negroes. It becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the
nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomen-
clature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology.
In the beginning there was the Bible. The word 'Ham' appears there
for the first time in Genesis, chapter five. Noah cursed Ham, his youngest
son, and said:
Cursed be Canaan;
A servant of servants shall he be
unto his brethren.
And he said,
Blessed be Jehovah, the God of Shem;
And let Canaan be his servant.
God enlarge Japhet,
And let him dwell in the tent of Shem;
And let Canaan be his servant.
Then follows an enumeration of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, Japhet,
and their sons who were born to them after the flood. The Bible makes
no mention of racial differences among the ancestors of mankind. It is
much later that an idea of race appears with reference to the sons of Noah;
it concerns the descendants of Ham. The Babylonian Talmud, a collection
of oral traditions of the Jews, appeared in the sixth century A.D.; it states
that the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and depicts Ham
as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates. Thus, early tradition
identified the Hamites with Negroes and endowed them with both certain
physiognomical attributes and an undesirable character.
I don't even know how to reply to that one...
