Draft:Contested African history

Contested history refers to historical events or claims that remain the subject of significant disagreement among historians, archaeologists, or other scholars.

This article documents controversial and contested claims, opinions about historical events in Africa.

The Mfecane

Main article: Mfecane § Controversy

Historian Julian Cobbing, in his 1988 Journal of African History article "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo," argued that white slave raiders operating in the 1810s and 1820s invented the idea of the mfecane as an alibi to cover up their own attacks on Africans. Cobbing argued that the mfecane framework has no root in any African language and instead conveyed a myth of cataclysmic black-on-black destruction during the era of Shaka. He described the construction of this narrative as combining "partly contextualised facts, half-truths, and lies, both of commission and omission."

Carolyn Hamilton, in her own paper "The Character and Objects of Chaka: A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as 'Mfecane' Motor," argued directly against Cobbing's alibi thesis, writing that his claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities is based on the misuse of evidence and an inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. In her book Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention, Hamilton argued against postmodernist interpretations holding that Shaka was simply a colonial invention, contending instead that particular historical limits and constraints operated on the activities of invention and imagination by both European observers and later African ideologues, and that these limits and constraints are themselves what give the various images of Shaka their power.

Great Zimbabwe builders

Main article: Great Zimbabwe § History of research and origins of the ruins

German explorer Carl Mauch, who reached Great Zimbabwe in September 1871, believed the ruins were the remnants of the biblical city of Ophir, from which the Queen of Sheba procured gold for the Temple of Solomon, and did not believe the structures could have been built by a local population resembling the one he found inhabiting the area. Before he even reached the site, a German trader had told Mauch of ruins in the region "which could never have been built by blacks." According to the British Academy, Mauch's account set in motion the view that Great Zimbabwe was too advanced to have been built by Africans, and that it must instead have been the work of a vanished people from the Middle East.

British archaeologist James Theodore Bent, sent to the site in 1891 as its first official archaeologist, concluded that Great Zimbabwe had been built by what he called a "local bastard race," reasoning, according to Scientific American, that the builders' fathers must have been white invaders from the north, since, in a view he shared with colonial administrator Cecil Rhodes, native Africans could never have constructed the site themselves. Bent's excavation around the Great Enclosure's conical tower destroyed the site's stratigraphy, and he discarded clay and metal artifacts, including Persian and Arab trade beads, judging them insignificant.

Journalist Richard Hall, appointed curator of the site by Rhodes in 1902, wrote in his book The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia that the site had been built by "more civilized races." Hall then carried out what he called a restoration, removing sediment deposits as deep as twelve feet across the site with the stated aim of freeing it "from the filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation," in the process destroying much of the archaeological record that could have established the site's African origins. A visiting archaeologist described Hall's excavation method as "reckless blundering... worse than anything I have ever seen," and Hall was subsequently dismissed from his post.

The race of the ancient Egyptians

Main article: Ancient Egyptian race controversy

Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop argued, across his body of work beginning with his 1954 book Nations nègres et culture, that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization rooted in a culture still present today in sub-Saharan Africa, challenging what he described as the Eurocentric position that ancient Egyptians were a non-African, white or Mediterranean people. Diop argued that the Egyptian term for their own land, Kemet, referred to the Egyptians' own black skin, and he called for melanin testing of pharaonic mummies, arguing that microscopic laboratory analysis could directly determine the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians. At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script," held in Cairo in 1974, Diop was one of only two participants, alongside fellow scholar Théophile Obenga, who argued the ancient Egyptians were black Africans, with other participants taking opposing positions. The conference's official proceedings record profound disagreement among scholars over Diop's position, referred to in the proceedings as the "Black Hypothesis."

Mary Lefkowitz in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, argued against Diop , writing that claims that Egypt invaded and founded Greek civilization, and that Greek philosophy was stolen from Egypt, are not supported by the historical record. Lefkowitz wrote that Diop's argument for a Greek African heritage relied on a single, highly dubious ancient source, the writer Diodorus, whom she said did not appear to have believed the claims made to him by Egyptian priests that Lefkowitz said Diop uncritically repeated. Lefkowitz also wrote that the ancient Egyptian empire was the world's first multiracial society, and that the people the Romans called "Africans" were ancestors of modern Berbers. Bernal, responding directly to Lefkowitz's criticism, wrote that she sometimes attacked claims he did not make rather than ones he did, and argued that in the instances where she did engage his actual claims, she selected evidence while rejecting data that did not support her own arguments.

A team of geneticists led by researchers at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History extracted and sequenced DNA from 151 Egyptian mummies recovered from Abusir el-Meleq in Middle Egypt, spanning roughly 1,300 years from the New Kingdom through the Roman period, and published their findings in Nature Communications in 2017. The study concluded that the ancient Egyptian individuals sampled shared more genetic ancestry with populations of the ancient Near East than with sub-Saharan African populations, and that modern Egyptians carry approximately 8% more sub-Saharan African ancestry than the ancient mummies analyzed in the study, a difference the authors attributed to an increase in sub-Saharan gene flow into Egypt occurring within the last 2000 years, in the post-Roman period.

Historian Christopher Ehret, in 2023, argued that the 2017 study's conclusions rested on an insufficiently small sample size and reflected a biased interpretation of the genetic data. Ehret specifically criticized the study for asserting there was no sub-Saharan genetic component in the ancient Egyptian population, citing separate genetic analysis identifying the Horn of Africa as the origin of the E-M35 paternal haplogroup found in some of the mummy samples. A separate assessment by researchers Stiebling and Helft, also in 2023, acknowledged the 2017 study as the largest of its kind performed on ancient Egyptian remains, but noted that its findings were derived from a small sample drawn from a single site in Middle Egypt, limited to the New Kingdom period and later, and stated the sample could not be taken as representative of earlier Egyptian populations or of Upper Egyptian populations, which were geographically closer to sub-Saharan Africa.

The Bantu expansion

Main article: Bantu expansion § Criticism

Bantu-speaking people spread across most of sub-Equatorial Africa over a period of thousands of years. How, when, and by what routes this spread happened remains debated among linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists.

Historian Jan Vansina, in a 1995 paper in the Journal of African History, wrote that new linguistic evidence about the classification of Bantu languages did not support the view that these languages spread through a massive migration or "expansion" by their speakers. Vansina wrote that the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is instead the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a span of millennia, involving reversals as well as successes.

Rebecca Grollemund, Simon Branford, Koen Bostoen, Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti, and Mark Pagel, in a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that Bantu-speaking populations did not expand from their ancestral homeland in a random walk. They wrote that the expansion instead followed savannah corridors that emerged from the Congo rainforest, and that Bantu speakers avoided unfamiliar rainforest habitats. They wrote that when Bantu speakers did move into the rainforest, migration rates were delayed by an average of 300 years compared with similar movements across savannah.

Cesare de Filippo and coauthors Koen Bostoen, Mark Stoneking, and Brigitte Pakendorf, in a paper on linguistic and genetic evidence for the Bantu expansion, wrote that two main models of the expansion have been proposed. They wrote that the "early-split" model holds that the most recent common ancestor of Eastern Bantu languages expanded north of the rainforest toward the Great Lakes region approximately 4,000 years ago, while the "late-split" model proposes that Eastern languages diversified from Western languages south of the rainforest approximately 2,000 years ago. They wrote that there is no consensus on which model is correct, and that it remains unclear whether the spread of Bantu languages was accompanied by a movement of people, or by language shift without significant population movement.

Who built the pyramids

Main article: Construction of the Egyptian pyramids

The idea that the Egyptian pyramids were built by enslaved people has been widely debated for centuries. This view has been challenged by archaeological findings over the past decades.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the builders of the pyramids were slaves. Harvard Magazine, describing the origin of this belief, stated that this notion of a vast slave class building the pyramids also has roots in Judeo-Christian tradition and was later popularized by Hollywood productions such as Cecil B. DeMille's films.

Archaeologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, identified a city near the pyramids that he concluded had housed the pyramid builders. Lehner found that the site contained evidence of bread-making technology, living arrangements, and animal remains, including cattle bone identified as coming from young, male animals under two years old, indicating a diet of prime beef. Lehner concluded, based on this evidence, that the workers were not slaves.

Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that graves discovered south of the Great Pyramid in 1990 belonged to the workers who built the monument, and that the manner and location of their burial indicated they were paid laborers rather than slaves. Hawass said the builders came from poor Egyptian families from the north and south of the country, and that those who died during construction were honored with burial in tombs near the pyramids of the pharaohs they served. Hawass said slaves would not have been given the honor of preparing their own tombs for eternity, as kings and queens did.

In 2025, Hawass released details of inscriptions found above the King's Chamber inside Khufu's pyramid, consisting of red-ochre marks recording the names of rotating work gangs and tallying days worked. Hawass said these inscriptions echoed findings from the Wadi el-Jarf papyri, which detail stone deliveries to Giza. Hawass said the site contained thousands of animal bones, including those of 11 cows and 33 goats, which he said was enough to feed approximately 10,000 workers a day, and said this level of provisioning would not have been given to slaves.