¹ Although my sense at the time was that Brown offered this course somewhat regularly, neither the archives of the UW-Madison History Department nor the memories of my contemporaries substantiate this. My sources for this essay have thus been confined to the syllabus and mountain of handouts that Brown distributed that spring, my moderately-legible notes on his lectures, and my declining memory. My thanks to Scott Burkhardt for digging through the department's files.

² W. A. Brown, ‘Toward a liberated African history’, lecture at the Institute of the Black World, Atlanta, 18 Aug. 1972, streaming audio, Northwestern University, Herskovits Library, audiovisual collection.

³ W. A. Brown, ‘The racist assumptions of European and American scholarship’, lecture at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Atlanta, 11 Aug. 1972, streaming audio, Northwestern University, Herskovits Library, audiovisual collection.

⁴ Brown, ‘Racist assumptions’.

⁵ E.g. a seminar on ‘Africa: Colony to Freedom’ focused on the ‘extraordinary scholarship of researchers who have raised the most interesting questions about the nature of “modern” society, notably Michel Foucault’. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of History. https:/history.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/202/2017/05/history600_fall2006_brown.pdf. Accessed 4 Oct. 2022.

⁶ Molefi Kete Asante's term for an Africa-centered perspective in analysis and assessment, ‘Afrocentrism’ has since come to be applied to a wide variety of academic and popular intellectual positions, including, retroactively, to Africa-minded forebears in the Americas and race-minded African cultural nationalists. I cannot do justice to its range of meanings. Bernal himself pointed to the varieties of Afrocentric positions, only some of which he endorsed: ‘Review: Not Out of Africa by Mary R. Lefkowitz’, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 5 Apr. 1996. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/1996.04.05/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2021. The literature is vast, including critiques and endorsements from all sides. The best overview is Bay's, Mia ‘The historical origins of Afrocentrism’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 45:4 (2000), 501–12Google Scholar. For a sense of how great the gap between the approaches appeared at the time, Roth, A. Macy, ‘Building bridges to Afrocentrism: a letter to my Egyptological colleagues’, Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt, 167–8 (1995)Google Scholar. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/afrocent_roth.html. Accessed 1 Mar 2022. Many Africanists then and now have shared Roth's sense that this ‘gap” is in fact quite generative. E.g.: MacGaffey, W., ‘Who owns Ancient Egypt?’, The Journal of African History, 32:3 (1991), 515–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mbembe, A., Necropolitics (Durham, NC, 2019), ch. 6Google Scholar.

⁷ Terminology doesn't provide easy guideposts here, but I might venture that Brown endorsed what St. Clair Drake called ‘vindicationist’ Afrocentrism but without Diop's or Asante's endorsement of counter-mythmaking. Black Folks Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (Berkeley, 1987), 1–4.

⁸ For a summary of the debates at the time on the ‘new’ (post-1970) Afrocentric Egyptology: Roth, A. Macy, ‘Ancient Egypt in America: claiming the riches’, in Meskell, L. (ed.), Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage (London, 1998), 217–29Google Scholar. For an overview of the earlier Black radical discourse, Trafton, S., Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC, 2004)Google Scholar and Drake, Black Folks, ch. 3.

⁹ Characteristically, however, Brown could not pass up the opportunity to bait both sides of the debate. The opening sentence of the lecture in which he discussed the matter was, ‘There is, my friends, only one human race: the black race’, followed by a half-facetious chuckle as he pretended to be shocked by his own audacity, and then an explanation of what he meant by reference to the geographic origins of homo sapiens and the genetic unity of the species.

¹⁰ Brown's commitment to handwriting was principled: in 1996, he insisted that papers in a graduate seminar be submitted in longhand — an exercise, he explained, in teaching us to think in complete sentences.

¹¹ Celenko, T. (ed.), Egypt in Africa (Indianapolis, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹² Ehret also offered a sketch of his attempt to assign a distinctive religious ethos to each African language family, about which Brown expressed more skepticism.

¹³ A key reading which helped frame these discussions about influence and frontiers was Trigger's, Bruce ‘The rise of Egyptian civilization’, in Trigger, B. et al. (eds.), Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge, 1983), 1–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Karenga, M., Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (Los Angeles, 1989 [1984])Google Scholar. Karenga's effort to develop a distinctively African/Black ethical system based in ideas of communitarianism and balance was, of course, a venerable one on both sides of the Atlantic, stretching from at least Edward Wilmot Blyden through Jordan Kush Ngubane and Julius Nyerere.

¹⁵ Roth, A. Macy, ‘The organization and functioning of the royal mortuary cults of the Old Kingdom in Egypt’, in Gibson, M. and Biggs, R. D. (eds.), The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, 1987), 115–21Google Scholar; Bard, K. A., ‘Toward an interpretation of the role of ideology in the evolution of complex society in Egypt’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 11:1 (1992), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Brown used ‘Nubia’ to designate the area between the first and sixth cataracts of the Nile.

¹⁷ Brown didn't explain his choice to stop in the 1500s with the Ottoman conquest of Makuria. Whatever his intentions, in doing so he reinforced a common misconception that conversion to Islam brought an end to a distinctively Nubian culture. In fact, Nubian Muslims were long important advisors to Ottoman rulers, continuing Nubia and Egypt's entangled relationship. Nubian languages are still spoken in southern Egypt and northern Sudan and the spate of dam building in the region has given Nubianness a powerful political valence. alia, Inter, Fluehr-Lobban, C. and Lobban, R. A., ‘New social movements in Nubian identity among Nubians in Egypt, Sudan, and the United States’, in Mullings, L. (ed.), New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid (New York, 2009), 313–23Google Scholar; Jedrej, M. C., Ingessana: The Religious Institutions of a People of the Sudan-Ethiopia Borderland (Leiden, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. David Schoenbrun has pointed out how the focus on past Nubian accomplishments combined with the erasure of current Nubian peoples in regional discourses parallels dominant ways of talking about Indigenous peoples in the US. Personal communication.

¹⁸ Some of the early pieces on the topic in The Journal of African History (as late as 1963) endorsed the idea that Kemet owed its origins to more civilized, racially-distinct migrants from the Middle East. E.g. Arkell, A. J., ‘Review of Ancient Egypt by W.B. Emery’, 4:1 (1963), 130–2Google Scholar. (Arkell himself imagined a small number of more civilized settlers from the Near East gradually producing early Kemet, as opposed to Emery's story of the mass invasion of a ‘dynastic race’.)

¹⁹ Since the 1990s, the Journal and many other fora have published key works bridging the Sahara, including scholarship on the pre-1800 period by Jacke Phillips, David N. Edwards, David P. V. Gutelius, Chouki El Hamel, Bruce Hall, Eve Troutt Powell, Jay Spaulding, and many others. Efforts to rework the history of early North Africa in ways that enable dialogue with the key themes and problematics of sub-Saharan historiography remain, however, a minority and largely confined to those trained as ‘Africanists’. As late as 2001, Phillips himself deemed it necessary to justify publishing book reviews on Ancient Egypt and Nubia in The Journal of African History. Phillips, ‘Egypt and Nubia’, The Journal of African History, 42:2 (2001), 307–9. For key discussions of the problem, see the contributions by Ghislaine Lydon and Baz Lecocq to the Journal's forum on ‘Trans-Saharan histories’, 56:1 (2015), 3–36. The Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of African Civilizations remain the preeminent venues for Afrocentric Egyptology.

²⁰ Brown, ‘Toward a liberated African history’.