ben-Jochannan, Yosef Alfredo Antonio

Impact on the world

Authored or self-published dozens of books on African and Egyptian history beginning with his 1970 'African Origins of the Major Western Religions,' which argued that ancient Egyptian civilization, rather than Greece, was the true wellspring of Western religious and philosophical thought, and led twice-yearly study tours to Egypt for decades that directly exposed thousands of students to Nile Valley archaeological sites; while he influenced a wide circle of Afrocentric scholars, including close collaborators John Henrik Clarke and Ivan Van Sertima, both already profiled in this collection, his claimed doctoral degrees from the University of Havana and University of Barcelona and master's degrees from Cambridge University were directly contradicted when those institutions confirmed no record of his enrollment or any degree conferred, and a specific chronological claim he made in a 1991 public debate, that Aristotle acquired Egyptian knowledge through the Library of Alexandria, was shown by classicist Mary Lefkowitz to be factually impossible since the library was founded more than three decades after Aristotle's death.

Life & background

Born in Ethiopia in 1918 and raised in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, ben-Jochannan moved to Harlem around 1940 or 1945 depending on the source, having first traveled to Egypt in 1939, an early visit that shaped his lifelong focus on Nile Valley civilization as the proper starting point for understanding African and African American history, in deliberate contrast to historical narratives that began with the transatlantic slave trade. He claimed an extensive array of academic credentials, including a 1938 civil engineering degree from the University of Puerto Rico along with later doctorates and master's degrees from several prestigious international universities, claims that appeared in official course catalogs at institutions where he taught; when researchers later contacted the specific universities named, including Cambridge and the University of Barcelona, those institutions reported no record of his ever having enrolled or received any degree, raising serious unresolved questions about the actual basis of his academic authority, separate from the merits of his historical arguments themselves. He nonetheless built a substantial career teaching as an adjunct professor of history and Egyptology at Cornell University's Africana Studies and Research Center and as a senior lecturer at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, closely collaborating with fellow historians John Henrik Clarke and Ivan Van Sertima and personally knowing Malcolm X; he organized regular pilgrimage tours to Egypt beginning in 1957, including humanitarian outreach work among Nubian communities along the Nile, and authored more than twenty published books along with dozens of additional manuscripts he claimed remained unpublished. Specific factual claims within his work, including his 1991 assertion regarding Aristotle's supposed access to the Library of Alexandria, were directly and conclusively refuted by classical scholars on simple chronological grounds, criticism Ben-Jochannan dismissed by questioning the certainty of historical dating more broadly, a response his academic critics rejected as unsupported. Late in life he converted to Islam, a development his admirers note sits uneasily alongside some of his earlier published writing on Judaism and Islam, and he died in 2015 at age 96 in the Bronx, remembered by figures including philosopher Cornel West, who said he had been privileged to study under him, as one of the most influential and widely read Afrocentric historians of his generation.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; African American Registry; AALBC.com; Black Classic Press (publisher)