“Nordics” and “Hamites”: Joseph Deniker and the Rise (and Fall) of Scientific Racism

Abstract

The “Hamite” as “Caucasian” civilizers of Central Africa was central to colonial discourse in Rwanda-Urundi in the first half of the twentieth century and the notion of Rwandan Tutsi as “Hamitic invaders” was to return as a component in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The idea of an exogenous, Hamitic aristocracy in East and Central Africa is pronounced in the writings (from 1913) of Charles Seligman (1873–1940) in which “race” infers biogenetic superiority. Seligman drew on the work of the Italian anthropologist Guisseppe Sergi (1841–1936) who, in turn, drew on the work of the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (1852–1918). Another key racial theory of the early twentieth century implicated in genocide can also be traced to Deniker. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the Nazi race theorist Alfred Rosenberg adopted “Nordic” (as Aryan) from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), who had, in turn adopted “Nordic Race” from William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). Ripley had adopted “Nordic” from Deniker. In other words, fantasies of both the “Hamite” and the “Aryan” as biogenetically superior races can both be traced to Deniker. And yet, notions of racial (biogenetic) superiority are entirely absent from Deniker who did not associate any intellectual or “cultural” superiority with any of his “races.” Contrary to the idea of a progression from early twentieth-century writings espousing “biogenetic” racial superiority to our contemporary rejection of racial determinism, there was, in reality, a regression from Deniker’s late nineteenth-century position.

A part of this chapter originally appeared in Nigel Eltringham, “‘Invaders who have stolen the country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide,” Social Identities 12 (2006): 425–444. See http://www.tandfonline.com.