HISTORY LESSON

Justin responds to this picture by admitting there were black people in ancient Egypt but they had to be imported as slaves, by the Sahara desert before 3000 BCE. Who is going to tell him?

Justin Anderson made a lot of the usual rookie errors you get when someone tries to rewrite African history while standing on sand dunes of fiction. His claim that Black Africans only entered Egypt via slavery—starting before Egypt even existed—is like saying the British royal family arrived on an EasyJet flight from Western Europe.

Let’s break this mirage down.

■ Mistakes the trans-Saharan slave trade for a time machine.

Justin claims there was a “trans-Saharan slave trade” before the Sahara was even a desert. The Sahara didn’t become a full-blown desert until about 3000–2500 BCE. Before then, it was a lush savanna—the “Green Sahara”—filled with lakes, cattle herders, and complex societies like those at Nabta Playa and Gobero. So no, caravans were not trudging through a desert that didn’t exist, prior to Africa adopting camels. That’s like describing a Viking cruise through the Amazon rainforest in the Ice Age.

■ Cites pharaohs like Sneferu as slave raiders before Egypt had cities.

Sneferu ruled in the 4th Dynasty (c. 2600 BCE), long after Africans from Southern Egypt had unified the two lands, and developed as a civilization. Before that time, there were established kingdoms south of Egypt like Ta-Seti (c. 3800 BCE) and Qustul (c. 3500 BCE) that had already influenced Egyptian kingship, burial, iconography, and wore the shendyt kilt. So claiming Sneferu was the “start” of south-to-north African contact is like saying Steve Jobs invented Latin.

■ Confuses indigenous Nile Valley trade relations with “slave routes.”

The Nile wasn’t a “slave route.” It was a civilizational highway where cultural and kinship ties ran deep between what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The earliest Egyptian iconography, pottery, and grave goods came from the south. Qustul tombs, predating Narmer, had royal regalia before dynastic kings wore them. That’s cultural diffusion northward—not human trafficking.

Trade relations were far more sophisticated than white supremacist fantasies which tried to justify their own atrocities by accusing ancient people of selling Africans. Trade is based on supply and demand of goods not locally available. Inscriptions at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut's temple at Karnak, and the tomb of Senmut tell us about trade expeditions to Present-day Somalia. This was an important region for trade and commerce located in the Horn of Africa, and was known for its exotic goods such as incense, myrrh, and ebony. The ancient Egyptians sometimes referred to Punt as "God's Land" or "Land of the Gods." No mention of importing slaves, or negative dismissive attitude towards the inhabitants of Punt.

■ Forgets the “desert” was a corridor of civilization.

The so-called “trans-Saharan trade” only became a slave-trading route many centuries after Egypt’s Old Kingdom, especially during the Islamic era (post-7th century CE). Before that, Saharan networks were used for migration, herding, and knowledge—not mass human trafficking. D’Atanasio et al. (2018) even found lineages like E-M78, E-M2, A3-M14 and R-V88 radiating from the Green Sahara toward Egypt and West Africa during 12,000-4,400 years ago, not the other way around. That’s population movement, not abduction.

■ Claims Nubians were slaves when they were co-founders.

Ta-Seti, centered in what is now northern Sudan, existed well before Dynasty 0. Its culture and regalia—crowns, palettes, royal imagery—directly shaped early Egypt. The alignments of Giza first show up in Nabta Playa, Nubia. And yet Justin wants us to believe these people needed to be brought in as slaves? That’s like claiming Lord Horatio Nelson learned to command British naval forces after being kidnapped by the Phoenicians.

■ Misrepresents Egypt’s language as non-African.

Egyptian is Afroasiatic—a language family that originated in Africa: THE MOST ATTESTED LANGUAGE FAMILY IN ACADEMIA. The deepest branches of Afroasiatic (like Omotic) are only found within the African continent. Semitic, found in the Levant and Arabia, is just one small offshoot. Egyptian has more lexical and phonological overlap with Cushitic and Chadic languages of Africa than anything spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. Saying Egypt’s language proves it wasn’t African is like saying English isn’t European because it shares words with Hindi.

■ Cherry-picks slavery to explain African DNA.

Justin’s argument requires Black Africans to be imported via slavery, but ancient DNA proves otherwise. Ancient Upper Egyptian remains (e.g., Abusir el-Meleq doesn’t even apply here, being northern and late) carry Y-DNA haplogroups like E-M78, A3-M13, E-V12, and R-V88—all with African origins and radiations from Sudan, the Green Sahara, and the Sahel (D’Atanasio 2018, Hollfelder 2021). Those haplogroups aren’t markers of slavery—they’re evidence of native African continuity. Peer-reviewed studies of Ramesses III imply 10 of the pharaohs of the 20th dynasty carried E-M2. Were all 10 pharaohs also slavery imports? How delusional to equate unsubstantiated private thoughts with hard science!

■ Confuses African aesthetics for foreign imports.

Egyptian statuary, murals, and tomb paintings depict individuals with dark reddish-brown skin, broad noses, and tightly curled hair—especially in the Old and Middle Kingdoms. These are not features of “slaves” brought from abroad. They’re national depictions of deities like Horus, kings, priests, and nobles. The black granite seated statue of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, who re-unified Egypt, is as visibly African as the continent that birthed him. No one imports kings.

■ Misuses medieval manuals to backdate a late-era slave trade.

Slave manuals and white-black slave classifications are products of the Islamic medieval period, not the Old or Middle Kingdom. Justin is confusing caliphs with khatabs, mamluks with Medjay. You don’t get to backdate medieval bureaucracy into 3000 BCE to suit your political agenda.

■ Ignores classical sources that contradict him.

Greek and Roman authors like Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Strabo all described Egyptians as dark-skinned and closely related to Ethiopians and other African peoples. Diodorus (Book 3) directly states that Egypt was founded by Black people from the South. Did they also need to be enslaved to enter their own homeland?

■ Claims African presence needs explaining, while ignoring their ownership of the terrain.

This is the heart of Justin’s mistake. Egypt is in Africa. Black Africans don’t need an excuse to be there. They were already there. The Nile flowed downstream from Sub-Saharan Africa. It was Egypt that needed the South to exist, not the other way around. You don’t smuggle builders into their own house.

■ Slavery is not a creation story.

No one denies slavery existed in ancient times. But slavery does not explain the demographic foundation of a civilization. You don’t build pyramids, draft astronomical calendars, and codify divine kingship using people you supposedly “just imported.” Egyptians were not shaped by slaves—they were shaped by their own ancestral continuum stretching deep into Saharan and Nilotic Africa.

⸻

Justin’s argument is what happens when someone finds a medieval footnote and tries to use it as the preface to a 5000-year history.

He took a valid phenomenon—the trans-Saharan slave trade—and dropped it into 3000 BCE like it was a GPS pin, hoping no one would notice the Sahara was still a tropical savanna at the time, that Egypt’s founders were southern neighbors, not prisoners, and that African genetics, linguistics, and culture were the source—not the cargo.

What Justin’s really trying to do isn’t history—it’s intellectual eviction. He wants Black Africans to be tenants in their own civilizational story.

But the lease was never up.

They didn’t come to Egypt.

They were Ta-Mery.

#Africa #World