Africa, Christianity and Anthropology: The Debate over Africa’s Role in Human Origins

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw two groups of European thinkers advance two different perspectives about the role of Africa and Africans in human evolution. Monogenesis affirmed that all humankind came from common ancestors while polygenesis affirmed the emergence of different races of humans at distinct times and places. Christian missionaries sought to affirm the monogenetic belief that Africans, like Europeans, were among the offspring of Adam and Eve, and for this reason deserved to be saved. Other explorers performing the sorts of investigations that would be later called anthropology sought to confirm “scientific” discoveries that the physiological and intellectual differences between the two races were so great, that it was impossible that the two races emerged from a common parent. In the end polygenesis could not be squared with the Darwinian demonstration that biological organisms evolve, and thus have different attributes in different environment. Both groups of Europeans wrote articles advancing their views that were published in a wide spectrum of journals and newspapers. This project will investigate these two bodies of literature. One important area of study will be how nineteenth century anthropologists sought to fit polygenetic ideas within Darwinian schema. Another question worth exploring is how Christian writers reconciled their beliefs with the scientific racism rampant in European thought at the end of the nineteenth century. The goal of this research is to assess the results of the debate and its effect on both the scholarly and the popular understandings of Africa’s role in the birth of human civilization.