Over the years, the Shikanda portal (of which the present page on African religion has attracted the largest number of visitors) has grown to such size, and its internal structure has become so complex, that visitors have had increasing difficulty finding their way, even despite the internal search facility which appears on all the index pages of the various constituent websites. Since Wim van Binsbergen's main output consists of texts for publication, an updated list of publications with hyperlinks to all available fulltext digital texts seems the best remedy. Thanks to the good services of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in the course of current retrodigitalisation of its members published work, many more digital texts have recently come available, so that now the list of publications could be greatly improved and given a more prominent place in the Shikanda portal. This list is now being provided with clickable links to these uploaded publications. Since that time-consuming process has not yet been completed, of many articles listed, fulltext or draft versions are in fact available in the Shikanda portal, even though no links yet appear in the list of publications. Therefore, please also look at the separate webpages within the Shikanda portal, and use the internal search facility (see below).

Wim van Binsbergen (*1947), Amsterdam-trained anthropologist, proto-historian, and intercultural philosopher (various professorial chairs in Europe and Africa, Professor of Intercultural Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Editor of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie). He has been passionately involved in the study of long-range global cultural history since the early 1990s, and as such has been, since 1996, a vocal but critical advocate of the work of Martin Bernal, and of its unique relevance

1987 the Sinologist and historian of ideas Martin Bernal published the splendid first volume of his Black Athena series, in which he seeks to identify 'the Afroasiatic roots' of classical Greek civilisation and hence of European and North Atlantic civilisation -- criticising the 'fabrication', in the 18th and 19th c. CE, of Ancient Greece as if it were a completely original, incomparably rich culture without historical antecedents or indebtedness to other cultures especially those of the Ancient Near East including Egypt. An intense world-wide debate followed, to which Wim van Binsbergen has made several contributions since 1996 (see further down on this page), including an acclaimed collection Black Athena Ten Years After, now to be reprinted by LIT Verlag (Berlin / Boston / Munster) in much updated and augmented form as Black Athena Twenty Years After. That the Black Athena debate is still alive and kicking, is demonstrated by the major international conference on the topic in Warwick (U.K.) early November 2008, in which prominent scholars participated in a bid to assess the lasting significance of Bernal's view, if any. Wim van Binsbergen was invited for this conference, but the invitation went astray, as was only found out when it was too late to participate. Meanwhile Wim van Binsbergen's constructively critical reflection on Bernal's work has continued. A recent and up-to-date product is the following article now submitted for publication:

The continued relevance of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena thesis: Yes and No

(32 pp., with one table and two figures, and extensive bibliographic references)

Prof. Valentin Mudimbe, one of the participants in the 2008 Warwick conference on Black Athena, tells me that the conference reached an agreement as to the respectability of the Black Athena thesis, so it was ushered into the mainstream paradigm. Great though my sympathy for Martin Bernal and his project has been (despite increasing doubts about his linguistics, his academic tactics and especially his politicised epistemology), I think such acceptance -- if Prof. Mudimbe's rendering is reliable -- is somewhat premature.Bernal’s Egyptocentric and ultimately increasingly Afrocentric perspective is inspiring, yet factually so one-sided as to be essentially wrong. In addition to the paper presented here, I have recently (Summer 2009) finished the advanced draft of a book Towards the Extended Pelasgian Hypothesis, whose argument nicely complements and further develops the argument in the last few sections of the paper. The crux of the matter is that the striking and undeniable continuities -- already stressed by Herodotus, and ‘rediscovered’ and popularised by Bernal -- between Ancient Egypt and the Late Bronze Age Aegean (about which we are mainly informed from Iron Age sources anyway, despite archaeology and Linear-B), are not in the first place to be attributed to massive Egyptian influence on the Aegean (as is Bernal’s view, and as plausibly was the case to a limited extent ), but to both regions drawing from a common fond of cultural (including religious and mythological) themes, whose outlines go back to the Neolithic and which was greatly transformed during the Bronze Age. In my new book I call this the Pelasgian realm, although I realise very clearly that the term will invite lots of confusion. What appears as African themes in this common fond, were in fact -- and as a vocal Afrocentrist I am sorry to admit this, but my first allegiance is to truth and not to consciousness raising -- West Asian and Mediterranean themes syphoning into Northern (as distinct from North) Africa in the course of the prehistoric Back into Africa migration, which geneticists have discovered over the past decade. Bernal was, as usually, right for the wrong reasons -- which does not in the least diminish his merits for putting the critique of Eurocentrist, hegemonic scholarship on the agenda, but which does make us now look with a different, less partisan and less suspicious, eye at the many serious scholars, many of them united under the aegis of Mary Lefkowitz (with, inevitably, her own political agenda), who raised factual and methodological objections to Bernal’s work.