Instead of being 'de(a)dicated', the mural is 'livicated'. The neologism shows how the past is still deeply relevant to contemporary black struggles like anti- apartheid, and to modern black heroes like C. L. R. James (the Marxist intellectual, historian of slavery and Third World nationalist, who had died a year before the 'livication'). The plaque goes on to list private benefactors who madecontributions, and adds that the mural was originally commissioned by Reading Borough Council. As an officially sponsored project, it reflects an official version of history in the same way as a war memorial does, through an emotive but not necessarily historically coherent collocation of symbols, images and texts. In one sense, the mural functions like an ancicnt Egyptian king list, invoking the great figures of the past and validating the present through association with that lineage. After being omitted from the official histories of his successors, who did not include him in their king lists, Akhenaten's reputation has been reclaimed as a link in the chain from the black past to the black future.
The Reading mural makes some significant statements about the importance of Akhenaten as a crucial figure in a particular version of black history. The portraits of Marley and Haile Selassie and the vocabulary of the plaque suggest that it is much influenced by Rastafarianism - Rastas like to rejig language (I was told in Reading that the pharaoh of the mural was called 'Blackhnatcn'). Significantly, the mural links Akhenaten with the prophet Mohammed as founder of Islam. New forms of Islam have had a central place in forming some modern black identities, especially in America, where the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) and now Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933) has thousands of followers. These forms of Islam gain an added clout by being given an implied ancestry in Egypt. The mural also illustrates the potent capacity of certain ancestors to function as cultural capital in a contemporary struggle, and how claiming back these ancestors can be an empowering act for those who feel that their history has been misrepresented or denied.5 Akhenaten is definitely one of those ancestors, and my intention is to look at how and why he has achieved this favoured status, rather than to comment on the historiographical questions raised by the relationship of ancient Egypt with modern Afrocentrism.7 Akhenaten's lack of any significant cultural presence in the west before the late nineteenth century makes him an interesting case here. Unlike Cleopatra, the other Egyptian ruler most frequently (rc)presented as black, images of Akhenaten have not previously been filtered through Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
Putting the pharaohs of Egypt back in their African context has been an issue sincc the beginnings, in the mid-nineteenth century, of political pan-Africanism, one of whose aims was to enable oppressed black people to regain their lost heritage and achieve greatness oncc again. As early as the 1840s, Egypt was being claimcd by black scholars and educators as an African civilisation already well advanced when the west was still in a state of barbarism, and whose monuments were symbols of great future possibilitcs rather than past glorious achievements. This idea became crystallised in the writings of the pan-African pioneer Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), who has provided Afrocentrism with its intellectual foundations. Advocating Liberia as an African homeland for freed slaves, in 1866 he went to Egypt and carved the word 'Liberia' on one of the Pyramids, establishing a link between the ancient Egyptians and contemporary black people. Black history being written on the Pyramids is still a common image of
Afroc.entrist discourse, as in my epigraph to this section. After visiting Egypt, Blydcn wrote an influential essay, 'The Negro in Ancient History', 'the first article in any Quarterly written by a hand claiming a pure Ethiopian lineage'. Here he argued fiercely against what would now be called Eurocentric views of history and for the blackness of the ancient Egyptians. 'But it may be said, The enterprising people who founded Babylon and Nineveh, settled in Egypt and built the Pyramids, though descendants of Ham, were not
