While the author begins and ends with the career of explorer Henry Stanley, and his alleged discovery of a tribe of "white" people in East Africa, what this book is mostly a study of is how efforts to validate the Christian Bible in the wake of a better understanding of the world's languages led to the so-called Hamitic Theory of human migration, which held that "white" people were essentially responsible for all advanced civilization; a very convenient theory at a time when European colonialism was peaking. The most interesting point for Robinson though is not the justifications for European predominance, but why there would be an interest in the possibility of isolated cultures of people identifiable as "Caucasian." Robinson's suggestion is that this interest comes from the unease with what industrial civilization seemed to be doing to to Western culture and the question of whether a hypothetical primitive "white" people could show what was essential to being "white," and thus assuage Western alienation; particularly since the overarching racism of the time negated the notion that there was something to learn from traditional cultures that didn't happen to be of European origin. ( )

Race to the bottom

Ah, race. It feeds dreams, nightmares, and an unending stream of unfounded theories. The Lost White Tribe, while nominally historical, is really about race: the search to prove one race or another was dominant, significant and living proof of something or other beyond the theories of the day. In this case, a tribe of whites in Central East Africa.
The book settles on three general theories:
-Indo-Europeans descended from Europe to Africa into Asia and South America and left evidence of advanced societies among the primitives
-Noah’s son Ham, banished and cursed, fathered a tribe of whites in Central East Africa (and possibly Persia and even India and maybe China)
-Aryan pure whites from northern Europe roamed the world, improving everything before totally disappearing.

The central character here is Henry Stanley, of Dr. Livingstone I presume fame. Stanley was a journalist who returned to Africa again and again on publisher’s grants, feeding his passion for exploration. We can look back from the 21st century of GPS and Google Earth and be amazed how many decades it took for him to nail down the source of the Nile. But in his day, there was nothing more exciting and sensational. He was the talk of the western world. In the 1870s, some time after publishing his accounts, he suddenly claimed to have encountered a tribe of whites while in Africa. But neither he nor anyone else ever found them again. The book begins by following Stanley, and delves deeply into his history and his psyche. But then like a good Aryan, he simply disappears as Michael Robinson takes us to Rhodesia, Persia, India, China and the Americas for other racial explorers and their theories. Stanley appears again in the epilogue to wrap things up.

We learn that Caucasians are whites named for the Caucasus Mountains area where a German doctor claimed the most perfect skulls came from. It was he who applied the name to all European whites, causing confusion ever since. We learn of theories that human races are all different species, that evolution began with whites, or with blacks, or with Adam and Eve, who seem to have been white, at least in the paintings. We learn that scientists, archaeologists, historians, doctors and psychologists followed slender threads to advance their own theories of race. It was a festival of racial nonsense for about a century. It wasn’t until 1950 that a UN agency finally declared that all humans are the same species. And still today, groups and individuals glom onto obscure discoveries and suspect evidence to claim proof that Noah’s son Ham is evident in Africa. The Lost White Tribe is a bizarre history lesson.

David Wineberg ( )