ABSTRACT
My subtitle for this chapter, “Why Two-Legged Animals Can’t Sit Gracefully,” is taken from an Igbo proverb Chinua Achebe quoted in a 1996 talk at the New York Public Library on racism. The full proverb is, “A two-legged animal never learns how to sit gracefully but a four-legged animal knows.” In other words, the animals in power never understand either their own capacities or the capacities of the “other” animals that watch them. It is as though a four-legged animal is watching a two-legged (human) animal, so Achebe says, “those who are given all the facilities [i.e., bottoms for sitting] don’t know how to use them but those who don’t have all the facilities [bottoms] struggle and master the problem nonetheless” (C.Achebe, personal communication, October 8, 1998).1 Borrowing a practice from
African orators, I parse the proverb in several ways, to review both African inputs to the IQ controversy and perspectives on ranking groups intellectually. First, I take up the IQ tests that have been carried out in Africa since 1915 and used to demonstrate the “inferiority” of Africans. Second, I discuss responses amongst educated Africans to such tomes as The Bell Curve, specifically the subscribers to an online discussion group, CAMNET, and the Cameroonians who are the majority of its participants. These responses illustrate the differences between American and African critiques of the issues, and point up the different categories and assumptions that Africans and Americans use in formulating their arguments. Finally, I contrast the 19th-century evolutionary racist notions espoused in The Bell Curve with the symbolic racist ideas that were gaining acceptance in the last decade of the 20th century and suggest what I believe to be appropriate social science responses to the issues raised by the history of IQ testing.
