For centuries, the so-called “curse of Ham” was used to justify the enslavement of Africans. But in 1798, Napoleon’s discovery of ancient Egypt’s antiquity forced a reconceptualization of Hamites as a civilizing race of “caucasian” invaders.

This essay examines the Hamitic myth from the African perspective, outlining the use (and misuse) of the story of Ham in both its religious and pseudo-scientific versions by African scholars from the medieval period to the Rwandan Genocide.