👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully… prickly… linguistic outcrop of 19th and early 20th-century weirdness. Strap yourselves into your colonial misunderstanding helmets – here goes!
What exactly is a Germanic Afroentrician anyway? (Spoiler: You probably shouldn't actually use it unless you want to sound like an archaeologist who spent too long in the repatriation room of the British Museum.) Basically, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were some very misguided European racial theorists. These guys were obsessed with proving a ridiculous genealogical straight line – essentially trying to invent a grand, hierarchical racial tree that would somehow justify colonial dominance. To do this, they needed to find a place for… pretty much everyone! Here’s where the Afrocentrician part comes in. Because it was so difficult to reasonably slot every human into existing racial classifications, some theorists started to dangle the ludicrous prospect of a supposed “ancient Germanic Africanist origin" - essentially arguing that the indigenous Africanists had somehow genetically and culturally influenced early Germanic tribes and therefore, through them, shaped the development of European cultures. Think of it as colonial-era busybodies desperately trying to manufacture a really complicated, and utterly baseless, racial pedigree for themselves! The whole thing was based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, misinterpreted folklore, and, frankly, a whole lotta wishful thinking fuelled by racist preconceptions. 19th century anthropology
