It is time to put emphasis on teaching a truer more complete
version of Afro-American history. For two years I taught
Afro-American History as part of the Black Studies Department
of the University
In the sixties I rode with brothers and sisters who took
over the Reed college (Oregon) administration building
and demanded that Black Studies programs be established.
You have to understand the past to make the most of the
future. Public schools do not teach anything about African
history.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka`s derogatory comments
on minorities in The United States a while ago, really
only serves to underscore his ignorance of scholarly matters.
But just because he has not been educated on the richness
and depth of African History does not mean the facts did
not occur.
Afro-Americans did not come into being in this world just
to work on southern plantations. That whole 200 year period
is but a moment in time in the total story of the modern
Afro-American. It is a purpose of the A RIPE IDEA to tell
the whole story.
Click Below for Quick Access to Subjects of your Interest
AFRICA,
THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATIONS
WORLD HISTORY AND AFRICANS
THE COLONIZATION OF
GREECE BY (KEMIT) EGYPTIANS
THE MIDDLE AGES
COLONIZATION AND DIASPORA
BORN IN THE U.S.A.
AFRO-AMERICANS IN HAWAII
AFRICA,
The January 11, 1988 issue of Time Magazine's
cover story stated once more the scholars agree that
the plains of Africa which now comprise the still growing
Sahara Desert was indeed the Garden of Eden about 200,000
years ago. The January 16, 1989 issue of the Honolulu
Star Bulletin had a little article about an anthropologist
named Wilson who claimed his genetic research showed
that the capacity for language was traced to a single
woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. Her descendants
supplanted all other humans who lived in Asia and Europe
within the next 20,000 years. The more you study history
and ultimately anthropology the more you become aware
of the many vast mass migrations of people which have
taken place many times over the continents. Dr. Louis
Leake and others have proven within the last generation
that all of humanity and the first burst of civilization
traces back to the Oldavai gorge of Eastern Africa, the
upper Nile.
As late as 1906 A.D. fresco art work was discovered inside
rock caves in the heart of the now barren Sahara which
proved through
people, societies and game animals thriving on the then
verdant (green) plains of the Sahara desert, years old
lie under the sands at Meroe, Axum, Zimbabwe, Timbuktu
and other places now part of the desert.
There are even some who say the Druids, builders of Stonehenge
and Pics, who inhabited The British Isles thousands of
years before the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests
were dark of skin and African in origin.
Certainly one of many reasons Prime Minister Tanaka is
ignorant of the vast millennia of African history is
because Julius Caesar's troops burned the huge and unbelievably
ancient Egyptian state library in Alexandria Egypt while
Julius was wooing Cleopatra there in the third century
B.C.
Typically, when Hollywood did the movie Liz Taylor got
to play Cleopatra instead of Pam Grear or Cicely Tyson.
Many of the troops who fought with Caesar in his subjugation
of the British Isles in 350 B.C. were Ethiopian, as
was the General he left in charge when he returned
to Rome. Some say one of the reasons Caesar was assassinated
was because his only blood heirs were his two sons
by Cleopatra, who as the saying goes was "Black
and comely". What incredible but true histories,
poems, genealogies, mathematical theories and astrological
discoveries were destroyed by Caesar's drunken hoards
that
It is said the Egyptian Pharaonic empire began to form
around 5,000 B.C. and arose to its fullest flower around
3500 B.C.. The largest Pyramids and the Sphinx were built
then by warrior pharaohs who dominated the countries
around Egypt at the time. Ancient Greece is the commonly
accepted cradle of "Western
"Civilization" and it is now very interesting
to read, in the ancient Greek what the Greek writers
said of the major influences upon their culture. Diodorus
Sikeliotes of Sicily wrote in 50 B.C.
"Now the
Ethiopians (Africans) as historians relate were the first
of all men" and the proof of this statement is manifestly
proven in the history written in that time, which also
established that the Egyptians were actually colonists
send down the Nile from the Ethiopian (African) nations
of the interior of Africa around 5500 B.C.. The mathematical
theorems for their pyramids and their system of gods
and ancestor worship they brought with them from the
ancient Empires of the upper Nile and then green Sahara
plains. Even today pyramids and monuments of architecture
similar to the Egyptian pyramids may to seen among the
growing sand dunes in Meroe 2000 miles west of Egypt
Herodotus of Helicarnassus wrote 10 volumes of world
histories around 450 B.C. The second one deals at length
with his lengthy journey to Egypt, where all Greek scholars
had to study in those days before they could call themselves
truly learned. Aristotle wrote "Egypt was the cradle
of mathematics". Pythagoras spent 21 years in Egypt
before returning the Greece to teach geometry.
The great pyramids of Gizeh was already 2000 years old
then and built with exacting mathematical precision.
One had but to gaze upon the exquisite solid gold mask
of the boy king Tutankhamen for three seconds to know
by the lips and the nose that was a "brother" in
the solid gold casket. The Egyptian royal tombs were
repositories of vast wealth in art, jewels and bullion.
Africa
The South African government passed a statute making
illegal for a black man to own a gold mine there for
the first time in 1872. Prior to that, of course Africans
had mined the substance for many millennia. Mansa Munsa
Emperor of Mali in 1328 A.D., which encompassed present
day Senegal, Mali and Sudan carried and dispensed so
much gold on his legendary pilgrimage from Timbuktu to
Mecca that he caused inflation in every country he passed
through. All 60,000 men in his entourage carried golden
staffs, it is said. He returned to Timbuktu with architects
to expand the university there, which thrived in literature,
law and medicine until the Berbers sacked and razed the
city in 1520 A.D.
WORLD
HISTORY AND AFRICANS
IMHOTEP was the world's first certified multi
genius. In 2980 BC., Imhotep was the chief physician, architect,
priest and Chancellor to the Pharaoh Zhoser of Kermit (upper
and lower Egypt). His father was an architect named Kanofer,
his mother was Khreduonkh and his wife, Ronfrenofert. Imhotep
was the architect of the first of the great pyramids, the
great stepped pyramid for his pharaoh Zhoser. He was the
world's first great builder in boulders of stone. His fame
as a healer was such that a temple was erected to him Memphis
and two bas-relief's profiles of him appear on the great
temple of Amen at Karnak.
Imhotep understood the circulation of the blood 4000 years
before he doctors of Europe. Homer wrote in his ODYSSEY
" In Egypt the men are more skilled in medicine than
any of human kind." Imhotep's fame increased with
his death and when the culture of Kermit crossed the Mediterranean
with the early Egyptian and Phoenician colonists of Greece
in 1200 BC.. The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA says:
"The evidence afforded by Egyptian and Greek texts
supports the view that Imhotep's reputation was respected
in very early times... His prestige increased with the
lapse of centuries and his temples in Greek times were
the centers of medical teaching."
Gerald Massey, noted poet and archeologist says that early
Christians in Rome worshipped him as one with Christ. James
Breasted, the historian said:
" The child-Christ remained a starrily bejeweled blackamoor
as the typical healer of Rome. A jeweled image of the child-Christ
as a blackamoor is sacredly preserved at the headquarters
of the Franciscan order. It was Imhotep who first quoted
saying, "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die."
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima has copiously documented and photographed
the African presence in Mexico and Central American dating
back to at least 1200 B.C., in carbon dated skeletons and
immense 10 ton exquisite 18 foot around carved stone heads,
with distinctly African features found near temple ruins
of the Olmec Indians in 6 different locations in Mexico
and Central America. Fragments of ancient maps showing
Central America were found in the ancient library of Alexandria
dating back before the fall of the Pharaohs.
Herodotus wrote that the story of how the Egyptians came
to the Peloponese (southern Greece) established settlements
and made themselves kings over that part of Greece was
so widely chronicled by other writers at that time, that
he himself merely stated " the names of nearly all
the (Greek) gods came to Greece from Egypt". Homer,
author of the Iliad wrote: "For Zeus had yesterday
to Ocean's bounds set forth to Feast with Ethiopia' faultless
men. And he was followed by all the gods."
THE
COLONIZATION OF GREECE BY (KEMIT) EGYPTIANS
According to ancient Greek legends, Athens and
Thebes were colonies founded by Egyptians and Phoenicians
run out of Egypt by the southern black Pharaoh Sesostris
in 1500 B.C. at the start of the 18th dynasty, which reclaimed
the Egyptian delta from Libyan and Asian invaders. Herodotus,
wrote in 450 B.C.:"The temple of Athena [in Rhodes]
was founded by the daughters of Danaos, who touched at
the island during their flight from the sons of Aigyptos. (Ancient
alternate spelling of Ethiopia) [KHMET in Egyptian,
meaning land of the Blacks]
Plutarch, in
"ON ISIS AND OSIRIS" in 400 B.C. wrote:
"That Osiris is identical with Dionysus who could
more fittingly know than yourself, Lea? For you are the
head of the inspired maidens [of Dionysus] of Delphi, and
have been consecrated by your father and mother in the
holy rites of Osiris."
Apuleius another Greek playwright of the 5th century B.C.
wrote the GOLDEN ASS, which climax's with the goddess announcing
to the hero: "Thus the Phrygians, earliest of all
races, call me Pessinuntia, mother of all gods. Thus the
Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropeian
Minerva and the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus,
the archer Cretans Diana, Dictynna, and the trilingual
Sicilians Proserphine; to the Eleusianians I am Ceres,
the ancient goddess, to others Juno, to others Bellona
and Hera and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians, who are illuminated
by the first rays of the sun-god as he is born every day,
together with the Africans and Egyptians, who excel through
having the original doctrine, honor me with my distinctive
rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis."
THE
MIDDLE AGES
There are many medieval proofs that racism was
a recent invention to rationalize barbarity of European
colonialism. None the least of these is Shakespeare' "Othello",
the saga of the great black Venetian General when Venice
was the dominant power in Italy. The works of Alexander
Dumas and Alexander Pushkin illustrate the accomplishment
and popularity of Afro-European writers in Europe during
past centuries. Its funny how the Dark Ages of Europe coincide
with the centuries of Moorish conquest of Spain.
One wonders how history would have developed
if Charles Martel had not ridden up in the Alps with
reinforcements for the Franks at the battle of Tours
in 785 and prevented the Moors from conquering the land
that later became France. There were many
tales of Ethiopian and Nubian Christian knights riding
with and sometimes to the rescue of European Christian
Knights during the crusades against the Moslems.
In the courtyard
of the thirteenth century cathedral in Magdeburg Germany
stands a statute carved in honor of St. Maurice, the
military saint in chain mail armor and Nubian from his
lips and nose to the lineage cuts on his forehead. James
Mitchner in his Jewish history epic the Covenant writes
about the tragedy of European Christian knights mistakenly
warring against Ethiopian Christian knights, who came
to aid the Christians in the Crusade against
Magdeburg is not the only medieval church to still possess
centuries old art work celebrating martyred Christian
Nubian or Ethiopian knights. In Herferdshire in western
England lies the parish of Brinsop, where the exquisite
stained glass window created in the thirteenth century
prominently displays a knight with a distinctly black
face.
Sometimes I think that the reason Africans were separated
from their friends at the start of slavery was because
there was a time when Africans were extremely organized.
J.A. Rogers writes in his book, Nature knows No Color
Line, that Maurus was the Greek word for African, as
in Mauritania and Morocco. The Romans pronounced it Maros,
and in English, Africans were referred to as "Moors"
thousands of years before anyone heard of a Negro in
1700.
In 711 A.D. Moorish troops commanded by General Tarik
crossed into Gibraltar and conquered all Spain and Portugal
much to his King's surprise. The Song of Roland describes
the 738 A.D. Sarrazin invaders of France in verses 145
and 146 as "blacker than ink with large noses and
ears" and with nothing white except the teeth." They
are 50,000 strong and are led by Marganice, Emperor of
Ethiopia and Carthage. In the Ninth Century, the Moslem
Empire stretched from Portugal through Italy to Baghdad
covering both sides of the Mediterranean.
In 982 A Moorish army defeated King Otto II in Germany.
Over the centuries of Moorish rule there was much intermingling
of Moor and European as Mr. Rogers points out by picturing
coats of arms of 495 noble European families prominently
displaying Africans in them. The Moorish
Kings generally observed polygamy.
David MacRitchie, eminent British archaeologist says, "So
late as the tenth century three Scottish provinces were
wholly black and the supreme ruler of them became for
a time the paramount king of Transmarine Scotland."
The
Moors ruled all or parts of Spain as part of the Almoravid
and Almohad empires of Morocco.
Until Boabdil capitulated to Ferdinand and Isabella's
armys in 1492, Moorish governors ruled Portugal and Spain
for 800 years from 711 A.D. to 1492.
Shortly thereafter, Chris Columbo began the Trans Atlantic
slave trade and changed the balance of power between
Africa and Europe, which had existed since before the
days of Hannibal Barca and the Phonecians.
The original Ras Tafari Haili Salassi did indeed trace
his lineage from the union of Solomon of Israel and
Sheba, Queen of Ethiopia 2500 years ago. The black
North African Jews for whom Senator Inoue obtained
an $8,000,000 aid appropriation for their Paris refuge
school, also can trace their history to the time of
Solomon and Sheba. Jomo Kenyatta lived through the
entire reign of the British in Kenya. In the hills
of Ethiopia there still exist today orthodox Christian
churches built underground in the manner of the pyramids
which are 2500 years old. British historian Basil Davidson
has written at length on these topics and Tower Video
presently is renting his six part video cassette history
of Africa. Show it to your children.
Martin Bernal in Black Athena: the Afro asiatic roots
of classical civilization. Viol. 1 "The fabrication
of ancient Greece, 1785-1985" (London,Free Association
Books, 1987., writes at length of the bleaching of Greek
history during the height of the slave trade in an attempt
by the imperialists to rationalize their inhuman treatment
of the African in order to plunder his continent and
multiply their fortunes in the "triangular trade".
That trade involved selling guns, salt and trinkets in
Africa at profit in exchange for slaves which were traded
in the Americas at a profit for rum, sugar and cotton,
which was sold in Europe at a profit for more guns etc.
to finance the "Industrial Revolution".
COLONIZATION
AND DIASPORA
The effect of the slave
trade on the Bight of Benin, the area of Africa that is
now the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon is comprehensively
set for in Onwuka Dike's Trade and Politics in the Niger
Delta written in 1956. Dike makes it clear that in the
African system, it was possible for a slave to become King,
if he was competent enough.
The story of JAJA a
slave who became King and lead the then Nigerians in
armed resistance against the British gun boat land occupation
and trade good theft practices until his capture in 1872
illustrates this.
Never the- less after
the Berlin conference of 1878 sponsored by Belgian King
Leapolde, peacefully divided Africa among the European
colonial sharks, the ancient African trade routes and
goods of gold, diamonds, Ivory, spice, clothe, leather,
sugar, rubber, etc. were seized and placed in foreign
hands of the French in the North and West, British West
in Ghana, East in Kenya, South in Zimbabwe and Johannesburg,
Germans in Cameroon and South Africa Namibia, Portuguese
in Angola and Mozambique,
In South America, where Catholicism dominated, hereditary
slavery did not. One was allowed to purchase one's freedom,
or procreate one's way out of bondage; and the right
to some individual work to that end was codified. A vast
mixing and melding of African, Indian and European created
the present day Brazilian.
And don't forget the Afro-Jamaican Diaspora story from
Nanny and Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey to Bob Marley etc.
Check out "JAMAICAN FREEDOM
FIGHTERS"
Amen Rasta's
Reggae Tour of Jamaica.
Vol. 15
Learn the Histories
of the Brothers and Sisters pictured on Jamiacan Money Marcus
Garvey's birthplace and much more
BORN IN THE U.S.A.
Only in Protestant America was the system of slavery
conceived to be irrevocable. Afro-Americans comprised fully
20 percent of the United States population at the time
the new nation came into being which barred prohibition
of slave importation for 20 years by constitutional edict.
Men like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey
and Nat Turner organized and died fighting against this
inhuman system. Frederick Douglas escaped slavery and
rallied the North in oratory and essay against slavery's
rape of human rights. John Brown and Sojourner Truth
Some Afro-Americans of course have always done well economically
in this country. Emmanuel and Mary Bernoon opened the
first oyster and ale house in Providence Rhode Island
in 1736, one of the largest businesses in the city. The
New York Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1768 in brother
Samuel Fraunces Tavern. James Forten patented a devise
for handling sails and was one of the major sail makers
in Philadelphia in 1800.
Paul Cuffe built a wharf and warehouse on the Westport
River in Massachusetts in 1797, and by 1806 owned a ship,
two brigs and several smaller vessels. For many years
he sailed the seas making voyages to Europe, Russia,
the West Indies and returned brothers and sister to Africa.
Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen and Prince Hall, founder
of the Masons were others who did relatively well in
colonial America, despite discrimination and the erroneous
preconceptions of a majority of others.
Of course the Civil War changed the original American
slave based economic system at great cost to all Americans.
The first grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan was Nathan
Bedford Forest, commanding General of the Confederacy
during the Fort Pillow massacre, where he ordered the
extermination of 300 black men, women and children after
they had surrendered. Before the Civil War he had been
one of the largest slave dealers in the south.
Many things have been about the Reconstruction period.
A number of black leaders came to be political officials
after the war, mostly from the union army. The first
public schools in the South were created by the reconstruction
governments. There were no public schools before the
war in the South. It was illegal to teach blacks to read.
The rich kids went to private schools, and the daddy's
who ran the legislature did not waste tax dollars of
educating poor white kids. No wonder the freedmen and
their children put such a high premium on education.
You can make something out of yourself if you get a good
education.
Cinque, Touissant L'Oveture, Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner,
Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington,
W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, M.L. King Jr. Jesse Jackson,
Reginald Lewis. African American leaders all, of which
there are many like Nelson Mandella, Robert Mugabe, Marcus
Garvey, Malcolm X and Bob Marley who believed that "Unless
all are free, none are truly free.
One of my childhood heroes was A. G. Gaston of Birmingham,
who founded the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co. 55
years ago. Martin Luther King Held many planning meetings
for the boycott staged in Birmingham in the late 50's
in Mr. Gaston's motel and it was later bombed. Recently,
Mr. Gaston who is 95, sold the company worth 34 million
in assets with 10 million in sales last year to his 400
employees for 3.5 million.
The Deal also included
the Booker T. Washington Broadcasting Co., Which owns
an Am and an Fm radio station and the A. G. Gaston Construction
Co. In some years, A. G. Gaston made as much or more
than any brother in the country.
Atty. Reginald Lewis,
founder of TLC Beatrice International took that spot
this year out earning even Michael Tyson and Bill Cosby
with his bold leveraged buyout of Beatrice International,
then selling off the Australian, Canadian and European
parts to pay
AFRO-AMERICANS
IN HAWAII
Martin Luther King, Jr. fought
and died to rid America of the disease of racism, which
prevented some native born Americans from full citizenship
and enjoying the protection of the Bill Of Rights for centuries.
This same business as usual attitude
contributed to the political climate which made the overthrow
of Hawaii's Queen possible, and for a while made Hawaiians
second class citizens in their own "aina". Dr.
King fought the attitudes that contributed to the World
War II internment of Japanese-Americans. The racial slurs
hurled at Hawaii's Senator during the Iran gate hearings
indicate that Dr. King's work is not yet finished.
Dr. King's aloha for Hawaii was demonstrated in his first
visit o the state in 1959 soon after statehood.
State census figures consistently ignore the 60,000 or
so Afro-American military family members living in Hawaii
for years while manning the defense forces of our nation
in the Pacific. Many of these families remain here after
their tour of duty is ended. Their families and the 25,000
or so permanent Afro-American residents in Hawaii contribute
to the international diversity of our schools, economy,
culture, musical and visual arts. Afro-American entertainers
are consistently well received in Hawaii. Hawaiians have
soul, and there is an empathy and deep level of communication
which exists between the many diverse peoples.
Afro-Americans have been living in Hawaii since the early
1800's. Anthony Allen was a sailor who farmed several pieces
of land in Waikiki before the missionaries landed in 1820.
Betsy Stockton started the first school for non royal Hawaiians
in Lahaina in 1824. The first official Hawaii state band
organized by King David Kalakaua in 1834 was conducted
by and Afro-American, as were most of the musicians.
For many years, the official state band
was staffed largely by Afro-American musicians. Ship
loads of Afro-American plantation workers were brought
to the islands from Tennessee in the 1890's. The
descendants of these people have been blending into the
local population for centuries producing respected citizens
like Buttons Kaluhiokalani, Marvin Foster, Judge William
Crockett, Counsel woman Hellene Hale of Hilo, and former
state legislator Charles Campbell. The "official" census
figures simply do not accurately reflect the total Afro-American
population of Hawaii.
In the National Museum of Suva, In Fiji
in The South Pacific Melanesian Sea, there is a plaque
which states according to their oldest legends the people
of Fiji came from The City of Thebes in Egypt, and exited
down the Nile and from the east coast of Africa, making
their way in a vast migration at some unknown time (possibly
the invasion of the Assyrians or Persians in 700 B.C.
or 525 B.C. or before.
Some of those people continued the migration and settled
in the Hawaiian Islands according to Fijian and Hawaiian
oral traditions.
Check
out the History, people, culture, beuty and surf of Fiji
in
THE
FIJI THEBES CONNECTION, Vol. 10
How the People
From Africa Arrived in the South Pacific First.
Grand
Temple of Amen Ra at the City of
Wa'Set-Thebes-Luxor, Capital
of KMT in the Middle and New Kingdoms (2060 B.C.-
525 B.C., the 10th - 26th Dynasties)
A
City which possessed three different names in three different
millenniums and lies
Accros
the River From King Tut's Tomb &
The Valley
of the King's & Queens.
Visit
them Both in Vol. 2 of:
THE
TEMPLES OF THE NILE SERIES
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