Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AFRICA'S GIFT TO THE WORLD
"Ex Africa semper aliquid novi." (Out of Africa comes something always new) — Ancient Greek saying quoted by Pliny, Roman historian, 23-79 A.D.
"He who has drunk of the waters of Africa will drink again." — Ancient Arab saying.
"I speak of Africa and golden joys." — Shakespeare, II Henry IV, v. iii.
"There is Africa and all her prodigies in us." — Sir Thomas Browne, English physician and author, 1605-1682.
"It is one of the paradoxes of history that Africa, the Mother of Civilization, remained for over two thousand years the Dark Continent. To the moderns Africa was the region where ivory was sought for Europe and slaves for America. In the time of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), as the satirist informs us, geographers in drawing African maps would fill in the gaps with savage pictures. Where towns should have been they placed elephants." — Dr. Victor Robinson, Ciba Symposia, 1940.
"The African continent is no recent discovery; it is not a new world like America or Australia. ... While yet Europe was the home of wandering barbarians one of the most wonderful civilizations on record had begun to work out its destiny on the banks of the Nile. ..." (History of Nations, Vol. 18, p. 1, 1906)
To ancient Europe Africa was for fully two thousand years the civilized world. "How low the savage European must have looked to the Nile Valley African looking north from his Pyramid of Cheops," says Professor Dorsey. When this Wonder of the Ancient World was some two thousand years old, Greece, first part, of the European continent to be touched by civilization, was a wilderness. Athens, later to become the leader in world culture, was as late as 1500 B.C., totally unknown. Civilization came to Greece from Egypt by way of the island of Crete, as Sir Arthur Evans, has shown.
And this civilization was Negroid. For this we have the word of Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), who travelled in Egypt and saw the Egyptians of his day. In Book Two, Chapter 57, he says they were "black" and in Book Two, Chapter 104, they were "black and wooly-haired." The hair of the Ethiopian he said was "very wooly." He adds that in other parts of the Near East he visited he saw other nations with the same racial characteristics as the Egyptians. "Several nations are so, too," he said.
Two thousand years later another famous traveller, Count Volney, said on his visit to Egypt in 1787, that what Herodotus said had solved for him the problem of why the people were so Negroid in appearance and especially the Great Sphinx of Ghizeh, supreme symbol worship and power. Reflecting on the then state of the Egyptians compared with what they had been, he said, "To think that to a race of black men who are today our slaves and the object of our contempt is the same one to whom we owe our arts, sciences and even the very use of speech." Of the blacks he saw in Upper Egypt among the ruins of the colossal monuments there, he said, "There a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and wooly hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." (Oeuvres, Vol. 2, pp. 65-68. 1825; Ruins of Empires, pp. 16-17. 1890).
Two other famous European scholars of that time who saw the Sphinx, Baron Denon and Gustav Flaubert, were of the same opinion. Denon, who made a sketch of it in 1798 said, "The character is African ... the lips are thick. Art must have been at a high pitch when this monument was executed." (Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, vol. 1, p. 140. 1803). Flaubert said (1849), "It is certainly Ethiopian. The lips are thick." (Notes de Voyage, p. 115. 1910).
With the rise of white racism, whose real aim was to justify the enslavement of the blacks, certain noted scholars denied that the Egyptians were black. They were pure white, such assert. But Herodotus saw them. They did not. Moreover what of the Negroid appearance of certain Egyptian rulers such as I have reproduced in Chapter Three of my Sex and Race, Vol. One? Other leading white scholars, however, are of the same opinion as Volney.
Volney wondered why Europe of his time with Africa so near knew so little about it. The answer is that with the rise of European power chiefly after the earlier Caesars, Africa lessened in importance until it became a land of fable and legend. The blacks and mixed bloods of the north-west part of the continent had a resurgence in the eighth century when the Moors invaded Europe but the rest remained unknown and almost forgotten.
This was true even of Egypt, which had the only remaining one of the Seven Wonders of the World. For instance, the Temple of Amen, most colossal structure of its kind ever built, Together with the adjoining buildings it surpassed in grandeur the Acropolis of Athens and the Foro Romano but was so buried by centuries of wind-blown sand that villagers lived in huts on the top of it entirely oblivious of the architectural marvels beneath their feet. As for the Sphinx all that was seen of its 194 feet length and its 66 feet height was the head and that was being cut off by the action of the sand.
Interest in Egypt was not revived until its invasion by Napoleon in 1798. As for the other buried and decayed civilizations further south as Meroe, Axum, Gida, Zymbabwe, Dhlo-Dhlo in Rhodesia, they were forgotten until our own times. More are being unearthed even now.
As late as Stanley's time, what was said of Africa was mostly wild imagination. It sounded very much like what the most ancient travellers said of parts of Europe and Asia they visited. Thomas Jefferson actually believed that in Africa the ourang-outang preferred the black woman to his own species. Long after Columbus the legend of Prester John of Ethiopia, "mightiest monarch on earth" persisted. His realm was said to extend to India as well as the Middle East. He "surpassed in riches all other potentates and no less than sixty kings were his vassals." Maps of Columbus' time and much later showed Ethiopia extending as far south as the Dominion of South Africa. The South Atlantic, the unknown sea over which Columbus sailed to reach the new world, was known as the Ethiopian Ocean. The Persian Gulf was first known as the Ethiopian Sea. Arabia was then a part of Ethiopia.
As for West Africa, Songhay with its capital, Timbuctoo, which flourished in 1500 A.D., and was more advanced than most countries of Western Europe, was known only to rare schollars. Other civilizations as the Mandingo Empire, Yoruba, and Ife were totally forgotten. Ghana, one of the greatest, had its name corrupted to Guinea. Then the world's richest producer of gold, its name was given to England's largest gold coin — the guinea. All that part of Africa came to be known as the Slave Coast.
Interest in Africa was not really revived until the nineteenth century when warships of the so-called Barbary States dominated in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and forced the United States to pay tribute to them to sail those waters; also the seizure of Algeria by France in 1830. But it wasn't until the 1870's that the interest of the West, and principally of the United States, was really captured. What did this was Stanley's search for Livingstone. Stanley's sensational dispatches to the New York Herald and the English press aroused the European powers to the immense potentialities of this undeveloped continent and a race for Africa began that reminds one of that for America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Stanley's tales and use of the term "Darkest Africa," made it appear a land of wildest savagery. It was not until the 1910's that a German scholar and explorer, Leo Frobenius, by his researches, restored humanity to the people of Africa, and changed the popular concept for those minds susceptible to change. In his principal work "Und Afrika sprach," translated into English as "The Voice of Africa," Frobenius urged:
"Let there be light!
"Light in Africa. In that portion of the globe to which the stalwart Anglo-Saxon Stanley gave the name of 'dark' and 'darkest'. Light upon the people of that continent whose children we are accustomed to regard as types of natural servility with no recorded history." But "The spell has ben broken. The buried treasures of antiquity again revisit the sun." He gives abundant proof of rich archaeologic and other finds, which since have been supplemented by the Mond expedition in the Sudan; the researches of Professor L. S. Leakey in East Africa; and Professors Broom and Dart in South Africa. Leakey discovered remains of the Boskop Man, a Bushman type of some 30,000 years ago; and Broom and Dart types that go still farther back. Their researches appear to bear out what an earlier anthropologist, Prichard, said in his "Physical History of Man," namely, "The primitive stock of men were probably Negroes and I know of no argument to be set on the other side." Europe, itself, when it was still joined to Africa, was tropical and was inhabited by Negroes. Abundant evidence of them have been found as far north as Russia. I have given in my other books, principally the first volume of Sex and Race, what leading archaeologists have said on this together with pictures of their finds.
As regards the title, "Africa's Gift to America," it is fitting to recall, also, that Africa played a role, perhaps the chief role in the earliest development of America — a period that antedates Columbus by many centuries, namely Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations. About 500 A.D. or earlier, Africans sailed over to America and continued to do so until the time of Columbus. This does not call for any particular stretch of the imagination. Africa is only 1600 miles distant from South America with islands in between among them St. Paul and Fernando Noronha. This also wasn't as great a feat as that of the Polynesians (also a Negroid people) who crossed the Pacific to Easter Island, off the coast of Chile.
Most United States archaeologists will deny that Negroes could possibly have been here before Columbus even though figures with pronounced Negro features appear on the most ancient American monuments. They say that the American Indian is of Mongolian stock, having come by way of the Bering Strait. This might be true of the North American Indians but it certainly is not of those that lived below the Rio Grande.
If we say that the Negro wasn't here before Columbus, why the typically Negro faces on the monuments? Deny that they were here and the only explanation left is that the American artist before Columbus dreamed up those features. Yes, one must either deny it or be forced to make an explanation as ridiculous as that made by Ignatius Donnelly in his book, "Atlantis," published in 1882. Donnelly's theory was that the New World was peopled from the western part of the Old, and in proof gives pictures of Negroes on the ancient monuments. He calls these "idols." But to square with the doctrine of "Negro inferiority," he says that these blacks were "slaves" brought from Africa since "Negroes are not a sea-going race." If the blacks were "idols" the only conclusion left is that ancient Americans worshipped their slaves!
However, most South and Central American archaelogists do agree the Negroes were here before Columbus. I have given in two of my earlier books quotations from these Latin-American scholars and will repeat some of them:
C. C. Marquez says, "The Negro type is seen in the most ancient Mexican sculpture ... Negroes figure frequently in the most remote traditions." Riva-Palacio, Mexican historian, says, "It is indisputable that in very ancient times the Negro race occupied our territory (Mexico) when the two continents were joined. The Mexicans recall a Negro god, Ixtilton, which means 'black-face'."
Colonel Braghine says in "The Shadow of Atlantis" that he saw in Ecuador a statuette of a Negro that is at least "20,000 years old ... Hitherto the ethnologists imagined that Negroes appeared in the New World only during our own epoch as slaves. Some statues of the Indian gods in Central America possess typical Negro features ..."
N. Leon says, "The almost extinction of the original Negroes during the time of the Spanish conquest and the memories of them in the most ancient traditions induce us to believe that the Negroes were the first inhabitants of Mexico.
Columbus in his "third Voyage" tells of seeing Negroes and when Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, he found Negroes in Panama. Peter Martyr, historian of the expedition, says "These were the first Negroes seen in the Indies." Balboa found them at war with the Indians and thought they had sailed over from "Ethiopia." A notable exception to the United States' archaeologists and their denial that Negroes were here before Columbus was the late Leo Wiener, professor of philology at Harvard University. In his three-volume work "Africa and the Discovery of America," he gives abundant proof that they were. He says, "The presence of Negroes before Columbus is proved by the representation of Negroes in American sculpture and design; by the occurence of a black nation at Darien early in the 16th Century and more specifically by Columbus' emphatic reference to Negro traders from Guinea (Ghana), who trafficked in gold alloy of precisely the same composition and bearing the same name (Guanin), is frequently referred to by early writers on Africa."
Professor Wiener, found that these Negro traders travelled as far north as New England. Their relics have been found in graves there, most notably a pipe with a Negro face.
It is even possible that Columbus had heard of the New World from Africans who had been brought to Spain and Portugal in his time. Furthermore, Columbus spent some time in West Africa just before he left Spain for America. The south-south-west direction he took might be a proof of this.
In the fifteenth century we find other of those periodic influxes of Africans into Europe which began under the Pharaohs. They came this time not as conquerors, like the Moors, but as slaves, principally in Portugal and Spain and as far north as England. The year is 1440 or 1442, fifty years before the discovery of the New World. Having proved so useful, it was inevitable that the Spaniards would bring them to the New World. In 1502 they are in the Caribbean. Their exportation continued until 1865 or later. In those three hundred and sixty-three years an estimated fifty millions were brought. Even a half of that would constitute a very substantial contribution. They were first brought to what is now the United States in 1512, and continued to arrive until 1861. In those three hundred and forty-nine years an estimated fifteen millions came. According to the testimony we shall present from many of the most prominent whites over those centuries the United States could not possibly have been the nation it became without them.
Elizabeth Lawson in her "Study Outline" of some of the early accomplishments of the African peoples names the following Rock painting (still preserved); rhythmic music; imaginative and poetic folklore. By the Bushmen of South Africa.
Domestication of animals by the Hottentots of South Africa.
Agriculture, and a system of exchange using cattle, sheep, or goats as the medium of circulation. By the Bantu of South Africa.
Gold and silver mining; trade in precious stones; building construction (houses and fortifications); pottery; metal work. By the peoples in the region of the Great Lakes.
Agricultural system, law, literature, music, natural sciences, medicine, and schooling system. In the kingdom of Songhay.
Cotton weaving in the Sudan (as early as the eleventh century).
Leaving consideration of separate portions of the continent and considering Africa as a whole, we may say that the Africans were at one time the greatest metal workers of the world they were the first to smelt iron and use the forge. They were masters of the art of basketry, pottery, and cutlery. They made many contributions to dancing, music, and sculpture. According to some authorities, the stimulus to Greek art came from Africa.
The Negroes brought art and sculpture to prehistoric Europe. They invented many musical instruments, and created sculpture in brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. They also had a glass factory.
Writing was known in Egypt and Ethiopia and to some extent elsewhere in Africa Over one hundred manuscripts of Ethiopian and Ethiopian-Arabic literature now exist. The Epic of the Sudan is considered by scholars as one of the world's greatest classics. The Africans also had a rich folklore and store of proverbs, and such tales as the Uncle Remus stories have grown out of this folklore..
Probably the most lasting and most important of the discoveries of ancient Africa was the smelting of iron, which Africa taught the rest of the world. Franz Boas says:
"It seems likely that at a time when the European was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented and adopted the art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this has meant for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, the saw, drill, spade, and hoe had to be chipped out of stone or had to be made of shell or hard wood, effective industry and work was not impossible, but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by smelting, and when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ore by smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe nor western Asia nor ancient China knew iron, and everything points to its introduction from Africa."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Africa's Gift to America"
by .
Copyright © 1989 HELGA M. ROGERS.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
