Tagged: Ivan van Sertima

“A fossilised jawbone found poking out of the ground in Ethiopia has set the story of human origins back nearly half a million years to a time when early man shared the vast grassland plains of eastern Africa with a rich variety of prehistoric animals. Scientists have confirmed that the jawbone belongs to the Homo genus and, at 1.8 million years old, is more than 400,000 years older than the oldest previous fossil of the same group of early humans who eventually gave rise to our own species, Homo sapiens.”

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The truth cannot be hidden forever!! #AgeofAquarius

Source: Steve Connor. “African Jawbone Discovery Pushes Birth of Humanity Back By 400,000 Years.” The Independent. March 4, 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/african-jawbone-discovery-pushes-birth-of-humanity-back-by-400000-years-10085939.html.

“The Internet has the power to bring down regimes.” — A Member of Anonymous

The Black Pharaohs: Conquerors of Ancient Egypt [National Geographic, February 2008]

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A few months after this issue was published, I graduated with my Masters in Music Business from the University of Miami. For the first twenty-three years of my life, I had been taught by majority white teachers and professors and excelled academically as one of the few black males in my [honors and AP] classes, but I was never  once taught anything about Africa’s rich history and its overall contributions to civilization — even in my introductory African American Studies course in college!

It was until after leaving William Morris in April 2010 and trying to understand why racism existed in the world, that I started discovering the truth about the history of my ancestors. I am disgusted that I am more than $100,000.00 in student loan debt, only to be indoctrinated with a false and distorted version of history and beliefs (“European intellectual imperialism”) which ultimately perpetuates the myth and maintains the illusion of white superiority . This is a major reason why so many whites remain so ignorant today and why our education ranking compared with the rest of the world, continues to decline.

Like Lauryn said: “Unlearn, and let your mind be retaught.” We must liberate our minds, because a lot of facts have been intentionally withheld from us and as long as we are taught by whites a false, incomplete and/or limited version of history, this problem will never go away due to the fact that we will never be able to understand and see the problem for what it truly is. Just imagine if children were not taught that the history of the African started with slavery, but were instead taught the truth, like the fact that Africans “civilized” the Greeks and Romans and actually roamed the Americas before Columbus, it would automatically destroy any notion that the white race is innately superior because of the color of their skin or that this wicked and destructive group of people “saved” or “civilized” us.

Although these facts have been known before this magazine was published, six years have now elapsed and this pertinent history is still being omitted from the classroom. If the United States of America  is not racist and white Americans harbor no ill will towards us, why not teach the truth? Do you agree or am I misguided? If you agree, then you probably understand why I am advocating for a “war on racism” because we have ALL been, and still are being, lied to at the end of the day. Race is social and legal construct thta is “relentlessly relevant” in our society and one cannot try to be “colorblind” — you have to be “race conscious” to understand many of the problems that plague our nation today.

I have yet to read what the National Geographic had to say about the black pharaohs, but I decided to scan some of the images that accompanied the article so you can see that the ancient Egyptians and Nubians (as well as their Gods) were melanated peoples and were NOT white.

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Africans were in the Americas hundreds of years BEFORE Leif Ericson, Christopher Columbus or ANY European “discovered” America!

Stop celebrating false history. That’s why majority of the human race is ignorant today when it comes to “race.” We’ve all been brainwashed into believing the myth of white superiority, and it’s nothing but a BIG LIE! Please read any book by Ivan van Sertima, especially They Came Before Columbus.

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“Blacks are the KEY to world progress.”

People of African descent, including Blacks in America, are holding up world progress because they know little about their history and are bombarded with lies about their contributions to the world, according to Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, professor of African Studies at Rutgers University.

Van Sertima, author of “They Came Before Columbus,” last week urged more than 150 parents, community activists, students and educators to reject myths about Black inferiority and seek the truth about Africans and African Americans.

“Africans taught Europeans about the Caesarean section. Africans were doing cataract (eye) surgery long before they were doing it in America. The Africans gave us the concept of time and the 24-hour day. The Africans taught us monotheism, belief in one God.

“The Africans are the inventors of math, science, and geography. Almost every European/American invention can be traced back to principles and practices that were developed, first, in Africa,” he said.

It is because African Americans do not have this knowledge that they have become oppressed by every other group of people that have come to America, he said.

Europeans and others are so worried about Africans discovering true African history that they prevent it from being taught in public schools, they limit images of Africans to buffoons and clowns, and they squash attempts at Black liberation, Van Sertima said.

“The past is more important than the present,” he added, saying African Americans must return to the past to understand why they are in their current condition.

The article further states:

Van Sertima has written several books that seek to unravel the lost history of the African before the invasions of the Europeans, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Romans, and others.

He currently is on tour with a series of books on Egypt, including “Egypt: Child of Africa,” which claims that the ancient Egyptians were predominantly African.

Van Sertima, who has lectured at more than 100 universities across the country, is urging Blacks in America to rethink themselves.

He made several points he believes are necessary for Africans and African Americans to understand who they are.

“First, there are two Africans: one before the holocaust and one after the holocaust. Also, there is no holocaust as terrible as our holocaust,” he said, while being careful not to slight the Jewish holocaust.

It is important for Blacks to understand that their history does not begin when they were beaten, whipped, and tortured by Europeans, brought to America and made slaves, said Van Sertima.

African history begins long before the birth of Christ, he said, and Africans are the original people, “the creators of civilization as we know it today.” The world has advanced to a state of high technology because of the African, he said.

Several myths prevent Blacks from understanding who they are, including the notion that the Black race is inferior, he said.

“Race is a social concept,” he said.

“It is documented that the first human to evolve (was) African. All variations of people, including Europeans, Asians, Eskimos, etc. are formerly Africans who mutated because of variations in the World’s environment.

“The African went into Europe and became white,” he said.

Because of extremely cold temperatures, cloud cover, and lack of vitamin D provided by the sun, the African who went into Europe became what we know now as European, he said.

There are ecological imperatives that play a role in the different variations of the human, he said.

He charged that the superior/inferior race concept among Blacks, whites, Asians, etc. was created by Europeans who wanted to create a climate in which Europeans were seen as the superior race.

“Also, a Jew is not a race,” he added. “We must be careful about understanding the Black/Jewish conflict. There are Black and white Jews.”

Blacks also have a misconception about God and the African continent, he said.

“The ancient African gave us the concept of one God, but that one God had a male and a female principle. We’re still calling God ‘he’ when it’s he/she. You can’t have life without the he/she,” he said.

There’s so much rich information contained in this article, but to me, the title is even more powerful.

Source: http://emeagwali.com/special/black-scientists/black-inventors.html. 

“Egyptian civilization owed its inspiration to a black race.”

If you could stand on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Gizeh, looking south, you would feel your spirit walking down a street that took you back to the beginnings of man’s longest civilization. As far as you could see on the southern horizon would lie the conical tents of the gods, pitched upon the earth for more than sixty miles, pyramid after pyramid, row after row of royal tombs, skyscrapers of sheer stone, the blocks of which, if laid end to end, would circle the belly of the world. You could descend and walk unannounced into this city of the dead, for the doors of the tombs are standing open.

When Count Volney stood under the shadow of the great Sphinx in 1783 and looked at these man-made mountains stretching across the western desert, he was startled and confused. He had walked across the low flat country, dotted with villages of mud-brick huts, where stood the tale date palms. The floor of the land was a vivid green, and through the green ran an intricate network of irrigation canals. Brown- and black-skinned men of slender build and dark hair, mostly Negroid, “having a broad and flat nose, very short, a large flattened mouth….thick lips,” were seen along the banks of the canals, swaying up and down as they rhythmically lifted buckets attached to what looked like a wellsweep. These men were native Egyptians, with skins and features like many of the slaves of the French empire. How could things have been turned so upside down? How could history have been so violently reversed?

A strange guilt troubled Count Volney. It was so natural to think of blacks as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” When did this curse begin? “How we are astonished,” he later wrote, “when we reflect that to the race of Negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our contempt, we owe our arts, sciences…”

Fifteen years later and expedition under Napoleon marched into Egypt. The scientists of that expedition were equally astonished and impressed. From what they saw they concluded, as the Greeks had done a thousand years before, that Egyptian civilization owed its inspiration to a black race.

This rediscovery by Europeans of ancient Egypt, and the disclosures of a powerful Negro-African element in the ancestry of a civilization to which Europe owed so much, came as an embarrassment.  It came also at a most inopportune time. It threatened to explode a myth of innate black inferiority that was necessary to the peace of the Christian conscience in a Europe that was then prospering from the massive exploitation of black slaves. Africa was being systematically depopulated. Its empires had disintegrated. Its history had been buried. Its movement in step with other world civilizations had been abruptly halted. Only its most backward and inaccessible elements were left virtually untouched to bear false witness in later times to the scale and complexity of its evolution. 

Source: Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus. pg. 110-11. (1976).

even the Native Indians & Mexicans worshipped BLACK GODS. why don’t WE?

…Black gods and gods with Negroid features (for black is sometimes just a ceremonial color) may be found among American Indians. Another black god is the god of jewelers, Naualpilli. The Negroid features of the god were sculpted in green stone by the Mexicans, while his kinky hair was case in pure gold. There is also the god of traveling merchants, of whom we shall later speak, Ek-chu-ah, who enters Mayan mythology in the wake of the Mandingo.

It is hard for many to imagine the Negro-African figure being venerated as a god among the American Indians. He has always been represented as the lowliest of the low, at least since the era of conquest and slavery. His humiliation as a world figure begins, in fact, with the coming of Columbus. It is the very decade of his “discoveries” that the black and white Moors were laid low. The image of the Negro-African as a backward, slow and uninventive being is still with us. Not only his manhood and his freedom but even the memory of his cultural and technological achievements before the day of his humiliation seem to have been erased from the consciousness of history. Even in the thinking of Leo Wiener, M.D.W. Jeffreys and James Bailey, white scholars who have all sought to prove the Negro-African presence in pre-Columbian America, the black man still figures as an inferior.

Bailey, in his book The God-Kings and Titans, disclaims any indigenous base for African cultures before the Arabs and Romans. “That African culture, prior to the Arab and Roman gold-trade, was an independent African invention…is nonsense.” He sees them in ancient America simply as mercenary soldiers of the Phoenicians. Leo Wiener, the Harvard philologist, assumes that the great Mali empire of medieval West Africa owed all its refinements, even its animist ritual and magic, to the Arab-Islamic civilization. The Mandingo came to America before Columbus, he declares, but carrying another man’s cultural baggage. He sees the Negro-African as simply a conductor of Islamic cultural electricity. The South African anthropologist M.D.W. Jeffreys refers to the Negro in one of his articles as “a West African item,” and while he presents forceful arguments for his pre-Columbian presence, suggests that he came here as a porter and paddler for the Arabs. For all these men, therefore, the image of the Negro-African has not changed. They remain victims of the myth created and sustained for half a millennium, while appearing to strive manfully to dispel it. For them, before and after Columbus, the Negro is still a beggar in the wilderness of history, a porter, a paddler, a menial, a mercenary — the eternal and immutable slave.

If this had indeed been the case, why should the Olmecs erect huge monuments to him which dwarf all other human figures in the Americas? Why should some of the Negroid representations  be venerated among the Maya and Aztecs as deities? Why should the finest of American potters sculpt such vivid and powerful portraits of this contemptible man? Can we image modern black artists in Mozambique building colossal monuments to the Portuguese soldiers who clashed with the freedom fighters of Cabral? Or the South African whites, for that matter, erecting altars and temples to the garbage collectors or street cleaners of Pretoria? These contradictions do not appear as the glaring absurdities they really are unless a shift in consciousness occurs. Such a shift is required if we are to reconstruct the history of America and Africa during those periods in which these worlds and cultures are seen to collide and converge. We cannot see very far if we enter an ancient time with contemporary blinkers, even if our pathways into the past are illuminated by a hundred torches lit by the most recent archaeological discoveries. What is needed far more than new facts is a fundamentally new vision of history.

Source: Ivan Van Sertima. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. 1976. p.  29-31.

new reading: Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus

While on the G train yesterday, I lost Frances Cress-Welsing’s The Isis Papers!! I was so pissed off and what made it even more frustrating was that I’d just begun reading the last chapter concerning AIDS and her belief that it was created by the white race to further destroy descendants of Africa. So until Amazon sends me another copy, I have decided my next reading will be Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus — a fascinating book which discusses the “pre-Columbian African presence in the Americas.” (further reason why Columbus Day should not be celebrated!!) Throughout my reading, I will periodically post quotes from the book that I find informative.