FROM MASTERS TO SLAVES: The black man’s history

Many a time, Africa has been disparaged as the continent which cannot breed innovation. Africa is thought to lag economically behind because Africans lack the innate ability to be creative. We have been led to believe that all important innovations and discoveries were made by whites. According to The Achievements of Black Civilisations, the basis of many of these western discoveries and inventions are improvements or copies of similar breakthroughs achieved by ancient black civilisations. It goes on to assert that the idea of white superiority against the black race is an artificially constructed thinking made for the purpose of domination of groups of people with selfish interest and not skin color. “The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Scandinavians, Germanics, Celts, Russians, Poles and many of these groups who claim “superiority” to Blacks and others, were from prehistoric times until the A.D.1500s much less advanced economically, culturally, intellectually and scientifically as well as socially than most Black nations, kingdoms and empires during that period.” The paper traces the roots of many mathematical, astronomical sciences, medical sciences in the ancient black civilisations of Khem (Egypt) and Kush (Sudan). These were later passed on by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Elamites (all originally Black civilisations), Greeks, Hebrews, Romans and Arabs. Paul Barton, in A History of Racism, wrote that by 800 B.C, when the Greeks were beginning to make their mark in Europe, they were overshadowed by powerful Black civilisations in the Mediterranean. There were the Black Maurites/Canaanites of Spain, the Western Mediterranean, the Egyptians in the Eastern Mediterannean, the Nubians, Black Sabeans/Ethiopians of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean and the Colchians of the Black Sea Region/Armenia. These Black nations are mentioned in the Greek Epics such as the Iliad and Homer’s works. For example, the binary system, the basis of computer programming, was an African invention still found in Yoruba oracle today. Gunpowder was an invention of Egyptians and Nigerians who used cola nut as a raw material. Steel was invented by Africans in ancient Tanzania, while the hydraulic pump for lifting water and irrigation was invented by Africans in Egypt. “Many ancient formulas in trigonometry, calculus and physics as well as chemistry (Khem Mysteries) came from the scientific discoveries of Blacks in Egypt and Nubia-Kush,” the history paper states. So if the black race had so glorious a past, how did it all go wrong? Part of the answer is found in the newfound military superiority the Europeans gained when they graduated from using swords to guns during war. Using gunpowder and guns, they managed to subjugate many African kingdoms although not very easily. African history is filled with examples where kingdoms fought bravely and defeated Europeans, their superior military power not withstanding. Such examples are Zulu, Ethiopia and the Ashanti. Also, black people were oppressed through the introduction of racism. Paul Barton writes that racism grew out of a system established in England and parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, when Africans/Black Moors began to fall out of favour from being a highly respected and accomplished people, to being reduced to slavery after Ferdinand and Isabella retook Spain from the Black Moors and Arabs. According to M. Gopinath of Dalit Sahitya Sangathane, in ancient times, a race of people related to Africans, Blacks called Naga, were spread from South Asia (also found from the South Pacific, through Indo-China to South India to the west to Cape Verde in Africa) all the way to West Africa. The Naga were a branch of this ancient Black race who were the first people to establish civilisation and culture around the world. The Naga were the people we call today Negro/ Negroid, African/ Africoid or loosely, The Black Race. According to Gopinath, the Blacks of India were invaded and their culture destroyed. Nomads from Eurasia spent hundreds of years working to destroy what was a magnificent Black civilisation that was spread from Eastern India all the way to Afghanistan and who were related to Blacks in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia etc. During the 1700s B.C. and after hundreds of years of fierce warfare, extermination and genocide along with religious trickery (such as entering Black religions, taking over their books and changing them), racism became tied to religions. Although the Blacks were not militarily conquered, they were psychologically and religiously conquered when their religious beliefs, writings and traditions were distorted by the invaders who established a system of “varna” or colour caste grading to maintain an apartheid-like system. This system continues today in India and it is the very fair skinned, high caste people who dominate South Asian aristocracy, while the Black/dark-skinned majority are at the middle to bottom. Meanwhile, the Bible was corrupted to justify slavery in the 1600s through the “Curse of Ham.” Slave trade by the Europeans in the West and the Semites in the East was fueled by theories on race, and racism itself developed and was used as an excuse to justify slavery. As a result, the dark ages for the black man began; in Asia, they were relegated to ‘untouchables’ for refusing to take up the new caste system that denigrated the former masters of the Naga Empire. In Africa, Europeans conquerors systematically destroyed the traditional African empires and looted what was left, setting the stage for colonial administrations and slave trade. The enslaved Africans in the Americas were treated like second class citizens. Interestingly the slave masters in America were the English and Irish immigrants who were former members of the serf and servant class in England and were tired of the segregation themselves. Therefore, the former slaves in Europe went to America and established a racist system that could allow them to plunder and snatch property from the indigenous Americans; the black aboriginals and mongoloid Indians (American Indians). They extended this system towards African slaves. This is how the black man fell from grace to grass – through not only subjugation, but also trickery, deliberate distortion and adulteration of his culture and religion, and later denigration of his race. Contact: kelvion@yahoo.com