The Downfall of the Jesuits
 US Jesuits agree to 166 million dollar sex abuse pay-out | |||
| 2011-03-26 16:20:00 | |||
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History of the Jesuits
Edmond Paris - The Secret History of Jesuits
Cusak.-.The.Black.Pope.-.A.History.of.the.Jesuits
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| The Nazi Pope |
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| Nazi Pope's Hitler Youth |
The King Alfred Plan
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1179.cfm
In the event of widespread, continuing and coordinated racial or civil distrubances in the United States of America, KING ALFRED, at the behest and discretion of the President, is to be put into action immediately.
Participating Federal Agencies
National Security Counsel (NSC)
Department of Justice (DOJ)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Departmant of Defense (DOD)
Federal Bureau of Investagation (FBI)
Department of Interior (DOI)
Federal Emergency Mgmt. Agency (FEMA)
Immigration Naturalization Service (INS)
Participating State Agencies
(Under Federal Jurisdiction)
National Guard Units
Reserve Units of the Army
Highway Patrol Agencies
State Police Agencies
State Emergency Mgmt. Agency (SEMA)
Disaster Relief & Cilvil Distrubance
Particpating County & Local Agencies
(Under Federal Jurisdiction)
County Police
Local Town & City Police
Even before 1954, when the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared unconstitutional separate educational and recreational facilities, racal unrest and discord had become very nearly a part of the American way of life. But that way of life was very repugant to most Americans. Since 1954, however, that unrest has resulted in the loss of life, limb, and property, and has cost the taxpayers of this nation tens of billions of dollars. And the end is not yet in sight. With Law Enforcement Agencies in this country continuing to excerise excessive force and murder of its So-called African-American citizenry. The statisics indicate that a violent confrontation is on the horizons.Why in fact given the recent uprisings in St.Louis and Cincinnati, it appears inevitable. This same injustice and violence has raised the tremendously grave question as to whether the races can ever live in peace with each other.
Each passing year and month has brought new intelligence that, despite new laws, programs passed or monies to alleviate the condition of the so-called Minority, the so-called Minority (African-Americans) is still not satisfied. Demonstration,rallies, sit-ins, marching and riotinghave become a part of the familar scence. Federal troops, State Police and National Guard Units have been called out in city after city across the land, and America\'s image as a world leader is severly damaged. Our enemies (U.S.A.\'s)
press closer seeking the advantage, possibly at a time during one of these outbreaks of violence. The Minority has adopted an almost military posture to gain its objectives, which are not clear to most Americans. It is expected, therefore, that , when those objectives are denied the Minority (So-Called African-Americans), racial war msut be considered inevitable. When that emergency comes, we must expect the total involvement of all 34 million members of the Minority, men , women and children, for once this project is launched, its goal is to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and indeed, the Free World.
Prelimianry Memo: Department of Interior
Under KING ALFRED the nation has been divided into 10 Regions[color=white:bb856c4a2a] (See »Map) [/color:bb856c4a2a]In case of a National Emergency or Civil Distrubance, Minority members will be evacuated from the cities by federalized national guard units, federal troops and state and local police agencies which have become federalized under Marshall Law or Executive Order. The Minority members will be transported using public, commerical or military transportation, and detained in nearby military interment centers, prisions or military installations units until a further course of action has been decided.');
INSERT INTO phpbb_posts_text (post_id, bbcode_uid, post_subject, post_text) VALUES('5600', 'da23c36cb8', '', 'The Plan
F. E. M. A. (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
The FEMA Gulag: SECRET CONCENTRATION CAMPS
The September issue of THE OSTRICH reprinted a story from the CBA BULLETIN which listed the following principal civilian concentration camps established in GULAG USA under the \"Rex \'84\" program: Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas; Ft. Drum, New York; Ft. Indian Gap, Pennsylvania; Camp A. P. Hill, Virginia; Oakdale, California; Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; Vandenberg AFB, California; Ft. Mc Coy, Wisconsin; Ft. Benning, Georgia; Ft.
Huachuca, Arizona; Camp Krome, Florida. The February OSTRICH printed a map of the expanding Gulag. Alhough this listing and map stirred considerable interest, the report was not new.
For at least 20 years, knowledgeable Patriots have been warning of these sinister plots to incarcerate dissidents opposing plans of the \"Elitist Syndicate\" for a totalitarian \"New World Order\". Indeed, the plot was recognized with the insidious encroachment of \"regionalism\" back in the 1960\'s. As early as 1968, the \"greatest land steal in history\" leading to global corporate socialism, was in a \"\"Master Land Plan\"\" for the United States by \"Executive Orders\" involving water resource regions, population movement and control, pollution control, zoning and land use, navigation and environmental bills, etc. Indeed, the real undercover aim of the so-called \"Environmental Rennaissance\" has been the abolition of private property.
All prelude to the total grab of the \"World Conservation Bank\", as THE OSTRICH has been reporting. The map on this page and the list of executive orders available for imposition of an \"emergency\" are from 1970s filesof the late Gen. \"P. A. Del Valle\'s\" ALERT, sent us by \"Merritt Newby\", editor of the now defunct AMERICAN CHALLENGE.
Wake up Americans!\" The Bushoviks have approved Gorbachev\'s imposition of \"Emergency\" to suppress unrest. Henry Kissinger and his clients hardly missed a day\'s profits in their deals with the butchers of Tiananmen Sqaure. Are you next?
SUBJECT: Executive Orders APPLICABLE EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The following \"Executive Orders\", now recorded in the Federal Register, and therefore accepted by Congress as the law of the land, can be put into effect at any time an emergency is declared:
10995--All communications media seized by the Federal Government.
10997--Seizure of all electrical power, fuels, including gasoline and minerals.
10998--Seizure of all food resources, farms and farm equipment.
10999--Seizure of all kinds of transportation, including your personal car, and control of all highways and
seaports.
11000--Seizure of all civilians for work under Federal supervision.
11001--Federal takeover of all health, education and welfare.
11002--Postmaster General empowered to register every man, woman and child in the U.S.A.
11003--Seizure of all aircraft and airports by the Federal Government.
11004--Housing and Finance authority may shift population from one locality to another. Complete integration.
11005--Seizure of railroads, inland waterways, and storage facilities.
11051--The Director of the Office of Emergency Planning authorized to put Executive Orders into effect in \"times of increased international tension or financial crisis\". He is also to perform such additional functions as the
President may direct.
A Dangerous Fact Not Generally Known
THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE ARTICLE 4 SECTION 4 OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. \"THE UNITED STATES SHALL GUARANTEE TO EVERY STATE IN THIS UNION A REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT, AND SHALLPROTECT EACH OF THEM AGAINST INVASION; AND ON APPLICATION OF THE LEGISLATURE, OR OF THE EXECUTIVE (WHEN THE LEGISLATURE CANNOT BE CONVENED) AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.\" \"REGIONAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE
REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT!\"
When Government gets out of hand and can no longer be controlled by the people, short of violent overthrow as in 1776, there are two sources of power which are used by the dictatorial government to keep the people in line:the Police Power and the Power of the Purse (through which the necessities of life can be withheld). And both of these powers are no longer balanced between the three Federal Branches, and between the Federal and the State and local Governments. These powers have been taken over, with the permission of the Federal Legislature and the State Governments, by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government and all attempts to reclaim that lost power have been defeated.
Stated simply: the dictatorial power of the Executive rests primarily on three basis: Executive Order 11490,
Executive Order 11647, and System which is operated through the new and all-powerful Office of Management
and Budget.
E. O. 11490 is a compilation of some 23 previous Executive Orders, signed by Nixon on Oct. 28, 1969, andoutlining emergency functions which are to be performed by some 28 Executive Departments and Agencies whenever the President of the United States declares a national emergency (as in defiance of an impeachment edict, for example). Under the terms of E. O. 11490, the President can declare that a national emergency exists and the Executive Branch can:
Take over all communications media
Seize all sources of power Take charge of all food resources
Control all highways and seaports Seize all railroads, inland waterways, airports, storage facilities Commandeer all civilians to work under federal supervision
Control all activities relating to health, education, and welfare Shift any segment of the population from one locality to another Take over farms, ranches, timberized properties
Regulate the amount of your own money you may withdraw from your bank, or savings and loan institution.
All of these and many more items are listed in 32 pages incorporating nearly 200,000 words, providing and absolute bureaucratic dictatorship whenever the President gives the word.
Executive Order 11647 provides the regional and local mechanisms and manpower for carrying out the provisions of E. O. 11490. Signed by Richard Nixon on Feb. 10, 1972, this Order sets up Ten Federal Regional Councils to govern Ten Federal Regions made up of the fifty still existing States of the Union.
Check out this book for the inside scoop on the \"secret\" Constitution.
SUBJECT: - \"The Proposed Constitutional Model\" Pages 595-621
Book Title - The Emerging Constitution
Author - Rexford G. Tugwell
Publisher - Harpers Magazine Press,Harper and Row
Dewey Decimal - 342.73 T915E
ISBN - 0-06-128225-10
Note Chapter 14
The 10 Federal Regions
REGION I: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont. Regional Capitol: Boston
REGION II: New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Virgin Island.
Regional Capitol: New York City
REGION III: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, District of Columbia.
Regional Capitol: Philadelphia
REGION IV: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee.
Regional Capitol: Atlanta
REGION V: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin.
Regional Capitol: Chicago
REGION VI: Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas.
Regional Capitol: Dallas-Fort Worth
REGION VII: Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska.
Regional Capitol: Kansas City
REGION VIII: Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming. Regional Capitol: Denver
REGION IX: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada.
Regional Capitol: San Fransisco
REGION X: Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho.
Regional Capitol: Seattle
Supplementing these Then Regions, each of the States is, or is to be, divided into subregions, so that Federal Executive control is provided over every community.
Then, controlling the bedgeting and the programming at every level is that politico-economic system known as
PPBS.
The President need not wait for some emergency such as an impeachment ouster. He can declare a National
Emergency at any time, and freeze everything, just as he has already frozen wages and prices. And the
Congress, and the States, are powerless to prevent such an Executive Dictatorship, unless Congress moves to
revoke these extraordinary powers before the Chief Executive moves to invoke them.
THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE THE INTENT AND PURPOSE OF [b:da23c36cb8] ARTICLE 4 SECTION 3[/b:da23c36cb8]. THERE IS NO PROVISION IN THIS SECTION OR THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES FOR FORMING A REGIONAL STATE OUT OF A GROUP OF STATES! FURTHER, THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE THE 9TH AND 10TH AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION!
By Proclaiming and Putting Into Effect Executive Order No. 11490, the President would put the United States under TOTAL MARTIAL LAW AND MILITARY DICTATORSHIP! The Guns Of The American People
Would Be Forcibly Taken!
__________________In the event of widespread, continuing and coordinated racial or civil distrubances in the United States of America, KING ALFRED, at the behest and discretion of the President, is to be put into action immediately.
Participating Federal Agencies
National Security Counsel (NSC)
Department of Justice (DOJ)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Departmant of Defense (DOD)
Federal Bureau of Investagation (FBI)
Department of Interior (DOI)
Federal Emergency Mgmt. Agency (FEMA)
Immigration Naturalization Service (INS)
Participating State Agencies
(Under Federal Jurisdiction)
National Guard Units
Reserve Units of the Army
Highway Patrol Agencies
State Police Agencies
State Emergency Mgmt. Agency (SEMA)
Disaster Relief & Cilvil Distrubance
Particpating County & Local Agencies
(Under Federal Jurisdiction)
County Police
Local Town & City Police
Even before 1954, when the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared unconstitutional separate educational and recreational facilities, racal unrest and discord had become very nearly a part of the American way of life. But that way of life was very repugant to most Americans. Since 1954, however, that unrest has resulted in the loss of life, limb, and property, and has cost the taxpayers of this nation tens of billions of dollars. And the end is not yet in sight. With Law Enforcement Agencies in this country continuing to excerise excessive force and murder of its So-called African-American citizenry. The statisics indicate that a violent confrontation is on the horizons.Why in fact given the recent uprisings in St.Louis and Cincinnati, it appears inevitable. This same injustice and violence has raised the tremendously grave question as to whether the races can ever live in peace with each other.
Each passing year and month has brought new intelligence that, despite new laws, programs passed or monies to alleviate the condition of the so-called Minority, the so-called Minority (African-Americans) is still not satisfied. Demonstration,rallies, sit-ins, marching and riotinghave become a part of the familar scence. Federal troops, State Police and National Guard Units have been called out in city after city across the land, and America\'s image as a world leader is severly damaged. Our enemies (U.S.A.\'s)
press closer seeking the advantage, possibly at a time during one of these outbreaks of violence. The Minority has adopted an almost military posture to gain its objectives, which are not clear to most Americans. It is expected, therefore, that , when those objectives are denied the Minority (So-Called African-Americans), racial war msut be considered inevitable. When that emergency comes, we must expect the total involvement of all 34 million members of the Minority, men , women and children, for once this project is launched, its goal is to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and indeed, the Free World.
Prelimianry Memo: Department of Interior
Under KING ALFRED the nation has been divided into 10 Regions[color=white:bb856c4a2a] (See »Map) [/color:bb856c4a2a]In case of a National Emergency or Civil Distrubance, Minority members will be evacuated from the cities by federalized national guard units, federal troops and state and local police agencies which have become federalized under Marshall Law or Executive Order. The Minority members will be transported using public, commerical or military transportation, and detained in nearby military interment centers, prisions or military installations units until a further course of action has been decided.');
INSERT INTO phpbb_posts_text (post_id, bbcode_uid, post_subject, post_text) VALUES('5600', 'da23c36cb8', '', 'The Plan
F. E. M. A. (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
The FEMA Gulag: SECRET CONCENTRATION CAMPS
The September issue of THE OSTRICH reprinted a story from the CBA BULLETIN which listed the following principal civilian concentration camps established in GULAG USA under the \"Rex \'84\" program: Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas; Ft. Drum, New York; Ft. Indian Gap, Pennsylvania; Camp A. P. Hill, Virginia; Oakdale, California; Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; Vandenberg AFB, California; Ft. Mc Coy, Wisconsin; Ft. Benning, Georgia; Ft.
Huachuca, Arizona; Camp Krome, Florida. The February OSTRICH printed a map of the expanding Gulag. Alhough this listing and map stirred considerable interest, the report was not new.
For at least 20 years, knowledgeable Patriots have been warning of these sinister plots to incarcerate dissidents opposing plans of the \"Elitist Syndicate\" for a totalitarian \"New World Order\". Indeed, the plot was recognized with the insidious encroachment of \"regionalism\" back in the 1960\'s. As early as 1968, the \"greatest land steal in history\" leading to global corporate socialism, was in a \"\"Master Land Plan\"\" for the United States by \"Executive Orders\" involving water resource regions, population movement and control, pollution control, zoning and land use, navigation and environmental bills, etc. Indeed, the real undercover aim of the so-called \"Environmental Rennaissance\" has been the abolition of private property.
All prelude to the total grab of the \"World Conservation Bank\", as THE OSTRICH has been reporting. The map on this page and the list of executive orders available for imposition of an \"emergency\" are from 1970s filesof the late Gen. \"P. A. Del Valle\'s\" ALERT, sent us by \"Merritt Newby\", editor of the now defunct AMERICAN CHALLENGE.
Wake up Americans!\" The Bushoviks have approved Gorbachev\'s imposition of \"Emergency\" to suppress unrest. Henry Kissinger and his clients hardly missed a day\'s profits in their deals with the butchers of Tiananmen Sqaure. Are you next?
SUBJECT: Executive Orders APPLICABLE EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The following \"Executive Orders\", now recorded in the Federal Register, and therefore accepted by Congress as the law of the land, can be put into effect at any time an emergency is declared:
10995--All communications media seized by the Federal Government.
10997--Seizure of all electrical power, fuels, including gasoline and minerals.
10998--Seizure of all food resources, farms and farm equipment.
10999--Seizure of all kinds of transportation, including your personal car, and control of all highways and
seaports.
11000--Seizure of all civilians for work under Federal supervision.
11001--Federal takeover of all health, education and welfare.
11002--Postmaster General empowered to register every man, woman and child in the U.S.A.
11003--Seizure of all aircraft and airports by the Federal Government.
11004--Housing and Finance authority may shift population from one locality to another. Complete integration.
11005--Seizure of railroads, inland waterways, and storage facilities.
11051--The Director of the Office of Emergency Planning authorized to put Executive Orders into effect in \"times of increased international tension or financial crisis\". He is also to perform such additional functions as the
President may direct.
A Dangerous Fact Not Generally Known
THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE ARTICLE 4 SECTION 4 OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. \"THE UNITED STATES SHALL GUARANTEE TO EVERY STATE IN THIS UNION A REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT, AND SHALLPROTECT EACH OF THEM AGAINST INVASION; AND ON APPLICATION OF THE LEGISLATURE, OR OF THE EXECUTIVE (WHEN THE LEGISLATURE CANNOT BE CONVENED) AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.\" \"REGIONAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE
REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT!\"
When Government gets out of hand and can no longer be controlled by the people, short of violent overthrow as in 1776, there are two sources of power which are used by the dictatorial government to keep the people in line:the Police Power and the Power of the Purse (through which the necessities of life can be withheld). And both of these powers are no longer balanced between the three Federal Branches, and between the Federal and the State and local Governments. These powers have been taken over, with the permission of the Federal Legislature and the State Governments, by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government and all attempts to reclaim that lost power have been defeated.
Stated simply: the dictatorial power of the Executive rests primarily on three basis: Executive Order 11490,
Executive Order 11647, and System which is operated through the new and all-powerful Office of Management
and Budget.
E. O. 11490 is a compilation of some 23 previous Executive Orders, signed by Nixon on Oct. 28, 1969, andoutlining emergency functions which are to be performed by some 28 Executive Departments and Agencies whenever the President of the United States declares a national emergency (as in defiance of an impeachment edict, for example). Under the terms of E. O. 11490, the President can declare that a national emergency exists and the Executive Branch can:
Take over all communications media
Seize all sources of power Take charge of all food resources
Control all highways and seaports Seize all railroads, inland waterways, airports, storage facilities Commandeer all civilians to work under federal supervision
Control all activities relating to health, education, and welfare Shift any segment of the population from one locality to another Take over farms, ranches, timberized properties
Regulate the amount of your own money you may withdraw from your bank, or savings and loan institution.
All of these and many more items are listed in 32 pages incorporating nearly 200,000 words, providing and absolute bureaucratic dictatorship whenever the President gives the word.
Executive Order 11647 provides the regional and local mechanisms and manpower for carrying out the provisions of E. O. 11490. Signed by Richard Nixon on Feb. 10, 1972, this Order sets up Ten Federal Regional Councils to govern Ten Federal Regions made up of the fifty still existing States of the Union.
Check out this book for the inside scoop on the \"secret\" Constitution.
SUBJECT: - \"The Proposed Constitutional Model\" Pages 595-621
Book Title - The Emerging Constitution
Author - Rexford G. Tugwell
Publisher - Harpers Magazine Press,Harper and Row
Dewey Decimal - 342.73 T915E
ISBN - 0-06-128225-10
Note Chapter 14
The 10 Federal Regions
REGION I: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont. Regional Capitol: Boston
REGION II: New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Virgin Island.
Regional Capitol: New York City
REGION III: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, District of Columbia.
Regional Capitol: Philadelphia
REGION IV: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee.
Regional Capitol: Atlanta
REGION V: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin.
Regional Capitol: Chicago
REGION VI: Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas.
Regional Capitol: Dallas-Fort Worth
REGION VII: Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska.
Regional Capitol: Kansas City
REGION VIII: Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming. Regional Capitol: Denver
REGION IX: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada.
Regional Capitol: San Fransisco
REGION X: Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho.
Regional Capitol: Seattle
Supplementing these Then Regions, each of the States is, or is to be, divided into subregions, so that Federal Executive control is provided over every community.
Then, controlling the bedgeting and the programming at every level is that politico-economic system known as
PPBS.
The President need not wait for some emergency such as an impeachment ouster. He can declare a National
Emergency at any time, and freeze everything, just as he has already frozen wages and prices. And the
Congress, and the States, are powerless to prevent such an Executive Dictatorship, unless Congress moves to
revoke these extraordinary powers before the Chief Executive moves to invoke them.
THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE THE INTENT AND PURPOSE OF [b:da23c36cb8] ARTICLE 4 SECTION 3[/b:da23c36cb8]. THERE IS NO PROVISION IN THIS SECTION OR THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES FOR FORMING A REGIONAL STATE OUT OF A GROUP OF STATES! FURTHER, THESE EXECUTIVE ORDERS GROSSLY AND FLAGRANTLY VIOLATE THE 9TH AND 10TH AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION!
By Proclaiming and Putting Into Effect Executive Order No. 11490, the President would put the United States under TOTAL MARTIAL LAW AND MILITARY DICTATORSHIP! The Guns Of The American People
Would Be Forcibly Taken!
Ta-Merri Glorious Light Meditation
Translation of the Hieroglyphic text of the Glorious Light Meditation
(from the book "Glorious Light Meditation" by Dr. Muata Ashby)
"Whosoever shall recite the words, here written,
with conscious awareness of Djehuty {mind with clear and keen intellect}
shall perform the rituals of sevenfold purification over 3 days {the seven psychospiritual centers}
which are to be performed in the Divine presence,
when this book is being read {studied, recited, remembered} (1)
And they shall make their position in a circle which is beyond them,
And their two eyes shall be focused upon themselves,
All their members shall be composed [relaxed, motionless]
And their steps shall not carry them away [from the place of meditation] (2)
Whoever among men shall recite [these] words
Shall visualize themselves as RA
On the day of his birth
And their awareness shall not become contracted
And his house shall never fall into decay
But shall endure in truth and righteousness
For eternity
INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE HIEROGLYPHIC TEXT
(1) -- Posture and Focus of Attention
Posture is one of the main components of the meditation practice. The text prescribes
a sitting position within a circle. Then it instructs that there should be a focusing of
the mind between the eyebrows. This area is also known as the sixth energy-consciousness
center. All members of the body, the arms, legs, etc. Should be motionless.
Posture: Be seated in a comfortable posture. You may create a circle figure in which to sit or
simply visualize that you are seated within a circle. See yourself at the center of the circle
which comprises the Sundisk of Ra, and see yourself as the source of all that is. The place you
use for meditation should be clean and free from drafts, dimly lit (preferably use a candle to
symbolize the innerlight. Incense may be used also. Use a mat, sitting comfortably with back
straight. This special area should be used only for meditation and you should practice at the
same time daily.
[Meditation postures: cross legged, half or full lotus sitting position;]
Introduction to the Seven-fold Cleansing; the Serpent Power and the Teaching of the Life Force:
(pg. 124)
The concept of the Serpent Power, a Life Force contained in the subtle body of a human being that
operates through the nervous system of the subtle spine and which has seven primary foci of energy
consciousness comes down through Ancient Kamitan history from the Great Sphinx to the teaching of
the Asarian Resurrection and is iconographically expressed central shaft of the balance scales of
Maat, in the pillar of Asar and in the Caduceus of Djehuti by the divinities Asar (his backbone)
and the two serpent goddesses Aset and Nebthet. The movement of the Serpent Power/Life Force is
described by the special text (see book "The Serpent" by Muata Ashby). The Sefekh Ba Ra (energy
centers) or "seven souls of Ra" wherein Life Force energy and consciousness are transformed from
subtle to gross energy for use by the body are seven in number.
Continuation of the Translated text of the Glorious Light Meditation
The words of power of the scripture and the
chant are a special protection {against
unrighteousness and negativity}. Through the
words of power "Nuk Hekau" { I am the Divinity
of the Word} the divinity purifies in the two
months of Ra {phenomenal/transcendental} gods
and goddesses such that "Nuk Ra Akhu" {I am Ra's
Glorious Spirit [Light]}. As Ra, I move in the
evening and the day as a shining Spirit {living
(in light) and not in death (darkness). Enemies
of the light {Unrigheousness, darkness, ignorance,
vices, etc} fall because Nuk Ba Ra Hekau {I am the
soul of Ra, the Divine Word, that transforms (into
the Shining Spirit [The Glorious Light])
INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE HIEROGLYPHIC TEXT
(2) -- Words of power
The papyrus instructs that after having read and recited the story one should assume a specific posture
and adopt a specific visualization. The story of the papyrus (Destruction of Humankind) is as follows:
Ra (Supreme being) created the world and human beings.
After many years they became arrogant and spoke evilly
about him. They forgot about his greatness and about their
own origins. Ra decided to punish them for their egoism and
sinful behaviour and so he sent out his eye of destruction ['death star', causing the 'flood'...KwameD's emphasis]
in the form of Hetheru to kill all sinners. He then recalled
his eye before it could kill all human beings and then he
retreated to heaven where he traverses in the form of the
sun and installed his vicar to watch over the world during
the night in the form of the moon.
SUMMARY OF THE TEACHING OF THE GLORIOUS LIGHT MEDITATION
(pg. 140)
Formal meditation in Sema (Yoga) consists of some basic elements: Posture, Sound (chanting words
of power), Visualization, Rhythmic Breathing (calm, steady breath). The instructions, translated
from the original hieroglyphic text contain the basic elements for formal meditation.
Basic Instructions for the Glorious Light Meditation System
Given in the Tomb of Seti I
(c. 1350 B.C.E.)
1. To be practised by clergy and lay alike
2. Listen to the mystical teaching in the myth of Hetheru and Djehuty
3. Be purified physically by proper hygiene (with Nile flood water (cleanest); wear proper clothing
4. Be purified by Maat (righteousness, truth, non-violence, non-stealing, non-killing etc.)
5. Sevenfold Cleansing for 3 days - Serpent power - transcend the 3 forms of mental expression
6. Posture and focus of attention - make the body still, concentrate on yourself
7. Words of power-chant
Nuk Hekau (I am the word itself - that purifies)
Nuk Ra Akhu (I am Ra's Glorious Shinning Spirit - Divine Light)
Nuk Hekau (I am the God who creates through Sound)
8. Visualization - see yourself in the center of the Sundisk (circle of Ra); see yourself as Ra (Mystic Union)
__________________________________________________ ________________________________________
EGYPTIAN YOGA VOLUME 1
DR MUATA ASHBY (this book is full of interesting info)
Pg 144
Sefekh Ba Ra (The Seven Souls of Ra) or Sefekh Uadjit (Seven Serpent Goddesses)
The 7 Energy Centers
1) SEFEKHT - Corresponds to the first energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Muladhara Chakra)
Also known as Sheshat, it is the root center (chakra) which is located at the base of the spine
2) TEKH - Corresponds to the second energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Swadhishtan Chakra)
It is in the area of the organs of procreation whiere, if controlled by the higher centers, cosmic
energy may be absorbed and transmuted to create more than just physical offspring.
3) AB(OB) -Correcponds to the third energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Manipura Chakra)
Its location is in the solar plexus.
4) KHEPER - Corresponds the the fourth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Anahata Chakra)
Its location is at the heart
5) SHEKHEM - Corresponds to the fifth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Vishudi Chakra)
It is the throat chakra, the Chakra of Medu Neter (divine speech).
6) MER - Corresponds to the sixth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Ajna Chakra)
It is the third eye, the level of intuitive wisdom that does not require "thinking or mind process".
7) IKH - Corresponds to the seventh energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Sahasrara Chakra)
It is the energy consciousness level where the dualistic mind symbolized by Apophis and the "life giving
fire" (primal energies), becomes united into one whole.
Egyptian Yoga Volume 1 Pgs 153-154
Psychic Powers
Psychic powers are any for mf mental achievement and they may or may not be related to spiritual achievement. The attainment of a college degree, for example, is a psychic power but it is done for worldly achievement (magic). The development of psychic powers for spiritual attainment require purity of heart (a mind which is free from passionate desire for worldly objects or achievements). All psychic powers, however, require some level of mental concentration in order to attain them. The ability to concentrate may be improved through practice of mental concentration exercises, meditation and practicing the virtues.
Forgiveness is a most important psychic power. The ability to forgive one's self and others for one's mistakes is essential. There will be many "failures" on the spiritual path. These are merely tests of help strengthen one's resolve and to raise consciousness and wisdom. If we take life (relative reality) so hard and forget the greater picture (absolute reality), we because preoccupied and un-forgiving. Bitterness and mental unrest become constant companions and higher spiritual evolution becomes impaired. Life becomes a constantly miserable experience in which there is always fault with something, therefore mental peace is seldom, if ever, possible.
Introspection and self analysis are good ways to discern one's motives and actions. Only you can decide if you acted on the basis of the lower self (SET, emotion, ego, body desires, guilt and fear) or if you acted out of the BA, the higher self (HERU, Maat, light, righteousness).
One of the greatest psychic powers is to be able to control one's emotions. It is said emotions are great servants but poor masters because intense emotions cloud the thinking process. Emotionally based actions usually promote detrimental results in which one becomes further embroiled in unwanted situations. These unwanted situations, when dealt with again in an emotional mammer will lead to further entanglements in the world of relative reality. Most people live in this way, acting and reacting based on their uncontrolled mental state which produces a cycle of alternating pleasurable or painful situations, both of which lead to mental agitation (unrest).
Patience is another important psychic power to develop. Patience is necessary for the task of spiritual growth, since it may take years to correct negative subconscious thought patterns learned in this life or in previous lives.
The Highest Psychic Power
Proper sublimation of the Life Force which is developed from the sexual energy center can increase the creative power if used for MAAT. When directed to the divine, psychic power can lead to union with the divine, NETER. This union may be seen in the Egyptian principles of: Heru and Set, Asar and Aset, Min and Hetheru, the Sun and the Moon as well as the East Indian deities: Krishna and Radha, Shiva and Shakti (Parvati), Ganesha and Siddhi. This union also represents the marriage of cosmic energy and earth energy (Spirit and Body). Both energies are of the same nature and differ only in their polarity. This union also represents the marriage of cosmic energy and earth energy (Spirit and Body). Both energies are of the same nature and differ only in their polarity. This, when they are united, they revert to their primordial state which is beyond polarity. The earth energy (Geb) rises from the base of the spine and reunites with heaven (Nut). When this occurs, the energy consciousness center at the crown of the head opens and one becomes anointed with the Life Force energy produced from the union of the male principle and the female principle. This is the highest psychic power, where one becomes an anointed one.
The elephant deity and faculty, "Ganesha", of Indian Hindu mythology symbolizes the awakening of sexual fire (the fire that urges us to live and endure) and spiritual ideals, and also, the opening of the way, creating auspiciousness in one's spiritual discipline. Invoking Ganesha enables one to attain peace of mind for meditation. The attainment of what Ganesha symbolizes are Siddhis or supernatural powers. Ganesha is one of the presiding deities at tantric rituals and is invoked before any spiritual or worldly undertaking. In the Egyptian system, the deity Anpu fills the role of "Opener of the Way". Geb, Min, and Asar are usually represented as the symbols of fertility and erectile power.
The Indian god Ganesha, with an erectile phallus and his consort, Siddhi who holds his penis with her right hand. Psychic powers are "given" through the sexual organs, through the development of sexual energy.
(from the book "Glorious Light Meditation" by Dr. Muata Ashby)
"Whosoever shall recite the words, here written,
with conscious awareness of Djehuty {mind with clear and keen intellect}
shall perform the rituals of sevenfold purification over 3 days {the seven psychospiritual centers}
which are to be performed in the Divine presence,
when this book is being read {studied, recited, remembered} (1)
And they shall make their position in a circle which is beyond them,
And their two eyes shall be focused upon themselves,
All their members shall be composed [relaxed, motionless]
And their steps shall not carry them away [from the place of meditation] (2)
Whoever among men shall recite [these] words
Shall visualize themselves as RA
On the day of his birth
And their awareness shall not become contracted
And his house shall never fall into decay
But shall endure in truth and righteousness
For eternity
INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE HIEROGLYPHIC TEXT
(1) -- Posture and Focus of Attention
Posture is one of the main components of the meditation practice. The text prescribes
a sitting position within a circle. Then it instructs that there should be a focusing of
the mind between the eyebrows. This area is also known as the sixth energy-consciousness
center. All members of the body, the arms, legs, etc. Should be motionless.
Posture: Be seated in a comfortable posture. You may create a circle figure in which to sit or
simply visualize that you are seated within a circle. See yourself at the center of the circle
which comprises the Sundisk of Ra, and see yourself as the source of all that is. The place you
use for meditation should be clean and free from drafts, dimly lit (preferably use a candle to
symbolize the innerlight. Incense may be used also. Use a mat, sitting comfortably with back
straight. This special area should be used only for meditation and you should practice at the
same time daily.
[Meditation postures: cross legged, half or full lotus sitting position;]
Introduction to the Seven-fold Cleansing; the Serpent Power and the Teaching of the Life Force:
(pg. 124)
The concept of the Serpent Power, a Life Force contained in the subtle body of a human being that
operates through the nervous system of the subtle spine and which has seven primary foci of energy
consciousness comes down through Ancient Kamitan history from the Great Sphinx to the teaching of
the Asarian Resurrection and is iconographically expressed central shaft of the balance scales of
Maat, in the pillar of Asar and in the Caduceus of Djehuti by the divinities Asar (his backbone)
and the two serpent goddesses Aset and Nebthet. The movement of the Serpent Power/Life Force is
described by the special text (see book "The Serpent" by Muata Ashby). The Sefekh Ba Ra (energy
centers) or "seven souls of Ra" wherein Life Force energy and consciousness are transformed from
subtle to gross energy for use by the body are seven in number.
Continuation of the Translated text of the Glorious Light Meditation
The words of power of the scripture and the
chant are a special protection {against
unrighteousness and negativity}. Through the
words of power "Nuk Hekau" { I am the Divinity
of the Word} the divinity purifies in the two
months of Ra {phenomenal/transcendental} gods
and goddesses such that "Nuk Ra Akhu" {I am Ra's
Glorious Spirit [Light]}. As Ra, I move in the
evening and the day as a shining Spirit {living
(in light) and not in death (darkness). Enemies
of the light {Unrigheousness, darkness, ignorance,
vices, etc} fall because Nuk Ba Ra Hekau {I am the
soul of Ra, the Divine Word, that transforms (into
the Shining Spirit [The Glorious Light])
INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE HIEROGLYPHIC TEXT
(2) -- Words of power
The papyrus instructs that after having read and recited the story one should assume a specific posture
and adopt a specific visualization. The story of the papyrus (Destruction of Humankind) is as follows:
Ra (Supreme being) created the world and human beings.
After many years they became arrogant and spoke evilly
about him. They forgot about his greatness and about their
own origins. Ra decided to punish them for their egoism and
sinful behaviour and so he sent out his eye of destruction ['death star', causing the 'flood'...KwameD's emphasis]
in the form of Hetheru to kill all sinners. He then recalled
his eye before it could kill all human beings and then he
retreated to heaven where he traverses in the form of the
sun and installed his vicar to watch over the world during
the night in the form of the moon.
SUMMARY OF THE TEACHING OF THE GLORIOUS LIGHT MEDITATION
(pg. 140)
Formal meditation in Sema (Yoga) consists of some basic elements: Posture, Sound (chanting words
of power), Visualization, Rhythmic Breathing (calm, steady breath). The instructions, translated
from the original hieroglyphic text contain the basic elements for formal meditation.
Basic Instructions for the Glorious Light Meditation System
Given in the Tomb of Seti I
(c. 1350 B.C.E.)
1. To be practised by clergy and lay alike
2. Listen to the mystical teaching in the myth of Hetheru and Djehuty
3. Be purified physically by proper hygiene (with Nile flood water (cleanest); wear proper clothing
4. Be purified by Maat (righteousness, truth, non-violence, non-stealing, non-killing etc.)
5. Sevenfold Cleansing for 3 days - Serpent power - transcend the 3 forms of mental expression
6. Posture and focus of attention - make the body still, concentrate on yourself
7. Words of power-chant
Nuk Hekau (I am the word itself - that purifies)
Nuk Ra Akhu (I am Ra's Glorious Shinning Spirit - Divine Light)
Nuk Hekau (I am the God who creates through Sound)
8. Visualization - see yourself in the center of the Sundisk (circle of Ra); see yourself as Ra (Mystic Union)
__________________________________________________ ________________________________________
EGYPTIAN YOGA VOLUME 1
DR MUATA ASHBY (this book is full of interesting info)
Pg 144
Sefekh Ba Ra (The Seven Souls of Ra) or Sefekh Uadjit (Seven Serpent Goddesses)
The 7 Energy Centers
1) SEFEKHT - Corresponds to the first energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Muladhara Chakra)
Also known as Sheshat, it is the root center (chakra) which is located at the base of the spine
2) TEKH - Corresponds to the second energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Swadhishtan Chakra)
It is in the area of the organs of procreation whiere, if controlled by the higher centers, cosmic
energy may be absorbed and transmuted to create more than just physical offspring.
3) AB(OB) -Correcponds to the third energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Manipura Chakra)
Its location is in the solar plexus.
4) KHEPER - Corresponds the the fourth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Anahata Chakra)
Its location is at the heart
5) SHEKHEM - Corresponds to the fifth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Vishudi Chakra)
It is the throat chakra, the Chakra of Medu Neter (divine speech).
6) MER - Corresponds to the sixth energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Ajna Chakra)
It is the third eye, the level of intuitive wisdom that does not require "thinking or mind process".
7) IKH - Corresponds to the seventh energy-consciousness center (Indian-Sanskrit: Sahasrara Chakra)
It is the energy consciousness level where the dualistic mind symbolized by Apophis and the "life giving
fire" (primal energies), becomes united into one whole.
Egyptian Yoga Volume 1 Pgs 153-154
Psychic Powers
Psychic powers are any for mf mental achievement and they may or may not be related to spiritual achievement. The attainment of a college degree, for example, is a psychic power but it is done for worldly achievement (magic). The development of psychic powers for spiritual attainment require purity of heart (a mind which is free from passionate desire for worldly objects or achievements). All psychic powers, however, require some level of mental concentration in order to attain them. The ability to concentrate may be improved through practice of mental concentration exercises, meditation and practicing the virtues.
Forgiveness is a most important psychic power. The ability to forgive one's self and others for one's mistakes is essential. There will be many "failures" on the spiritual path. These are merely tests of help strengthen one's resolve and to raise consciousness and wisdom. If we take life (relative reality) so hard and forget the greater picture (absolute reality), we because preoccupied and un-forgiving. Bitterness and mental unrest become constant companions and higher spiritual evolution becomes impaired. Life becomes a constantly miserable experience in which there is always fault with something, therefore mental peace is seldom, if ever, possible.
Introspection and self analysis are good ways to discern one's motives and actions. Only you can decide if you acted on the basis of the lower self (SET, emotion, ego, body desires, guilt and fear) or if you acted out of the BA, the higher self (HERU, Maat, light, righteousness).
One of the greatest psychic powers is to be able to control one's emotions. It is said emotions are great servants but poor masters because intense emotions cloud the thinking process. Emotionally based actions usually promote detrimental results in which one becomes further embroiled in unwanted situations. These unwanted situations, when dealt with again in an emotional mammer will lead to further entanglements in the world of relative reality. Most people live in this way, acting and reacting based on their uncontrolled mental state which produces a cycle of alternating pleasurable or painful situations, both of which lead to mental agitation (unrest).
Patience is another important psychic power to develop. Patience is necessary for the task of spiritual growth, since it may take years to correct negative subconscious thought patterns learned in this life or in previous lives.
The Highest Psychic Power
Proper sublimation of the Life Force which is developed from the sexual energy center can increase the creative power if used for MAAT. When directed to the divine, psychic power can lead to union with the divine, NETER. This union may be seen in the Egyptian principles of: Heru and Set, Asar and Aset, Min and Hetheru, the Sun and the Moon as well as the East Indian deities: Krishna and Radha, Shiva and Shakti (Parvati), Ganesha and Siddhi. This union also represents the marriage of cosmic energy and earth energy (Spirit and Body). Both energies are of the same nature and differ only in their polarity. This union also represents the marriage of cosmic energy and earth energy (Spirit and Body). Both energies are of the same nature and differ only in their polarity. This, when they are united, they revert to their primordial state which is beyond polarity. The earth energy (Geb) rises from the base of the spine and reunites with heaven (Nut). When this occurs, the energy consciousness center at the crown of the head opens and one becomes anointed with the Life Force energy produced from the union of the male principle and the female principle. This is the highest psychic power, where one becomes an anointed one.
The elephant deity and faculty, "Ganesha", of Indian Hindu mythology symbolizes the awakening of sexual fire (the fire that urges us to live and endure) and spiritual ideals, and also, the opening of the way, creating auspiciousness in one's spiritual discipline. Invoking Ganesha enables one to attain peace of mind for meditation. The attainment of what Ganesha symbolizes are Siddhis or supernatural powers. Ganesha is one of the presiding deities at tantric rituals and is invoked before any spiritual or worldly undertaking. In the Egyptian system, the deity Anpu fills the role of "Opener of the Way". Geb, Min, and Asar are usually represented as the symbols of fertility and erectile power.
The Indian god Ganesha, with an erectile phallus and his consort, Siddhi who holds his penis with her right hand. Psychic powers are "given" through the sexual organs, through the development of sexual energy.
The African Background of Medical Science
January 05 2000
A special feature by Charles Finch, M.D. Chairman, Dept. of International Medicine, The Morehouse School of Medicine
It has become increasingly clear that traditional African cultures and civilizations knew and accomplished much more than has traditionally been assumed. Even after we've "restored" ancient Egypt - a civilization that was the fountainhead of science - to its true and natural place on African soil as an African creation, there is yet a profound reluctance to admit that Africa contributed anything of substance to world science.
In this article, the author hopes to show that traditional African physicians evolved effective - even sophisticated - diagnostic and therapeutic modalities in medicine which belie the notion that Africa was without a medical science.
Just as any discussion of the achievements of Western medicine harkens back to Hippocrates and Galen, so any discussion of African medical achievements harkens back to ancient Egypt. Newsome, among others, has shown what a debt Greek medicine owed to the priest-physicians of Egypt.(1) Not only was the most important Greek healing deity, Asclepios, identified with the legendary Egyptian physician-architect-aphorist Imhotep but Hippocratic therapeutics had direct antecedents in Egyptian medicine. The city-state of Athens used to import Egyptian physicians, as did most of the kingdoms of the Near East, and in the Odyssey, Homer says, "In medical knowledge, Egypt leaves the rest of the world behind."(2)
Like all African medicine, Egyptian medicine has baffled scholars because of the complete interpenetration of "magico-spiritual" and "rational" elements. Mostly, this magico-spiritual aspect has been downplayed or belittled. However, at least one researcher concedes that healing, being a complicated psychic as well as physical process, may be amenable to an approach that touches that hidden area of the psyche beyond the reach of rational therapy.(3) Even modern medicine concedes that as much as 60% of illness has a psychic base and indeed, the well-known "placebo" effect of modern pharmaco-medicine arises from this.(4) We moderns like to deride this magico-spiritual medicine but it can and does produce startling results that we do not understand.
The Egyptians were writing medical textbooks as early as 5,000 years ago.(5) This indicates not only a mature civilization but also a long period of medical development. Out of the hundreds and thousands of medical papyri that must have been written, only 10 have come down to us, the most important being the Ebers and Edwin Smith Papyri. These 10 papyri form the basis of most of what Egyptologists know about Egyptian medicine. It has been affirmed, however, that much of the training and instruction of the healing priests must have been orally transmitted, as it is in the rest of Africa.(6) It is likely, therefore, that we have only a partial grasp of the true scope of Egyptian medical knowledge. Moreover, like their counterparts in the rest of Africa, the Egyptian priest-physicians often kept their best knowledge secret.
Egyptian physicians were instructed in the "per ankh" or "house of life" which served as a university, library, medical school, clinic, temple, and seminary. The numerous Greek philosophers who studied in Egypt, such as Pythagorous, Thales, and Plato, must have spent their time in a per ankh. In these centers of learning, there was no sharp demarcation between the fields of study; religion, philosophy, science, astronomy, mathematics, music, and hieroglyphics were all part of the same species of knowledge and were reflected in one another.
It is of interest that the Egyptians were alone among the nations of antiquity in the development of specialty medicine. In the Old Kingdom, the diseases of each organ were under the care of a specialist. In the later epochs, the specialists disappeared as the Egyptian physician began to function as a generalist. However, during Ptolemaic times, specialization came back into the vogue, probably as a result of renewed interest in the archaic culture. Not until the 20th century did anything comparable in the sphere of medicine develop. Contemporary doctors are accustomed to believing that modern specialty medicine resulted from a progressive evolution of medical techniques and knowledge, hardly realizing that it is a throw back to the earliest form of Egyptian medical practice.
A study of ancient Egyptian diagnostic methods reads disconcertingly like a modern textbook on physical diagnosis. A physician summoned to examine a patient would begin with a careful appraisal of the patient's general appearance. This would be followed by a series of questions to elicit a description of the complaint. The color of the face and eyes, the quality of nasal secretions, the presence of perspiration, the stiffness of the limbs or abdomen, and the condition of the skin were all carefully noted. The physician was also at pains to take cognizance of the smell of the body, sweat, breath, and wounds. The urine and feces were inspected, the pulse palpated and measured, and the abdomen, swellings, and wounds probed and palpated. The pulse taking is worth noting because it indicates that the Egyptians knew of its circulatory and hemodynamic significance. Percussion of the abdomen and chest was performed and certain functional tests we still use today were done, i.e., the coughing test for hernia detection; the extension-flexion maneuver of the legs to test for a dislocated lumbar vertebra. Sometimes, the case required more than one consultation and the physician might, as is done today, embark on a "therapeutic trial" to ascertain the efficacy of treatment. It also seems that the Egyptians practiced a form of socialized medicine. All physicians were employees of the state and medical care was available to everyone.(7)
The extant medical papyri show us that the Egyptians had quite an extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology. They understood the importance of pulsation and - 4500 years before Harvey - knew something of the structure and function of the cardiovascular system. They knew that the heart was the center of this system, had names for all the major vessels, knew the relation between heart and lung, and knew the distribution of the vessels through the limbs.(8) They had names for the brain and meninges (the covering of the brain and spinal cord) and also seem to have known the relation between the nervous system and voluntary movements. In addition, the ureters (the connections between the kidneys and the bladder) were known and named. Most writers state that the Egyptians’ anatomical knowledge while relatively sophisticated, was, by modern standards, rudimentary. They aver, for example, that the Egyptians attached no special significance to the brain.(9) But at least one researcher, utilizing sources entirely different from the papyri, contradicts this notion, asserting that their knowledge of neuroanatomy in particular was as detailed and advanced as that in modern times.(10)
The Egyptians were well-versed in many pathological syndromes. The identification of a disease syndrome necessitates acute and painstaking clinical observation, often over many years, and many of the ones described in the medical papyri are known today. Egyptian physicians understood the origin of paraplegia and paralysis from spinal cord injuries and recognized the traumatic origin of neurological symptoms such as deafness, urinary incontinence, and priapism. They described many syndromes of cardiac origin. They knew that excess blood in the heart and lungs was pathological which is consistent with what we know about congestive heart failure today. They also seem to have recognized the significance of heart palpitations and arrhythmias and gave a rather precise definition of angina pectoris:
"If thou examinest a man for illness in his cardia and he has pains in his arms, in his breast, and on one side of his cardia...it is death threatening him."(ll)
The modern description of angina pectoris can hardly improve upon this. The phrase seen in the Ebers Papyrus, "belly too narrow for food," seems to indicate an esophageal or stomach stricture perhaps from an inflammatory or ulcerating process. Egyptian physicians also knew that a weak heart adversely affected the liver, calling to mind the pathological enlargement of the liver which we know to be due to heart failure. Faintness due to a "dumb heart" was described which seems to be an allusion to a Stokes-Adams attack.(12) It is evident that the ancient Egyptian physicians had a fundamental grasp of the pathophysiology of many of the syndromes we know today.
Perhaps the most remarkable document among the medical papyri is the surgical Edwin Smith Papyrus, a compendium of Egyptian anatomical knowledge and surgical methods. It is in this papyrus that the remarkable descriptions of the traumatic surgical lesions and their treatment are found. We also find that the priest-physicians also recognized the signs and symptoms of sciatica, the sharp pain radiating down the leg caused by nerve compression in the lower spinal cord. Like many other peoples in Africa and the rest of the world, the Egyptians practiced trephination. (13) This operation, the forerunner of neurosurgery, involves boring a hole through the skull to the outer covering of the brain. This was done to remove fragments from a skull fracture compressing the brain, to treat epilepsy, or to relieve chronic headache. Today in Africa there are people who have undergone this operation with no apparent ill effects and there are skulls from ancient Egyptian graves with definite signs of healing around the trephination site so it is clear that patients survived this operation.
As is seen very commonly in Africa, there was a separate guild of bonesetters in Egypt who treated fractures and dislocations. These specialists devised a completely effective method for reducing collar bone fractures which Hippocrates later used. (14) The Edwin Smith Papyrus also describes maneuvers for reducing dislocated jaws and shoulders. Long bone fractures were immobilized with tight splints and nasal fractures were treated by the insertion of stiff nasal packings into the affected nostril, a method also used today for uncomplicated nasal fractures.
The Egyptians had perhaps 3-4 thousand years of experience dissecting and bandaging mummies and this must have had beneficial effects on surgical technique. They had an array of knives and scalpels to excise tumors and drain abscesses. They used red-hot metal instruments to seal off bleeding points and closed clean wounds with sutures or adhesive tape. They were unsurpassed as "bandagists" and used their techniques to control bleeding. Fresh meat was also used to stop oozing hemorrhage from surgical wounds. Like the ancient Chinese, they used molds from bread or cereals to treat wound infections. Modern penicillin was extracted from a mold so the priest-physicians must also have been aware of its bacteriacidal properties. (15)
Like all African peoples, the Egyptians had a large materia medica, using as many as 1000 animal, plant, and mineral products in the treatment of illness. Night blindness, caused by vitamin A deficiency, was treated with ox livers, known to be rich in vitamin A. Poppy extract - the source of opium - was used to treat colicky babies. Modern physicians use paregoric - whose active ingredient is opium - for exactly the same purpose. Patients with scurvy - caused by vitamin C deficiency - were fed onions, a known source of vitamin C. Castor seeds, the source of castor oil, were used to make cathartic preparations. Mandrake and henbane, sources of belladonna alkaloids, were also known and used. The belladonnas possess properties that stimulate the heart, decrease stomach motility, dilate the pupils, and cause sedation. The Egyptians dispensed their prescriptions as pills, enemas, suppositories, infusions, and elixirs in accurate, standardized doses causing some to wonder if they had separate pharmacies and pharmacists. (16)
The Egyptians were also quite knowledgeable in handling obstetric and gynecological problems. They knew and treated uterine prolapse. They had means of inducing abortions and preventing conception. They even had an effective pregnancy test! A sample of a woman's urine was sprinkled on growing cereals; if the cereals did not grow the woman was considered not pregnant; if they did grow she was declared pregnant. Modern experiments have shown that a pregnant woman's urine has a permissive effect on the growth of barley in about 40% of the case, demonstrating that there must have been some validity in the world's first pregnancy test. (17)
Our glimpse of the medical system of this ancient African civilization shows that it deserves its reputation as the best and most advanced of antiquity. Indeed, medicine as we know it today began in Egypt rather than Greece. A study of other African systems of medicine is more problematic, however, because of the absence of surviving written records. Thus, most of what we know comes from the testimony of European missionaries whose contemptuous view of traditional culture was most pointed when writing about traditional medical practices. Nonetheless, it can be shown that the best of the traditional healers in various parts of Africa acquired a startling level of proficiency and, contrary to contemporary opinion, were not without a medical science.
It is pertinent to remember that Africa has been subjected to centuries of almost continuous political, social, and cultural disruption and that - among cultures that rely heavily on oral transmission of knowledge - a tremendous amount of knowledge has been lost. Thus, the state of traditional medicine today does not reflect the best of what the traditional doctors knew and surviving fragments of eye-witness reports - as shall be shown - indicate that they knew quite a lot.
Like ancient Egypt, all traditional African cultures had a magico-spiritual conception of disease. Thus in this setting, moral, social, or spiritual transgressions are likely to lead to illness because they create both individual and communal disharmony. Without the psycho-spiritual cure - without re-establishing this sensitive harmony - the medicinal cure is considered useless. The traditional practitioner is intimately acquainted with the psychic, social, and cultural nuances of his people and more than one commentator has acknowledged that the traditional doctor is often an expert psychotherapist, achieving results with his patients that conventional Western psychotherapy cannot.
Though there is no single paradigm of medical practice that applies to all of Africa, many of the essential features of the various traditional systems are comparable and even identical. Among the Mano of Liberia, for example, all children's diseases, all obstetrics, all of the "everyday" complaints are handled by women, particularly the elderly women; surgery, bonesetting, and special diagnostic and therapeutic problems are handled almost exclusively by men. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout Africa.
The approach to the patient can vary in different parts of Africa. In some societies, where the doctor is credited with paranormal insight, the physician may arrive at a diagnosis and prescribe treatment without questioning or examining the patient since he is supposed to know what is wrong by virtue of his special powers. However, other traditional doctors affect an approach toward physical diagnosis closer to our own:
"Many Western-trained doctors concede that the traditional medical experts have a profound knowledge of the human body and anatomy. This is demonstrated by a usually careful diagnosis beginning with a history of the disease followed by a thorough physical examination...He palpates the different parts and looks for tender spots. He feels the beating of the heart, the position of the inner organs, checks the eyes and ears, and smells the mouth for bad breath." (18)
Most commentators have disparaged the traditional doctor's knowledge of anatomy and physiology. The Mano, however, have names for most of the major organs and know the difference between normal and abnormal anatomy. (19) Another author notes that the Banyoro of Uganda, renowned in the last century for their surgical skill, had a wide knowledge of anatomy. (20) A Hausa maneuver to test for impotence has been described:
"An individual is stripped and placed on a mat lying on his back. A pin or thorn is lightly rubbed over the inside of his thigh. If the scrotum or testicles do not move, the individual is considered impotent."
There is a physiological basis for this procedure. The maneuver in effect tests the cremasteric reflex. The cremaster muscle contracts and pulls the testicles upward on stimulation of the inside of the thigh. (21) This passage belies the notion that African doctors were without a knowledge of some of the body's physiological processes. Moreover, Mano physicians - reputedly without an understanding of the body's cardiovascular system - knew that the conditions of anasarca and ascites were due to fluid overload and treated accordingly with diuretic preparations. These interesting fragments do not by themselves admit of a sophisticated anatomical or physiological knowledge but they hint at a greater degree of knowledge - perhaps in past ages - than has hitherto been recognized.
Some case studies of cultures in east-central Africa have brought to light some remarkable evidence revealing the presence of scientific medicine there. The practice of carrying out autopsies on patients dying of unknown causes among the Banyoro of Uganda and the Likundu of Central Africa has been described. Almost always these were carried out to detect a possible witchcraft etiology but may well have contributed to a more extensive knowledge of anatomy than previously supposed:
"The procedures for autopsying bodies under the Likundu culture have been reviewed, not for the purpose of considering the beliefs that impelled such procedures but to indicate that in some areas autopsies were frequently carried out and that they involved searching in the body, a search which might be casual and superficial but which in other cases might be prolonged and exacting and involved opening up and examining a variety of organs. These are precisely the circumstances under which considerable knowledge of anatomy and pathology could be acquired by persons who, for any purpose, might wish to do so. (22)
Further, there is a report of a Banyoro king who commissioned a traditional doctor to travel around the countryside to investigate, describe, and search for a cure for sleeping sickness, which was ravaging the country at the time.(23) This clearly indicates that a spirit of clinical investigation did exist among Banyoro physicians and probably among other traditional practitioners as well. In many parts of Africa, treatments were devised for new diseases like venereal disease and scrofula that were imported into Africa and this would presuppose some form of clinical investigation and experimentation.
In some parts of Africa, it would seem that the traditional doctor had a firm grasp of some fundamental public health principles. In Liberia, the Mano developed an admirable quarantine system for smallpox. They were well aware of its contagiousness and set aside a "sick bush" for affected patients. This was situated well away from the village and the patient was attended by only one person; no one else was allowed to approach the area. The patient was put on a careful diet and was rubbed with topical anesthetic medications to prevent scratching which could lead to infection. When the illness ran its course, the area wasburned. The "sick-bush" approach would do a modern epidemiologist proud. Of further interest is the centuries-old practice of small-pox variolation which is carried out all over Africa. During an epidemic, material from the pustule of a sick person is scratched into the skin of unaffected persons with a thorn. In the majority of instances, there is no reaction and the persons inoculated are protected against smallpox. In some cases, the inoculation will produce a mild, non-fatal form of the disease which will also confer permanent immunity.(24) Centuries before Jenner, Africans had devised an effective vaccination method against smallpox.
In the area of surgery, the best evidence indicates that some African surgeons attained a level of skill comparable, and in some respects superior, to that of Western surgeons up to the 20th century. As in ancient Egypt, the bonesetter guilds were separate from those of the traditional doctors and were renowned for their skill. Some commentators, observing the bonesetters of today, feel that this reputation was somewhat inflated and the bonesetters' results were less than optimum by Western standards.(25) Yet other reports cite techniques that led tohighly satisfactory results. Mano bonesetters treated a patient with a thigh fracture by placing him in the loft of a house allowing the affected leg to dangle free with a heavy stone attached. This was a very effective traction method and once the fracture was reduced, it was immobilized with a tight splint. (26) In addition, the patient was encouraged to exercise a fractured leg and we know today that new bone is laid down more rapidly over the fracture site when there is some exercise of the limb. Bonesetters in other parts of Africa would dig a deep pit for the purpose of exercising traction on a fractured limb and in East Africa, the bonesetters reduced fractures and dislocations by manual manipulation and traction. These examples indicate that the bonesetters' reputation was not entirely undeserved.
In many areas, especially among warlike peoples, the traditional physician was particularly adept in treating traumatic wounds. One report describes the treatment of an open wound by the following method: plant juices with anti-septic properties were squeezed into the open wound, a red hot metal tip was used to cauterize bleeding points and burn away damaged tissue, the wound edges were closed with a tough thorn, an awl, and fibrous suture and a fiber mat was wrapped tightly around the wound to prevent bleeding. The wound was never closed until the bleeding had been stopped. (27) In another documented instance, a native surgeon successfully resected part of a patient's lung to remove a penetrating arrow-head.(28) In the Congo, a native surgeon was seen using stiff elephant hairs to probe for and successfully remove a bullet.(29) In Nigeria, a man who had had his abdomen ripped open by an elephant was treated by the doctor by replacing the intestines in the abdominal cavity, securing them in place with a calabash covering, and finally suturing together the overlying abdominal wall and skin. Not only did the man recover but was soon back working on a road gang. (30) In the testimony of one author:
"Witch doctors of many tribes perform operations for cataract. They squeeze the juice from the leaves of an alkaloid-containing plant directly into the eye to desensitize it, then push the cataract aside with a sharp stick. A surprising number of these cases turn out successfully."(31)
In East Africa, Masai surgeons were known to successfully treat pleurisy and pneumonitis by creating a partial collapse of the lung by drilling holes into the chest of the sufferer.(32)
It is pertinent to now consider one of the most remarkable examples of African surgery ever documented. This is an eye-witness account by a missionary doctor named Felkin of a Caesarean section performed by a Banyoro surgeon in Uganda in 1879:
"The patient was a healthy-looking primipara (lst pregnancy) of about twenty years of age and she lay on an inclined bed, the head of which rested against the side of the hut. She was half-intoxicated with banana wine, was quite naked and was tied down to the bed by bands of bark cloth over the thorax and thighs. Her ankles were held by a man...while another man stood on her right steadying her abdomen...the surgeon was standing on her left side holding the knife aloft and muttering an incantation. He then washed his hands and the patient's abdomen first with banana wine and then water. The surgeon made a quick cut upwards from just above the pubis to just below the umbilicus severing the whole abdominal wall and uterus so that amniotic fluid escaped. Some bleeding points in the abdominal wall were touched with red hot irons. The surgeon completed the uterine incision, the assistant helping by holding up the sides of the abdominal wall with his hand and hooking two fingers into the uterus. The child was removed, the cord cut, and the child was handed to an assistant." (33)
The report goes on to say that the surgeon squeezed the uterus until it contracted, dilated the cervix from inside with his fingers (to allow post-partum blood to escape), removed clots and the placenta from the uterus, and then sparingly used red hot irons to seal the bleeding points. A porous mat was tightly secured over the wound and the patient turned over to the edge of the bed to permit drainage of any remaining fluid. The peritoneum, the abdominal wall, and the skin were approximated back together and secured with seven sharp spikes. A root paste was applied over the wound and a bandage of cloth was tightly wrapped around it. Within six days, all the spikes were removed. Felkin observed the patient for 11 days and when he left, mother and child were alive and well. (34)
In Scotland, Lister had pioneered antiseptic surgery just two years prior to this event but universal application of his methods in the operating rooms of Europe was still years away. Caesarean sections were performed only under the most desperate circumstances and only to save the life of the infant. A Caesarean section to save the lives of both mother and child was unheard of in Europe nor are there records of such a procedure among the great civilizations of antiquity. As one commentator has said:
"The whole conduct of the operation as Felkin described it suggests a skilled, long-practiced surgical team at work conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth efficiency and unhurried skill...Lister's team in London could hardly have performed with greater smoothness." (35)
Not only did the surgeon understand the sophisticated concepts of anesthesia and antisepsis but also demonstrated advanced surgical technique. In his sparing use of the cautery iron, for example, he showed that he knew tissue damage could result from its overuse. The operation was without question a landmark, reflecting the best in African surgery.
African midwives possessed a good understanding of some fundamental obstetric and pediatric principles. Mano midwives pulled repeatedly at the breasts of women in labor, a maneuver which induces the release of oxytocin - a stimulator of uterine contractions - from the pituitary gland. They sometimes took laboring mothers upon their backs walking around with and shaking them. This undoubtedly had the effect of causing the cervix to dilate and the head to engage, thus facilitating labor.(36) Some Bantu midwives were known to use Indian hemp during labor for its sedative properties. Newborn babes and infants were taken and exposed to the sun for a period each day "to make them strong." One author attributed the rare occurrence of rickets among Mano children to this practice.(37) In addition, these women healers recognized the causes of malnutrition and retarded development, putting such children on special diets high in vitamins and carbohydrates with favorable results.(38)
Traditional African cultures have an abundant materia medica. The Zulus, for example are reputed to know the medicinal uses of some 700 plants. (39) Ouabain, capsicum, physostigmine, kola, and calabar beans are just a few of the substances from the African materia medica that have made their way into the Western pharmacopeia.(40) The traditional midwives often have drugs that can induce abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and in Uganda, in an area where there is a high incidence of dystocia (retarded labor), the midwives have preparations which stimulate uterine contractions. "Fever-leaf" is used all over Africa to treat the recurring fevers of malaria. Certain Bantu-speaking peoples use the bark of Salix capensis (willow) to treat the musculoskeletal complaints of rheumatism.(41) This family of plants yields salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, a sovereign remedy the world over for musculoskeletal pains. Kaolin, the active ingredient in Kaopectate is used in Mali to combat diarrhea. Caffeine-containing kola nuts are chewed all over Africa for their stimulating and fatigue-combating properties. To combat snakebite, plants containing ouabain and strichnine are used. The former is a heart stimulant and therefore useful against cardiotoxic venoms and the latter is a nerve tonic, useful against neurotoxic venoms. In
Nigeria in 1969, the rootbark Annona senegalensis was found to possess strong anti-cancer properties.(42) Even more recently in 1979, herbal preparations that were used in Nigeria to treat skin infections were found have definite bacteriocidal activity against gram-positive bacteria, the very organisms that cause skin infections. (43) There was an interesting case in 1925 of an eminent Nigerian in England who was suffering from severe psychotic episodes not amenable to treatment by English doctors. A traditional doctor from Nigeria was summoned who was able to relieve the patient of his symptoms with decoctions made from a rauwolfia root. (44) The Rauwolfia family of plants is the source of modern-day Reserpine, first used as a major tranquilizer to treat severe psychosis but now used mainly as an antihypertensive medication.
The list of effective drugs in the African pharmocopeia is too extensive to elucidate here but suffice to say that traditional doctors in Africa had and have effective remedies against intestinal parasites, vomiting, skin ulcers, rashes, catarrh, convulsions, tumors, venereal disease, bronchitis, conjunctivitis, urethral stricture and many other complaints.
There are at least two documented instances of Europeans benefiting from the ministrations of the traditional physician. In the last century, a Bushman doctor cured a European woman dying of sepsis that the European doctor could not treat. In Swaziland, a European doctor, dying of dysentery, was cured by a native physician. (45) Moreover, the native physicians in this area were so skilled at treating Typhoid Fever that the European doctors used their decoctions for the same purpose.
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This article has attempted to show that the traditional doctors of Africa from the earliest times had a high level of medical and surgical skill, certainly much more than they have been given credit for. It is to be hoped that more substantive and careful investigations will be carried out among the traditional healers of Africa before Western-style medicine supplants them entirely.
Copyright (c)1998-1999:The Black Health Network.
A special feature by Charles Finch, M.D. Chairman, Dept. of International Medicine, The Morehouse School of Medicine
It has become increasingly clear that traditional African cultures and civilizations knew and accomplished much more than has traditionally been assumed. Even after we've "restored" ancient Egypt - a civilization that was the fountainhead of science - to its true and natural place on African soil as an African creation, there is yet a profound reluctance to admit that Africa contributed anything of substance to world science.
In this article, the author hopes to show that traditional African physicians evolved effective - even sophisticated - diagnostic and therapeutic modalities in medicine which belie the notion that Africa was without a medical science.
Just as any discussion of the achievements of Western medicine harkens back to Hippocrates and Galen, so any discussion of African medical achievements harkens back to ancient Egypt. Newsome, among others, has shown what a debt Greek medicine owed to the priest-physicians of Egypt.(1) Not only was the most important Greek healing deity, Asclepios, identified with the legendary Egyptian physician-architect-aphorist Imhotep but Hippocratic therapeutics had direct antecedents in Egyptian medicine. The city-state of Athens used to import Egyptian physicians, as did most of the kingdoms of the Near East, and in the Odyssey, Homer says, "In medical knowledge, Egypt leaves the rest of the world behind."(2)
Like all African medicine, Egyptian medicine has baffled scholars because of the complete interpenetration of "magico-spiritual" and "rational" elements. Mostly, this magico-spiritual aspect has been downplayed or belittled. However, at least one researcher concedes that healing, being a complicated psychic as well as physical process, may be amenable to an approach that touches that hidden area of the psyche beyond the reach of rational therapy.(3) Even modern medicine concedes that as much as 60% of illness has a psychic base and indeed, the well-known "placebo" effect of modern pharmaco-medicine arises from this.(4) We moderns like to deride this magico-spiritual medicine but it can and does produce startling results that we do not understand.
The Egyptians were writing medical textbooks as early as 5,000 years ago.(5) This indicates not only a mature civilization but also a long period of medical development. Out of the hundreds and thousands of medical papyri that must have been written, only 10 have come down to us, the most important being the Ebers and Edwin Smith Papyri. These 10 papyri form the basis of most of what Egyptologists know about Egyptian medicine. It has been affirmed, however, that much of the training and instruction of the healing priests must have been orally transmitted, as it is in the rest of Africa.(6) It is likely, therefore, that we have only a partial grasp of the true scope of Egyptian medical knowledge. Moreover, like their counterparts in the rest of Africa, the Egyptian priest-physicians often kept their best knowledge secret.
Egyptian physicians were instructed in the "per ankh" or "house of life" which served as a university, library, medical school, clinic, temple, and seminary. The numerous Greek philosophers who studied in Egypt, such as Pythagorous, Thales, and Plato, must have spent their time in a per ankh. In these centers of learning, there was no sharp demarcation between the fields of study; religion, philosophy, science, astronomy, mathematics, music, and hieroglyphics were all part of the same species of knowledge and were reflected in one another.
It is of interest that the Egyptians were alone among the nations of antiquity in the development of specialty medicine. In the Old Kingdom, the diseases of each organ were under the care of a specialist. In the later epochs, the specialists disappeared as the Egyptian physician began to function as a generalist. However, during Ptolemaic times, specialization came back into the vogue, probably as a result of renewed interest in the archaic culture. Not until the 20th century did anything comparable in the sphere of medicine develop. Contemporary doctors are accustomed to believing that modern specialty medicine resulted from a progressive evolution of medical techniques and knowledge, hardly realizing that it is a throw back to the earliest form of Egyptian medical practice.
A study of ancient Egyptian diagnostic methods reads disconcertingly like a modern textbook on physical diagnosis. A physician summoned to examine a patient would begin with a careful appraisal of the patient's general appearance. This would be followed by a series of questions to elicit a description of the complaint. The color of the face and eyes, the quality of nasal secretions, the presence of perspiration, the stiffness of the limbs or abdomen, and the condition of the skin were all carefully noted. The physician was also at pains to take cognizance of the smell of the body, sweat, breath, and wounds. The urine and feces were inspected, the pulse palpated and measured, and the abdomen, swellings, and wounds probed and palpated. The pulse taking is worth noting because it indicates that the Egyptians knew of its circulatory and hemodynamic significance. Percussion of the abdomen and chest was performed and certain functional tests we still use today were done, i.e., the coughing test for hernia detection; the extension-flexion maneuver of the legs to test for a dislocated lumbar vertebra. Sometimes, the case required more than one consultation and the physician might, as is done today, embark on a "therapeutic trial" to ascertain the efficacy of treatment. It also seems that the Egyptians practiced a form of socialized medicine. All physicians were employees of the state and medical care was available to everyone.(7)
The extant medical papyri show us that the Egyptians had quite an extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology. They understood the importance of pulsation and - 4500 years before Harvey - knew something of the structure and function of the cardiovascular system. They knew that the heart was the center of this system, had names for all the major vessels, knew the relation between heart and lung, and knew the distribution of the vessels through the limbs.(8) They had names for the brain and meninges (the covering of the brain and spinal cord) and also seem to have known the relation between the nervous system and voluntary movements. In addition, the ureters (the connections between the kidneys and the bladder) were known and named. Most writers state that the Egyptians’ anatomical knowledge while relatively sophisticated, was, by modern standards, rudimentary. They aver, for example, that the Egyptians attached no special significance to the brain.(9) But at least one researcher, utilizing sources entirely different from the papyri, contradicts this notion, asserting that their knowledge of neuroanatomy in particular was as detailed and advanced as that in modern times.(10)
The Egyptians were well-versed in many pathological syndromes. The identification of a disease syndrome necessitates acute and painstaking clinical observation, often over many years, and many of the ones described in the medical papyri are known today. Egyptian physicians understood the origin of paraplegia and paralysis from spinal cord injuries and recognized the traumatic origin of neurological symptoms such as deafness, urinary incontinence, and priapism. They described many syndromes of cardiac origin. They knew that excess blood in the heart and lungs was pathological which is consistent with what we know about congestive heart failure today. They also seem to have recognized the significance of heart palpitations and arrhythmias and gave a rather precise definition of angina pectoris:
"If thou examinest a man for illness in his cardia and he has pains in his arms, in his breast, and on one side of his cardia...it is death threatening him."(ll)
The modern description of angina pectoris can hardly improve upon this. The phrase seen in the Ebers Papyrus, "belly too narrow for food," seems to indicate an esophageal or stomach stricture perhaps from an inflammatory or ulcerating process. Egyptian physicians also knew that a weak heart adversely affected the liver, calling to mind the pathological enlargement of the liver which we know to be due to heart failure. Faintness due to a "dumb heart" was described which seems to be an allusion to a Stokes-Adams attack.(12) It is evident that the ancient Egyptian physicians had a fundamental grasp of the pathophysiology of many of the syndromes we know today.
Perhaps the most remarkable document among the medical papyri is the surgical Edwin Smith Papyrus, a compendium of Egyptian anatomical knowledge and surgical methods. It is in this papyrus that the remarkable descriptions of the traumatic surgical lesions and their treatment are found. We also find that the priest-physicians also recognized the signs and symptoms of sciatica, the sharp pain radiating down the leg caused by nerve compression in the lower spinal cord. Like many other peoples in Africa and the rest of the world, the Egyptians practiced trephination. (13) This operation, the forerunner of neurosurgery, involves boring a hole through the skull to the outer covering of the brain. This was done to remove fragments from a skull fracture compressing the brain, to treat epilepsy, or to relieve chronic headache. Today in Africa there are people who have undergone this operation with no apparent ill effects and there are skulls from ancient Egyptian graves with definite signs of healing around the trephination site so it is clear that patients survived this operation.
As is seen very commonly in Africa, there was a separate guild of bonesetters in Egypt who treated fractures and dislocations. These specialists devised a completely effective method for reducing collar bone fractures which Hippocrates later used. (14) The Edwin Smith Papyrus also describes maneuvers for reducing dislocated jaws and shoulders. Long bone fractures were immobilized with tight splints and nasal fractures were treated by the insertion of stiff nasal packings into the affected nostril, a method also used today for uncomplicated nasal fractures.
The Egyptians had perhaps 3-4 thousand years of experience dissecting and bandaging mummies and this must have had beneficial effects on surgical technique. They had an array of knives and scalpels to excise tumors and drain abscesses. They used red-hot metal instruments to seal off bleeding points and closed clean wounds with sutures or adhesive tape. They were unsurpassed as "bandagists" and used their techniques to control bleeding. Fresh meat was also used to stop oozing hemorrhage from surgical wounds. Like the ancient Chinese, they used molds from bread or cereals to treat wound infections. Modern penicillin was extracted from a mold so the priest-physicians must also have been aware of its bacteriacidal properties. (15)
Like all African peoples, the Egyptians had a large materia medica, using as many as 1000 animal, plant, and mineral products in the treatment of illness. Night blindness, caused by vitamin A deficiency, was treated with ox livers, known to be rich in vitamin A. Poppy extract - the source of opium - was used to treat colicky babies. Modern physicians use paregoric - whose active ingredient is opium - for exactly the same purpose. Patients with scurvy - caused by vitamin C deficiency - were fed onions, a known source of vitamin C. Castor seeds, the source of castor oil, were used to make cathartic preparations. Mandrake and henbane, sources of belladonna alkaloids, were also known and used. The belladonnas possess properties that stimulate the heart, decrease stomach motility, dilate the pupils, and cause sedation. The Egyptians dispensed their prescriptions as pills, enemas, suppositories, infusions, and elixirs in accurate, standardized doses causing some to wonder if they had separate pharmacies and pharmacists. (16)
The Egyptians were also quite knowledgeable in handling obstetric and gynecological problems. They knew and treated uterine prolapse. They had means of inducing abortions and preventing conception. They even had an effective pregnancy test! A sample of a woman's urine was sprinkled on growing cereals; if the cereals did not grow the woman was considered not pregnant; if they did grow she was declared pregnant. Modern experiments have shown that a pregnant woman's urine has a permissive effect on the growth of barley in about 40% of the case, demonstrating that there must have been some validity in the world's first pregnancy test. (17)
Our glimpse of the medical system of this ancient African civilization shows that it deserves its reputation as the best and most advanced of antiquity. Indeed, medicine as we know it today began in Egypt rather than Greece. A study of other African systems of medicine is more problematic, however, because of the absence of surviving written records. Thus, most of what we know comes from the testimony of European missionaries whose contemptuous view of traditional culture was most pointed when writing about traditional medical practices. Nonetheless, it can be shown that the best of the traditional healers in various parts of Africa acquired a startling level of proficiency and, contrary to contemporary opinion, were not without a medical science.
It is pertinent to remember that Africa has been subjected to centuries of almost continuous political, social, and cultural disruption and that - among cultures that rely heavily on oral transmission of knowledge - a tremendous amount of knowledge has been lost. Thus, the state of traditional medicine today does not reflect the best of what the traditional doctors knew and surviving fragments of eye-witness reports - as shall be shown - indicate that they knew quite a lot.
Like ancient Egypt, all traditional African cultures had a magico-spiritual conception of disease. Thus in this setting, moral, social, or spiritual transgressions are likely to lead to illness because they create both individual and communal disharmony. Without the psycho-spiritual cure - without re-establishing this sensitive harmony - the medicinal cure is considered useless. The traditional practitioner is intimately acquainted with the psychic, social, and cultural nuances of his people and more than one commentator has acknowledged that the traditional doctor is often an expert psychotherapist, achieving results with his patients that conventional Western psychotherapy cannot.
Though there is no single paradigm of medical practice that applies to all of Africa, many of the essential features of the various traditional systems are comparable and even identical. Among the Mano of Liberia, for example, all children's diseases, all obstetrics, all of the "everyday" complaints are handled by women, particularly the elderly women; surgery, bonesetting, and special diagnostic and therapeutic problems are handled almost exclusively by men. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout Africa.
The approach to the patient can vary in different parts of Africa. In some societies, where the doctor is credited with paranormal insight, the physician may arrive at a diagnosis and prescribe treatment without questioning or examining the patient since he is supposed to know what is wrong by virtue of his special powers. However, other traditional doctors affect an approach toward physical diagnosis closer to our own:
"Many Western-trained doctors concede that the traditional medical experts have a profound knowledge of the human body and anatomy. This is demonstrated by a usually careful diagnosis beginning with a history of the disease followed by a thorough physical examination...He palpates the different parts and looks for tender spots. He feels the beating of the heart, the position of the inner organs, checks the eyes and ears, and smells the mouth for bad breath." (18)
Most commentators have disparaged the traditional doctor's knowledge of anatomy and physiology. The Mano, however, have names for most of the major organs and know the difference between normal and abnormal anatomy. (19) Another author notes that the Banyoro of Uganda, renowned in the last century for their surgical skill, had a wide knowledge of anatomy. (20) A Hausa maneuver to test for impotence has been described:
"An individual is stripped and placed on a mat lying on his back. A pin or thorn is lightly rubbed over the inside of his thigh. If the scrotum or testicles do not move, the individual is considered impotent."
There is a physiological basis for this procedure. The maneuver in effect tests the cremasteric reflex. The cremaster muscle contracts and pulls the testicles upward on stimulation of the inside of the thigh. (21) This passage belies the notion that African doctors were without a knowledge of some of the body's physiological processes. Moreover, Mano physicians - reputedly without an understanding of the body's cardiovascular system - knew that the conditions of anasarca and ascites were due to fluid overload and treated accordingly with diuretic preparations. These interesting fragments do not by themselves admit of a sophisticated anatomical or physiological knowledge but they hint at a greater degree of knowledge - perhaps in past ages - than has hitherto been recognized.
Some case studies of cultures in east-central Africa have brought to light some remarkable evidence revealing the presence of scientific medicine there. The practice of carrying out autopsies on patients dying of unknown causes among the Banyoro of Uganda and the Likundu of Central Africa has been described. Almost always these were carried out to detect a possible witchcraft etiology but may well have contributed to a more extensive knowledge of anatomy than previously supposed:
"The procedures for autopsying bodies under the Likundu culture have been reviewed, not for the purpose of considering the beliefs that impelled such procedures but to indicate that in some areas autopsies were frequently carried out and that they involved searching in the body, a search which might be casual and superficial but which in other cases might be prolonged and exacting and involved opening up and examining a variety of organs. These are precisely the circumstances under which considerable knowledge of anatomy and pathology could be acquired by persons who, for any purpose, might wish to do so. (22)
Further, there is a report of a Banyoro king who commissioned a traditional doctor to travel around the countryside to investigate, describe, and search for a cure for sleeping sickness, which was ravaging the country at the time.(23) This clearly indicates that a spirit of clinical investigation did exist among Banyoro physicians and probably among other traditional practitioners as well. In many parts of Africa, treatments were devised for new diseases like venereal disease and scrofula that were imported into Africa and this would presuppose some form of clinical investigation and experimentation.
In some parts of Africa, it would seem that the traditional doctor had a firm grasp of some fundamental public health principles. In Liberia, the Mano developed an admirable quarantine system for smallpox. They were well aware of its contagiousness and set aside a "sick bush" for affected patients. This was situated well away from the village and the patient was attended by only one person; no one else was allowed to approach the area. The patient was put on a careful diet and was rubbed with topical anesthetic medications to prevent scratching which could lead to infection. When the illness ran its course, the area wasburned. The "sick-bush" approach would do a modern epidemiologist proud. Of further interest is the centuries-old practice of small-pox variolation which is carried out all over Africa. During an epidemic, material from the pustule of a sick person is scratched into the skin of unaffected persons with a thorn. In the majority of instances, there is no reaction and the persons inoculated are protected against smallpox. In some cases, the inoculation will produce a mild, non-fatal form of the disease which will also confer permanent immunity.(24) Centuries before Jenner, Africans had devised an effective vaccination method against smallpox.
In the area of surgery, the best evidence indicates that some African surgeons attained a level of skill comparable, and in some respects superior, to that of Western surgeons up to the 20th century. As in ancient Egypt, the bonesetter guilds were separate from those of the traditional doctors and were renowned for their skill. Some commentators, observing the bonesetters of today, feel that this reputation was somewhat inflated and the bonesetters' results were less than optimum by Western standards.(25) Yet other reports cite techniques that led tohighly satisfactory results. Mano bonesetters treated a patient with a thigh fracture by placing him in the loft of a house allowing the affected leg to dangle free with a heavy stone attached. This was a very effective traction method and once the fracture was reduced, it was immobilized with a tight splint. (26) In addition, the patient was encouraged to exercise a fractured leg and we know today that new bone is laid down more rapidly over the fracture site when there is some exercise of the limb. Bonesetters in other parts of Africa would dig a deep pit for the purpose of exercising traction on a fractured limb and in East Africa, the bonesetters reduced fractures and dislocations by manual manipulation and traction. These examples indicate that the bonesetters' reputation was not entirely undeserved.
In many areas, especially among warlike peoples, the traditional physician was particularly adept in treating traumatic wounds. One report describes the treatment of an open wound by the following method: plant juices with anti-septic properties were squeezed into the open wound, a red hot metal tip was used to cauterize bleeding points and burn away damaged tissue, the wound edges were closed with a tough thorn, an awl, and fibrous suture and a fiber mat was wrapped tightly around the wound to prevent bleeding. The wound was never closed until the bleeding had been stopped. (27) In another documented instance, a native surgeon successfully resected part of a patient's lung to remove a penetrating arrow-head.(28) In the Congo, a native surgeon was seen using stiff elephant hairs to probe for and successfully remove a bullet.(29) In Nigeria, a man who had had his abdomen ripped open by an elephant was treated by the doctor by replacing the intestines in the abdominal cavity, securing them in place with a calabash covering, and finally suturing together the overlying abdominal wall and skin. Not only did the man recover but was soon back working on a road gang. (30) In the testimony of one author:
"Witch doctors of many tribes perform operations for cataract. They squeeze the juice from the leaves of an alkaloid-containing plant directly into the eye to desensitize it, then push the cataract aside with a sharp stick. A surprising number of these cases turn out successfully."(31)
In East Africa, Masai surgeons were known to successfully treat pleurisy and pneumonitis by creating a partial collapse of the lung by drilling holes into the chest of the sufferer.(32)
It is pertinent to now consider one of the most remarkable examples of African surgery ever documented. This is an eye-witness account by a missionary doctor named Felkin of a Caesarean section performed by a Banyoro surgeon in Uganda in 1879:
"The patient was a healthy-looking primipara (lst pregnancy) of about twenty years of age and she lay on an inclined bed, the head of which rested against the side of the hut. She was half-intoxicated with banana wine, was quite naked and was tied down to the bed by bands of bark cloth over the thorax and thighs. Her ankles were held by a man...while another man stood on her right steadying her abdomen...the surgeon was standing on her left side holding the knife aloft and muttering an incantation. He then washed his hands and the patient's abdomen first with banana wine and then water. The surgeon made a quick cut upwards from just above the pubis to just below the umbilicus severing the whole abdominal wall and uterus so that amniotic fluid escaped. Some bleeding points in the abdominal wall were touched with red hot irons. The surgeon completed the uterine incision, the assistant helping by holding up the sides of the abdominal wall with his hand and hooking two fingers into the uterus. The child was removed, the cord cut, and the child was handed to an assistant." (33)
The report goes on to say that the surgeon squeezed the uterus until it contracted, dilated the cervix from inside with his fingers (to allow post-partum blood to escape), removed clots and the placenta from the uterus, and then sparingly used red hot irons to seal the bleeding points. A porous mat was tightly secured over the wound and the patient turned over to the edge of the bed to permit drainage of any remaining fluid. The peritoneum, the abdominal wall, and the skin were approximated back together and secured with seven sharp spikes. A root paste was applied over the wound and a bandage of cloth was tightly wrapped around it. Within six days, all the spikes were removed. Felkin observed the patient for 11 days and when he left, mother and child were alive and well. (34)
In Scotland, Lister had pioneered antiseptic surgery just two years prior to this event but universal application of his methods in the operating rooms of Europe was still years away. Caesarean sections were performed only under the most desperate circumstances and only to save the life of the infant. A Caesarean section to save the lives of both mother and child was unheard of in Europe nor are there records of such a procedure among the great civilizations of antiquity. As one commentator has said:
"The whole conduct of the operation as Felkin described it suggests a skilled, long-practiced surgical team at work conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth efficiency and unhurried skill...Lister's team in London could hardly have performed with greater smoothness." (35)
Not only did the surgeon understand the sophisticated concepts of anesthesia and antisepsis but also demonstrated advanced surgical technique. In his sparing use of the cautery iron, for example, he showed that he knew tissue damage could result from its overuse. The operation was without question a landmark, reflecting the best in African surgery.
African midwives possessed a good understanding of some fundamental obstetric and pediatric principles. Mano midwives pulled repeatedly at the breasts of women in labor, a maneuver which induces the release of oxytocin - a stimulator of uterine contractions - from the pituitary gland. They sometimes took laboring mothers upon their backs walking around with and shaking them. This undoubtedly had the effect of causing the cervix to dilate and the head to engage, thus facilitating labor.(36) Some Bantu midwives were known to use Indian hemp during labor for its sedative properties. Newborn babes and infants were taken and exposed to the sun for a period each day "to make them strong." One author attributed the rare occurrence of rickets among Mano children to this practice.(37) In addition, these women healers recognized the causes of malnutrition and retarded development, putting such children on special diets high in vitamins and carbohydrates with favorable results.(38)
Traditional African cultures have an abundant materia medica. The Zulus, for example are reputed to know the medicinal uses of some 700 plants. (39) Ouabain, capsicum, physostigmine, kola, and calabar beans are just a few of the substances from the African materia medica that have made their way into the Western pharmacopeia.(40) The traditional midwives often have drugs that can induce abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and in Uganda, in an area where there is a high incidence of dystocia (retarded labor), the midwives have preparations which stimulate uterine contractions. "Fever-leaf" is used all over Africa to treat the recurring fevers of malaria. Certain Bantu-speaking peoples use the bark of Salix capensis (willow) to treat the musculoskeletal complaints of rheumatism.(41) This family of plants yields salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, a sovereign remedy the world over for musculoskeletal pains. Kaolin, the active ingredient in Kaopectate is used in Mali to combat diarrhea. Caffeine-containing kola nuts are chewed all over Africa for their stimulating and fatigue-combating properties. To combat snakebite, plants containing ouabain and strichnine are used. The former is a heart stimulant and therefore useful against cardiotoxic venoms and the latter is a nerve tonic, useful against neurotoxic venoms. In
Nigeria in 1969, the rootbark Annona senegalensis was found to possess strong anti-cancer properties.(42) Even more recently in 1979, herbal preparations that were used in Nigeria to treat skin infections were found have definite bacteriocidal activity against gram-positive bacteria, the very organisms that cause skin infections. (43) There was an interesting case in 1925 of an eminent Nigerian in England who was suffering from severe psychotic episodes not amenable to treatment by English doctors. A traditional doctor from Nigeria was summoned who was able to relieve the patient of his symptoms with decoctions made from a rauwolfia root. (44) The Rauwolfia family of plants is the source of modern-day Reserpine, first used as a major tranquilizer to treat severe psychosis but now used mainly as an antihypertensive medication.
The list of effective drugs in the African pharmocopeia is too extensive to elucidate here but suffice to say that traditional doctors in Africa had and have effective remedies against intestinal parasites, vomiting, skin ulcers, rashes, catarrh, convulsions, tumors, venereal disease, bronchitis, conjunctivitis, urethral stricture and many other complaints.
There are at least two documented instances of Europeans benefiting from the ministrations of the traditional physician. In the last century, a Bushman doctor cured a European woman dying of sepsis that the European doctor could not treat. In Swaziland, a European doctor, dying of dysentery, was cured by a native physician. (45) Moreover, the native physicians in this area were so skilled at treating Typhoid Fever that the European doctors used their decoctions for the same purpose.
#
This article has attempted to show that the traditional doctors of Africa from the earliest times had a high level of medical and surgical skill, certainly much more than they have been given credit for. It is to be hoped that more substantive and careful investigations will be carried out among the traditional healers of Africa before Western-style medicine supplants them entirely.
Copyright (c)1998-1999:The Black Health Network.
Euro-centrism versus Afro-centrism
Euro-centrism versus Afro-centrism
Dr. Kwame Nantambu
Posted: April 15, 2002
It is totally racist to suggest that Afrocentrism "sometimes distorts facts and turns
history into 'ethnic cheerleading'" (Daley, 1990). The salient fact is that there is
absolutely no need for Afrocentrism to falsify, distort, or misrepresent world history.
Afrocentrism resents and deals with an authentic and specific culture and history - a
cultural history that did not begin in Father Europe but a human/world history that
began in Mother Africa.
Indeed, the stark reality is that Eurocentrism had to - and still continues to - falsify,
mis-represent, and distort human/world history as His-Story, His-Eurocentric-Story
in order to maintain European global dominance/hegemony.
Eurocentrism indeed represents a racist, divisive, ahistorical, and dysfunctional view
of world history. The purpose of this article is to engage in an Afrocentric geopolitical
linkage analysis of the struggle between Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism.
Eurocentrism: Historical Origins and Contemporary Manifestations Since the 15th
century, ethnocentrism, etnocentrism, and xenophobia have characterized,
fashioned, and conditioned the European attitude or mind-set toward African
peoples. As such, in the spirit of Eurocentrism, the African could not and cannot be
integrated as a social equal. Eurocentric exclusiveness and its striving for global
dominance left no place for the African except servitude and second-class citizenship.
Eurocentric ideology has refused to accept Africans on the basis of their humanity
because of the color of their skin. As a result, Eurocentric history (His-Story)
deliberately promulgated the myth that African was a "Dark Continent" replete with
cannibals, savages, and inferior, uncivilized, backward, primitive peoples, devoid of
knowledge and culture and possessing evil traits and desires.
The erudite Afrocentric historian, John Henrik Clarke (1970), however, completely
destroys this Eurocentric myth by correctly asserting that: Civilization did not start in
European countries and the rest of the world did not wait in darkness for the
Europeans to bring the light...most of the history books in the last five hundred years
have been written to glorify Europeans at the expense of other peoples....
Most Western historians have not been willing to admit that there is an African
history to be written about and that this history predates the emergence of Europe
by thousands of years. It is not possible for the world to have waited in darkness for
the Europeans to bring the light because, for most of the early history of man, the
Europeans themselves were in darkness When the light of culture came for the first
time to the people who would later call themselves Europeans, it came from Africa
and Middle Eastern Asia....
It is too often forgotten that, when the Europeans emerged and began to extend
themselves into the broader world of Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, they would colonize world scholarship, mainly to show or imply
that Europeans were the only creators of what could be called civilization. In order to
accomplish this, the Europeans had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they previously
knew about Africa.(pp.3-4)This particularistic geopolitical mind-set has permeated European policy toward
African peoples and the African continent. This particularistic mind-set also
precipitated the European proselytizing mission to "save" those "infidel" African
peoples. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Africa was never a Dark
Continent.
The glorious history and progressive advancement/contribution of African peoples to
humanity have already been well documented to dispel the Eurocentric myth that the
continent was dark and its people uncivilized, inferior, or backward. What needs to be
emphasized here is that mere survival forced Europeans to adopt this offensive
geopolitical strategy; in other words, Europeans had to devise a reverse
psychological warfare strategy to show that indeed they were superior and Africans
inferior.
It must be understood that a paramount modus operandi of imperialism was to link
Eurocentrism "with innate qualities of excellence in intelligence, beauty and the right
to rule other races. Its reverse effect on the African was to degrade his color and the
physical subordination that had been imposed by force came to be associated with
the (African's) innate qualities" (Magubane, 1989, p.33).
This goal was achieved through miseducation of the African and the falsification of
his history. As Kwame Ture (1975) once warned: "If you don't know who you are,
you would not know what your interests are." A people without a sense of history are
ill-equipped to visualize and plan a future because of an unclear and
distorted/miseducated picture of their past.
A people without a sense of history are ill-equipped to visualize and plan a future
because of an unclear and distorted/miseducated picture of their past. A people
without the knowledge of "having done" will have grave difficulty acknowledging the
motivation of "can do". Or as the slain Pan-African nationalist Malcolm X(1963) put it
in a speech delivered Novmber 10, 1963, in Detroit, The Black man has no selfconfidence;
he has no confidence in his own race because the white man(European)
destroyed you and my past; he destroyed you and my past; he destroyed our
knowledge of our culture and by having destroyed it, now we don't know of any
achievement, any accomplishment and as long as you can be convinced that you
never did anything, you can never do anything.
Hence, the vital necessity is for African people to use the weapons of education and
history to extricate themselves from this psychological dependency
complex/syndrome as a necessary precondition for liberation. Let us be reminded
that Mark Twain once said that when a country enslaves a people, the first necessity
is to make the world feel that the people enslaved are subhuman.
The next effort is to make his fellow countrymen believe that the enslaved man is
inferior; and then, worst of all, to make that man believe himself inferior (Magubane,
1989). European hegemony attempted this in various forms, principally through
religion and Eurocentric global miseducation and then by economic, military, political,
and psychocultural imperialistic means.
By denigrating and devaluating African culture and civilizations, Europeans attempted
to rape/strip African peoples of their oneness, their Africanity, their humanity.
However, Europeans have not been totally successful in doing so because of the
potency, continuity, and adaptability of the African personality.
Indeed, historiography shows that African peoples are the only people to resist all 15
European powers at the same time-during the scramble/partitioning of African,
November 1884-February 1885-and to emerge with their culture wounded but not
dead, their political systems developed and their economics ravaged and engulfed in
powerlessness and dependent underdevelopment. In the 1920's, the dominant
European power, the United States, brandished the geopolitical Eurocentric sword
designed "to make the world safe for democracy" a la Pax Americana.
Contemporary Eurocentric geopolitics told us that only Soviet communism was bent
on global domination and expansionism, but American imperialism is not. It is
benevolent. Eurocentrism further pontificates that Africans must always judge
themselves using the European as their standard, model, or norm. It is here that
Afrocentrism and the Africa-centered curriculum must be potent, ubiquitous,
countervailing force not only so that African peoples must see themselves through
the lens of the dawn of human/world history, but also more importantly, so that they
extricate themselves from this vicious, divisive, and deleterious Eurocentric
psychological dependency complex. This is precisely why some prominent Eurocentric
historians and educators are rebelling against Afrocentrism, the Africa-centered
curriculum, and the curriculum of inclusion.
Afrocentrism is the plaintiff in an intellectual class action suit filed against
Eurocentrism, the Euro-American power structure, the Eurocentric world view and
the curriculum of exclusion, just at the "new world order" represents a declaration of
war against African peoples. The defendants, Eurocentric historians and educators
stand accused of 500 years of distortion, falsification, and misrepresentation of the
historical truth, with the sole purpose to ossify, defend, and perpetuate the Big Lie of
European supremacy, invincibility, and originality coterminous with the Big Lie of
African inferiority and nothingness.
It must also be borne in mind that cultural diversity, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism,
and cultural pluralism are all four sides of the same European hegemonic coin. On
the one hand, cultural diversity represents the geopolitical racist reality of the new
world order, whereas multiculturalism and cultural pluralism are not only a
hierarchical system with Europe at the top but also a contemporary manifestation of
that 15th-century Eurocentric, ethnocentric, etnocentric, and xenophobic
subconscious mind-set.
The insidious aspect of multiculturalism is that it represents diffusion and exclusion,
not inclusion. As a riposte, Afrocentrism demands that the African culture must be
treated as original, unique, and distinct. It does not need a European connection,
legitimization, and imprimatur to make it legitimate. It must also be clear that
Afrocentrism is not a stepping stone to multicultrualism. In fact, the reverse is true.
Multiculturalism is indeed a stepping stone to Afrocentrism, because of the historical
truism that the African culture is the original culture from which all other cultures are
derived. Furthermore, within the context of Afrocentrism, we do not speak of cultural
diversity but cultural specificity.
The bottom line is that Europeans still want to control the minds and actions of
African peoples so that they can perpetuate, maintain and ossify their global
dominance and power position. This is the crux of the issue, because if African
peoples (the global majority) were to become Afrocnetric (Afrocentricized), if they
were to control their actions and mind-sets and begin to act independently as a
global, united, and powerful majority with an Africa-centered subconscious mind-set,
then that would spell the ineluctable end of European global power and dominance.
This indeed is the fear of Europeans. Europeans, a global minority, do not want to
lose their global power position; hence their insecure status makes them scared
whenever they hear the footsteps of Afrocentrism or people demanding an Africacentered
curriculum.
Europeans do not want African peoples to see, evaluate, and judge themselves from
their own authentic, original, Africa-centered perspective and context. However,
through the process of Afrocentrism, African peoples must go back to the dawn of
human history in order to de-Europeanize/detoxify/demystify/de-brainwash their
subconscious mind-set of this invisible drug called Eurocentric mis-education
(Eurocentrism), so that as they approach the 21st century, they can look Europeans
straight in the eye as equals because they are now armed with the correct
knowledge, information, and interpretation of the rich, glorious, and dynastical
history, scientific inventions, humane-communal modus vivendi, and
unprecedented/unmatched intellectual acumen of their African ancestors.
The African dynastical/ancestral history is the bedrock or spinal cord upon which
African peoples must build their contemporary and future Pan-African nationalist
challenge to European nationalism. As an African class of people, we must face the
stark reality, and the only way to do so is to go through the program/process of
Afrocentrification. Afrocentrism is an inside job.
African peoples have to detoxify their subconscious mind of the Eurocentrism
garbage (mis-education) that has been dumped/injected in it over the past 500
years. They must stop thinking of themselves, and stop acting, as a global minority
peoples.
It is precisely because Eurocentric mis-education (Eurocentrism) has imbued African
peoples with this global minority, subconscious mind-set that they are disunited,
powerless, mindless, self-destructive, homeless, myopic, and ancestorless. After
their minds have been detoxified through the process/program of Afrocentrism, then
their newly acquired internal subconscious sobriety/spiritualism will fill that void so
that they will now begin to love each other, respect each other, save each other, and
in the process, save themselves. As a result of Eurocentric global mis-education, we
have been brainwashed, misdirected, and dislocated; ergo, the primary function of
Afrocentrism is to relocate our subconscious mind-set to its original locus/reference
point, Mother Africa.
However, as a vital first step, we must clearly understand what Afro-centrism is.
What Afrocentrism Is Not First of all, let me state quite unequivocally what
Afrocentrism is not. Africa is not "reversed Eurocentricity"; it is not "anti-White"; it is
not the opposite to Eurocentrism, it is not a "new" form of racism; it is not
comparable with Eurocentrism; it is not a concept or movement to make African
peoples feel good; it is not "an offspring of the separationist Black nationalist and
Black Power movements of the 1960s and the 1970s"
(Nicholson, 1990, p. B1); it is not "systematic propagation of fantasy history and
bizarre theories," nor is it based "around a coherent and powerful central myth of
stolen black glory and the unjust ascendance implacably hostile whites"
(Leo, 1990, p. 25); it is not "a dangerous step toward the tribalization of our society
and the making of our schools into educational Bantustans"
(Nicholson, 1990, p. B4); it is not based on "educated guesswork ans sensible
conjectures"
(Lefkowitz, 1992a, p. 30); and it is not "particular multiculturalism . . . an
ethnocentric curriculum to raise the self-esteem an dacademic achievement of
children from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds"
(Ravitch, 1990, p. 340), nor does it pose "a threat to the rationalist tradition"
(Lefkowitz, 1992b, p. A52); nor is it supported and defended by "Black Damagogues
and Pseudo-Scholars" who want "to turn the wellspring of memory into a renewable
resource of enmity everlasting"
(Gates, 1992, p. A11). Afrocentrism: Definition, Purpose, and Function Now, what is
Afrocentrism? According to Molefi Kete Asante (1991), Afrocentrism/Afrocentricity "is
a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the
African person" (p. 172).
I wish to suggest that Afrocentricity is a state of mind, a particular subconscious
mind-set that is rooted in the African ancestral heritage and communal value system.
It represents the Africanness of a people, positing the human being as the
centrality/totalness of all existence as opposed to Eurocentrism, which posits political
power and crass materialism as the centrality/totalness of all existence. The human
factor/element is not central. Afrocentrism postulates that African peoples are the
subject of world history/culture/civilization and not the object of His-Eurocentric-
Story. It is based on the historical reality that Africans are the original, global
majority peoples, whereas Europeans are the inherited, transmitting, global minority
people. It proves that Europeans did not create science, mathematics, philosophy,
agriculture, religion, and so on, but indeed imitated the African originals.
Afrocentrism pontificates that Eurocentrism has committed the sin of
educational/psychocultural incest on African peoples; ergo, African peoples are now
culturally comatose and brain-dead, brain-damaged. More specifically, Afrocentrism
seeks to cure African peoples of the deadly disease Afro-sclerosis, which
Eurocentrism has inflicted on them over the past 500 years. It teaches that the blood
that unites African peoples is thicker than the disparate water and culture that
separate and divide them. It also teaches that African nationality is an accident of
birth based on disparate European geographic dipsersion, but African originality is
based on the reality and authenticity of Mother Africa, and that is no accident.
Afrocentrism not only trains but also equips African peoples with the necssary tools
and research methodology to engage in critical thinking and analysis of themselves,
their history, and their future from their perspective and reference point. Through the
process of Afrocentrism or Afrocentrification, African peoples would be imbued with a
positive, subconcious sense of self-confidence and self-empowerment and thus be
fully equipped to eliminate and permanently eradicate the mental paralysis, induced
collective historical-cultural amnesia, collective lobotomy, and psychological genocide
Eurocentrism has imposed upon them.
Afrocentrism proves that we are the ancestors of European. In fact, true
historiography states quite clearly that for the first 110,000 years of human/world
history, only African peoples inhabited this planet. No European existed. Yet,
Eurocentrism has the racist arrogance to state that during those 100,000 years
"those" people (Africans) did nothing, created nothing, and contributed nothing to
world civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that's why
Afrocentrism corrctly proves that the Europe of today is a progressive
replica/derivative/mutation of the Africa of yesterday-the dawn of human existence,
world history.
True historiography, which is the bedrock of Afrocentrism, also postulates that it took
Europeans about 20,000 years to be metamorphosed from the original, advanced
global majority African people to the contemporary global minority European people.
In sum, Afrocentrism represents the most potent challenge to the European power
structure (European nationalism) in the past 100 years. Europeans are scared to
death that cyclical historical reality dictates thawt their time is up-the demise of the
Eurocentric worldview and modus vivendi is at hand.
Hence, slogans such as cultural diversity, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and cultural
pluralism (which are mere cultural throwbacks of the 1960s integration slogan) are
just survival techniques by the global minority. And at times, these survival actions
have taken on military manifestations against the global majority. The Eurocentric
mindset is to resort to any and all necessary means for survival. European survival is
the name of the game. Nature of the Struggle.
In 1903, the historian W.E.B. DuBois made the salient but apocalyptic statement that
the "problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." I am suggesting
that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of nationalism.
In other words, what we have is the reality of two contending, opposing, but
mutually exclusive forces. Ergo, the nature of the struggle is as follows:
At the national level Cultural diversity Africa-centered curriculum Eurocentrism
Vs.Curriculum of inclusion Multicuturalism Afrocentricity Cultural pluralism
Afrocentrism.
At the international level Eurocentric global miseducation Afrocentric global reeduction/
Afrocentrification Eurocentric Worldview Vs. Afrocentric worldview
European nationalism/ Pan-African nationalism New World Order/"Europe
1992"/"Fortress Europe 1992"
In this geopolitical scenario, the major problem is the inablitiy or arrogant resistance
on the part of the Europeans (descendants of the slave master) to treat, accept, and
respect the descendant of the former African slaves as equal, full-fledged human
beings.
As the historian John Henrik Clarke surmised in a 1988 interview on "For the People"
(SHMM-TV, Washington, D.C.), The major problem facing the European of the future
(21st century)...is that the European will ask himself, how will I walk this earth in
peace and security when I am no longer its master?
The European assumes that he cannot walk the earth in peace and security unless he
is the master of all of it; unless he is the master of its mineral wealth, master of its
land, and master of its people and their minds. This is the nature of the struggle
between Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, African peoples, through their intellectual
class action suit (Afrocentrism), are determined to take their minds, to rescue their
minds form the suzerainty of Eurocentric, mideducated control.
Afrocentrism is the most potent weapon in the armory of African peoples in this
struggle. Furthermore, according to Joseph Lattimore (1992), "Being black in
America is like being forced to wear ill-fitting shoes. Some people adjust to it. It's
always uncomfortable on your foot, but you've got to wear it because it's the only
shoe you've got" (p. A13).
This is the invisible message/dictum behind Eurocentrism. On the other hand, the
visible message/dictum behind Afrocentrism is to tell African peoples that Eurocentric
miseducation/Eurocentrism is not "the only shoe you've got." The Africa-centered
curriculum Afrocentric global reeducation is the alternative shoe they've got now.
Footnotes
Asanti, M. K. (1991). The Afrocentric idea in education. Journal of Negro Education. 60, 170-179
Asanti, M.K. (1980). Afrocentricity: Tje theory of social change. Buffalo,NY:Amulefei.
Asante, M.K. (1987). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Clark, H.J (1970). Introduction. In J.G. Jackson, Introduction to African civilization. New Jersey: The Citadel
Press.
Clayton, C.W. (1992, April 8). Politics and liberal education. The chronicle of Higher Education, pp.B1-B2
D'Souza, D. (1991, March). Illiberal education. The Atlantic Monthly, pp.51-79.
Daley, S. (1990, October 10). Black history efforts criticized as "cheerleading." Akron Beacon Journal, p. A11.
Ellis, J.M. (1992, January 15). The origins of PC. The Chronicle of HigherEducation, pp. B1-B2.
Gates, L.H. (1992, July 20). Black demagogues and pseudo-scholars. New York Times, p.A11.
Hoskins, L.A. (1991).Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism: The nationaldebate-Proceedings of the A public Policy
Forum. Institute for African-American Affairs, Kent State University.
Hoskins, L.A. (1992). Decoding European geopolitics: Afrocentric perspectives. New York: Kayode.
Joseph G.G.,Reddy, V.,& Searle-Chatterjee,M. (1990). Eurocentrism in the social sciences. Race & Class, 31,1-26.
Lattimore, J. (1992,July 12). We are already crazy. The News Tribune, pp.A1-A13.
Lefkowitz, M. (1992b, May 6). Point of View. The Chronicle of Higher Education, P. A52.
Leo, J. (1990, November 12). On society: A fringe history of the world. U.S. News & World Report, pp.25-26.
Magubane, B.M. (1989). The ties that bind: African American consciousness of Africa. New Jersey: Africa World
Press.
Nicholson, D. (1990, September 23). Afrocentrism and the tribalization of America. The Washinton Post, pp. B1-
B4.
Ravitch, D. (1990 Summer). Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures. The American Scholar, pp. 337-354.
Rodriguez, R. (1992, March 26). Ethnic studies: Precursor to the multicultural debate. Black Issues in Higher
Education, pp. 9, 14-16.
Ture, K. (1975, February 13). Education is a weapon. Lecture given at Howard University.
Walters, R.W. (1990). The Afrocentricity concept at Howard University: A viewpoint. New Directions, 17, 6-9.
Weiner, A.B. (1992, July 22). Anthropology's lessons for cultural diversity. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp.
B1-B2. Shem Hotep
Dr. Nantambu is an Associate Professor, Dept. of Pan-African Studies, Kent State
University, U.S.A. a Public Policy versus Human Needs
Dr. Kwame Nantambu
Posted: April 15, 2002
It is totally racist to suggest that Afrocentrism "sometimes distorts facts and turns
history into 'ethnic cheerleading'" (Daley, 1990). The salient fact is that there is
absolutely no need for Afrocentrism to falsify, distort, or misrepresent world history.
Afrocentrism resents and deals with an authentic and specific culture and history - a
cultural history that did not begin in Father Europe but a human/world history that
began in Mother Africa.
Indeed, the stark reality is that Eurocentrism had to - and still continues to - falsify,
mis-represent, and distort human/world history as His-Story, His-Eurocentric-Story
in order to maintain European global dominance/hegemony.
Eurocentrism indeed represents a racist, divisive, ahistorical, and dysfunctional view
of world history. The purpose of this article is to engage in an Afrocentric geopolitical
linkage analysis of the struggle between Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism.
Eurocentrism: Historical Origins and Contemporary Manifestations Since the 15th
century, ethnocentrism, etnocentrism, and xenophobia have characterized,
fashioned, and conditioned the European attitude or mind-set toward African
peoples. As such, in the spirit of Eurocentrism, the African could not and cannot be
integrated as a social equal. Eurocentric exclusiveness and its striving for global
dominance left no place for the African except servitude and second-class citizenship.
Eurocentric ideology has refused to accept Africans on the basis of their humanity
because of the color of their skin. As a result, Eurocentric history (His-Story)
deliberately promulgated the myth that African was a "Dark Continent" replete with
cannibals, savages, and inferior, uncivilized, backward, primitive peoples, devoid of
knowledge and culture and possessing evil traits and desires.
The erudite Afrocentric historian, John Henrik Clarke (1970), however, completely
destroys this Eurocentric myth by correctly asserting that: Civilization did not start in
European countries and the rest of the world did not wait in darkness for the
Europeans to bring the light...most of the history books in the last five hundred years
have been written to glorify Europeans at the expense of other peoples....
Most Western historians have not been willing to admit that there is an African
history to be written about and that this history predates the emergence of Europe
by thousands of years. It is not possible for the world to have waited in darkness for
the Europeans to bring the light because, for most of the early history of man, the
Europeans themselves were in darkness When the light of culture came for the first
time to the people who would later call themselves Europeans, it came from Africa
and Middle Eastern Asia....
It is too often forgotten that, when the Europeans emerged and began to extend
themselves into the broader world of Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, they would colonize world scholarship, mainly to show or imply
that Europeans were the only creators of what could be called civilization. In order to
accomplish this, the Europeans had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they previously
knew about Africa.(pp.3-4)This particularistic geopolitical mind-set has permeated European policy toward
African peoples and the African continent. This particularistic mind-set also
precipitated the European proselytizing mission to "save" those "infidel" African
peoples. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Africa was never a Dark
Continent.
The glorious history and progressive advancement/contribution of African peoples to
humanity have already been well documented to dispel the Eurocentric myth that the
continent was dark and its people uncivilized, inferior, or backward. What needs to be
emphasized here is that mere survival forced Europeans to adopt this offensive
geopolitical strategy; in other words, Europeans had to devise a reverse
psychological warfare strategy to show that indeed they were superior and Africans
inferior.
It must be understood that a paramount modus operandi of imperialism was to link
Eurocentrism "with innate qualities of excellence in intelligence, beauty and the right
to rule other races. Its reverse effect on the African was to degrade his color and the
physical subordination that had been imposed by force came to be associated with
the (African's) innate qualities" (Magubane, 1989, p.33).
This goal was achieved through miseducation of the African and the falsification of
his history. As Kwame Ture (1975) once warned: "If you don't know who you are,
you would not know what your interests are." A people without a sense of history are
ill-equipped to visualize and plan a future because of an unclear and
distorted/miseducated picture of their past.
A people without a sense of history are ill-equipped to visualize and plan a future
because of an unclear and distorted/miseducated picture of their past. A people
without the knowledge of "having done" will have grave difficulty acknowledging the
motivation of "can do". Or as the slain Pan-African nationalist Malcolm X(1963) put it
in a speech delivered Novmber 10, 1963, in Detroit, The Black man has no selfconfidence;
he has no confidence in his own race because the white man(European)
destroyed you and my past; he destroyed you and my past; he destroyed our
knowledge of our culture and by having destroyed it, now we don't know of any
achievement, any accomplishment and as long as you can be convinced that you
never did anything, you can never do anything.
Hence, the vital necessity is for African people to use the weapons of education and
history to extricate themselves from this psychological dependency
complex/syndrome as a necessary precondition for liberation. Let us be reminded
that Mark Twain once said that when a country enslaves a people, the first necessity
is to make the world feel that the people enslaved are subhuman.
The next effort is to make his fellow countrymen believe that the enslaved man is
inferior; and then, worst of all, to make that man believe himself inferior (Magubane,
1989). European hegemony attempted this in various forms, principally through
religion and Eurocentric global miseducation and then by economic, military, political,
and psychocultural imperialistic means.
By denigrating and devaluating African culture and civilizations, Europeans attempted
to rape/strip African peoples of their oneness, their Africanity, their humanity.
However, Europeans have not been totally successful in doing so because of the
potency, continuity, and adaptability of the African personality.
Indeed, historiography shows that African peoples are the only people to resist all 15
European powers at the same time-during the scramble/partitioning of African,
November 1884-February 1885-and to emerge with their culture wounded but not
dead, their political systems developed and their economics ravaged and engulfed in
powerlessness and dependent underdevelopment. In the 1920's, the dominant
European power, the United States, brandished the geopolitical Eurocentric sword
designed "to make the world safe for democracy" a la Pax Americana.
Contemporary Eurocentric geopolitics told us that only Soviet communism was bent
on global domination and expansionism, but American imperialism is not. It is
benevolent. Eurocentrism further pontificates that Africans must always judge
themselves using the European as their standard, model, or norm. It is here that
Afrocentrism and the Africa-centered curriculum must be potent, ubiquitous,
countervailing force not only so that African peoples must see themselves through
the lens of the dawn of human/world history, but also more importantly, so that they
extricate themselves from this vicious, divisive, and deleterious Eurocentric
psychological dependency complex. This is precisely why some prominent Eurocentric
historians and educators are rebelling against Afrocentrism, the Africa-centered
curriculum, and the curriculum of inclusion.
Afrocentrism is the plaintiff in an intellectual class action suit filed against
Eurocentrism, the Euro-American power structure, the Eurocentric world view and
the curriculum of exclusion, just at the "new world order" represents a declaration of
war against African peoples. The defendants, Eurocentric historians and educators
stand accused of 500 years of distortion, falsification, and misrepresentation of the
historical truth, with the sole purpose to ossify, defend, and perpetuate the Big Lie of
European supremacy, invincibility, and originality coterminous with the Big Lie of
African inferiority and nothingness.
It must also be borne in mind that cultural diversity, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism,
and cultural pluralism are all four sides of the same European hegemonic coin. On
the one hand, cultural diversity represents the geopolitical racist reality of the new
world order, whereas multiculturalism and cultural pluralism are not only a
hierarchical system with Europe at the top but also a contemporary manifestation of
that 15th-century Eurocentric, ethnocentric, etnocentric, and xenophobic
subconscious mind-set.
The insidious aspect of multiculturalism is that it represents diffusion and exclusion,
not inclusion. As a riposte, Afrocentrism demands that the African culture must be
treated as original, unique, and distinct. It does not need a European connection,
legitimization, and imprimatur to make it legitimate. It must also be clear that
Afrocentrism is not a stepping stone to multicultrualism. In fact, the reverse is true.
Multiculturalism is indeed a stepping stone to Afrocentrism, because of the historical
truism that the African culture is the original culture from which all other cultures are
derived. Furthermore, within the context of Afrocentrism, we do not speak of cultural
diversity but cultural specificity.
The bottom line is that Europeans still want to control the minds and actions of
African peoples so that they can perpetuate, maintain and ossify their global
dominance and power position. This is the crux of the issue, because if African
peoples (the global majority) were to become Afrocnetric (Afrocentricized), if they
were to control their actions and mind-sets and begin to act independently as a
global, united, and powerful majority with an Africa-centered subconscious mind-set,
then that would spell the ineluctable end of European global power and dominance.
This indeed is the fear of Europeans. Europeans, a global minority, do not want to
lose their global power position; hence their insecure status makes them scared
whenever they hear the footsteps of Afrocentrism or people demanding an Africacentered
curriculum.
Europeans do not want African peoples to see, evaluate, and judge themselves from
their own authentic, original, Africa-centered perspective and context. However,
through the process of Afrocentrism, African peoples must go back to the dawn of
human history in order to de-Europeanize/detoxify/demystify/de-brainwash their
subconscious mind-set of this invisible drug called Eurocentric mis-education
(Eurocentrism), so that as they approach the 21st century, they can look Europeans
straight in the eye as equals because they are now armed with the correct
knowledge, information, and interpretation of the rich, glorious, and dynastical
history, scientific inventions, humane-communal modus vivendi, and
unprecedented/unmatched intellectual acumen of their African ancestors.
The African dynastical/ancestral history is the bedrock or spinal cord upon which
African peoples must build their contemporary and future Pan-African nationalist
challenge to European nationalism. As an African class of people, we must face the
stark reality, and the only way to do so is to go through the program/process of
Afrocentrification. Afrocentrism is an inside job.
African peoples have to detoxify their subconscious mind of the Eurocentrism
garbage (mis-education) that has been dumped/injected in it over the past 500
years. They must stop thinking of themselves, and stop acting, as a global minority
peoples.
It is precisely because Eurocentric mis-education (Eurocentrism) has imbued African
peoples with this global minority, subconscious mind-set that they are disunited,
powerless, mindless, self-destructive, homeless, myopic, and ancestorless. After
their minds have been detoxified through the process/program of Afrocentrism, then
their newly acquired internal subconscious sobriety/spiritualism will fill that void so
that they will now begin to love each other, respect each other, save each other, and
in the process, save themselves. As a result of Eurocentric global mis-education, we
have been brainwashed, misdirected, and dislocated; ergo, the primary function of
Afrocentrism is to relocate our subconscious mind-set to its original locus/reference
point, Mother Africa.
However, as a vital first step, we must clearly understand what Afro-centrism is.
What Afrocentrism Is Not First of all, let me state quite unequivocally what
Afrocentrism is not. Africa is not "reversed Eurocentricity"; it is not "anti-White"; it is
not the opposite to Eurocentrism, it is not a "new" form of racism; it is not
comparable with Eurocentrism; it is not a concept or movement to make African
peoples feel good; it is not "an offspring of the separationist Black nationalist and
Black Power movements of the 1960s and the 1970s"
(Nicholson, 1990, p. B1); it is not "systematic propagation of fantasy history and
bizarre theories," nor is it based "around a coherent and powerful central myth of
stolen black glory and the unjust ascendance implacably hostile whites"
(Leo, 1990, p. 25); it is not "a dangerous step toward the tribalization of our society
and the making of our schools into educational Bantustans"
(Nicholson, 1990, p. B4); it is not based on "educated guesswork ans sensible
conjectures"
(Lefkowitz, 1992a, p. 30); and it is not "particular multiculturalism . . . an
ethnocentric curriculum to raise the self-esteem an dacademic achievement of
children from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds"
(Ravitch, 1990, p. 340), nor does it pose "a threat to the rationalist tradition"
(Lefkowitz, 1992b, p. A52); nor is it supported and defended by "Black Damagogues
and Pseudo-Scholars" who want "to turn the wellspring of memory into a renewable
resource of enmity everlasting"
(Gates, 1992, p. A11). Afrocentrism: Definition, Purpose, and Function Now, what is
Afrocentrism? According to Molefi Kete Asante (1991), Afrocentrism/Afrocentricity "is
a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the
African person" (p. 172).
I wish to suggest that Afrocentricity is a state of mind, a particular subconscious
mind-set that is rooted in the African ancestral heritage and communal value system.
It represents the Africanness of a people, positing the human being as the
centrality/totalness of all existence as opposed to Eurocentrism, which posits political
power and crass materialism as the centrality/totalness of all existence. The human
factor/element is not central. Afrocentrism postulates that African peoples are the
subject of world history/culture/civilization and not the object of His-Eurocentric-
Story. It is based on the historical reality that Africans are the original, global
majority peoples, whereas Europeans are the inherited, transmitting, global minority
people. It proves that Europeans did not create science, mathematics, philosophy,
agriculture, religion, and so on, but indeed imitated the African originals.
Afrocentrism pontificates that Eurocentrism has committed the sin of
educational/psychocultural incest on African peoples; ergo, African peoples are now
culturally comatose and brain-dead, brain-damaged. More specifically, Afrocentrism
seeks to cure African peoples of the deadly disease Afro-sclerosis, which
Eurocentrism has inflicted on them over the past 500 years. It teaches that the blood
that unites African peoples is thicker than the disparate water and culture that
separate and divide them. It also teaches that African nationality is an accident of
birth based on disparate European geographic dipsersion, but African originality is
based on the reality and authenticity of Mother Africa, and that is no accident.
Afrocentrism not only trains but also equips African peoples with the necssary tools
and research methodology to engage in critical thinking and analysis of themselves,
their history, and their future from their perspective and reference point. Through the
process of Afrocentrism or Afrocentrification, African peoples would be imbued with a
positive, subconcious sense of self-confidence and self-empowerment and thus be
fully equipped to eliminate and permanently eradicate the mental paralysis, induced
collective historical-cultural amnesia, collective lobotomy, and psychological genocide
Eurocentrism has imposed upon them.
Afrocentrism proves that we are the ancestors of European. In fact, true
historiography states quite clearly that for the first 110,000 years of human/world
history, only African peoples inhabited this planet. No European existed. Yet,
Eurocentrism has the racist arrogance to state that during those 100,000 years
"those" people (Africans) did nothing, created nothing, and contributed nothing to
world civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that's why
Afrocentrism corrctly proves that the Europe of today is a progressive
replica/derivative/mutation of the Africa of yesterday-the dawn of human existence,
world history.
True historiography, which is the bedrock of Afrocentrism, also postulates that it took
Europeans about 20,000 years to be metamorphosed from the original, advanced
global majority African people to the contemporary global minority European people.
In sum, Afrocentrism represents the most potent challenge to the European power
structure (European nationalism) in the past 100 years. Europeans are scared to
death that cyclical historical reality dictates thawt their time is up-the demise of the
Eurocentric worldview and modus vivendi is at hand.
Hence, slogans such as cultural diversity, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and cultural
pluralism (which are mere cultural throwbacks of the 1960s integration slogan) are
just survival techniques by the global minority. And at times, these survival actions
have taken on military manifestations against the global majority. The Eurocentric
mindset is to resort to any and all necessary means for survival. European survival is
the name of the game. Nature of the Struggle.
In 1903, the historian W.E.B. DuBois made the salient but apocalyptic statement that
the "problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." I am suggesting
that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of nationalism.
In other words, what we have is the reality of two contending, opposing, but
mutually exclusive forces. Ergo, the nature of the struggle is as follows:
At the national level Cultural diversity Africa-centered curriculum Eurocentrism
Vs.Curriculum of inclusion Multicuturalism Afrocentricity Cultural pluralism
Afrocentrism.
At the international level Eurocentric global miseducation Afrocentric global reeduction/
Afrocentrification Eurocentric Worldview Vs. Afrocentric worldview
European nationalism/ Pan-African nationalism New World Order/"Europe
1992"/"Fortress Europe 1992"
In this geopolitical scenario, the major problem is the inablitiy or arrogant resistance
on the part of the Europeans (descendants of the slave master) to treat, accept, and
respect the descendant of the former African slaves as equal, full-fledged human
beings.
As the historian John Henrik Clarke surmised in a 1988 interview on "For the People"
(SHMM-TV, Washington, D.C.), The major problem facing the European of the future
(21st century)...is that the European will ask himself, how will I walk this earth in
peace and security when I am no longer its master?
The European assumes that he cannot walk the earth in peace and security unless he
is the master of all of it; unless he is the master of its mineral wealth, master of its
land, and master of its people and their minds. This is the nature of the struggle
between Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, African peoples, through their intellectual
class action suit (Afrocentrism), are determined to take their minds, to rescue their
minds form the suzerainty of Eurocentric, mideducated control.
Afrocentrism is the most potent weapon in the armory of African peoples in this
struggle. Furthermore, according to Joseph Lattimore (1992), "Being black in
America is like being forced to wear ill-fitting shoes. Some people adjust to it. It's
always uncomfortable on your foot, but you've got to wear it because it's the only
shoe you've got" (p. A13).
This is the invisible message/dictum behind Eurocentrism. On the other hand, the
visible message/dictum behind Afrocentrism is to tell African peoples that Eurocentric
miseducation/Eurocentrism is not "the only shoe you've got." The Africa-centered
curriculum Afrocentric global reeducation is the alternative shoe they've got now.
Footnotes
Asanti, M. K. (1991). The Afrocentric idea in education. Journal of Negro Education. 60, 170-179
Asanti, M.K. (1980). Afrocentricity: Tje theory of social change. Buffalo,NY:Amulefei.
Asante, M.K. (1987). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Clark, H.J (1970). Introduction. In J.G. Jackson, Introduction to African civilization. New Jersey: The Citadel
Press.
Clayton, C.W. (1992, April 8). Politics and liberal education. The chronicle of Higher Education, pp.B1-B2
D'Souza, D. (1991, March). Illiberal education. The Atlantic Monthly, pp.51-79.
Daley, S. (1990, October 10). Black history efforts criticized as "cheerleading." Akron Beacon Journal, p. A11.
Ellis, J.M. (1992, January 15). The origins of PC. The Chronicle of HigherEducation, pp. B1-B2.
Gates, L.H. (1992, July 20). Black demagogues and pseudo-scholars. New York Times, p.A11.
Hoskins, L.A. (1991).Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism: The nationaldebate-Proceedings of the A public Policy
Forum. Institute for African-American Affairs, Kent State University.
Hoskins, L.A. (1992). Decoding European geopolitics: Afrocentric perspectives. New York: Kayode.
Joseph G.G.,Reddy, V.,& Searle-Chatterjee,M. (1990). Eurocentrism in the social sciences. Race & Class, 31,1-26.
Lattimore, J. (1992,July 12). We are already crazy. The News Tribune, pp.A1-A13.
Lefkowitz, M. (1992b, May 6). Point of View. The Chronicle of Higher Education, P. A52.
Leo, J. (1990, November 12). On society: A fringe history of the world. U.S. News & World Report, pp.25-26.
Magubane, B.M. (1989). The ties that bind: African American consciousness of Africa. New Jersey: Africa World
Press.
Nicholson, D. (1990, September 23). Afrocentrism and the tribalization of America. The Washinton Post, pp. B1-
B4.
Ravitch, D. (1990 Summer). Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures. The American Scholar, pp. 337-354.
Rodriguez, R. (1992, March 26). Ethnic studies: Precursor to the multicultural debate. Black Issues in Higher
Education, pp. 9, 14-16.
Ture, K. (1975, February 13). Education is a weapon. Lecture given at Howard University.
Walters, R.W. (1990). The Afrocentricity concept at Howard University: A viewpoint. New Directions, 17, 6-9.
Weiner, A.B. (1992, July 22). Anthropology's lessons for cultural diversity. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp.
B1-B2. Shem Hotep
Dr. Nantambu is an Associate Professor, Dept. of Pan-African Studies, Kent State
University, U.S.A. a Public Policy versus Human Needs
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