Showing posts with label Ta-Merri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ta-Merri. Show all posts
Signs and Symbols of Primodial Man the Evolution of the Eschatology of the Ancient Egyptians by Albert Church Ward
Imhotep the Vizier and Physician of King Zoser, Jamison B. Hurry, M.A., M.D. ( Oxford Univ. Press 1926)
THE GLOBAL MIGRATIONS OF AFRICAN PEOPLE BY RUNOKO RASHIDI
THE GLOBAL MIGRATIONS OF AFRICAN PEOPLE
BY RUNOKO RASHIDI
runoko@yahoo.com
INTRODUCTION
It has been said that "history is a light that illuminates the past and a key that unlocks the door to the future." This paper is designed to help reconnect and refocus the history and present conditions of the Global African Community from the periphery of our imaginations to the center of our attention, and is devoted to the review of what has been referred to as "That Other African." This is not the stereotypical African savage, but the African that first peopled the earth, and gave birth to or significantly influenced the world's oldest and most magnificent civilizations. This is the African that first entered Asia, Europe, Australia, the South Pacific, and the early Americas not as slave, but as master. We now know, based on recent scientific studies of DNA, that modern humanity originated in Africa, that Black people are the world's original people, and that all modern humans can ultimately trace their ancestral roots back to Africa. If not for the primordial migrations of early African people, humanity would have remained physically Africoid, and the rest of the world outside of the African continent absent of human life.
Our concern is not only with Africa as the cradle of human culture, but as the birthplace and the cradle of humanity itself. For a long time the cradle of humanity was "placed" in Asia. This was apparently done for at least two basic reasons: the ancient presence in Asia of all three major human ethnic types (Black, White, and Yellow); and the discovery of Homo erectus in Asia at a time when Africa had not yet become a significant target for palaeontological excavations.
Homo erectus, whose origins have been traced back to about 1.6 million years before present, was the first hominid to leave Africa. More than 500,000 years ago, having domesticated fire and possessing rudimentary methods of transporting food and water, Homo erectus, with physical characteristics distinctly marked by dark complexion and tightly curled hair, was ready to embark upon his Asia trek. Both the well known "Peking Man" and "Java Man" fossils are only regional variations of early, Africoid Homo erectus populations. The arrival of Homo erectus from Africa into Europe has been estimated at about 400,000 years ago.
In addition to Homo erectus, the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa also produced the first modern human populations (Homo sapiens sapiens). New researches and discoveries in the relevant
scientific fields confirm this. In 1986, for example, after a meticulous analysis of mitochondrial DNA, an elite group of scientists led by Oxford University's James S. Wainscoat, recorded the following statement: "The earliest fossils of anatomically modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) have been found in Africa at Omo in Ethiopia, Border Cave [Ingwavuma] in South Africa and at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa. The data from the last site suggests that Homo sapiens sapiens was present in South Africa more than 100,000 years ago, and an adult mandible from Border Cave has been dated to about 90,000 years before present. Hence, it has been argued that the evolution of modern man took place in Africa. Our data are consistent with such a scheme, in which a founder population migrated from Africa and subsequently gave rise to all non-African populations."
In 1987, less than a year after the initial publication of their findings, Wainscoat was even more convinced of their validity. In a more specific report, Wainscoat noted that, "It seems likely that modern man emerged in Africa and...that subsequently a founder population left Africa and spread throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas."
Douglas Wallace, another scientist actively engaged in DNA research, adds that, "The scientist's Eve--subject of one of the most provocative theories in a decade--was more likely a dark-haired, black-skinned woman, roaming a hot savanna in search of food." According to Diop: "The man born in Africa was necessarily dark-skinned due to the considerable force of ultraviolet radiation in the equatorial belt. As he moved toward the more temperate climates, this man gradually lost his pigmentation by process of selection and adaptation."
Throughout the 1990s DNA research has continued and has given added weight to the African origins of humanity. As the direct result of migrations then, African people came to populate the rest of the world. There were different routes with varying degrees of difficulty that the migrants could have taken as they left the Great Lakes region. These routes include the Nile Valley, the Suez Isthmus into Asia, and the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe. It is in the light of these routes that the presence of modern humans in Asia, Europe, and, ultimately the Americas, can be traced.
When we speak of the African presence globally we are referring to all of the Black populations that have peopled the planet within both the prehistoric and historic periods. We are using the words African and Black interchangeably, as synonyms. This includes Africans as the first modern humans, the subsequent migrations and movements of African people, and the later involuntary arrival of African people around the world as the result of enslavement.
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN ASIA
The First Asians
The earliest modern human (Homo sapiens sapiens) populations of Asia were also of African birth. Here we are speaking of the Diminutive Africoids--the extremely important and much romanticized family of Black people phenotypically characterized by: unusually short statures; skin-complexions that range from yellowish to dark brown; tightly curled hair; and, in frequent cases (like many other Blacks), steatopygia. They are probably more familiar to us by such pejorative terms as pygmies," "negritos" and "negrillos." Similar peoples who live today in Southern Africa have been titled Bushmen." More accurate names for these latter people are San (translated as "original inhabitants").
Moving slowly and sporadically from their African birthplace, beginning perhaps 100,000 years ago and continuing through the millennia, untold numbers of Diminutive Africoids began to people Asia. Although they currently exist in limited numbers, and are generally found in heavily forested, barren, isolated or similarly forbidding terrains, the Diminutive Africoids were at one time the supreme lords of the earth. It is indeed unfortunate that the histories of the Diminutive Africoids, including distinct and fundamental contributions to monumental civilizations characterized by agricultural science, metallurgy, advanced scripts and urbanization, are so little understood.
Next, in the sequence of the Black presence in Asia, were the Afro-Australoids. These are the Blacks who spread into Asia, and ultimately Australia itself, at least 50,000 years ago. What the forces and factors were that gave rise to their migratory movements we do not know. Like the Diminutive Africoids, no comprehensive histories of the Afro-Australoids have been written, and all we really have are the tattered and tantalizing fragments of what this archaic period must have been like.
The Afro-Australoids constituted a significant factor in the initial peopling of South Arabia; with their skeletal remains also having been exhumed from sites in Iraq. In South Asia they proliferated, and are six million strong today in eastern and central India, where they are known as Mundas and Kolarians. A Munda sub-group, the Gonds, form the root word of the semi-mythical, submerged continent of Gondwanaland, reputed to have formed an extensive land-bridge joining East Africa to South Asia. The Veddas--an Afro-Australoid population in Sri Lanka, represent the oldest known occupants of that island-nation.
It was perhaps waves of Afro-Australoids, who, characterized by straight to wavy hair textures, and dark to near black complexions, after having ventured into the northeastern stretches of Asia, through a process that is only vaguely understood, diverged from the original parent stock into the Mongoloid or "yellow" ethnic types of modern times.
Eastern Asia
Certainly, traces of Blacks have been found in both the prehistoric and historic periods throughout the latitudes of northeastern Asia. A recent Associated Press report, for example, stated that, "The oldest Stone Age hut in Japan has been unearthed near Osaka.... Archeologists date the hut to about 22,000 years ago and say it resembles the dugouts of African bushmen." A Japanese proverb states that "Half the blood in one's veins must be black to make a good Samurai." We also have knowledge, in Japan, of Sakanouye Tamura Maro (ca. 800 C.E.), the Black general who led the Japanese armies into battle against the Ainu. Tamura Maro's successful generalship ultimately won him the Japanese shogunate.
In China an Africoid presence is visible from remote antiquity through the major historical periods. The Shang, for example, China's first dynasty, apparently had a Black background, so much so that the conquering Chou described them as having "black and oily skin." The famous Chinese sage, Lao-Tze (ca. 600 B.C.E.), was "black in complexion." Lao-Tze was described as "marvelous and beautiful as jasper." Magnificent and ornate temples were erected for him, inside of which he was worshipped like a god.
Funan is the name given by Chinese historians to the earliest kingdom of Southeast Asia. Its builders were a Black people known as Khmers, a name that loudly recalls ancient Kmt (Egypt). In remote antiquity the Khmers seem to have established themselves throughout a vast area that encompassed Myanmar, Kampuchea, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Emerging during the third century, the kingdom of Funan spread over southern Kampuchea and Vietnam. A Chinese observer described the Funanese men as small and black, and noted the Khmer's impressive libraries and high regard for scholars.
The story of Southeast Asia's Black kingdoms is essentially the story of the African people in early Asia itself: the creators and innovators of nation-states and powerful civilizations, only to be overwhelmed in the end. The Black presence in Asia, however, has been deeply etched, and the Asian nations of today, whether conscious of it or not, have merely raised themselves under a guiding African tutelage.
Western Asia
Sumer (the Biblical land of Shinar) was the formative civilizing influence in early West Asia. Flourishing during the third millennium B.C.E., Sumer set the tone and established the guidelines for the kingdoms and empires which succeeded her. Frequently designated as, or linked with, Chaldea and Babylonia, Sumer embraced the Tigris/Euphrates river valley from the base of the Persian Gulf north to Akkad, a distance of about 300 miles.
While Sumer's many cultural and technical achievements are much celebrated, the important question of her ethnic composition is frequently either glossed over or left out of the discussion altogether. Independent and objective study of the available data however, reveals the very real question of whether the so-called "problem of Sumerian origins" is actual or artificial. The Sumerians did, after all, refer to themselves as "the Blackheaded people," and their most powerful and pious leaders, such as Gudea, consistently chose very dark (and preferably black) stone for their statuary representations. There is also no doubt that the oldest and most exalted deity of the Sumerians was Anu, a name that loudly recalls the thriving and widely-spread Black civilizers found at history's dawn in Africa, Asia and even Europe. Eye-witness accounts, religious similarities, linguistic affinities, skeletal evidence, Biblical references, architectural patterns, and oral traditions all point to an early African origin for the Sumerians of Iraq.
Elam was the first civilization of Iran (formerly called Persia), and shared Sumer's eastern border. Diop points to the Africoid presence in early Elam, focusing especially on the region's artistic and sculptural remains identified by Marcel Dieulafoy from his late nineteenth century excavations at Susa. The district of Susa was generally thought by the ancients to be the residence and capital city of Memnon--the illustrious Black warrior-king. The heroic story of Memnon--his courage and prowess at the siege of Troy--was one of the most widely circulated and celebrated of antiquity. Memnon is mentioned repeatedly in the works of such writers as Aeschylus, Apollonius of Tyana, Athenaeus, Catullus, Dio Chrysostom, Hesiod, Ovid, Pausanias, Philostratus, Pindar, Quintus of Smyrna, Seneca, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Virgil. Arctinus of Miletus composed an epic poem entitled Ethiopia in which Memnon was the leading figure.
Quintus of Smyrna credits Memnon with "bringing the countless tribes of his people who live in Ethiopia, land of the black man," to Priam's Troy in support of his war for survival against the hostile coalition of Greek city-states. "Memnon came to help them. Memnon was lord over the dark Ethiopians, and the host be brought seemed infinite. The Trojans were delighted to see him in their city."
Herodotus (ca. 450 B.C.E.) regarded Colchis, a land located along the western slope of the Caucasus mountains near the Black Sea and considered the home of the Golden Fleece in Greek mythology, as an actual Kemetic colony. He not only pointed to the Colchians' black skin and woolly hair, but also to their oral traditions, language, methods of weaving, and practice of circumcision. He notes that:
"It is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it, and when it occurred to me I asked some questions both in Colchis and in Egypt, and found that the Colchians remembered the Egyptians more distinctly than the Egyptians remembered them. The Egyptians did, however, say that they thought the original Colchians were men from Sesostris' army. My own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they have black skins and woolly hair (not that that amounts to much, as other nations have the same), and secondly, and more especially, on the fact that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians are the only races which from ancient times have practised circumcision.... There is a further point of resemblance between the Colchians and the Egyptians: they share a method of weaving linen different from that of any other people."
Saint Jerome, writing during the fourth century, called Colchis the "Second Ethiopia." Two hundred years later, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, described an "Ethiopian" presence in the same region. Even today, in the same district about which Herodotus wrote, exists a minute black-skinned and woolly-haired community.
Phoenicia was the name given by Greeks in the first millennium B.C.E. to the coastal provinces of modern Lebanon and northern Palestine, although occasionally the term seems to have been applied to the entire Mediterranean seaboard from Syria to Palestine. Phoenicia was not considered a nation, in the strict sense of the word, but rather as a chain of coastal cities, of which the most important were Sidon, Byblos, Tyre and Ras Shamra. To the Greeks, the term Phoenician, from the root "Phoenix," had connotations of "red," and it is likely that the name was derived from the physical appearance of the people themselves.
The Phoenicians were a coastal branch of the Canaanites, who, according to Biblical traditions, were the brothers of Kush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egypt): members of the Hamite, or Kamite, ethnic family. The Bible says that the Canaanites, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all Black and of Nile Valley origin. Diop claims that "Phoenician history is therefore incomprehensible only if we ignore the Biblical data according to which the Phoenicians, in other words, the Canaanites, were originally Negroes, already civilized, with whom nomadic, uncultured white tribes [as represented by Abraham] later mixed." From
this period, towards the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., the term Leuco (White) Syrians came to be applied to the newly arrived populations. Ultimately, says Diop, the people of Abraham and the already settled Canaanites fused to become the historical Hebrews. It was among the Canaanite peoples that one of the most momentous inventions in human history is attested--the alphabet.
While acknowledging the Biblical data, the economic relations shared by the Kamites and the Phoenicians should not be minimized in explaining the strong sense of solidarity which generally existed between them. There was frequently a Kemetic presence: military, diplomatic, religious or commercial, both in the Canaanite hinterland and the Phoenician city-states themselves, and Diop goes on to state that, "Even throughout the most troubled periods of great misfortune, Egypt could count on the Phoenicians as one can count more or less on a brother."
Spurred on by increasing population pressures, the Phoenicians, who were becoming increasingly mixed racially, had, by the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. developed a prowess on the seas, and were in the process of establishing a network of colonies and trading posts that not only brought them fame and prosperity, but introduced in some cases, and reinforced in others, vital elements of the cultural attributes of the Southern world. Phoenician inscriptions have been found as far north as central Turkey and at least as far west as Tunisia, where the famous ancient city of Carthage was founded.
The Arabian Peninsula, first inhabited more than 8,000 years ago, was early populated by Blacks. Once dominant over the entire peninsula, the African presence in early Arabia is most clearly traceable through the Sabeans. The Sabeans were the first Arabians to step firmly within the realm of civilization. The southwestern corner of the peninsula was their early home. This area, which was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, embraces the country that is today called Yemen. In antiquity this region gave rise to a high degree of civilization because of the fertility of the soil, the growth of frankincense and myrrh, and the close proximity to the sea and consequently its importance in the trade routes. The Sabeans have even been called "the Phoenicians of the southern seas."
One of the earliest known Sabean construction project was probably the Marib Dam (possibly South Arabia's most enduring technical achievement). Serving the South Arabians for more than a thousand years, the Marib Dam is traditionally believed to have been conceived by Lokman, the sage and multi-genius of pre-Islamic South Arabia. In effect, the Dam was an earthen ridge stretching slightly more than 1700 feet across a prominent wadi. Both sides sloped sharply upward, with the Dam's upstream side fortified by small pebbles established in mortar. The Marib Dam was rebuilt several times by piling more earth and stone onto the existing structure. The last recorded height of the Marib Dam was slightly more than forty-five feet.
Before the advent of Islam southern Arabia already possessed the sacred Kaaba sanctuary, with its black stone, at Makkah. Diop claimed that "The Kaaba was reputed to have been constructed by Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian (a Negro woman), historical ancestor of Mohammed, according to all Arab historians." "In Egypt he [Abraham] had married a Negro woman, Hagar, mother of Ishmael, the Biblical ancestor of the second Semitic branch, the Arabs. Ishmael was said to be the historical ancestor of Mohammed."
The city of Makkah was considered a holy place and the destination of pilgrims long before the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad himself, who was to unite the whole of Arabia, appears to have had a prominent African lineage. According to al-Jahiz, the guardian of the sacred Kaaba--Abd al-Muttalib, "fathered ten Lords, Black as the night and magnificent." One of these men was Abdallah, the father of Muhammad. According to tradition, the first Muslim killed in battle was Mihdja--a Black man. Another Black man, Bilal, was such a pivotal figure in the development of Islam that he has been referred to as "a third of the faith." Many of the earliest Muslim converts were Africans, and a number of the Muslim faithful sought refuge in Ethiopia because of Arabian hostility to Muhammad's teachings.
Southern Asia
The ancient riverine civilization of the Indus Valley (named after one of its largest and most studied sites--Harappa) actually had extensions reaching from the river Oxus in Afghanistan in the north to the Gulf of Gambay in India in the south. The Harappan civilization flourished from about 2200 B.C.E. to approximately 1700 B.C.E. At its height, the Harappans engaged in regular commercial relations with Iraq and Iran. This much we know with certainty. We are equally certain that the founders of the Harappan civilization were Black. This is verifiable through the available physical evidence--skeletal remains, eye-witness accounts preserved in the Rig Veda, artistic and sculptural remains, the regional survival of Dravidian languages (including Brahui, Kurukh, and Malto) and the essential role of these languages which are now being used in the decipherment of the Harappan script. We should also take into account the prominence accorded the mother goddess
in the Harappan cities and the sedentary nature of the Harappan people themselves. Walter Fairservis claims that the "Harappans cultivated cotton and perhaps rice, domesticated the chicken and may have invented the game of chess and one of the two of the great early sources of nonmuscle power: the windmill."
Exceptionally valuable writings expressing intimate connections between early India, Egypt and Ethiopia have existed for more than two thousand years. In the first century B.C.E., for example, the famous Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, "From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as to India....He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt where he was brought up." Apollonius of Tyana, who is said to have visited India near the end of the first century C.E., was convinced that "The Ethiopians are colonists sent from India, who follow their forefathers in matters of wisdom." The Itinerarium Alexandri, a Latin work written about 345 C.E. for the Roman emperor Constantius, says that, "India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians."
The epic story of the African presence in Asia is one of the most exciting and, yet, least known aspects of the Black experience. It spans a period of more than 100,000 years and encompasses the largest single land mass on earth. Although many are startled by the notion, it is absolutely undeniable, that: as the first hominids and modern humans; as simple hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturists; as heroic warriors and premier civilizers; as sages and priests, poets and prophets, kings and queens; as deities and demons of misty legends and shadowy myths; and yes, even as servants and slaves, the Black race has known Asia intimately from the very beginning. Even today, after an entire series of holocausts and calamities, the numbers of Blacks in Asia approach two-hundred million. The Black populations of Asia, what they have done and are now doing, are questions that beg and demand serious answers. These answers, which we must diligently seek to supply, cannot be sought merely to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of an elite group, but to further the vision of Pan-Africanism and reunite a family that has been separated far too long.
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY EUROPE
Minoan Crete
The first civilization of Europe was established on the island of Crete. It is called the Minoan Culture, after King Minos, an early legendary ruler of the island. It has been argued that the ancestors of the Cretans were natives of Africa, a branch of Western Ethiopians.
Minoan Crete, the forerunner of Greek civilization, is the earliest known European high-culture. Although modest in size (170 miles east to west, thirty-five miles north to south), Crete exercised immeasurable influence on the Aegean archipelago, Western Asia, and the Greek mainland. Throughout Crete the vestiges of complex palaces, paved highways, aqueducts, terracotta pipes for drainage, and irrigation canals provide plentiful proof of Minoan ingenuity in the areas of scientific and technical innovation. The Minoans possessed registered trademarks, uniform weights and measures, calendrical systems based on precise astronomical observations, and advanced scripts. Interestingly enough, there were few fortifications on the island.
While the cultural and technical prowess of ancient Crete appears relatively well known, the ethnic make-up of the early population and the direction from which sprang its impetus for civilization is much more hotly debated. John G. Jackson advocates the view that Minoan civilization is African-rooted. He believes that the ancestors of the Minoans "dwelt in the grasslands of North Africa before that area dried up and became a great desert. As the Saharan sands encroached on their homeland, they took to the sea, and in Crete and neighboring islands set up a maritime culture."
Arthur Evans (1851-1941), who conducted extensive excavations on the island, was convinced of African migrations to Neolithic Crete. He noted that: "The multiplicity of these connections with the old indigenous race of the opposite African coast, and with which we undoubtedly have to deal with in the predynastic population of the Nile Valley, can in fact be hardly explained on any other hypothesis than that of an actual settlement in Southern Crete."
Moorish Civilizers of Europe
It would not be inaccurate to say that the Moors helped reintroduce Europe to civilization. But just who were the Moors of antiquity anyway? Chancellor Williams has written that "The original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were Black Africans." Much of the apparent confusion about Moorish ethnicity may be related to the fact that the same people called Moors in Europe, were known in Arab literature as Berbers. Indeed, in Arabic texts the word Moor was fairly non-existent and the term Berber was applied to practically all the inhabitants of ancient northwest Africa.
Early in the eighth century, after a grim and extended resistance to the Arab invasions of North Africa, the Moors, or Berbers, joined the triumphant surge of Islam. Following this, numbers of them crossed over to the Iberian Peninsula, where their swift victories and remarkable feats became the substance of legends.
The man chosen to lead the eighth century probe into Iberia was Tarif, son of Zar`a ibn Abi Mudrik. Tarif was one of the young generation of Islamized Berbers imbued with the military philosophy of Hassan ibn al-Nu`man and Musa ibn Nusayr--the two men who had just commanded the Arab conquest of northwest Africa. In July 710, Tarif, with four-hundred foot soldiers and one-hundred horse, all Berbers, successfully carried out a reconnaissance mission in southern Iberia. Tarifa, a small port in southern Spain, is named after him.
It is clear, however, that the actual conquest of Spain was undertaken upon the initiative of Tarik ibn Ziyad. Tarik ibn Ziyad ibn `Abd Allah ibn Walghu was a member of the Warfadjuma branch of the Nafza Berbers. Musa ibn Nusayr had previously appointed him governor of the far western Maghrib (Islamic North Africa west of Egypt), which covered what is today the southern part of the kingdom of Morocco. Tarik was in command of an army of at least 10,000 men, mainly Sanhadja Berbers.
In 711, with a Berber expeditionary force and a small number of Arab translators and propagandists (some say three-hundred), Tarik crossed the straits and disembarked near a rocky promontory which from that day since has borne his name: Djabal Tarik (`Tarik's mountain'), or, Gibraltar. In August 711, he won a paramount victory over the Visigoth army. It was during this conflict that Roderick (the last Visigoth king) was killed. On the eve of the battle, Tarik is alleged to have roused his troops with the following words: "My brethren, the enemy is before you, the sea is behind; whither would ye fly? Follow your general: I am resolved either to lose my life or to trample on the prostate king of the Romans."
Wasting no time to relish his victory, Tarik pushed on with his seemingly tireless Berber cavalry to Toledo and seized the Visigoth capital. Within a month's time, Tarik ibn Ziyad had effectively terminated Visigothic dominance of the Iberian Peninsula.
Musa ibn Nusayr joined Tarik in Spain and helped complete the conquest of Iberia with an army of 18,000 Arab and Berber troops. The two commanders met at Talavera, where Tarik and his Berbers were given the task of subduing the northwest of Spain. With vigor and speed they set about their mission, and within three months they had swept the entire territory north of the Ebro River as far as the Pyrenees, and annexed the turbulent Basque country. There they left a small detachment of men under Munusa, a Berber lieutenant who was later to play a decisive role in the Muslim campaigns in southern France.
In the aftermath of these brilliant struggles, Berbers by the thousand flooded into the Iberian peninsula. So eager were they to come that some are said to have floated over on tree-trunks. Tarik himself, at the conclusion of his illustrious military career, retired to the distant East, we are informed, to spread the teachings of Islam.
St. Maurice: Knight of the Holy Lance
The name Maurice is derived from Latin and means "like a Moor." The Black St. Maurice (the Knight of the Holy Lance) was patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. The earliest version of the Maurice story and the account upon which all later versions are based, is found in the writings of Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons (ca. 450). According to Eucherius, Maurice was a high official in the The baid region of Egypt--an early center of Christianity. Specifically, Maurice was the commander of a Roman legion of Christian soldiers stationed in Africa. By the decree of Roman emperor Maximian, his contingent of 6,600 men was dispatched to Gaul and ordered to suppress a Christian uprising there. Maurice disobeyed the order. Subsequently, he and almost all of his troops were martyred when they chose to die rather than persecute Christians, renounce their faith, and sacrifice to the gods of the Romans. The execution of the Thebans occurred in Switzerland near Agaunum (which later became Saint Maurice-en-Valais) on September 22, either in the year 280 or 300.
In the second half of the fourth century the worship of St. Maurice spread over a broad area in Switzerland, northern Italy, Burgundy, and along the Rhine. Tours, Angers, Lyons, Chalon-sur-Saone, and Dijon had churches dedicated to St. Maurice. By the epoch of Islamic Spain, the stature of St. Maurice had reached immense proportions. Charlemagne (768-814), grandson of Charles Martel and the most distinguished representative of the Carolingian Dynasty, attributed to St. Maurice the virtues of the perfect Christian warrior. In token of victory, Charlemagne had the Lance of St. Maurice (a replica of the holy lance reputed to have pierced the side of Christ) carried before the Frankish army. Like the general populace, which strongly relied on St. Maurice for intercession, the Carolingian Dynasty prayed to this military saint for the strength to resist and overcome attacks by enemy forces.
A center of extreme devotion to St. Maurice was developed in the Baltic states, where merchants in Tallin and Riga adopted his iconography. The House of the Black Heads of Riga, for instance, possessed a polychromed wooden statuette of St. Maurice. Their seal bore the distinct image of a Moor's head. The existence of nearly three-hundred major images of the Black St. Maurice have been catalogued, and even today the veneration of St. Maurice remains alive in numerous cathedrals in eastern Germany.
Sir Morien: Black Knight of the European Middle Ages
Few documents portray the ethnicity of the Moors in medieval Europe with more passion, boldness and clarity than Morien. Morien is a metrical romance rendered into English prose from the medieval Dutch version of the Lancelot. In the Lancelot, it occupies more than five thousand lines and forms the ending of the first extant volume of that compilation. Neither the date of the original poem or the name of the author is known. The Dutch manuscript is dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century. The whole work is a translation, and apparently a very faithful translation, of a French original. It is quite clear that the Dutch compiler understood his text well, and though possibly somewhat fettered by the requirement of turning prose into verse, he renders it with uncommon fidelity.
Morien is the adventure of a splendidly heroic Moorish knight (possibly a Christian convert), supposed to have lived during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morien is described as follows: "He was all black, even as I tell ye: his head, his body, and his hands were all black, saving only his teeth. His shield and his armour were even those of a Moor, and black as a raven."
It is noted that Morien was as "black as pitch; that was the fashion of his land--Moors are black as burnt brands." Ultimately, and ironically, Morien came to personify all of the finest virtues of the knights of medieval Europe. According to Gerald Massey (1829-1907), "Morion is said to have been the architect of Stonehenge.... Now, as a Negro is still known as a Morien in English, may not this indicate that Morien belonged to the black race, the Kushite builders?" It should be noted that for a very long period the Dutch language used Moor and Moriaan for Black Africans. Among the Lorma community in modern Liberia, the name Moryan is still prominent.
The Expulsion and Dispersal of the Moors
In Iberia, Christian pressures on the Moors grew irresistible. Finally, in 1492, Granada, the last important Muslim stronghold in al-Andalus, was taken by the soldiers of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and the Moors were expelled from Spain. In 1496, to appease Isabella, King Manuel of Portugal announced a royal decree banishing the Moors from that portion of the peninsula. The Spanish king Philip III expelled the remaining Moors by a special decree issued in 1609. Fully 3,500,000 Moors, or Moriscos, as their descendants were called, left Spain between 1492 and 1610. Over a million Moors settled in France. Others moved into Holland. A very curious story in the Netherlands is that of Zwarte Piet (Black Peter). By some accounts Zwarte Piet, the companion to Sinterklaas (Santa Claus), was a Moorish orphan boy whom Sinterklaas adopted and trained as his assistant!
Britons and Vikings
David MacRitchie (1851-1925), author of Ancient and Modern Britons, was convinced that the Moors were Black people who played an important role in the early settlement of Britain:
"For although it may not be easy to trace their route hither, and the date of their arrival, a branch of this family did inhabit Britain, and are not only known as Mauri and Moors, but also as Moravienses, Morienses, Murray-men, and people of Moray or Moravia.
The `Moors' are still largely represented throughout the British Islands; although of course the crossing and re-crossing of thirty generations, while increasing the number of descendants, has lessened the intensity of the resemblance to the ancestral stock. But the swarthy hue asserts itself still, though in a modified degree. Last century, when Martin described the Western Islands of Scotland, he remarked that the complexion of the natives of Skye was `for the most part black,' of the natives of Jura he said that they were generally black of complexion,' and of Arran that they were `generally brown, and some of black complexion.'
The legends and the history of the Scottish Highlands are both witnesses to the existence of purely black people. The Welsh traditions bear a similar testimony. The hero Peredur, Son of Evrawc, discovers a company of `bald, swarthy youths,' sitting at the hall- door of a black giant, playing at chess. This giant is styled the Black Oppressor, and seems to have been of the same genial nature as the `black knight' of Ashton-under-Lyne. He very frankly informs Peredur that `for this reason I am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man around me whom I have not oppressed; and justice have I done unto none.'"
A prominent Viking of the eleventh century was Thorhall, who was aboard the ship that carried the Vikings to the shores of North America. Thorhall was "the huntsman in summer, and in winter the steward of Eric the Red. He was, it is said, `a large man, and strong, black, and like a giant, silent, and foul-mouthed in his speech, and always egged on Eric to the worst; he was a bad Christian.'" We also have knowledge of the "African sea-rovers, the Fomorians, who had a main stronghold on Tory Island, off the Northwest Coast," and who came to be regarded as the "sinister forces in Irish mythology."
Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin: Great Black Russian
Of all the Blacks in Russian history, few have achieved greater fame than Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin. Born in Moscow on May 26, 1799 of well-to-do parents--members of the Russian aristocracy, Pushkin was proudly descended, on his mother's side, from Major-General Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal--an Ethiopian prince who became a favorite of Tsar Peter I (1682-1725). Pushkin has been positively identified as the very father of Russian literature. He composed in the Russian language at a time when most, if not all, Russian intellectuals were writing in French. Pushkin died prematurely, defending his honor in a duel, in January 1837. Today, Pushkin's name is loftily borne by twenty museums. Of Pushkin, Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) wrote:
"No Russian writer was ever so intimately at one with the Russian people as Pushkin... Without him (Pushkin) we should have lost, not literature alone, but much of our irresistible force, our faith in our national individuality, our belief in the people's power, and most of all our belief in our destiny."
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) wrote that, "Pushkin is the greatest master in the world. Pushkin, in our country, is the beginning of all beginnings. He most beautifully expressed the spirit of our people." Allison Blakley writes that, "Pushkin was truly the Russian counterpart to Shakespeare."
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY AMERICA
The First Americans
Most modern scientists believe that the earliest immigrants to reach the Western Hemisphere were Asian Mongoloids. It would appear, however, that this general view ignores evidence that strongly suggests that the first people to arrive and settle in the Western Hemisphere were Black people of very ancient African ancestry.
European-American archaeologist Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883-1983) advanced that the first actual migrants to America were Afro-Australoids. The Afro-Australoid migrations to America probably began about 40,000 years ago and lasted for several millennia. These migrants are called "Australoids" because of their close physical and cultural relationships to the people who more than 50,000 years ago colonized much of Asia and Australia.
One of the most well-documented single pieces of evidence for the presence of Afro-Australoids in the prehistoric Americas during the period of Gladwin's writing was the Punin Skull: a female crania found in 1923, embedded in a stratum of volcanic ash near the small village of Punin in the Andean region of Ecuador. In addition to the skull itself, the stratum yielded the remains of a number of long extinct mammals; including an Andean horse--an animal known to have been extinct for more than 10,000 years. The Punin Skull's recovery by the American Museum of Natural History of New York created a sensation. It was, first of all, hailed as the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas, and, secondly, it was clearly of an Afro-Australoid type. On these two issues "the leading experts" agreed. According to British anatomist Arthur Keith (1886-1955):
"When the expedition returned to New York from Ecuador, the skull was transferred to the Anthropological side of the Museum, where it was examined and described by Drs. Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman. Both anthropologists were struck by its resemblance to the skulls of the native women of Australia. I agree with them; the points of resemblance are too numerous to permit us to suppose that the skull could be of a sort produced by an American Indian parentage. We cannot suppose that an Australian native woman had been spirited across the Pacific in some migratory movement and that afterwards her skull was buried in a fossiliferous bed in the high plateau of Ecuador...The discovery at Punin does compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene invasion of America by an Australoid people."
Harvard anthropologist Earnest Houghton echoed Keith, although in somewhat less detail:
"The Punin skull, found in 1923 in a fossiliferous bed in the Andean highlands of Ecuador...is a skull that any competent craniologist would identify as Australian in type. It is easier to find Australoid-looking dolichocephals in the more ancient burials in the New World than anything in the way of a skull that resembles a Mongoloid."
The second migration to the Americas, Asiatic-Africoids, began about 15,000 years ago. These migrants' physical appearance seems to have resembled the Melanesians--the proud Black Islanders of the South Pacific. After having first penetrated their way northward up the coasts of Asia, they began to gradually enter North America, where they ultimately developed the revolutionary and highly pivotal Clovis and Folsom fluted-point tool industries.
Clovis and Folsom were the respective locations (both of them in New Mexico, U.S.A.) that provided the first evidences of the earliest projectile points associated with the Big Game Hunting Traditions of North
America. Clovis points have been reliably dated to between 11,000 and 11,500 years before present. Folsom points, which are usually smaller, more refined and sophisticated than their Clovis antecedents, were actually identified before the Clovis points, and have been dated to about 10,000 B.C.E. Both Clovis and Folsom spearheads were several inches long and were characterized by smoothly fluted or grooved channels extending lengthwise along both faces. Their precision and firepower were revolutionary and awesome; and their rapidly widespread usage, with the increasingly greater food supplies that resulted, laid the basis for steadily larger American populations.
It is of further interest that the first known modern discovery and revelation of the existence of these tool industries was made by an African-American; a tantalizingly and frustratingly obscure, self-taught naturalist and archaeologist named George McJunkin. The son of slaves, McJunkin, whose name may be searched for unsuccessfully in most history books, made the find in 1908 while riding out to check fence posts at a flooded creek. In 1925, three years after McJunkin's death, a dig at the Folsom site revealed a 10,000 year old spear point piercing the ribs of an extinct species of bison. It was McJunkin though, the obscure African-American, who had first documented Folsom points, which were then regarded (this was before the discovery of Ecuador's Punin Skull) "as the first unequivocal evidence of late Ice Age humans ever unearthed in the Americas."
The Clovis-Folsom Point Blacks seem to have come to North America in relatively small numbers. Later migrations of essentially the same physical type populated most of the rest of North America south of Canada. Their movements into the New World were then slowed, and later halted altogether, by the Australoid populations that were already well established in the North American Southwest. The later period Basket Makers of Arizona (the prehistoric culture bearers who eventually evolved into North America's Pueblo peoples) were probably the result of a fusion of Clovis-Folsom Point Blacks with the numerically larger Afro-Australoid populations.
Fossil remains of these early Black folk have been found in Baja, California, northeastern Mexico, Central America and in various parts of South America. Ancient Mongoloids it now appears followed the early Black immigrants and, after several thousand years, became the dominant people in the New World. Gladwin himself stated that, "The arrival of the Eskimo along the Arctic Coasts marked a fundamental transition in the anthropological history of North America. It was the last of a series of long-headed migrations, and the broad faces and slant eyes of the Eskimo marked the initial stage of a long period of Mongoloid domination in lands where Mongoloid people had therefore been unknown."
Mongoloid peoples, in fact, were soon coming to the Americas in such massive numbers, crossing the Bering Strait in boats rather than across the Beringia land bridge, that they eventually almost totally
absorbed the New World's earlier arrivals. The resulting fusion of peoples constituted the Native American populations at the time of the catastrophic European intrusions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earlier arrived Blacks (the very first Americans) tended to fade away with increasing rapidity into the shadowy realms of fairy tales, myths and legends. Some native legends of the Americas abound with exploits of early Black people. An Inuit legend, for example, explains that:
"A man and his wife and their only daughter lived in a remote place. Their daughter was outside, working when she saw a big black speck moving along the ground, coming towards her. When it got closer, she realized it was a man with a sledge. The man and the sledge were all black. He came towards the house, stopped, and said to the girl, `I have come to take you with me.' He was black all over, even his face. The girl replied, `Very well. I'll go and tell my parents.' She entered the igloo and the man followed her. He stood outside the door and told the father, `I have come to take your daughter away with me.' The father replied, `I won't have my daughter going away with a black man like you.' The stranger became angry and made a step forward with his right foot. The whole house shook. Then the father said to his daughter, `My daughter, you'll have to go away with this man. This will go badly with us if you don't.' She got ready and left the house, with the stranger behind her. Before leaving, he put his left foot down hard on the floor and the house shook again. He went out, put the girl on the sledge and shoved the sledge because it had no huskies. After a while they saw a house--the man's house. They stopped and entered. Everything inside was black, and his parents also were completely black."
For the Greenlander, the color black symbolizes strength and wisdom--traditionally he was not allowed to wear black boots until he had become a skilled hunter and reached a respectable age--but black is also associated with spirits and occult forces. In the Southwest Indian story of the Emergence, a story that is as important in the region as the Book of Genesis is to Christians, the First World is called the Black World.
The First Civilization of the Americas: The Olmecs
The Olmec (2000 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.) were an early people of Meso-America, who settled the Mexican Gulf Coast. This ancient American culture been labeled the first civilization of the western hemisphere, as they surpassed their neighbors in an attempt to settle certain problems of living together--of government, defense, religion, family, property, science and art. In this endeavor, the Olmecs laid the foundations of American civilization. No one knows whence the Olmecs came or whether they were direct derivatives of the indigenous population; but that much of their sculpture, especially the colossal heads, evidences an ancient Africoid presence in the Americas is beyond sane rebuttal. In fact, some
scientists have concluded that the Olmecs may have originally have been an African settler-colony which conquered the indigenous population of southern Mexico. Others are convinced that the Black presence among the Olmecs merely consisted of a small but elite and highly-influential community.
Sculptural and skeletal remains found in ancient Olmec sites provide the most conclusive evidence yet discovered concerning the presence of African people in America before Columbus. The most pronounced and widely acknowledged Africoid sculptural representations to appear in the ancient "New World" were produced by the Olmecs. At least fifteen colossal stone heads, weighing ten to forty tons, have been unearthed in Olmec sites along the Mexican Gulf Coast. One of the first European-American scientists to comment on the "Olmec heads,"archaeologist Matthew Stirling, described their facial features as "amazingly Negroid."
In 1974, Polish craniologist Andrzej Wiercinski informed the Congress of Americanists that skulls from Olmec and other pre-Christian sites in Mexico (Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban) "show a clear prevalence of the total Negroid pattern."
Other scientists have found a host of cultural parallels between ancient Africans and native Americans, including architectural patterns and religious practices. As for the latter, some native American communities worshipped black gods of great antiquity, such as Ekchuah, Quetzalcoatl, Yalahau, Nahualpilli and Ixtliltic, long before the first African slave arrived in the New World.
Harun Kofi Wangara (1928-1989) wrote that:
"Black seamen, who can be specifically identified as Mandinga, brought the West African gold trade to the Americas. This is established through African designations for gold, the West African method of alloying gold, its ceremonial as well as trade value and, more important, the identity of the Blacks who trafficked in it."
During his third voyage, Columbus recorded that when he reached Haiti the resident population informed him that Black men from the south and southeast had preceded him to the island. In 1513, Balboa found a colony of Black men on his arrival in Darien, Central American.
All of these facts, buttressed by skeletons and sculptures, make it clear that African people have had a profound presence and influence in pre-Columbian America. Some scholars, such as Carlos C. Marquez, have even concluded that "the youthful America was also a Negro continent.
THE BLACK PRESENCE IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANICA
The Black Presence in Australia: Fighting for Survival
Australia was settled at least 50,000 years ago by people who call themselves Blackfellas, and who are usually referred to as the Australian Aborigines. Physically, the Blackfellas are distinguished by straight to wavy hair textures, and dark to near black complexions. In January 1788, when Britain began using Australia as a prison colony, an estimated 300,000 indigenous people were spread across the continent in about six-hundred small-scale societies. Each of these communities maintained social, religious, and trade connections with its neighbors.
The dumping of British convicts into Australia proved catastrophic for the Blacks. Victims of deliberate poisonings, calculated and systematic slaughters; decimated by tuberculosis and syphilis; swept away by infectious epidemics; their community structures and moral fibers shredded, by the 1930's the Blackfellas had been reduced to a pathetic remnant of about 30,000 people, and perhaps twice that number of mixed descent.
When the continent was invaded by Europeans in the nineteenth century, the white historians who wrote about Australia invariably included a section on the Blacks, and acknowledged that the original inhabitants of the continent had had an historical role. After 1850, however, few writers referred to the Blacks at all. The Black were thought of as a "dying race." By 1950 general histories of the continent by European-Australians almost never referenced the indigenous people. During this period--the indigenous people--whether part or full blood, were excluded from all major European-Australian institutions, including schools, hospitals and labor unions. They could not vote. Their movements were restricted. They were outcasts in white Australia.
Today, the Blacks of Australia are terribly oppressed, and they remain in a desperate struggle for survival. Recent demographic surveys, for example, show that the Black infant mortality rate is the highest in Australia. Aborigines have the shoddiest housing and the poorest schools. Their life expectancy is twenty years less than Europeans. Their unemployment rate is six times higher than the
national average. Aborigines did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1961, nor the right to consume alcoholic beverages until 1964. They were not officially counted as Australian citizens until after a constitutional amendment in 1967. Today, the indigenous people constitute less than two per cent of the total Australian population.
Perhaps the Blackfellas should consider themselves fortunate. The Black aborigines of Tasamania were completely destroyed. Tasmania, an island only slightly larger than West Virginia, lies two-hundred miles off Australia's southeast coast. In 1802, following mainland Australia, Tasmania was established as a British prison colony. The colonial government itself was not even inclined to consider the Tasmanians as full human beings. To the Europeans of the island, the Tasmanians were a people fit only to be exploited in the cruelest of manners. European convicts regularly hunted Tasmanians for sport, casually shooting, spearing or clubbing the men to death, torturing and raping the women. Europeans murdered Tasmanians for use as dog food. Tasmanian infants were burned alive. Tasmanian women were kidnapped and chained, and exploited as sexual slaves. Between 1802 and 1830 the Tasmanians were reduced from an estimated five-thousand people to less than seventy-five.
In May, 1876 Truganinni, the last Tasmanian, died at seventy-three years of age. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European. Her sisters were kidnapped by Europeans. Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. It might be accurately said that Truganinni's numerous personal sufferings typify the tragedy of the Tasmanian people as a whole. After her burial, Truganinni's body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum, and remained on display until 1947. Finally, in 1976--the centenary year of Truganinni's death--despite the museum's objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. Truganinni's life spanned to the year the beginning of the "association" between Europeans and Tasmanians. During this period the Tasmanians were humiliated, degraded, and largely exterminated.
Melanesia: The Struggle Continues
In the 1970s Ben Tanggahma, Foreign Minister of Papua New Guinea, pointed out that "Africa is our motherland. All of the Black populations which settled in Asia over the hundreds of thousands of years, came undoubtedly from the African continent. In fact, the entire world was populated from Africa. Hence, we the Blacks in Asia and the Pacific today descend from proto-African peoples. We were linked to Africa in the past. We are linked to Africa in the present. We will be linked to Africa in the future."
C. Madang has described Melanesia (the Black Islands of the South Pacific) as the eastern flank of the black world, and the expression of ages past when an uninterrupted belt of Black populations stretched across Africa, Eurasia, Australia, Oceanica, and ancient America. To the contrary, the present Mongoloid inhabitants of Indonesia entered the region during relatively recent times; a period which some scientists have dated to as late as the first millennium C.E.
As was the case in Japan, the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, the Mongoloid invaders found the land already occupied by long-settled Black populations. These new peoples, to a very basic extent, eventually absorbed, vanquished or drove the Blacks into generally inaccessible areas, including the deep forests, high mountains, and remote islands where they remain to this day.
By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Muslim Indonesian sultanate of Tidore was raiding the coasts of New Guinea in search of chattels for the markets of Turkey, Iraq and the Chinese empire. It is even said that the Malay term "Papuan" (literally "kinky-haired"), which was applied to the Melanesians of New Guinea, was born out of scorn and contempt, and eventual became synonymous with "slave."
New Guinea itself is the biggest and most populous of the islands of Melanesia. Indeed, it is the largest island in the world after Greenland. It is tremendously wealthy in mineral resources, including: uranium, copper, cobalt, silver, gold, manganese, iron and oil. Now split into two by colonial design, New Guinea has until lately contained a racially homogeneous population of five to six million Africoid people. The eastern half of the island became independent in 1975 under the name of Papua New Guinea, with Michael Somare as its Prime Minister. The western half of New Guinea, however, along with a significant portion of the island's total population (estimated at three to four million people), has been seized by Indonesia as its twenty-sixth "province."
For the people of West New Guinea, Indonesia has been and continues to be a brutal and aggressive occupying power. Under Indonesian rule since 1963, the Melanesians have been prone to both physical and cultural genocide. Indonesians generally have a condescending view of Melanesians, who they consider their racial inferiors--except, of course, those who turn away from their own culture and choose to identify with Indonesian cultural values, behavior modes and language. Additionally, members of the Indonesian military and other high government officials possess considerable wealth in West New Guinea, and are firmly resolved not to share it with the Melanesians.
Melanesians living in the forest communities of West New Guinea have been subjected to forced labor schemes, while in urban areas Melanesians face overt racial discrimination. A major part of the Indonesian regime's genocidal policy, in fact, is the physical replacement of Melanesians with Indonesian nationals. This poses the distinct possibility that the Melanesians of West New Guinea, like those of Fiji, could become a minority in their own country.
Indonesia's naked offensive in New Guinea has not been met with passivity. In 1963, for example, when the Dutch occupation of West New Guinea ended and control passed to Indonesia, the struggle for national independence accelerated. In that year the Free Papua Movement (OPM) was formed. Interesting enough, the Republic of Senegal early on provided its territory as a base for the international activities of the self-proclaimed Revolutionary Provisional Government of West Papua New Guinea.
Indonesian territorial aggression in Melanesia has not been confined to New Guinea. In 1975, for example, East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, was formally annexed as Indonesia's twenty-seventh "province." A Timorese national liberation movement, the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor (FRETILIN)was formed in September 1974, and was inspired by the revolutionary nationalism of African resistance leaders from other former Portuguese colonies--Dr. Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique, Dr. Agostinho Neto of Angola, and Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau.
During the course of East Timor's national independence struggle, Indonesia has coordinated an unrelenting extermination campaign against the indigenous people. The Timorese have been bombed, shot, tortured and starved by the invading Indonesian army, with more than fifteen per cent of the total East Timorese population murdered. Despite adverse official reactions by some Western governments, none of these countries has imposed economic sanctions or adopted forceful policies against Indonesia to coerce its withdrawal.
New Caledonia, another mineral wealthy South Pacific island, lies hundreds of miles to the southeast of Indonesia and is currently a French colony. To New Caledonia's Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), the grouping of political parties representing the majority of New Caledonia's 64,000 Melanesians, the principle of national self-determination is crystal clear. Although the Blacks are now said to constitute less than fifty per cent of the total New Caledonian population, they were in fact native to the land 4,000 years before the 1853 French invasion. The Melanesians of New Caledonia, known as Kanaks, want their island to become an independent country run by and for Melanesians.
CONCLUSION
There is an African proverb that says "Until the lion has his historian, the hunter will always be a hero." I would contend that not nearly enough energy is expended by us on the history of African people, whether in antiquity or modern times. Not nearly enough. All strong peoples emphasize their history all the time; weak peoples do not. Not only must intellectuals do their work, they must give the information to the masses. I believe that as Africans, if we are to be a strong people again, we must continually clarify who we are and where we are, and constantly emphasize the things that made us great in the past. Some peoples have gone as far as to essentially make their history sacred. No one questions the right of a people to engage in this process. Europeans, Chinese, etc., do it all the time as a matter of course. Even Malcolm X said, "Of all our studies, it is history that is most qualified to reward our research." And this is not just ancient history that Malcolm X was talking about, but history ancient and modern. Our greatest leaders and intellectuals, including David Walker, Martin Robison Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, J.A. Rogers, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, John Henrik Clarke, and many, many more were clear on this. Nkrumah, however, took it a step further and clarified the matter unmistakably when he said that "Thought without practice is empty, and action without thought is blind." I believe that we must use our history, not just for intellectual purposes, but to galvanize our people into action to solve our current problems. In other words, we must use our history as a springboard for struggle. I do not pretend to speak for everyone on this matter, but I do feel quite strongly about it. Nobody in their right mind would argue that we can simply return to the past. But certainly we must look at the past in another light. I say that history is a light that illuminates the past and key that unlocks the door to the future. We need that light and we need that key. Not only must we emphasize our historical greatness as a people, as well as analyze the mistakes that we have made, we must inject it into the minds of the masses of our people and build upon it. This is a fundamental step in our liberation process.
REFERENCES
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Translated from the French and edited by Mercer Cook. Translator's Preface by Mercer Cook. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1974.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1976.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. Introduction by John Henrik Clarke. Afterword by James G. Spady. Chicago: Third World Press, 1978.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Translated from the French by Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Edited by Harold J. Salemson and Marjolijn de Jager. Foreword by John Henrik Clarke. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1991.
Hansberry, William Leo. Africa and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers: The William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook, Vol. 2. Preface by Joseph E. Harris. Edited by Joseph E. Harris. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977.
Houston, Drusilla Dunjee. The Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. Book 1, Nations of the Cushite Empire. Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records. Oklahoma City: Universal Publishing, 1926; rpt. Introduction by W. Paul Coates. Afterword by Asa G. Hilliard III. Commentary by James G. Spady. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1985.
Jackson, John G. Introduction to African Civilizations. Introduction and Additional Bibliographical Notes by John Henrik Clarke. Secaucus: Citadel, 1970.
Jackson, John G. Ages of Gold and Silver and Other Short Sketches of Human History. Foreword by Madalyn O'Hair. Austin: American Atheist Press, 1990.
Parker, George Wells. The Children of the Sun. Omaha: The Hamitic League of the World, 1918; rpt. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1978.
Rashidi, Runoko, and Ivan Van Sertima, eds. African Presence in Early Asia. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1996.
Rogers, Joel Augustus. World's Great Men of Color, 2 Vols. Edited with an Introduction, Commentary, and New Bibliographical Notes by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier, 1972.
Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House, 1977.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1983.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early Europe. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1985.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of Civilizations, 1988.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early America. Rev. ed. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Golden Age of the Moor. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992.
Van Sertima, Ivan, and Larry Williams, eds. Great African Thinkers. Vol. 1, Cheikh Anta Diop. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1986.
Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Rev. ed. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974.
READMORE
BY RUNOKO RASHIDI
runoko@yahoo.com
INTRODUCTION
It has been said that "history is a light that illuminates the past and a key that unlocks the door to the future." This paper is designed to help reconnect and refocus the history and present conditions of the Global African Community from the periphery of our imaginations to the center of our attention, and is devoted to the review of what has been referred to as "That Other African." This is not the stereotypical African savage, but the African that first peopled the earth, and gave birth to or significantly influenced the world's oldest and most magnificent civilizations. This is the African that first entered Asia, Europe, Australia, the South Pacific, and the early Americas not as slave, but as master. We now know, based on recent scientific studies of DNA, that modern humanity originated in Africa, that Black people are the world's original people, and that all modern humans can ultimately trace their ancestral roots back to Africa. If not for the primordial migrations of early African people, humanity would have remained physically Africoid, and the rest of the world outside of the African continent absent of human life.
Our concern is not only with Africa as the cradle of human culture, but as the birthplace and the cradle of humanity itself. For a long time the cradle of humanity was "placed" in Asia. This was apparently done for at least two basic reasons: the ancient presence in Asia of all three major human ethnic types (Black, White, and Yellow); and the discovery of Homo erectus in Asia at a time when Africa had not yet become a significant target for palaeontological excavations.
Homo erectus, whose origins have been traced back to about 1.6 million years before present, was the first hominid to leave Africa. More than 500,000 years ago, having domesticated fire and possessing rudimentary methods of transporting food and water, Homo erectus, with physical characteristics distinctly marked by dark complexion and tightly curled hair, was ready to embark upon his Asia trek. Both the well known "Peking Man" and "Java Man" fossils are only regional variations of early, Africoid Homo erectus populations. The arrival of Homo erectus from Africa into Europe has been estimated at about 400,000 years ago.
In addition to Homo erectus, the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa also produced the first modern human populations (Homo sapiens sapiens). New researches and discoveries in the relevant
scientific fields confirm this. In 1986, for example, after a meticulous analysis of mitochondrial DNA, an elite group of scientists led by Oxford University's James S. Wainscoat, recorded the following statement: "The earliest fossils of anatomically modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) have been found in Africa at Omo in Ethiopia, Border Cave [Ingwavuma] in South Africa and at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa. The data from the last site suggests that Homo sapiens sapiens was present in South Africa more than 100,000 years ago, and an adult mandible from Border Cave has been dated to about 90,000 years before present. Hence, it has been argued that the evolution of modern man took place in Africa. Our data are consistent with such a scheme, in which a founder population migrated from Africa and subsequently gave rise to all non-African populations."
In 1987, less than a year after the initial publication of their findings, Wainscoat was even more convinced of their validity. In a more specific report, Wainscoat noted that, "It seems likely that modern man emerged in Africa and...that subsequently a founder population left Africa and spread throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas."
Douglas Wallace, another scientist actively engaged in DNA research, adds that, "The scientist's Eve--subject of one of the most provocative theories in a decade--was more likely a dark-haired, black-skinned woman, roaming a hot savanna in search of food." According to Diop: "The man born in Africa was necessarily dark-skinned due to the considerable force of ultraviolet radiation in the equatorial belt. As he moved toward the more temperate climates, this man gradually lost his pigmentation by process of selection and adaptation."
Throughout the 1990s DNA research has continued and has given added weight to the African origins of humanity. As the direct result of migrations then, African people came to populate the rest of the world. There were different routes with varying degrees of difficulty that the migrants could have taken as they left the Great Lakes region. These routes include the Nile Valley, the Suez Isthmus into Asia, and the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe. It is in the light of these routes that the presence of modern humans in Asia, Europe, and, ultimately the Americas, can be traced.
When we speak of the African presence globally we are referring to all of the Black populations that have peopled the planet within both the prehistoric and historic periods. We are using the words African and Black interchangeably, as synonyms. This includes Africans as the first modern humans, the subsequent migrations and movements of African people, and the later involuntary arrival of African people around the world as the result of enslavement.
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN ASIA
The First Asians
The earliest modern human (Homo sapiens sapiens) populations of Asia were also of African birth. Here we are speaking of the Diminutive Africoids--the extremely important and much romanticized family of Black people phenotypically characterized by: unusually short statures; skin-complexions that range from yellowish to dark brown; tightly curled hair; and, in frequent cases (like many other Blacks), steatopygia. They are probably more familiar to us by such pejorative terms as pygmies," "negritos" and "negrillos." Similar peoples who live today in Southern Africa have been titled Bushmen." More accurate names for these latter people are San (translated as "original inhabitants").
Moving slowly and sporadically from their African birthplace, beginning perhaps 100,000 years ago and continuing through the millennia, untold numbers of Diminutive Africoids began to people Asia. Although they currently exist in limited numbers, and are generally found in heavily forested, barren, isolated or similarly forbidding terrains, the Diminutive Africoids were at one time the supreme lords of the earth. It is indeed unfortunate that the histories of the Diminutive Africoids, including distinct and fundamental contributions to monumental civilizations characterized by agricultural science, metallurgy, advanced scripts and urbanization, are so little understood.
Next, in the sequence of the Black presence in Asia, were the Afro-Australoids. These are the Blacks who spread into Asia, and ultimately Australia itself, at least 50,000 years ago. What the forces and factors were that gave rise to their migratory movements we do not know. Like the Diminutive Africoids, no comprehensive histories of the Afro-Australoids have been written, and all we really have are the tattered and tantalizing fragments of what this archaic period must have been like.
The Afro-Australoids constituted a significant factor in the initial peopling of South Arabia; with their skeletal remains also having been exhumed from sites in Iraq. In South Asia they proliferated, and are six million strong today in eastern and central India, where they are known as Mundas and Kolarians. A Munda sub-group, the Gonds, form the root word of the semi-mythical, submerged continent of Gondwanaland, reputed to have formed an extensive land-bridge joining East Africa to South Asia. The Veddas--an Afro-Australoid population in Sri Lanka, represent the oldest known occupants of that island-nation.
It was perhaps waves of Afro-Australoids, who, characterized by straight to wavy hair textures, and dark to near black complexions, after having ventured into the northeastern stretches of Asia, through a process that is only vaguely understood, diverged from the original parent stock into the Mongoloid or "yellow" ethnic types of modern times.
Eastern Asia
Certainly, traces of Blacks have been found in both the prehistoric and historic periods throughout the latitudes of northeastern Asia. A recent Associated Press report, for example, stated that, "The oldest Stone Age hut in Japan has been unearthed near Osaka.... Archeologists date the hut to about 22,000 years ago and say it resembles the dugouts of African bushmen." A Japanese proverb states that "Half the blood in one's veins must be black to make a good Samurai." We also have knowledge, in Japan, of Sakanouye Tamura Maro (ca. 800 C.E.), the Black general who led the Japanese armies into battle against the Ainu. Tamura Maro's successful generalship ultimately won him the Japanese shogunate.
In China an Africoid presence is visible from remote antiquity through the major historical periods. The Shang, for example, China's first dynasty, apparently had a Black background, so much so that the conquering Chou described them as having "black and oily skin." The famous Chinese sage, Lao-Tze (ca. 600 B.C.E.), was "black in complexion." Lao-Tze was described as "marvelous and beautiful as jasper." Magnificent and ornate temples were erected for him, inside of which he was worshipped like a god.
Funan is the name given by Chinese historians to the earliest kingdom of Southeast Asia. Its builders were a Black people known as Khmers, a name that loudly recalls ancient Kmt (Egypt). In remote antiquity the Khmers seem to have established themselves throughout a vast area that encompassed Myanmar, Kampuchea, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Emerging during the third century, the kingdom of Funan spread over southern Kampuchea and Vietnam. A Chinese observer described the Funanese men as small and black, and noted the Khmer's impressive libraries and high regard for scholars.
The story of Southeast Asia's Black kingdoms is essentially the story of the African people in early Asia itself: the creators and innovators of nation-states and powerful civilizations, only to be overwhelmed in the end. The Black presence in Asia, however, has been deeply etched, and the Asian nations of today, whether conscious of it or not, have merely raised themselves under a guiding African tutelage.
Western Asia
Sumer (the Biblical land of Shinar) was the formative civilizing influence in early West Asia. Flourishing during the third millennium B.C.E., Sumer set the tone and established the guidelines for the kingdoms and empires which succeeded her. Frequently designated as, or linked with, Chaldea and Babylonia, Sumer embraced the Tigris/Euphrates river valley from the base of the Persian Gulf north to Akkad, a distance of about 300 miles.
While Sumer's many cultural and technical achievements are much celebrated, the important question of her ethnic composition is frequently either glossed over or left out of the discussion altogether. Independent and objective study of the available data however, reveals the very real question of whether the so-called "problem of Sumerian origins" is actual or artificial. The Sumerians did, after all, refer to themselves as "the Blackheaded people," and their most powerful and pious leaders, such as Gudea, consistently chose very dark (and preferably black) stone for their statuary representations. There is also no doubt that the oldest and most exalted deity of the Sumerians was Anu, a name that loudly recalls the thriving and widely-spread Black civilizers found at history's dawn in Africa, Asia and even Europe. Eye-witness accounts, religious similarities, linguistic affinities, skeletal evidence, Biblical references, architectural patterns, and oral traditions all point to an early African origin for the Sumerians of Iraq.
Elam was the first civilization of Iran (formerly called Persia), and shared Sumer's eastern border. Diop points to the Africoid presence in early Elam, focusing especially on the region's artistic and sculptural remains identified by Marcel Dieulafoy from his late nineteenth century excavations at Susa. The district of Susa was generally thought by the ancients to be the residence and capital city of Memnon--the illustrious Black warrior-king. The heroic story of Memnon--his courage and prowess at the siege of Troy--was one of the most widely circulated and celebrated of antiquity. Memnon is mentioned repeatedly in the works of such writers as Aeschylus, Apollonius of Tyana, Athenaeus, Catullus, Dio Chrysostom, Hesiod, Ovid, Pausanias, Philostratus, Pindar, Quintus of Smyrna, Seneca, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Virgil. Arctinus of Miletus composed an epic poem entitled Ethiopia in which Memnon was the leading figure.
Quintus of Smyrna credits Memnon with "bringing the countless tribes of his people who live in Ethiopia, land of the black man," to Priam's Troy in support of his war for survival against the hostile coalition of Greek city-states. "Memnon came to help them. Memnon was lord over the dark Ethiopians, and the host be brought seemed infinite. The Trojans were delighted to see him in their city."
Herodotus (ca. 450 B.C.E.) regarded Colchis, a land located along the western slope of the Caucasus mountains near the Black Sea and considered the home of the Golden Fleece in Greek mythology, as an actual Kemetic colony. He not only pointed to the Colchians' black skin and woolly hair, but also to their oral traditions, language, methods of weaving, and practice of circumcision. He notes that:
"It is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it, and when it occurred to me I asked some questions both in Colchis and in Egypt, and found that the Colchians remembered the Egyptians more distinctly than the Egyptians remembered them. The Egyptians did, however, say that they thought the original Colchians were men from Sesostris' army. My own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they have black skins and woolly hair (not that that amounts to much, as other nations have the same), and secondly, and more especially, on the fact that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians are the only races which from ancient times have practised circumcision.... There is a further point of resemblance between the Colchians and the Egyptians: they share a method of weaving linen different from that of any other people."
Saint Jerome, writing during the fourth century, called Colchis the "Second Ethiopia." Two hundred years later, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, described an "Ethiopian" presence in the same region. Even today, in the same district about which Herodotus wrote, exists a minute black-skinned and woolly-haired community.
Phoenicia was the name given by Greeks in the first millennium B.C.E. to the coastal provinces of modern Lebanon and northern Palestine, although occasionally the term seems to have been applied to the entire Mediterranean seaboard from Syria to Palestine. Phoenicia was not considered a nation, in the strict sense of the word, but rather as a chain of coastal cities, of which the most important were Sidon, Byblos, Tyre and Ras Shamra. To the Greeks, the term Phoenician, from the root "Phoenix," had connotations of "red," and it is likely that the name was derived from the physical appearance of the people themselves.
The Phoenicians were a coastal branch of the Canaanites, who, according to Biblical traditions, were the brothers of Kush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egypt): members of the Hamite, or Kamite, ethnic family. The Bible says that the Canaanites, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all Black and of Nile Valley origin. Diop claims that "Phoenician history is therefore incomprehensible only if we ignore the Biblical data according to which the Phoenicians, in other words, the Canaanites, were originally Negroes, already civilized, with whom nomadic, uncultured white tribes [as represented by Abraham] later mixed." From
this period, towards the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., the term Leuco (White) Syrians came to be applied to the newly arrived populations. Ultimately, says Diop, the people of Abraham and the already settled Canaanites fused to become the historical Hebrews. It was among the Canaanite peoples that one of the most momentous inventions in human history is attested--the alphabet.
While acknowledging the Biblical data, the economic relations shared by the Kamites and the Phoenicians should not be minimized in explaining the strong sense of solidarity which generally existed between them. There was frequently a Kemetic presence: military, diplomatic, religious or commercial, both in the Canaanite hinterland and the Phoenician city-states themselves, and Diop goes on to state that, "Even throughout the most troubled periods of great misfortune, Egypt could count on the Phoenicians as one can count more or less on a brother."
Spurred on by increasing population pressures, the Phoenicians, who were becoming increasingly mixed racially, had, by the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. developed a prowess on the seas, and were in the process of establishing a network of colonies and trading posts that not only brought them fame and prosperity, but introduced in some cases, and reinforced in others, vital elements of the cultural attributes of the Southern world. Phoenician inscriptions have been found as far north as central Turkey and at least as far west as Tunisia, where the famous ancient city of Carthage was founded.
The Arabian Peninsula, first inhabited more than 8,000 years ago, was early populated by Blacks. Once dominant over the entire peninsula, the African presence in early Arabia is most clearly traceable through the Sabeans. The Sabeans were the first Arabians to step firmly within the realm of civilization. The southwestern corner of the peninsula was their early home. This area, which was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, embraces the country that is today called Yemen. In antiquity this region gave rise to a high degree of civilization because of the fertility of the soil, the growth of frankincense and myrrh, and the close proximity to the sea and consequently its importance in the trade routes. The Sabeans have even been called "the Phoenicians of the southern seas."
One of the earliest known Sabean construction project was probably the Marib Dam (possibly South Arabia's most enduring technical achievement). Serving the South Arabians for more than a thousand years, the Marib Dam is traditionally believed to have been conceived by Lokman, the sage and multi-genius of pre-Islamic South Arabia. In effect, the Dam was an earthen ridge stretching slightly more than 1700 feet across a prominent wadi. Both sides sloped sharply upward, with the Dam's upstream side fortified by small pebbles established in mortar. The Marib Dam was rebuilt several times by piling more earth and stone onto the existing structure. The last recorded height of the Marib Dam was slightly more than forty-five feet.
Before the advent of Islam southern Arabia already possessed the sacred Kaaba sanctuary, with its black stone, at Makkah. Diop claimed that "The Kaaba was reputed to have been constructed by Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian (a Negro woman), historical ancestor of Mohammed, according to all Arab historians." "In Egypt he [Abraham] had married a Negro woman, Hagar, mother of Ishmael, the Biblical ancestor of the second Semitic branch, the Arabs. Ishmael was said to be the historical ancestor of Mohammed."
The city of Makkah was considered a holy place and the destination of pilgrims long before the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad himself, who was to unite the whole of Arabia, appears to have had a prominent African lineage. According to al-Jahiz, the guardian of the sacred Kaaba--Abd al-Muttalib, "fathered ten Lords, Black as the night and magnificent." One of these men was Abdallah, the father of Muhammad. According to tradition, the first Muslim killed in battle was Mihdja--a Black man. Another Black man, Bilal, was such a pivotal figure in the development of Islam that he has been referred to as "a third of the faith." Many of the earliest Muslim converts were Africans, and a number of the Muslim faithful sought refuge in Ethiopia because of Arabian hostility to Muhammad's teachings.
Southern Asia
The ancient riverine civilization of the Indus Valley (named after one of its largest and most studied sites--Harappa) actually had extensions reaching from the river Oxus in Afghanistan in the north to the Gulf of Gambay in India in the south. The Harappan civilization flourished from about 2200 B.C.E. to approximately 1700 B.C.E. At its height, the Harappans engaged in regular commercial relations with Iraq and Iran. This much we know with certainty. We are equally certain that the founders of the Harappan civilization were Black. This is verifiable through the available physical evidence--skeletal remains, eye-witness accounts preserved in the Rig Veda, artistic and sculptural remains, the regional survival of Dravidian languages (including Brahui, Kurukh, and Malto) and the essential role of these languages which are now being used in the decipherment of the Harappan script. We should also take into account the prominence accorded the mother goddess
in the Harappan cities and the sedentary nature of the Harappan people themselves. Walter Fairservis claims that the "Harappans cultivated cotton and perhaps rice, domesticated the chicken and may have invented the game of chess and one of the two of the great early sources of nonmuscle power: the windmill."
Exceptionally valuable writings expressing intimate connections between early India, Egypt and Ethiopia have existed for more than two thousand years. In the first century B.C.E., for example, the famous Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, "From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as to India....He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt where he was brought up." Apollonius of Tyana, who is said to have visited India near the end of the first century C.E., was convinced that "The Ethiopians are colonists sent from India, who follow their forefathers in matters of wisdom." The Itinerarium Alexandri, a Latin work written about 345 C.E. for the Roman emperor Constantius, says that, "India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians."
The epic story of the African presence in Asia is one of the most exciting and, yet, least known aspects of the Black experience. It spans a period of more than 100,000 years and encompasses the largest single land mass on earth. Although many are startled by the notion, it is absolutely undeniable, that: as the first hominids and modern humans; as simple hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturists; as heroic warriors and premier civilizers; as sages and priests, poets and prophets, kings and queens; as deities and demons of misty legends and shadowy myths; and yes, even as servants and slaves, the Black race has known Asia intimately from the very beginning. Even today, after an entire series of holocausts and calamities, the numbers of Blacks in Asia approach two-hundred million. The Black populations of Asia, what they have done and are now doing, are questions that beg and demand serious answers. These answers, which we must diligently seek to supply, cannot be sought merely to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of an elite group, but to further the vision of Pan-Africanism and reunite a family that has been separated far too long.
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY EUROPE
Minoan Crete
The first civilization of Europe was established on the island of Crete. It is called the Minoan Culture, after King Minos, an early legendary ruler of the island. It has been argued that the ancestors of the Cretans were natives of Africa, a branch of Western Ethiopians.
Minoan Crete, the forerunner of Greek civilization, is the earliest known European high-culture. Although modest in size (170 miles east to west, thirty-five miles north to south), Crete exercised immeasurable influence on the Aegean archipelago, Western Asia, and the Greek mainland. Throughout Crete the vestiges of complex palaces, paved highways, aqueducts, terracotta pipes for drainage, and irrigation canals provide plentiful proof of Minoan ingenuity in the areas of scientific and technical innovation. The Minoans possessed registered trademarks, uniform weights and measures, calendrical systems based on precise astronomical observations, and advanced scripts. Interestingly enough, there were few fortifications on the island.
While the cultural and technical prowess of ancient Crete appears relatively well known, the ethnic make-up of the early population and the direction from which sprang its impetus for civilization is much more hotly debated. John G. Jackson advocates the view that Minoan civilization is African-rooted. He believes that the ancestors of the Minoans "dwelt in the grasslands of North Africa before that area dried up and became a great desert. As the Saharan sands encroached on their homeland, they took to the sea, and in Crete and neighboring islands set up a maritime culture."
Arthur Evans (1851-1941), who conducted extensive excavations on the island, was convinced of African migrations to Neolithic Crete. He noted that: "The multiplicity of these connections with the old indigenous race of the opposite African coast, and with which we undoubtedly have to deal with in the predynastic population of the Nile Valley, can in fact be hardly explained on any other hypothesis than that of an actual settlement in Southern Crete."
Moorish Civilizers of Europe
It would not be inaccurate to say that the Moors helped reintroduce Europe to civilization. But just who were the Moors of antiquity anyway? Chancellor Williams has written that "The original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were Black Africans." Much of the apparent confusion about Moorish ethnicity may be related to the fact that the same people called Moors in Europe, were known in Arab literature as Berbers. Indeed, in Arabic texts the word Moor was fairly non-existent and the term Berber was applied to practically all the inhabitants of ancient northwest Africa.
Early in the eighth century, after a grim and extended resistance to the Arab invasions of North Africa, the Moors, or Berbers, joined the triumphant surge of Islam. Following this, numbers of them crossed over to the Iberian Peninsula, where their swift victories and remarkable feats became the substance of legends.
The man chosen to lead the eighth century probe into Iberia was Tarif, son of Zar`a ibn Abi Mudrik. Tarif was one of the young generation of Islamized Berbers imbued with the military philosophy of Hassan ibn al-Nu`man and Musa ibn Nusayr--the two men who had just commanded the Arab conquest of northwest Africa. In July 710, Tarif, with four-hundred foot soldiers and one-hundred horse, all Berbers, successfully carried out a reconnaissance mission in southern Iberia. Tarifa, a small port in southern Spain, is named after him.
It is clear, however, that the actual conquest of Spain was undertaken upon the initiative of Tarik ibn Ziyad. Tarik ibn Ziyad ibn `Abd Allah ibn Walghu was a member of the Warfadjuma branch of the Nafza Berbers. Musa ibn Nusayr had previously appointed him governor of the far western Maghrib (Islamic North Africa west of Egypt), which covered what is today the southern part of the kingdom of Morocco. Tarik was in command of an army of at least 10,000 men, mainly Sanhadja Berbers.
In 711, with a Berber expeditionary force and a small number of Arab translators and propagandists (some say three-hundred), Tarik crossed the straits and disembarked near a rocky promontory which from that day since has borne his name: Djabal Tarik (`Tarik's mountain'), or, Gibraltar. In August 711, he won a paramount victory over the Visigoth army. It was during this conflict that Roderick (the last Visigoth king) was killed. On the eve of the battle, Tarik is alleged to have roused his troops with the following words: "My brethren, the enemy is before you, the sea is behind; whither would ye fly? Follow your general: I am resolved either to lose my life or to trample on the prostate king of the Romans."
Wasting no time to relish his victory, Tarik pushed on with his seemingly tireless Berber cavalry to Toledo and seized the Visigoth capital. Within a month's time, Tarik ibn Ziyad had effectively terminated Visigothic dominance of the Iberian Peninsula.
Musa ibn Nusayr joined Tarik in Spain and helped complete the conquest of Iberia with an army of 18,000 Arab and Berber troops. The two commanders met at Talavera, where Tarik and his Berbers were given the task of subduing the northwest of Spain. With vigor and speed they set about their mission, and within three months they had swept the entire territory north of the Ebro River as far as the Pyrenees, and annexed the turbulent Basque country. There they left a small detachment of men under Munusa, a Berber lieutenant who was later to play a decisive role in the Muslim campaigns in southern France.
In the aftermath of these brilliant struggles, Berbers by the thousand flooded into the Iberian peninsula. So eager were they to come that some are said to have floated over on tree-trunks. Tarik himself, at the conclusion of his illustrious military career, retired to the distant East, we are informed, to spread the teachings of Islam.
St. Maurice: Knight of the Holy Lance
The name Maurice is derived from Latin and means "like a Moor." The Black St. Maurice (the Knight of the Holy Lance) was patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. The earliest version of the Maurice story and the account upon which all later versions are based, is found in the writings of Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons (ca. 450). According to Eucherius, Maurice was a high official in the The baid region of Egypt--an early center of Christianity. Specifically, Maurice was the commander of a Roman legion of Christian soldiers stationed in Africa. By the decree of Roman emperor Maximian, his contingent of 6,600 men was dispatched to Gaul and ordered to suppress a Christian uprising there. Maurice disobeyed the order. Subsequently, he and almost all of his troops were martyred when they chose to die rather than persecute Christians, renounce their faith, and sacrifice to the gods of the Romans. The execution of the Thebans occurred in Switzerland near Agaunum (which later became Saint Maurice-en-Valais) on September 22, either in the year 280 or 300.
In the second half of the fourth century the worship of St. Maurice spread over a broad area in Switzerland, northern Italy, Burgundy, and along the Rhine. Tours, Angers, Lyons, Chalon-sur-Saone, and Dijon had churches dedicated to St. Maurice. By the epoch of Islamic Spain, the stature of St. Maurice had reached immense proportions. Charlemagne (768-814), grandson of Charles Martel and the most distinguished representative of the Carolingian Dynasty, attributed to St. Maurice the virtues of the perfect Christian warrior. In token of victory, Charlemagne had the Lance of St. Maurice (a replica of the holy lance reputed to have pierced the side of Christ) carried before the Frankish army. Like the general populace, which strongly relied on St. Maurice for intercession, the Carolingian Dynasty prayed to this military saint for the strength to resist and overcome attacks by enemy forces.
A center of extreme devotion to St. Maurice was developed in the Baltic states, where merchants in Tallin and Riga adopted his iconography. The House of the Black Heads of Riga, for instance, possessed a polychromed wooden statuette of St. Maurice. Their seal bore the distinct image of a Moor's head. The existence of nearly three-hundred major images of the Black St. Maurice have been catalogued, and even today the veneration of St. Maurice remains alive in numerous cathedrals in eastern Germany.
Sir Morien: Black Knight of the European Middle Ages
Few documents portray the ethnicity of the Moors in medieval Europe with more passion, boldness and clarity than Morien. Morien is a metrical romance rendered into English prose from the medieval Dutch version of the Lancelot. In the Lancelot, it occupies more than five thousand lines and forms the ending of the first extant volume of that compilation. Neither the date of the original poem or the name of the author is known. The Dutch manuscript is dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century. The whole work is a translation, and apparently a very faithful translation, of a French original. It is quite clear that the Dutch compiler understood his text well, and though possibly somewhat fettered by the requirement of turning prose into verse, he renders it with uncommon fidelity.
Morien is the adventure of a splendidly heroic Moorish knight (possibly a Christian convert), supposed to have lived during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morien is described as follows: "He was all black, even as I tell ye: his head, his body, and his hands were all black, saving only his teeth. His shield and his armour were even those of a Moor, and black as a raven."
It is noted that Morien was as "black as pitch; that was the fashion of his land--Moors are black as burnt brands." Ultimately, and ironically, Morien came to personify all of the finest virtues of the knights of medieval Europe. According to Gerald Massey (1829-1907), "Morion is said to have been the architect of Stonehenge.... Now, as a Negro is still known as a Morien in English, may not this indicate that Morien belonged to the black race, the Kushite builders?" It should be noted that for a very long period the Dutch language used Moor and Moriaan for Black Africans. Among the Lorma community in modern Liberia, the name Moryan is still prominent.
The Expulsion and Dispersal of the Moors
In Iberia, Christian pressures on the Moors grew irresistible. Finally, in 1492, Granada, the last important Muslim stronghold in al-Andalus, was taken by the soldiers of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and the Moors were expelled from Spain. In 1496, to appease Isabella, King Manuel of Portugal announced a royal decree banishing the Moors from that portion of the peninsula. The Spanish king Philip III expelled the remaining Moors by a special decree issued in 1609. Fully 3,500,000 Moors, or Moriscos, as their descendants were called, left Spain between 1492 and 1610. Over a million Moors settled in France. Others moved into Holland. A very curious story in the Netherlands is that of Zwarte Piet (Black Peter). By some accounts Zwarte Piet, the companion to Sinterklaas (Santa Claus), was a Moorish orphan boy whom Sinterklaas adopted and trained as his assistant!
Britons and Vikings
David MacRitchie (1851-1925), author of Ancient and Modern Britons, was convinced that the Moors were Black people who played an important role in the early settlement of Britain:
"For although it may not be easy to trace their route hither, and the date of their arrival, a branch of this family did inhabit Britain, and are not only known as Mauri and Moors, but also as Moravienses, Morienses, Murray-men, and people of Moray or Moravia.
The `Moors' are still largely represented throughout the British Islands; although of course the crossing and re-crossing of thirty generations, while increasing the number of descendants, has lessened the intensity of the resemblance to the ancestral stock. But the swarthy hue asserts itself still, though in a modified degree. Last century, when Martin described the Western Islands of Scotland, he remarked that the complexion of the natives of Skye was `for the most part black,' of the natives of Jura he said that they were generally black of complexion,' and of Arran that they were `generally brown, and some of black complexion.'
The legends and the history of the Scottish Highlands are both witnesses to the existence of purely black people. The Welsh traditions bear a similar testimony. The hero Peredur, Son of Evrawc, discovers a company of `bald, swarthy youths,' sitting at the hall- door of a black giant, playing at chess. This giant is styled the Black Oppressor, and seems to have been of the same genial nature as the `black knight' of Ashton-under-Lyne. He very frankly informs Peredur that `for this reason I am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man around me whom I have not oppressed; and justice have I done unto none.'"
A prominent Viking of the eleventh century was Thorhall, who was aboard the ship that carried the Vikings to the shores of North America. Thorhall was "the huntsman in summer, and in winter the steward of Eric the Red. He was, it is said, `a large man, and strong, black, and like a giant, silent, and foul-mouthed in his speech, and always egged on Eric to the worst; he was a bad Christian.'" We also have knowledge of the "African sea-rovers, the Fomorians, who had a main stronghold on Tory Island, off the Northwest Coast," and who came to be regarded as the "sinister forces in Irish mythology."
Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin: Great Black Russian
Of all the Blacks in Russian history, few have achieved greater fame than Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin. Born in Moscow on May 26, 1799 of well-to-do parents--members of the Russian aristocracy, Pushkin was proudly descended, on his mother's side, from Major-General Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal--an Ethiopian prince who became a favorite of Tsar Peter I (1682-1725). Pushkin has been positively identified as the very father of Russian literature. He composed in the Russian language at a time when most, if not all, Russian intellectuals were writing in French. Pushkin died prematurely, defending his honor in a duel, in January 1837. Today, Pushkin's name is loftily borne by twenty museums. Of Pushkin, Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) wrote:
"No Russian writer was ever so intimately at one with the Russian people as Pushkin... Without him (Pushkin) we should have lost, not literature alone, but much of our irresistible force, our faith in our national individuality, our belief in the people's power, and most of all our belief in our destiny."
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) wrote that, "Pushkin is the greatest master in the world. Pushkin, in our country, is the beginning of all beginnings. He most beautifully expressed the spirit of our people." Allison Blakley writes that, "Pushkin was truly the Russian counterpart to Shakespeare."
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY AMERICA
The First Americans
Most modern scientists believe that the earliest immigrants to reach the Western Hemisphere were Asian Mongoloids. It would appear, however, that this general view ignores evidence that strongly suggests that the first people to arrive and settle in the Western Hemisphere were Black people of very ancient African ancestry.
European-American archaeologist Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883-1983) advanced that the first actual migrants to America were Afro-Australoids. The Afro-Australoid migrations to America probably began about 40,000 years ago and lasted for several millennia. These migrants are called "Australoids" because of their close physical and cultural relationships to the people who more than 50,000 years ago colonized much of Asia and Australia.
One of the most well-documented single pieces of evidence for the presence of Afro-Australoids in the prehistoric Americas during the period of Gladwin's writing was the Punin Skull: a female crania found in 1923, embedded in a stratum of volcanic ash near the small village of Punin in the Andean region of Ecuador. In addition to the skull itself, the stratum yielded the remains of a number of long extinct mammals; including an Andean horse--an animal known to have been extinct for more than 10,000 years. The Punin Skull's recovery by the American Museum of Natural History of New York created a sensation. It was, first of all, hailed as the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas, and, secondly, it was clearly of an Afro-Australoid type. On these two issues "the leading experts" agreed. According to British anatomist Arthur Keith (1886-1955):
"When the expedition returned to New York from Ecuador, the skull was transferred to the Anthropological side of the Museum, where it was examined and described by Drs. Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman. Both anthropologists were struck by its resemblance to the skulls of the native women of Australia. I agree with them; the points of resemblance are too numerous to permit us to suppose that the skull could be of a sort produced by an American Indian parentage. We cannot suppose that an Australian native woman had been spirited across the Pacific in some migratory movement and that afterwards her skull was buried in a fossiliferous bed in the high plateau of Ecuador...The discovery at Punin does compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene invasion of America by an Australoid people."
Harvard anthropologist Earnest Houghton echoed Keith, although in somewhat less detail:
"The Punin skull, found in 1923 in a fossiliferous bed in the Andean highlands of Ecuador...is a skull that any competent craniologist would identify as Australian in type. It is easier to find Australoid-looking dolichocephals in the more ancient burials in the New World than anything in the way of a skull that resembles a Mongoloid."
The second migration to the Americas, Asiatic-Africoids, began about 15,000 years ago. These migrants' physical appearance seems to have resembled the Melanesians--the proud Black Islanders of the South Pacific. After having first penetrated their way northward up the coasts of Asia, they began to gradually enter North America, where they ultimately developed the revolutionary and highly pivotal Clovis and Folsom fluted-point tool industries.
Clovis and Folsom were the respective locations (both of them in New Mexico, U.S.A.) that provided the first evidences of the earliest projectile points associated with the Big Game Hunting Traditions of North
America. Clovis points have been reliably dated to between 11,000 and 11,500 years before present. Folsom points, which are usually smaller, more refined and sophisticated than their Clovis antecedents, were actually identified before the Clovis points, and have been dated to about 10,000 B.C.E. Both Clovis and Folsom spearheads were several inches long and were characterized by smoothly fluted or grooved channels extending lengthwise along both faces. Their precision and firepower were revolutionary and awesome; and their rapidly widespread usage, with the increasingly greater food supplies that resulted, laid the basis for steadily larger American populations.
It is of further interest that the first known modern discovery and revelation of the existence of these tool industries was made by an African-American; a tantalizingly and frustratingly obscure, self-taught naturalist and archaeologist named George McJunkin. The son of slaves, McJunkin, whose name may be searched for unsuccessfully in most history books, made the find in 1908 while riding out to check fence posts at a flooded creek. In 1925, three years after McJunkin's death, a dig at the Folsom site revealed a 10,000 year old spear point piercing the ribs of an extinct species of bison. It was McJunkin though, the obscure African-American, who had first documented Folsom points, which were then regarded (this was before the discovery of Ecuador's Punin Skull) "as the first unequivocal evidence of late Ice Age humans ever unearthed in the Americas."
The Clovis-Folsom Point Blacks seem to have come to North America in relatively small numbers. Later migrations of essentially the same physical type populated most of the rest of North America south of Canada. Their movements into the New World were then slowed, and later halted altogether, by the Australoid populations that were already well established in the North American Southwest. The later period Basket Makers of Arizona (the prehistoric culture bearers who eventually evolved into North America's Pueblo peoples) were probably the result of a fusion of Clovis-Folsom Point Blacks with the numerically larger Afro-Australoid populations.
Fossil remains of these early Black folk have been found in Baja, California, northeastern Mexico, Central America and in various parts of South America. Ancient Mongoloids it now appears followed the early Black immigrants and, after several thousand years, became the dominant people in the New World. Gladwin himself stated that, "The arrival of the Eskimo along the Arctic Coasts marked a fundamental transition in the anthropological history of North America. It was the last of a series of long-headed migrations, and the broad faces and slant eyes of the Eskimo marked the initial stage of a long period of Mongoloid domination in lands where Mongoloid people had therefore been unknown."
Mongoloid peoples, in fact, were soon coming to the Americas in such massive numbers, crossing the Bering Strait in boats rather than across the Beringia land bridge, that they eventually almost totally
absorbed the New World's earlier arrivals. The resulting fusion of peoples constituted the Native American populations at the time of the catastrophic European intrusions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earlier arrived Blacks (the very first Americans) tended to fade away with increasing rapidity into the shadowy realms of fairy tales, myths and legends. Some native legends of the Americas abound with exploits of early Black people. An Inuit legend, for example, explains that:
"A man and his wife and their only daughter lived in a remote place. Their daughter was outside, working when she saw a big black speck moving along the ground, coming towards her. When it got closer, she realized it was a man with a sledge. The man and the sledge were all black. He came towards the house, stopped, and said to the girl, `I have come to take you with me.' He was black all over, even his face. The girl replied, `Very well. I'll go and tell my parents.' She entered the igloo and the man followed her. He stood outside the door and told the father, `I have come to take your daughter away with me.' The father replied, `I won't have my daughter going away with a black man like you.' The stranger became angry and made a step forward with his right foot. The whole house shook. Then the father said to his daughter, `My daughter, you'll have to go away with this man. This will go badly with us if you don't.' She got ready and left the house, with the stranger behind her. Before leaving, he put his left foot down hard on the floor and the house shook again. He went out, put the girl on the sledge and shoved the sledge because it had no huskies. After a while they saw a house--the man's house. They stopped and entered. Everything inside was black, and his parents also were completely black."
For the Greenlander, the color black symbolizes strength and wisdom--traditionally he was not allowed to wear black boots until he had become a skilled hunter and reached a respectable age--but black is also associated with spirits and occult forces. In the Southwest Indian story of the Emergence, a story that is as important in the region as the Book of Genesis is to Christians, the First World is called the Black World.
The First Civilization of the Americas: The Olmecs
The Olmec (2000 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.) were an early people of Meso-America, who settled the Mexican Gulf Coast. This ancient American culture been labeled the first civilization of the western hemisphere, as they surpassed their neighbors in an attempt to settle certain problems of living together--of government, defense, religion, family, property, science and art. In this endeavor, the Olmecs laid the foundations of American civilization. No one knows whence the Olmecs came or whether they were direct derivatives of the indigenous population; but that much of their sculpture, especially the colossal heads, evidences an ancient Africoid presence in the Americas is beyond sane rebuttal. In fact, some
scientists have concluded that the Olmecs may have originally have been an African settler-colony which conquered the indigenous population of southern Mexico. Others are convinced that the Black presence among the Olmecs merely consisted of a small but elite and highly-influential community.
Sculptural and skeletal remains found in ancient Olmec sites provide the most conclusive evidence yet discovered concerning the presence of African people in America before Columbus. The most pronounced and widely acknowledged Africoid sculptural representations to appear in the ancient "New World" were produced by the Olmecs. At least fifteen colossal stone heads, weighing ten to forty tons, have been unearthed in Olmec sites along the Mexican Gulf Coast. One of the first European-American scientists to comment on the "Olmec heads,"archaeologist Matthew Stirling, described their facial features as "amazingly Negroid."
In 1974, Polish craniologist Andrzej Wiercinski informed the Congress of Americanists that skulls from Olmec and other pre-Christian sites in Mexico (Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban) "show a clear prevalence of the total Negroid pattern."
Other scientists have found a host of cultural parallels between ancient Africans and native Americans, including architectural patterns and religious practices. As for the latter, some native American communities worshipped black gods of great antiquity, such as Ekchuah, Quetzalcoatl, Yalahau, Nahualpilli and Ixtliltic, long before the first African slave arrived in the New World.
Harun Kofi Wangara (1928-1989) wrote that:
"Black seamen, who can be specifically identified as Mandinga, brought the West African gold trade to the Americas. This is established through African designations for gold, the West African method of alloying gold, its ceremonial as well as trade value and, more important, the identity of the Blacks who trafficked in it."
During his third voyage, Columbus recorded that when he reached Haiti the resident population informed him that Black men from the south and southeast had preceded him to the island. In 1513, Balboa found a colony of Black men on his arrival in Darien, Central American.
All of these facts, buttressed by skeletons and sculptures, make it clear that African people have had a profound presence and influence in pre-Columbian America. Some scholars, such as Carlos C. Marquez, have even concluded that "the youthful America was also a Negro continent.
THE BLACK PRESENCE IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANICA
The Black Presence in Australia: Fighting for Survival
Australia was settled at least 50,000 years ago by people who call themselves Blackfellas, and who are usually referred to as the Australian Aborigines. Physically, the Blackfellas are distinguished by straight to wavy hair textures, and dark to near black complexions. In January 1788, when Britain began using Australia as a prison colony, an estimated 300,000 indigenous people were spread across the continent in about six-hundred small-scale societies. Each of these communities maintained social, religious, and trade connections with its neighbors.
The dumping of British convicts into Australia proved catastrophic for the Blacks. Victims of deliberate poisonings, calculated and systematic slaughters; decimated by tuberculosis and syphilis; swept away by infectious epidemics; their community structures and moral fibers shredded, by the 1930's the Blackfellas had been reduced to a pathetic remnant of about 30,000 people, and perhaps twice that number of mixed descent.
When the continent was invaded by Europeans in the nineteenth century, the white historians who wrote about Australia invariably included a section on the Blacks, and acknowledged that the original inhabitants of the continent had had an historical role. After 1850, however, few writers referred to the Blacks at all. The Black were thought of as a "dying race." By 1950 general histories of the continent by European-Australians almost never referenced the indigenous people. During this period--the indigenous people--whether part or full blood, were excluded from all major European-Australian institutions, including schools, hospitals and labor unions. They could not vote. Their movements were restricted. They were outcasts in white Australia.
Today, the Blacks of Australia are terribly oppressed, and they remain in a desperate struggle for survival. Recent demographic surveys, for example, show that the Black infant mortality rate is the highest in Australia. Aborigines have the shoddiest housing and the poorest schools. Their life expectancy is twenty years less than Europeans. Their unemployment rate is six times higher than the
national average. Aborigines did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1961, nor the right to consume alcoholic beverages until 1964. They were not officially counted as Australian citizens until after a constitutional amendment in 1967. Today, the indigenous people constitute less than two per cent of the total Australian population.
Perhaps the Blackfellas should consider themselves fortunate. The Black aborigines of Tasamania were completely destroyed. Tasmania, an island only slightly larger than West Virginia, lies two-hundred miles off Australia's southeast coast. In 1802, following mainland Australia, Tasmania was established as a British prison colony. The colonial government itself was not even inclined to consider the Tasmanians as full human beings. To the Europeans of the island, the Tasmanians were a people fit only to be exploited in the cruelest of manners. European convicts regularly hunted Tasmanians for sport, casually shooting, spearing or clubbing the men to death, torturing and raping the women. Europeans murdered Tasmanians for use as dog food. Tasmanian infants were burned alive. Tasmanian women were kidnapped and chained, and exploited as sexual slaves. Between 1802 and 1830 the Tasmanians were reduced from an estimated five-thousand people to less than seventy-five.
In May, 1876 Truganinni, the last Tasmanian, died at seventy-three years of age. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European. Her sisters were kidnapped by Europeans. Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. It might be accurately said that Truganinni's numerous personal sufferings typify the tragedy of the Tasmanian people as a whole. After her burial, Truganinni's body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum, and remained on display until 1947. Finally, in 1976--the centenary year of Truganinni's death--despite the museum's objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. Truganinni's life spanned to the year the beginning of the "association" between Europeans and Tasmanians. During this period the Tasmanians were humiliated, degraded, and largely exterminated.
Melanesia: The Struggle Continues
In the 1970s Ben Tanggahma, Foreign Minister of Papua New Guinea, pointed out that "Africa is our motherland. All of the Black populations which settled in Asia over the hundreds of thousands of years, came undoubtedly from the African continent. In fact, the entire world was populated from Africa. Hence, we the Blacks in Asia and the Pacific today descend from proto-African peoples. We were linked to Africa in the past. We are linked to Africa in the present. We will be linked to Africa in the future."
C. Madang has described Melanesia (the Black Islands of the South Pacific) as the eastern flank of the black world, and the expression of ages past when an uninterrupted belt of Black populations stretched across Africa, Eurasia, Australia, Oceanica, and ancient America. To the contrary, the present Mongoloid inhabitants of Indonesia entered the region during relatively recent times; a period which some scientists have dated to as late as the first millennium C.E.
As was the case in Japan, the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, the Mongoloid invaders found the land already occupied by long-settled Black populations. These new peoples, to a very basic extent, eventually absorbed, vanquished or drove the Blacks into generally inaccessible areas, including the deep forests, high mountains, and remote islands where they remain to this day.
By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Muslim Indonesian sultanate of Tidore was raiding the coasts of New Guinea in search of chattels for the markets of Turkey, Iraq and the Chinese empire. It is even said that the Malay term "Papuan" (literally "kinky-haired"), which was applied to the Melanesians of New Guinea, was born out of scorn and contempt, and eventual became synonymous with "slave."
New Guinea itself is the biggest and most populous of the islands of Melanesia. Indeed, it is the largest island in the world after Greenland. It is tremendously wealthy in mineral resources, including: uranium, copper, cobalt, silver, gold, manganese, iron and oil. Now split into two by colonial design, New Guinea has until lately contained a racially homogeneous population of five to six million Africoid people. The eastern half of the island became independent in 1975 under the name of Papua New Guinea, with Michael Somare as its Prime Minister. The western half of New Guinea, however, along with a significant portion of the island's total population (estimated at three to four million people), has been seized by Indonesia as its twenty-sixth "province."
For the people of West New Guinea, Indonesia has been and continues to be a brutal and aggressive occupying power. Under Indonesian rule since 1963, the Melanesians have been prone to both physical and cultural genocide. Indonesians generally have a condescending view of Melanesians, who they consider their racial inferiors--except, of course, those who turn away from their own culture and choose to identify with Indonesian cultural values, behavior modes and language. Additionally, members of the Indonesian military and other high government officials possess considerable wealth in West New Guinea, and are firmly resolved not to share it with the Melanesians.
Melanesians living in the forest communities of West New Guinea have been subjected to forced labor schemes, while in urban areas Melanesians face overt racial discrimination. A major part of the Indonesian regime's genocidal policy, in fact, is the physical replacement of Melanesians with Indonesian nationals. This poses the distinct possibility that the Melanesians of West New Guinea, like those of Fiji, could become a minority in their own country.
Indonesia's naked offensive in New Guinea has not been met with passivity. In 1963, for example, when the Dutch occupation of West New Guinea ended and control passed to Indonesia, the struggle for national independence accelerated. In that year the Free Papua Movement (OPM) was formed. Interesting enough, the Republic of Senegal early on provided its territory as a base for the international activities of the self-proclaimed Revolutionary Provisional Government of West Papua New Guinea.
Indonesian territorial aggression in Melanesia has not been confined to New Guinea. In 1975, for example, East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, was formally annexed as Indonesia's twenty-seventh "province." A Timorese national liberation movement, the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor (FRETILIN)was formed in September 1974, and was inspired by the revolutionary nationalism of African resistance leaders from other former Portuguese colonies--Dr. Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique, Dr. Agostinho Neto of Angola, and Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau.
During the course of East Timor's national independence struggle, Indonesia has coordinated an unrelenting extermination campaign against the indigenous people. The Timorese have been bombed, shot, tortured and starved by the invading Indonesian army, with more than fifteen per cent of the total East Timorese population murdered. Despite adverse official reactions by some Western governments, none of these countries has imposed economic sanctions or adopted forceful policies against Indonesia to coerce its withdrawal.
New Caledonia, another mineral wealthy South Pacific island, lies hundreds of miles to the southeast of Indonesia and is currently a French colony. To New Caledonia's Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), the grouping of political parties representing the majority of New Caledonia's 64,000 Melanesians, the principle of national self-determination is crystal clear. Although the Blacks are now said to constitute less than fifty per cent of the total New Caledonian population, they were in fact native to the land 4,000 years before the 1853 French invasion. The Melanesians of New Caledonia, known as Kanaks, want their island to become an independent country run by and for Melanesians.
CONCLUSION
There is an African proverb that says "Until the lion has his historian, the hunter will always be a hero." I would contend that not nearly enough energy is expended by us on the history of African people, whether in antiquity or modern times. Not nearly enough. All strong peoples emphasize their history all the time; weak peoples do not. Not only must intellectuals do their work, they must give the information to the masses. I believe that as Africans, if we are to be a strong people again, we must continually clarify who we are and where we are, and constantly emphasize the things that made us great in the past. Some peoples have gone as far as to essentially make their history sacred. No one questions the right of a people to engage in this process. Europeans, Chinese, etc., do it all the time as a matter of course. Even Malcolm X said, "Of all our studies, it is history that is most qualified to reward our research." And this is not just ancient history that Malcolm X was talking about, but history ancient and modern. Our greatest leaders and intellectuals, including David Walker, Martin Robison Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, J.A. Rogers, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, John Henrik Clarke, and many, many more were clear on this. Nkrumah, however, took it a step further and clarified the matter unmistakably when he said that "Thought without practice is empty, and action without thought is blind." I believe that we must use our history, not just for intellectual purposes, but to galvanize our people into action to solve our current problems. In other words, we must use our history as a springboard for struggle. I do not pretend to speak for everyone on this matter, but I do feel quite strongly about it. Nobody in their right mind would argue that we can simply return to the past. But certainly we must look at the past in another light. I say that history is a light that illuminates the past and key that unlocks the door to the future. We need that light and we need that key. Not only must we emphasize our historical greatness as a people, as well as analyze the mistakes that we have made, we must inject it into the minds of the masses of our people and build upon it. This is a fundamental step in our liberation process.
REFERENCES
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Translated from the French and edited by Mercer Cook. Translator's Preface by Mercer Cook. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1974.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1976.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. Introduction by John Henrik Clarke. Afterword by James G. Spady. Chicago: Third World Press, 1978.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Translated from the French by Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Edited by Harold J. Salemson and Marjolijn de Jager. Foreword by John Henrik Clarke. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1991.
Hansberry, William Leo. Africa and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers: The William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook, Vol. 2. Preface by Joseph E. Harris. Edited by Joseph E. Harris. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977.
Houston, Drusilla Dunjee. The Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. Book 1, Nations of the Cushite Empire. Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records. Oklahoma City: Universal Publishing, 1926; rpt. Introduction by W. Paul Coates. Afterword by Asa G. Hilliard III. Commentary by James G. Spady. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1985.
Jackson, John G. Introduction to African Civilizations. Introduction and Additional Bibliographical Notes by John Henrik Clarke. Secaucus: Citadel, 1970.
Jackson, John G. Ages of Gold and Silver and Other Short Sketches of Human History. Foreword by Madalyn O'Hair. Austin: American Atheist Press, 1990.
Parker, George Wells. The Children of the Sun. Omaha: The Hamitic League of the World, 1918; rpt. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1978.
Rashidi, Runoko, and Ivan Van Sertima, eds. African Presence in Early Asia. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1996.
Rogers, Joel Augustus. World's Great Men of Color, 2 Vols. Edited with an Introduction, Commentary, and New Bibliographical Notes by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier, 1972.
Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House, 1977.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1983.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early Europe. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1985.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of Civilizations, 1988.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early America. Rev. ed. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992.
Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Golden Age of the Moor. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992.
Van Sertima, Ivan, and Larry Williams, eds. Great African Thinkers. Vol. 1, Cheikh Anta Diop. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1986.
Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Rev. ed. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974.
The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'gemni: the Oldest Books in the World
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.
READMORE
(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.
READMORE
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.
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