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Dawn Voyage I |
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Dawn Voyage: The Black African Discovery of America by Michael Bradley Excerpts and Commentary "In 1444, the first consignment of black African slaves was landed on the quays of Lisbon. The slaves had come directly from the mouth of the Senegal River…By the next year, the Potruguese had inched slightly further down the African coast and had rounded Cape Verde." (4) "Cape Verde projects into the Atlantic Ocean at latitude 15 degrees north. The cape is only 1900 miles from the coast of Brazil as the crow flies…Cape Verde mariners had, despite the capricious deflections of tradewinds and equatorial currents, much the shortest passage across the Atlantic to the regions of the New World where high cultures flourished…it is written that they voyaged upon the Atlantic and that these black Africans sent an expedition of 'two hundred ships' into the west not two centuries before the Portuguese doubled Cape Verde. The predecessor of Emperor Kankan Musa of Mali sponsored this expedition…in 1307 A.D." (5) Colombus was no fool. He had either spoken to slaves from the Verde Islands themselves, read the accounts of the Empire of Mali, or spoken with other sailors who knew this story. He knew there was land within sailing distance of Iberia, and he even knew quite accurately how long that distance was. Did he think it was India? This is hard to say, but he hedged his bets: in his agreement with Ferdinand and Isabella on April 30, 1492, he was entitled to "take possession of and govern in his lifetime any 'islands and mainlands' he might discover before reaching Asia." (8) But clearly, 1307 does not mark the Africans' first voyage to America. "For how otherwise are we to explain the statues with Negroid features found at La Venta, or the representations of black men in the murals of the Temple of Warriors at Chichen Itza, or the presence of the tropical African bottle gourd in the New World? How otherwise can we explain that in both Central America and in the eastern foothills of the Andes linguists find Negroid languages related to Mandinga, the language spoken by the people around Cape Verde?." (12) The statues from La Venta date from the beginning of the Olmec culture, the seed civilization of the ones that came later, the Maya and the Aztec among them. This would put the first contact between Africa and America at at least 3,000 years ago. And here is another in a long line of the 'forgetting of history' in order to further national interests by being able to make a clear claim of 'discovery.' "But no such discovery (by the Africans) could have been forgotten so completely without the help of the slave trade, which would ultimately form the basis of the European view of all black achievements." (15) The coast of West Africa was nearly completely depopulated through slavery, with the few refugees fleeing inland. An empire more advanced than any existing in Europe at the time, a place of beauty and riches and learning, collapsed under the weight. Here is a description of the people of Mali from about 1300 A.D. from Islamic geographer Ibn Battuta: "They are seldom unjust, and have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people. Their sultan shows no mercy to anyone who is found guilty of the least act of it. There is complete security in the country. Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers and men of violence. They do not confiscate the property of any white man who dies in their country, even if it be uncounted wealth. On the contrary, they give it into the charge of some trustworthy person among the whites, until the rightful heir takes possession of it." (16) And after 400 years of the slave trade: "Truly has Benin been called a city of blood. Its history is one long record of savagery of the most debased kind…Blood was everywhere…On the right was a crucifixion tree with a double crucifixion on it, the two poor wretches stretched out facing west, with their arms bound together in the middle…At the base were skulls and bones, literally strewn about, the debris of former sacrifices and down every main road were two or more human sacrifices." (16) Of course the European observer in 1897 made no connection between what he saw in Benin and the ravages of the slave trade. It is so convenient to forget. David Hume, that 'great' philosopher of the European 'Enlightenment' can write in the 1800's: "For countless centuries, while all the pageant of history swept by, the African remained unmoved-in primitive savagery…No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences. No approach to the civilization of his white fellow creatures, whom he imitates as a monkey does a man." (17) The ancestors of these West Africans were the mothers and fathers of Ancient Egypt: and every Egyptian knew it. They called the lands to the south "God's Land." It was more of the same in America. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss: "In what used to be called Hispaniola (today Haiti and Santo Domingo) the native population numbered about one hundred thousand in 1492, but had dropped to 200 about a century later, since people died of horror and disgust at European civilization even more than of smallpox and physical ill-treatment." (17) These survivors were described by their conquerors as "lazy, filthy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and fit only for slavery, in which state alone there might be some hope of converting them to Christianity." So history is not simply forgotten or lost, but suppressed by the conquerors so that they may rewrite it to justify their barbarity. No wonder so few Europeans have bothered to find it out. They would have to change their lives. Continue to Dawn Voyage II   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
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