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Dawn Voyage II |
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Dawn Voyage: The Black African Discovery of America by Michael Bradley Excerpts and Commentary The West African empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Kanem-Bornu, and others, only reverted to tribalism with the onslaught of slavery and the subsequently successful Muslim invasion. The Muslim attempts at invasion were all thwarted until slavery had denuded West Africa. What the Europeans did not realize when they spoke of the barbarous and backward Africa they saw is that they were looking upon their own reflection. The real 'Heart of Darkness', as Joseph Conrad well knew, was Europe itself. It is morbidly amusing that Europe cited 'human sacrifice' and 'cannibalism' as evidence of the 'barbarity' and 'backwardness' of the people they encountered in Africa and America. Truly it was looking through a distorted mirror at its very own face. West Africa in 1444 was a place of great cities, surpassing anything in Europe at the time, a place of immense wealth from gold and salt, and was possessed of an advanced civil society. One evidence of this is the status of women, so much higher than anything yet seen in European or Arabian lands. Ibn Battuta upon visiting the recently Muslimized Mali: "Their men show no sign of jealousy whatsoever. No one claims descent from his father, but on the contrary from his mother's brother. A person's heirs are his sister's sons, not his own sons. This is a thing which I have seen nowhere in the world except among the Indians of Malabar. But THOSE are heathens; THESE people are Muslims, punctilios in observing the hours of prayer, studying books of law, and in memorizing the Koran. Yet their women show no bashfulness before men and do not veil themselves, though they are assiduous in attending prayer." (31) AFRICA AND IRELAND It is instructive to look at the commonalities of Black African and ancient Briton and Celtic culture. They each possessed great mathematical and astronomical knowledge, a rich oral literary tradition, and a complex religious system. They worked bronze and weaved. They built monumental structures that were both religious and astronomical in nature. They each had a distinctive language, but borrowed their alphabets from others. Most people lived very simply. "Like the Africans, the Celts seem to have concentrated on religious and literary development rather than technological invention." (35) "Recalibrated carbon dating now shows that the megaliths of northwest Europe are older than the Egyptian pyramids, and it is very possible that the mathematical and astronomical knowledge needed to build monumentally came originally out of the lost Saharan world and traveled with Celts more directly and more quickly than it did in Egypt. There is every reason to believe that the intellectual foundation of civilization existed among the Celts and Black Africans no less than among the earliest Egyptians and Sumerians. The difference in subsequent development was due to the limitations of environment: we should not be fooled into assuming the Celts and black Africans were culturally retarded, though their material lifestyle may have been so." (36) "...We know that these seeds of culture came from the Sahara to Egypt, to Nubia, across the Mediterranean to Greece-and to the 'Celts' in North Africa who later carried the seeds of culture across the Mediterranean to the 'Celtiberians' of Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and on to Ireland..." We are speaking here in the range of 5,000-3,000 BC. It is interesting that the Irish have always been regarded as the 'niggers' of Europe, and the same language used to disparage them and their achievements was used against Africans and Native Americans. One reason why it has been difficult to clearly see the cultural influence of Africa on the the 'New World' is the African habit of "adopting the gods and ancestors of the original inhabitants of any new place." "...Europeans have dispossessed the original inhabitants of their lands and gods and imposed European gods upon them. At the same time they segregated themselves from the native population in a superior social position. The process is so 'natural' to us that we automatically assess cultural influence in terms of imported and imposed gods and customs, in terms of conquest." (37) We associate 'discovery' with 'conquest'. It is widely accepted that the Norse and Celts visited America long before Columbus did, and yet since they did not come to conquer, we tend to dismiss this fact. "As Basil Davidson has explained at some length, black Africans conceived of gods as granting the right to settle in, but not own in our Western sense, land under the gods' protection. Therefore, instead of imposing their own gods when they migrated into a new region, black Africans more commonly adopted whatever gods were already worshiped in the existing inhabitants." (36) Here is an example: "Wene, chief on the incomers, thereupon married into one of the clans of the people already settled in the area. But the clan he chose was one whose ancestors were recognized as holding spiritual title to the land...He could properly take over the title of mani and rule as Mani-Kongo, Lord of Congo, duly accepted by the spirit of the earth." (37) Now tell me, where in this story of European conquest do the 'civilized' ones truly exist?   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
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