“It is indisputable that in very ancient times the Negro race occupied our territory (Mexico).”
– Vicente Riva Palacio, historian, 1870
“The Negro started his career in America not as a slave but as master.”
– R. A. Jairazbhoy, Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America
“Once you are on the West Africa run the interesting alternatives should be noticed; the better your ship, the more easily you will cross to America on purpose, the worse your ship, the more easily you will cross by mistake.”
– James Bailey, The God-Kings and the Titans
“In Aztec mythohistory, the Olmecs were known as ‘the people who lived in the direction of the rising sun’ …”
– Victor W. Von Hagen, archaeologist, The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas, 1957
“What was most characteristic in the predynastic culture of Egypt is due to intercourse with the interior of Africa and the immediate influence of that permanent Negro element which had been present in the population of southern Egypt from the remotest times to our day.”
– Randall McIver, Ancient Races of the Thebaid
“Egypt was the receiver still more than the giver … Ancient Egypt was essentially an African colonization.”
– Basil Davidson, The African Past
“Remember that, just like in Egypt, a great (Olmec) civilization flourished and then died. And then people forgot about it. The pyramids lay under the sand, the sphinx lay under the sand, something stood there like enigmatic witnesses of a glorious past, but many people continued to live for centuries without recovering the majesty of that civilization, without being able to go back to their roots.”
– Ivan Van Sertima, historian, 1976
“Until the other day, African tribesmen on the screen excited derisive West Indian laughter.”
– V. S. Naipaul in Middle Passage, quoted by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in Homecoming
In early November American voters go to the polls for what they call mid-term elections in the United States. It is felt that President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party have lost a lot of momentum and a lot of popularity with the American people, so that an electoral disaster for Barack and the Democrats would not surprise anyone.
Barack Obama is the son of a black Kenyan intellectual and a white American mother. Barack was born in Hawaii. His mother and his father became estranged, whereupon Barack’s mother married an Indonesian man. The couple lived in Indonesia for some years, so Barack spent that time as a child in school in Indonesia.
When Barack became the 44th President of the United States, there was a picture of Winston Churchill, the story goes, in one of the offices which had been occupied by the previous President, George Bush, Jr. Barack had the Churchill picture removed. The British, you see, had persecuted and imprisoned Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya against British colonialism in East Africa.
This was one of the very few actions by Barack Obama that we can identify as decisive and bold where his ancestry is concerned. Barack would never have become the President of the United States if the white American power structure had believed for an instant that he had a black agenda. In fact, if Barack ever steps out of line, so to speak, the white American power structure will murder him. They’ve done it to their white own before, so a bullet for Barack would be no big deal. Obama knows this.
Yet, all over the black world our excitement reached euphoric levels when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States two years ago. We older ones shed many tears of happiness. Those tears were shed for the massive symbolism of the moment – a black man in the White House. Crazy. We conscious ones from the “movement” knew that nothing had changed in substance. But the moment was awesome, because there was a five hundred-year history of enslavement, genocide, humiliation, pain and torture which lived in our collective psyche.
Let’s say that the American empire lasts for three or four thousand more years. That is really doubtful, but we are imagining, for argument’s sake. How will the white Americans explain the picture of the 44th. President and his family? No doubt Barack, Michelle and their children will have been seriously lightened in color by the historians and spin doctors, the same way the black woodcutters in the 1819 coat-of-arms have become red and yellow on Belize’s 2010 national flag.
The Europeans and their American cousins have spent five centuries lying to themselves and brainwashing their black slaves and subjects about the world before slavery and Christopher Columbus. The military power of the Europeans gave birth to a religious and educational hegemony which inflicted mental programming on black men, until some of us actually became “boys” instead of men.
The truth was the direct opposite of what the Europeans and Americans taught our ancestors after they had destroyed our ancestors’ families, tribes, religions, history and dignity. The key to the lie of white superiority and black inferiority was Egypt, where the world’s greatest pre-Christian civilizations emerged. This was two, three, four thousand years before Christ. It is only the most racist of the scholars who still try to deny that Egypt’s were African civilizations, with the Nubians playing a serious starring role.
The evidence that Egyptians and other Africans reached America, and specifically Mexico, more than two thousand years before Christopher Columbus, is staggering, at least to me. I will give Columbus this. He made his way back to Europe after landing in the West Indies. Those Africans who reached the Americas never made it back to the east. They set up shop in Mexico. This is what the story of the Olmecs is all about. (You can Google this.)
The Olmecs, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Mali, Benin, Zimbabwe and the like were big news back then for those of us who embraced black-consciousness. These realities proved the lie. Still, the Europeans insisted, and sadly, some of our own had been so poisoned they ran away from the real. It’s a damn shame.
The election of Barack Obama was a wonderful and inspiring symbolism. A black man had proved something. To those of us who are black-conscious, Barack didn’t have to prove anything. We knew, Jack. We knew. We knew then, and we know now.
All power to the people. Power in the struggle.