Zimbabwe, down in the south would be an example which is known mostly by these great stone ruins giving evidence of the fact that there was a major civilization organized in that area in Southern Africa.

The writings of Arab travellers can also be sourced, because many of the best documents on West African history are written in Arabic. So unless someone is fluent in Arabic, and has access to Arabic literature, much of the history of Africa, even though it is the history of Black African people and not the history of Arabs, much of that history remains inaccessible to us.

This is one of the early books dated 1325-1354 AD and written by one of the travellers in ancient Africa named IBN Batutta. It is great to read these journals because they don’t describe anything like the colonizers would describe. The colonizers later will begin to describe Africans as people who were underdeveloped and having tails, evolving from monkeys, living in trees, cannibals and so forth, which was totally untrue, especially in the Islamic countries.

Africans in the Islamic countries were almost universally literate in Koranic studies. They were also the home of major universities of the world at that time up to and through much of the colonial period. So many of the slaves that were brought to America for example, were literate in Arabic, some of them could write the Koran from memory and did it there in the United States. So not all the people who went there were illiterate, in fact almost all were literate in some form or other.

IBN Batutta’s “The Golden Trade of the Moors” shows that West Africa developed because of its continuing contact with itself and East Africa, which meant that unlike the images that some people have of West Africa as an isolated cultural enclave, it was always connected in a fluent way with the rest of the continent especially with East Africa. So the Moors traded for example, across the Sahara or the desert sands regularly and routinely to Egypt and Mecca, especially after the Islamic period. These are the images that we need to keep in mind.

This is a picture that symbolizes the kind of intellectual level of Africans at the time that colonialism was about to get underway. When they came to West Africa in the empire that was Mali, Songhai and Ghana, they came to a highly developed, civilized, intellectual set of communities. Cities like Timbuktu, Guinea and Gao in West Africa were just tremendous intellectual centres.

Below is a manuscript from the 13th century which is very interesting, showing Africans playing Chess with Europeans as slaves. This is one of the earliest examples of Chess being played anywhere. This is a part of what was happening in West Africa, in other words, we were not the only people that have been slaves, but many people do not know that Africans at one point held Europeans as slaves.

This is again in West Africa. This is Mansa Musa who is a king in Mali. He is holding a gold nugget in his hand with an Arab trader coming toward him.

Mansa Musa was the king in Mali who went back to Mecca and took so much gold to give away on his journey that he depressed the economy of the Middle East for 12 years.
Mansa Musa took over 50,000 people with him to West Africa on a caravan before he came back to Mali and still found his government in tact.

Earlier the question was asked, “so who is this Negro?” to which it was stated that the Negro was an invention of the European so he must be European. So who is the European? Is he not a concoction, an invention, a self creation?

We have seen that the Negro is a fabrication. With this manipulation of history on the part of Europe, is the European not a self creation. Have the Europeans not created a superficial, unreal image of themselves for the world to view them?

The whole concept of Europe did not even exist at the time of Christ. There was no idea of an embodiment, a shared culture or a political entity called Europe. They never saw themselves that way at the time, which was around zero on the calendar. They saw themselves in Greece as city states, and anybody who was not a Greek was a barbarian. They even saw themselves as Romans, but the idea of Europe itself is fairly new. If you are asking in terms of people who populate Europe, who they are, then you have to go back biologically to the fact that they are the descendants ultimately of Africa.

People can establish names for themselves. For example, when Germany got ready to write its history, much of it was written from the folk tales of the people. In other words, there was no consciousness of Germany, and part of the thing they say that the Grim brothers did was not only to write fairy tales, but in picking up those fairy tales to pick up images that could be used to create that history for Germany. So you begin to wonder what took place before the Grim brothers since there was no national consciousness before that time that you could point to. Then you would have to say that anything that came after that was a fabrication or a creation.

If you ask almost any European at least a few years ago up until recently about the history of Europe, they would start with Greece and Rome, but many of the people who occupied what we now call Europe, apparently had no connection to Greece or Rome. In other words, England did not have any connection with the development of Greece or Rome.

If you read the works of Julius Caesar, by the time he got there around the time of Christ with his description of the English, it did not make sense to connect the English with the Romans at that point. It is true that later what the Greeks and Romans developed would be inherited by the English, but it would not be true to put them in the same European basket at that time.

How do we get the road map to African-American/Black liberation in terms of historical, psychological information?

Every group of people has to have a kind of the division of labour which means that someone has to be supported to do the research that is necessary to be firmly grounded in the information that we need to disseminate. This means that historians like Chancellor Williams, Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, Dr. Ben Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima and others who dig up this information for us, must be supported preferably by us. Getting the information is an important part of the programme, so we have to get behind those people who are in the best position to get it for us.

The second part is just as important because the information can be around for many years, but the question arises, how do we get it out to the masses of the people? At this point the burden is on the artists, such as the musicians, actors, literary people and so forth who are the best communicators that can take this kind of information and put it in a form that will communicate rapidly and on a broad base to the widest spectrum of our people.

That is one aspect of dissemination, but there is also scholarly dissemination through journals and professional organizations. The fact of digging up the information and the organized dissemination of that information are the two primary things which will help us to understand what we are about.

Do we have to see ourselves in the world in the future as being under Europeans or white people? Is there a way out?

There is a way out, but the first step is to envision the goal. For example, the Jewish people who envisioned a state of Israel went in and established the state of Israel and also invented a whole new culture. Here we have our own culture already present which does not need to be invented, along with the locations. It becomes important to re-enforce the development of those locations.

Not every African in the Diaspora is going to be able to physically get up and go back to Africa, but every African in the Diaspora ought to care as much about their homeland as any other group of people in the world will care about their homeland, and must take active steps to ensure that those homelands survive, develop and are enhanced.

After completing these sections, you should now understand how the creation of two myths, two lies produced much of the problems we still face today concerning Black-white relations. For in an effort to create the myth of white superiority, Europeans, including European-Americans, had to create the myth of Black or African inferiority.

The Europeans saw that only by claiming for themselves that which had been created by Africans, could they spread the seeds of Black inferiority around the globe, and that they did with such calculated precision, that they were able to get the African to reject his own skin; to reject his own God.

The negative indoctrination of Black people by some white Americans reminds one of how elephants are trained. It is said that the elephant trainer starts off training the elephant by putting a large chain around the elephant’s neck and pulling on the chain to make the elephant respond to different commands. The elephant trainer then uses smaller and smaller chains to get the same responses he had obtained with the more cumbersome chain, until finally he is able to use not a chain, but a string.

The cumbersome chains of slavery around the world were thrown away after Black people had been trained how to respond to alien commands. Many of us are walking around thinking that we still have chains on our feet and minds not knowing that a mere string is keeping us in check. This string is the myth of white superiority and invincibility.

What happens when the elephant discovers that a mere string has been stretching between it and independent power? We should all look around ourselves and dare to step beyond the boundaries that have been set for us and our children.