Transcription
I would like to first express my appreciation for your invitation. It took me 50 years to get to Tusk. 50 years ago, at age 16, I applied for entrance to Tuskegee. My application was accepted, but the immigration laws of the United States of America were such, and I don't think they have changed much, that I couldn't get here.
I remember that such had happened to a man before me by the name of Marcus Messiah Garvey. He was invited by Booker T. Washington. I don't know if you know about him. I heard you don't have a Booker T. Washington Day. Unusual, but anyhow, probably better thoughts may come about, and there will be a Booker T. Washington Day at Tuskegee. But anyhow, Marcus M. Garvey was invited by Booker T. Washington to come to the United States. The facts are that red tape in the immigration department. Garvey arrived six months subsequent to the death of the great Booker T. Washington. So, taking 50 years to get here, nevertheless, I got here.
I do not know if I would have taken the course of action in my life that I have now taken. However, I was lucky enough to slip through an engineering course and graduate in a few more courses, and here I am. Dr. Yousef Bakinin, a renowned African historian and scholar, delivered his famous lecture "Black Man Wake Up" as part of his lifelong effort to challenge the widespread miseducation of African people. In this powerful lecture, Dr. Bakinin, also known as Dr. Ben, emphasized the need for black people to reclaim and celebrate their rich cultural heritage, which has been systematically erased or distorted by European colonization and white supremacist ideologies.
Dr. Ben argued that black people have been miseducated through Western-centered narratives that have systematically excluded the achievements of African civilizations. From childhood, many black people are taught a version of history that marginalizes African contributions to world culture, knowledge, and civilization. This has led to an internalized inferiority complex among many in the black community, which, according to Dr. Ben, is one of the greatest obstacles to black liberation and empowerment. He called for a complete overhaul of the education system to center African history and achievements.
Within the context of my education, if you could call it that, I would prefer to call it the course of my indoctrination, my training, which started in Ethiopia, East Africa, and continued in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United States, Virgin Islands, England, and Spain. Been around a few places, and in all of these places that I've been, I never once received an education in the history of African people. Yet, I thought that I've educated myself down through those periods of time. And it is because of that self-education in those things which meant most to me as an African person that I decided at no time would I stand still in these halls of indoctrination and not rebel with the necessary documentation of the lies that are being taught in these halls.
And so, I may be saying things that may hurt many of you, if not most of you, because some of the lies have become your dear frame of reference. We could start with the Greeks. I hope you have fraternities and sororities. Don't get too bothered about it, since the Greeks weren't too much anyhow. But we can start with that because that is where our institutions of learning have decided to start civilization. Yet, the Greeks are only here from at least 1,000 before the Common Era, or before the Christian Era, as you would prefer to say.
Let us, for example, cite one, and that particular person would be Hippocrates. And I'm sure that you've heard of Hippocrates. And when you consider that Hippocrates wasn't born until 333 BC, or before the Common Era, yet in your education, you were told that Hippocrates is the father of medicine. That's a lie. There's no way that I can say about it other than it's a lie. A lie is a lie, whether it's in the university or in the church. How could Hippocrates be the father of medicine when the first time you see him, he is in Egypt learning medicine from Africans?
There are numerous medical papyri. The nearest to Hippocrates is at least 1,300 years before he was born. For example, we have what is known as the Kahun Papyrus, the Ebers Papyrus, and now the so-called Rockefeller Papyrus, the Edwin C. Smith Papyrus. All of these papyri go back to as early as 3100 BC. The man who Hippocrates took an oath that he would practice medicine according to this man, this African, whom the Greeks call Asclepius in the Hippocratic Oath. A man by the name of Imhotep died. He practiced medicine and died 2500 years before the birth of Hippocrates. And you are telling me that the medical school and the pre-med historians don't know this? They don't know it because, unfortunately, Imhotep had a high visibility, like myself, otherwise called black.
They don't know that the Ebers Papyrus by Hatshepsut dealing with family planning, I said family planning, 1550 years before the birth of Jesus the Christ, is out there when every medical journal in 1961 published copies of the Ebers Papyrus. And we could go on with the papyri with respect to all kinds of diseases that the Africans had produced, both in Egypt and Ethiopia and Sudan and a place then called Punt, now called Somalia. But that would be satisfactory.
But let us take the kind of education that we do have. We are in a chapel, and we have been told about an immaculate conception and virgin birth. We have been told about the beginning of the world with Adam and Eve. We have been told about a man by the name of Cain who slew his brother Abel. And we've been told that all of these things only happened once, and they go back to the Old Testament, or otherwise called the Torah, or the Pentateuch, or the Khamsah. Those are names for what you call the Old Testament. But we have never been told that they are only copies of stories that predated them by thousands of years. Let us them one by one.
I heard some "ahs" and everything already. Oh yes, you have been told a lot of lies. No other way to talk about it. And those who teach them, if in fact they did any research, must know their lies. That is providing that they have never gone to Egypt or to Ethiopia or to Sudan to see the living proof, the writings on the tombs, the writings in the pyramids, the what is called the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. That is providing that they have not seen the holy scriptures of the Africans of the Nile Valley, otherwise called the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or as Budge called it in his translation of the hieroglyphic writing, or the Egyptian Book of the Coming Forth by Day and by Night.
In the Temple of Seti I, for example, at a place called Abydos, not only is there the writing of an immaculate conception 4,000 years before the story of Mary, but it is there in picture form. Are we to say that the theologians of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have never once taken a trip to Egypt from whence these things were taken? In that same temple, you see a story of how Set murdered his brother Osiris 2,000 years before the Jewish story of Cain and Abel.
And we are told that an African from Egypt by the name of Moses, born in the city of Goshen, that's still Egypt, Egypt is in Africa, by the way, the last time I saw it in January. You heard of a place called the Middle East. I don't know of any place called the Middle East. That's political jingoism. But we can find that there was no Moses on Mount Horeb in the Sinai to receive any Ten Commandments that had not been given before or written before in Egypt. Because you could go in the Book of the Coming Forth by Day and by Night, the Book of the Dead, and see in what is called the Osirian drama, not only those 10 but for 32 more, a total of 42, which you can also go in the Temple of Rameses VI in the Valley of the Kings, across what is today called Luxor. And in that tomb, you would see the 42 listed commandments, or otherwise negative confession, 2,000 years before the birth of Moses.
But they told you that Moses was taught, he was an Egyptian, taught in school in Egypt, and became a priest in the system. Could you have been born in the United States of America, went to kindergarten, then elementary school, junior high school, high school, and never heard of the United States Constitution? It was equally impossible for Moses to have gone to, born in Egypt, go to school in Egypt, study in an Egyptian system, worship God and Ra, and never once heard of the 42 negative confessions, which have in it "Thou shalt not kill." I mean, I have not killed men or women. I have not made like a harlot. I have not. Moses himself is charged with theft, with murder. His brother Aaron is charged with theft 40 years before they reached Mount Sinai. Then somebody had a law against death and against murder before he reached Mount Sinai. Where did they get it?
But you won't taught anything about this. All of this information has been suppressed at a place called the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Chalcedon in 325 AD, when Constantine, the Roman Emperor, conquered North Africa, took over the role of the Christian Church, which started in Alexandria with Pantanus and Basilides, not in Rome. But this too, you have not been taught. You have not been taught that the two, the three people who died first in the name of Jesus the Christ were three African women: Felicitas, Perpetua, and Nano. Yet, you know everything. You're born again. You know it all. You can't be blamed for it. Even your teachers may not be able to be blamed for this, because one can't teach what one doesn't know, or one hasn't learned, or one hasn't experienced. Because there is no interest for people to go to Egypt to see anything, but to go to the Holy Land. And that's why Jesse Jackson had to get on his knees and pray and beg forgiveness. He was scared he wouldn't be able to get back in the Holy Land for saying what was right.
But there's more than that, because you have been told that unless Europeans teach you, you haven't been taught. But who told you that? The first university built in all of Europe was built by Africans called Moors at the University of Salamanca in Spain. Check it out. Europe's first university. Not only the stones were put together like the stones in most of the buildings and the bricks in most of the buildings here. I'm not talking about that aspect of only the building. I'm talking about the educational system. It is nothing but a copy of the University of Djenné, of ancient Ghana, which was burnt down and rebuilt as the University of Sankore in the city of Timbuktu, which the French later called Timbuktu. To then carried as the Africans called Moors conquered Iberia, now Spain and Portugal, and Southern France, and established in there the university system. And as I said before, it was not the first. The earliest of the Greeks were trained in a place called the Grand Lodge, the subordinate Lodge of Croton and Delphi, subordinate lodges of the Grand Lodge in a place called Waset, which the Greeks later changed to Thebes, or Dios, the current Arabs changed it to Luxor.
But did you get that in Greek philosophy? Did you get it in Greek history or European history? History? None whatsoever. And how did you get Hannibal? Hannibal Barca and his father Hamilcar Barca and his brother and his father, his brother Hamilcar. How did you receive it in the educational system? How did the textbooks show it? It showed it as they were not Africans. What they said is some Phoenicians came from Phoenicia, and Carthage, which they later called Carthage, was in fact a Phoenician country. Eighty people came from Phoenicia with a woman named Elisa, which Virgil called Dido or Aeneas in his little play about it. And those eighty changed all the Africans into Phoenicians. And thus, we are taught that the Africans of Carthage were in fact Caucasians.
It's all right. When they taught me in school in Puerto Rico, I didn't know any difference. I was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, in Cuba, and Brazil. So when they were teaching me that at the University of Puerto Rico, I knew no different. And so it went down all right. But I accidentally went to Morocco, accidentally, and found that what I had been taught in school was nothing but a pack of lies. Because I didn't went into the temple, I then went into the museum and found that it was totally different. But then I went on to Italy, in the Medici Museum, the Museum of Alessandro de Medici, only to find that Alessandro was an African born in Italy. And no one had told me up to then that there were Roman emperors from Africa, such as Honorius and Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla. No one had taken time, had taken time to explain to me anything about the Greeks coming to Egypt and to Nubia and to Ethiopia, depending on who they were, to receive their earliest education. Those who had not gone to a little colony, a little enclave in what was then called Libya, now called Libya, to receive their first glimpse into education taught by Africans.
Dr. Ben stressed that African civilizations, especially Egypt or Kemet, laid the foundation for much of what is celebrated as European history. He highlighted that ancient Egypt, a primarily African civilization, influenced Greek and Roman philosophy, science, and culture. Dr. Ben meticulously detailed how great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates studied in Africa, particularly in Egyptian temples, before returning to Greece to establish their schools of thought. However, this African origin of knowledge has been downplayed or outright denied in mainstream education.
Beyond Egypt, Dr. Ben underscored the contributions of various African civilizations from East to West Africa. He talked about the powerful empires of the West, such as Mali, Ghana, and Songhai, and how their achievements in education, law, trade, and governance were on par with or surpassed their European contemporaries. Timbuktu, for example, was a renowned center for learning, attracting scholars from across the world. Dr. Ben urged black people to recognize the sophistication and global impact of black societies.
Dr. Ben critiqued how Western society appropriated African philosophy and presented it as European innovation. He pointed out that European philosophies, concepts of spirituality, governance, and morality have deep African roots. For example, the Egyptian principle of Ma'at, which stands for truth, justice, order, and balance, predates and influences many Western philosophical ideas about justice and ethics. Dr. Ben argued that by denying this African influence, Europe sought to paint Africa as a primitive, backward continent, justifying the enslavement and colonization of its people.
In his lecture, Dr. Ben passionately called for black people to wake up from the mental slavery imposed by centuries of colonial and neocolonial miseducation. He urged them to study African history and to teach future generations the true story of their ancestors. Dr. Ben believed that this reclamation of history was crucial for black people's psychological, social, and political liberation. By embracing their heritage, he argued, black people could rebuild their self-esteem and challenge the structures of oppression that have kept them marginalized. "Black Man Wake Up" was more than just a lecture; it was a rallying cry for black consciousness and empowerment. Dr. Yousef Bakinin's insightful critique of global miseducation aimed to inspire black people to rediscover their true history, take pride in their African identity, and challenge the narratives that sought to diminish their cultural and intellectual legacy. His message remains relevant today as the global struggle for racial justice and equality continues.