Dr John Henrik Clarke, Dr Ivan Van Sertima, Dr Yosef Ben Jochannan on Gil Noble Low

Hello, welcome to Like It Is, and our continuation of our series with three eminent historians about African history and its impact on our lives. Our guests are Professor Ivan vanera of Rutgers University, Professor Yosef Ben yinan of Cornell University, and Professor John Henri Clark of Hunter College. Our historic excavations will begin or continue right after these words.

At a time when Europe, at its very best, could not produce a machine with the temperature blast in the blast furnaces of more than 1600° Centigrade, they found in that area where they were producing steel that there were higher population densities than there are today. Tanzania, in fact, supported comfortably certain population densities which it cannot support today. One of the things that we do not seem to understand is that colonialism, in some places, actually destroyed African soil. Machines were introduced that were totally inappropriate to that world, and that destroyed possibilities.

In Tanzania, for example, you find 4.5 million heads of cattle in the interior of Tanzania. Within a matter of a century after colonialism, all that cattle disappeared. And things were introduced that were not, um, in Tanzania at at the time, or it did not take on epidemic proportions. Rinderpest, smallpox, [ __ ] fleas, all these things were introduced under the colonial period. Do we usually assume that these diseases just took over as a result of the backwardness of Africans? And all of these helped to undermine the strength of Africa. You're saying yes.

And you find, for example, in Kenya, they found an astronomical observatory 300 years before Christ. On the basis of the alignments of the stones of that observatory, they found Africans had built, um, one of the world's most accurate prehistoric calendars. They found very complex astronomy among the West Africans. In the last program, for example, um, Professor Ben had been pointing out reasons for the decline and and fall of the Egyptian civilization. One of the things that must be noted is that after that fall, Africa rose again in other places.

That Mali Empire, for example, in the 13th and 14th centuries, was quite extraordinary. The Dogon people among the the the Mali in the Mali Empire plotted an invisible star, a white dwarf, which we, when I say we, I mean modern astronomy, only became aware of in the 20th century. They not only plotted it, its orbit and trajectory, up to the up to 1990. We have found that our best machines produce the same chart that they produced several centuries ago.

Where is the evidence that they did plot this inv? Well, G and Diop, two anthropologists, studied the Dogon and found, after 16 years, what an extraordinary knowledge they had of the of our, not only of our planet, but of star systems and our galaxy. They pointed out, for example, that this star, which they plotted, and I have looked through a powerful telescope, I could not see it, even with that powerful telescope, because even with our best telescopes, it is only visible at certain times. They know so. So mathematics must also be involved, as well as telescopes.

The Russians discovered in ancient Africa, finally, ground spherical crystal lenses in the excavations. They found this, and, um, they have, um, indicated this was found in Egypt. Um, this was, um, found on a NASA time, and they have indicated that the Africans were capable of making telescopes. The Dogon kept up a caravan trade with Egypt even after it declined and could have got this knowledge and refined it afterwards. So what we have is a story of an African people that had developed a high technology. But their humanity was such that no, I don't think it's a question of humanity. I do not believe in theories of people being more human than others. I do believe, however, and the evidence bears us out, that whereas the Africans had the opportunities to destroy European civilizations whenever they invaded Europe, where it was under the Gauls before the emergence of Cro-Magnon man, where it was under the Moors, when with other peoples, they were in Egypt, they were in Europe, where it was on Hannibal, when even Taharka made an excursion into a part of Europe, they found him in Spain. The, um, European profited in all the circumstances. Never was his civilization shattered. Whereas when the Europeans invaded, they wiped out cultures. And that is a very, and yet, that that speaks not of humanity. You say it speaks, it speaks of, of very extraordinary, um, circumstances. How this can be translated in terms of whether you have different kinds of human beings, or different types of human consciousness, or different human character, perhaps in terms of the social character of the African. You see, the African never believed that, for example, if he has a religion and he conquers another person or walks into another territory, he has to, um, plaster it down in them. The times when these invasions were made, it was times when Europe thought, or at least she liked to think, in order to cover up, to assuage her guilty conscience, that she could say, "Well, look, I've come on the name of Christ, in the name of God, to save these souls." So that she therefore found it necessary to wipe out everything. Like, for example, in the Americas, she destroyed all the books in America except three. Well, did the African ever do that? Never did that. Because, did the African ever enslave the European? No, no. You don't have evidence of that. And this, um, is not only a question of humanity. It has to do, as I say, with the, the assumption with which you move forward, that what are you doing? The African, for example, did not have these monolithic religions where you would go, like the Arab or the, um, this, the, um, Christians, the European Christians, when they distorted Christ, Christ, it would go and say, "In the name of such and such, I'm going to wipe you out." I don't think the African invader ever operated under those premises. So that you can have a totally different kind of impact occurring.

Okay, let's talk about some of the vast resources on the African continent and how they were exploited and utilized by the African. Well, um, they have found, for example, in medicine, extraordinary things occurring in African medicine. And not just talking about the witch doctor. Um, the, the, in the Edinburgh Journal, for example, they noted Africans were the first in cesarean operations. They have a picture of it in my recent Journal of African Civilizations. That they had invented a vaccine for smallpox before the Europeans. That they were using tetracycline consciously before the Europeans. That they were the first people to have standardized medicinal doses. In Egypt, as, um, socialized medicine. I thought tetracycline was a relatively modern drug. Centuries ago, they have found Africans using the tetracycline. They found the yellow green flash in their bones, and they found where they were using that tetracycline, there's the lowest incidence of infectious disease in an ancient population. Do they know how it was administered? No. They found it for, in their grain bin, so that it may have started as an accident. But then the Africans became aware of it and started to use it in medicinal doses.

Um, we also have evidence of mathematical systems. And this is one of the things that one finds so frustrating, that in most of the anthropological and archaeological records, or anthropological and historical record, you do not, um, there's no mention of African mathematical systems. Work has been done showing that these mathematical systems were highly complex, particularly among the people like the Yoruba, etcetera. And some of them were on the verge of computers before the Holocaust. And you wonder, why are these things not mentioned? The reason why they're not mentioned is that most of the studies of Africa are done in, were done in small communities, survival communities. Studies at the core and centers of major African civilization, few of these have been done. And even when done, they haven't been done in terms of technology, because it was assumed that they did not have a technology.

Their resources are incredible. South Africa has still retained control, and in that sense, Africa's only gained the paper independence. South Africa controls the world's diamond, the world's gold. 23 million ounces of gold are produced in South Africa a year. Zimbabwe and Ghana has only 1 million. The, the diamonds among the South Africans, they are the leading diamond producers in the world. Manganese, it's incredible. They have 5 million, um, tons of manganese against 2 million in any other African, in Gabon. African, perhaps there in lies a reason why the West is so in support of the racist regime that controls South Africa today. Yes, there's a tremendous, um, reappraisal recently done in the Reagan administration as to whether they stand to profit by having this kind of relationship. And very often, when resources are found, like Gabon, they found, um, it has 1 billion tons of fine iron ore. United Nations status where should allow the Gabonese to have, um, money to build a railroad to the sea, 400 miles to the sea, to exploit this. They abandoned that. The Gabonese, the people in Gabon, although they are only 1 million, are slowly building that railway. It would be finished about the year 2000.

Thank you, Professor vanera. Like It Is, we'll continue with Professor Ben right after this.

In the process of the colonization of Africa, there were a number of treaties and agreements and whatnot that were drawn. Maybe we can sort of cover those in an overview. I think that if we examine the major source of this, these treaties, we will go to a three-volume work by the official historian of Queen Victoria by the name of Edward Herzet. He wrote a book, a three-volume work, called "The Map of Africa by Treaties." Under these treaties, it showed there where certain "quote unquote" chiefs, because this is a European term, sign away lands by the mark of an X. The documents are written in either English, French, Dutch, depending on who the colonizer was. No indication that the African knew that language. There is nothing in any of these treaties that would indicate that the people of that African land attested to those signing, that the land belonged to the people, and none of the so-called chiefs could take away the land of the people and sell it or something. We had similar situations here in the United States, of what is now the United States of America, with the indigenous people. Treaties were formed between Europeans and Europeans. The worst of such treaties was the one that gave away the entire portion of what was then called the Congo, later called the Congo Free State, to Leopold of Belgium, with the approval of the United States of America, Great Britain, and the other 12 colonial powers of, um, Europe. For example, you had such people as the Gould, the Vanderbilts, and others who were part of the Congo Free State. Is that the Berlin Conference you're talking about? The Berlin Conference came out of this. Mhm. After this behavior, that they were given this. And at the time when the Europeans were grabbing the lands in Africa, starting in 1830 when France invaded Algeria, the northern part of Africa, that tip that closest to the Gibraltar. Germany was in a war with France fighting for Alsace-Lorraine. So that when the other colonial powers had taken land, Germany didn't get any yet. So the Germans came and started fighting the other Europeans to get some land of her own. And thus they were obliged to give Germany some territory, such as what is called Togo, which was German territory, Cameroon, and so forth. Germany then went all the way down to what is today called Southwest Africa, Namibia, and around the horn up to what was then Tanganyika, was, um, part of the German colonial empire. Um, most of that was taken away with the First World War. As a result of this, this conference was called because the Europeans were fighting among themselves for this rich African land. Kaiser Wilhelm and Otto von Bismarck called the conference in Germany, thus the Berlin Conference. That it was called the United States of America, Great Britain, and 12 European countries participated. The United States was represented at a later conference, also called the Brussels Conference. That, which was the, that that treaty conference was one in which they now had given Leopold his land at the Berlin Conference. They started to encroach on Leopold because they found that they had given him what was thought to be the richest part of Africa at that time. Leopold then called a conference called the Brussels Conference. The United States was represented at this conference by a man by the name of Henry Terrell, the other one was, um, C.E.N., both of them carrying the title Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary. So that the United States were participating in the cutting up of Africa, in the colonization of Africa. Yet in politics, in political science, we are told in the classroom, America had nothing to do. Of course, America controlled Liberia up to this date, um, in spite of the latest, um, um, um, revolution. That was the treaties made by the United States and France and England with respect to the American Colonization Society, which came out of the ages of the Congress and the Senate of the United States. The role of U.S. Grant in, in the Bixby decision there. Even the United States President Grant took part in such negotiation and do such treaty negotiations. So the determination of who got what share of Africa was made by non-Africans. There were no Africans at either the Berlin or the Brussels conferences, not a single one. And at the time, you had independent African nations. You had Ethiopia, which became independent older than India, a nation that you got in the world today. Um, at that period of time, you still had, um, the, um, 1880s. You had Haiti, which had become, um, come independent in the 1800s. You had, um, Liberia became independent in 1857.

So are you suggesting that all these treaties, though, that beforehand and afterward, that were struck between Europeans and Africans, the Africans didn't really understand what they were signing away? But those, and those who signed weren't even authorized to do so? Those who signed had no authority, and many of them did not sign anything. They had people on paper who did not exist, and they drew line boundary lines according to the river, the flow of the river, according to the, the lake. They, and then they made such things. They even had tigers in Africa shown on the map, and a tiger is not an indigenous animal to the African continent.

Were the definitions of the countries of Africa as we know them now drawn out of these conferences? Every one of the countries of, you have in Africa now, without exception, the jigsaw puzzle of lines, boundaries were established at the Berlin Conference and the Brussels Conference with only minor changes. As was when I went, when out of the Berlin Conference and the Brussels Conference, then came the, the, the First World War. And out of that, the documents of that was adopted by the, um, League of Nations. The League of Nations made their own conditions with the treaties they made between Italy, even before that, when the Italians had invaded, um, Ethiopia for the first time and defeated in the Battle of Adwa by Menelik II, although he had won, the European powers came together, made treaties to stop him, because he had said he was going to wipe the Europeans from, um, Africa. Then there was that other set of treaties. There were more treaties again, adjusting the boundaries, um, in the, the, the Berlin, as the, the, that conference at the, the, the League of Nations, which had taken away that land adjustments were, were made. The next body of the international body.

But let me just interrupt from it. In other words, our concept as Africans of Africa didn't have those boundaries? No, sir. We didn't have a Mali or Nigeria or something like that. The boundaries varied depending on where the people fed their animals. In other words, the, the, the boundary of Mali was where the Malian was with his cattle, and that could have shifted with the season. Just so the neighbor next door to him. Africans did not have, "If you cross, I'm going to shoot you." Well, this cross here, going to strangle you. The, um, Malian would meet, for example, his neighbor and says, "Oh, how is the grass up there?" He said, "Well, it's a little better up there, you know, it's richer." He says, "Well, okay, I move up there today." Well, let us all go up. And the two of the families would talk, and they'll go up. And that's where the boundary of that next nation. This land is mine, kind of concept. This European, European established the land boundaries, situation, fences, and things of that nature started among the Europeans. Land boundaries, ship among African people, you didn't have this. Say, "Well, if you cross, you're going to shoot you," and all this kind of thing. It was a late. It's just like surnames. It's that same process. It, it brings to mind what the European brought to this land, the United States, treaties with the Native American that meant nothing. They, you could, all these so-called treaties. Did the indigenous people read the language? Do they know what they were signing when they did sign that X? If they, in fact, signed the X, how many of them knew in Louisiana that, um, in French? How many spoke French? And the, the man knew what was written down there? If I tell you something that you're signing, but you don't, can't read the language, what I told you could be quite different than what you, that little X, and what identification there is about an X that you could identify tomorrow. That is, that's your X, and not my X, even if I signed it. And this is not something that we are saying that happened in the past. It is happening today, right now. They are indigenous people here being moved up in Africa. They are indigenous in Australia. You say the same thing. The Caribbeans, the Malvinas, or whatever they call it, is a good indication of how they had done it. Of course, it doesn't belong to either one. It doesn't belong to Argentina, and it certainly doesn't belong to, um, England. But the people to whom it belonged, and now since dead, you know, they've been liquidated to the last man. People are talking about Holocaust. I mean, that's a Holocaust. Nobody left. Holocaust in Tasmania. Not a single one left. Holocaust in Southern Africa. Mona, when, um, this man was brought from India, Lugard, Captain Lugard, and he had exterminated Indians. Then they brought him to South Africa, Cecil John Rhodes. He liquidated millions of Africans. I would say about at least 20 to 30 million Africans with the attempt to match Cairo with the Cape.

All right, let me, let me interrupt and stop you at this moment. That leads into the discussion that awaits us with Professor Clark. We will continue with Professor Clark of Hunter College right after this.

Portion of the preceding segment, you heard Professor Ben raised the question of the Holocaust, which seems of a Holocaust, an African Holocaust. Seldom is that word used in that particular context. We've only heard Holocaust used in a particular, um, context. Maybe we can amplify on that. Well, Ava, Holocaust started 500 years ago, and it's not over yet. In fact, our relationship with Europe has been a continuous Holocaust, and we have been continuously resisting that Holocaust. African resistance to this Holocaust started in the hinterlands of Africa when he was revolting the keep from being taken to the shore, and continued along the shore when he revolted to keep from getting on the boat, continued on the boats, and he revolted to keep from getting off of the boats. Forced off the boats, he continued to revolt on the, on the land. But the apex of this resistance, um, while coming in the 19th, um, century. But slavery revolts, um, had started. There was a slavery revolt in Cuba as early as 15, um, 25. And these slave revolts, mostly led by people called Maroons. In this is a term that really means runaway. These slaves who bypassed the auction block many times and went into the hills and defied people to enslave them and found separate societies. Why, the best known of these societies are in Jamaica and, and Haiti, but there were maroon societies all over the so-called New World, including, um, here in the, in, in the United States. You know, I found out, Professor Clark, that my, when my ancestors from Mar in Jamaica, well, you're from royalty and the, um, fighting nobility, as I often say, about my sharecropper appearance in Alabama, I'm from the peasant nobility. Well, from one noble to another. Good to talk to you. And, um, it is left for us to declare what we are. And we said that these people who, who fought, um, so that other generations can live, is our revolutionary royalty. Let me press you a little bit on the dimensions of our Holocaust. What numerically, what, what numbers are we talking about? We heard Professor Ben talk about 10, 20 million lives, African lives taken in the Holocaust. I would say the figure is rather conservative, um, when, uh, you consider that in the movement from the coast, from, from the hinterland to the coast, every 10 captured, less than three got to that coast. And so we have now figures that's kind of lost forever from the computer. And many times, if you look at the logs of the slave ships, they might load on 300 and not making any stops. And when they finally get to the main port of debarkation, you have less than 200. So that's all that. So many went overboard, so many died of suffocation. But now, what we need to concentrate on is that that fight on the land, the maroon revolts, the different slave revolts in, in Haiti, Jamaica, the B.B.S. revolt in Guiana, and Professor vanera's country, that there was continuous revolts all over the Caribbean area and in South America. And in South America, they not only large numbers of Africans bypassed the slave, bypassed the auction block, went into the hinterlands, found separate nations, us Palmares and, and, and, um, and B. These are separate African nations carved out in Brazil itself. And now these revolts in the Caribbean would stimulate, um, black revolt here in, in the United States. But when we look at the, the 19th century, we have to look at the whole of the African world in revolt. The Africans in Africa, them in Africa, began a series of wars that would last over 100 years. The Ashanti Wars, the Ashanti Wars, and what is now Ghana, started in 1805. The last war was fought in 1901, led by a great African woman warrior, Yanti. The Zulu Wars would last far more than that. The wars against the, um, coming of the Europeans started in 1652 when the Europeans arrived. The last war in Southern Africa was 1906. And between our, our breaks, you were mentioning, um, in the mention of the Holocaust, the experience of a particular group. Oh, I was talking about the Herero War, and what is now Namibia, then formally called Southwest Africa. The Germans tried to create a bastardized population in this area by cohabiting with the Herero women. What they did not understand is that culturally, the Herero woman never cohabits outside of her tribe or her group, not even with another African. And traditionally, she makes every attempt to bring virginity to her wedding bed. And if she is violated before marriage, it's all one can do to keep her from committing suicide because she has lost her womanhood and has nothing to give to a man. The Germans would drive almost 60,000 of these women out into the Kalahari Desert and say, "Cohabit or die." And an old king, Mandume, called the Mbunda, and the Hereros, and all the different groups together, and said that, "In essence, if we let this happen to our women, we are no longer men. We are proud people. We walk the earth carrying the sun on our shoulders. And if this happens to our women without our rescuing them, we are no longer men. We will have to take off the trousers and take care of the children and milk the cows and bring in the bread, and other women will no longer respect us as men." He took about 300,000 people into this war. He lost a third of them, but he rescued those women. It was the honor of that people. And I never forget his beautiful words that, uh, "If we fail in this mission, we will have to put down the sun from our shoulders, and the world will be in darkness because we are men. We light up the world." Does it therefore follow that across the continent of Africa, there were, um, coalitions of African people who organized militantly to resist this encroachment called slavery? Not only that, but came together a little better than they're doing right now. Incidentally, or sadly, um, in the, um, Sudan, there were wars stimulated by Islam, led by a man called Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, the holy man, holy, holy man. These wars were, were, lasted from about 1860 to, um, the death of the Mahdi in 1885. Then another Mahdi took over, Khalifa Abdullah, and he was defeated by Kitchener, um, and, um, when he was defeated after 11 years of independence. This war was reported by a young British reporter named Winston Churchill, and his book on it is called "The River War." And he said that, you know, um, he boasted of killing 50,000 people one evening. See, when we talk about Holocaust, I guess people should talk about Holocaust the way we talk about fish stories. Those who caught the biggest fish do the most talking. And that means we would have to talk forever because our casualties would exceed 100 million people. Far exceed 100 million people. No people in the history of the world ever sustained such a loss and stayed alive. On that note, we'll break and continue with a collective examination in continuance of our history after this.

To go over some of the areas that undoubtedly we weren't able to cover in the individual interviews. Let's start with you, Professor vanera. Yes, there are one or two things that I want to raise. First of all, there's the, there's a different kind of Holocaust, which is even more terrifying than the destruction of people. Death can be merciful. There is a nuclear bombing of the African brain. That kind of Holocaust, the mental Holocaust, that occurred whereby many people who were, many Africans who were colonized were actually had their African character almost zapped away from them, and something else planted upon their brains, which was, uh, which is a kind of duplication of the European. They were turned into European duplicates. I could say that by the time I was 24, with the exception of an interval during our upheaval and the death of my father, I was a European duplicate. I was a British, um, duplicate. Everything that the British wanted me to think, I could enter their brain. Every reflex, every attitude, every prejudice that was native to the British Empire was in my brain, and it occupied at least 95% of my brain. It is only in later years, as one became aware of African civilizations and American civilizations, that this began to fall away.

Did you love England at that time tremendously? I would celebrate. I mean, like now, for example, suppose I was still in the British Empire, which is it no longer exists except in the mind of the British, and the Falkland Islands thing was going on. I would be waiting patiently every moment to see an Argentine ship go down. This is the kind of loyalty, allegiance to the, the, um, the enslaver, that became part of our inheritance. You're saying, "God save the Queen." Not only, "God save the Queen." I felt proud that I was in an empire which was able to put everybody in their right place, including the Americans. I was very upset when I read that Americans had broken away from British rule. This is the kind of training we were given. Not a single book on Africa did I see before I was 20. Not a single book.

So we're talking about the evils of the colonization of the mind as well as of land and body. We're talking about the rise of the evil genius of Europe and Western racism. There wasn't enough soldiers in all of Europe to hold down that vast world. They had to conquer something else other than just the physical body. They had to conquer the mind. And maybe the most tragic and dubious achievement was the convincing of so many people that they were supposed to be ruled over by these Europeans. It was one of the great propaganda miracles. And what was the most effective vehicle for that propaganda? The Bible. And the assumption that the European was a Christian. He never was a Christian. He never will be a Christian. And there are two things the European dares not live by. If he tried to live by them 24 hours, he is finished. And that is Christianity and democracy. Because his civilization, his way of life, his power is based on things diametrically opposed to those two things.

How does the Bible help enslave the mind? By, by saying that this is the will of God. There's an excellent book, good God, I haven't seen it in years though, except the Xerox copy in my library, called "The Role of the Missionary in, um, in Conquest." A lot of the land was taken from the African, um, uh, with the missionary going ahead of the colonizer and telling them, "It is the will of God that we, uh, uh, control this land." A lot of the land, the Kenyan Highlands, the, a lot of land in Uganda was taken over by the church. Uh, in fact, the Catholic Church had title over most of the land surface of, uh, Uganda and hadn't relinquished it completely to this, uh, to this very day. Christianity was an instrument of, um, of colonial handmaiden of colonialism. And I can remember as a little boy, um, wanting to teach the junior class in Sunday school, and I, I began to look into the Great Book trying to find my own people, and I didn't see their image nowhere. I tried to find the word "negro," and it wasn't in the Bible. I didn't know there was no such thing as a negro, you know. And, and I looked at the Sunday school lesson, looked at all these images, and all these images told me that I was nothing. I was outside of everything in the world. That all the achievements in the world were done by, um, by white people. I go to the basic history books, and I see nothing but white images. I see nothing that endears me to myself or to my own people.

Professor Ben, what do you have to say about the missionary position? I should say the practice of missionaries. Well, uh, I don't have anything good to say. So I could make it by that one statement. And I don't think, I think anyone who knows their African history could, uh, uh, complement the missionaries. First thing is that the, the assumption is made by Europeans, Billy Graham and others, and I noticed that he's getting his lumps now, for having the courage to say that somebody has, uh, practiced Christianity. But I don't know what he meant by that either. But number one, Christianity started in Africa at a place called Alexandria with two people, Panterus and Clemens. It spread across the North African continent. There were seven patriarchs, equivalent to world popes, 27 bishops before it arrived in Europe. An African by the name of Augustine, who made modern Christianity, the basis for his, his writing. Europeans copied Augustine's books. Are called some of them of the 40 had books, "The Confessions," that tells you who he was, on Christian doctrines. They lay down the fundamentals of modern Christianity. And the other one called, "The, um, the, um, The Holy City of God." It is not only the Bible, Christian Bible. However, the Old Testament, or the Torah as it is called, speaks of chosen people. A God made a world full of people and selected a handful to be the special ones. The Quran and Islam, equally, the jihads were brought, although Ben and had Kuran, Rab, taught Muhammad ibn Abdullah, who was illiterate in his own language, the fundamentals of, uh, the, the religions that upon the, the fundamental upon which both all three got their beginning. We were told and still being told that there's a holy land for us in Palestine or Jerusalem. There's a holy land for us in Bethlehem. There's a holy land for us in Mecca. But not a single piece of holy land in the 13.8 million square miles of African territory. Yet all three of those religions that have spoken about got their fundamental principles. The concept of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph, this whole concept came from "The Book of the Dead" with Horus and so forth. The concept of a one true God before all other gods was taught by the Africans of the Nile, Akhenaten specifically, the god Aten, long before the birth of Moses.

Let me ask you this, Professor Ben. Will you like, uh, Professor vanera, raised with another awareness and another religious loyalty and national loyalty? Yes. Where are you raised? I was raised in the Hebrew religion. What, what nation? I grew up in Port, um, and the Virgin Islands. Uh-huh. And, uh, uh, I was raised in, therefore, in American territory. But the same colonialism. I remember myself as a youngster and the Fourth of July, walking with a red, white, blue flag with the, what it was then, 40-something stars, and running down there when Eleanor Roosevelt came and all these different things. And, you know, I volunteered in World War II. You know, nobody called me, I volunteered. I was so stupid. I went volunteer, went to Panama to a segregated army where I couldn't go on the bus with the American people. And in Panama, I went, the Panamanians, I could go. Am I came to Newport News, Virginia, in the service, and could go, they had a line called, um, [ __ ] [ __ ] officers and the white officers. That happened to me. And do you know it was a German soldier that I was guarding, officer, that asked me, "Nigger," he says, exact word, he said to me, "Nigger officer, do you know that when this is over, I'm coming to America and be your boss?" And then I started for the first time to get some sense. Although I had been segregated in Panama and so forth, and in, I didn't even recognize I was being segregated in Port, and the Virgin Islands, I didn't even realize it. I thought that everything was like they say, honky-dory down there. But, you know, because of what he said, "honky-dory," that was the expression that means real good. And I was a perfect fool and didn't know it. You know, I use the term negro then. Color was a big thing, you know. And Africa was not on your lips. What you talking about Africa? Africa where Timbuktu and Jane was. And, you know, the H.B.I. I used to go to see John Wayne and Tom Mix and Ronald Reagan and all of them shooting up the indigenous people. And I used to say, "Hey, there's a savage coming, shoot them." And then with the African, I'd say, "Oh, look at them savage tribes, and he's coming." And I'm hoping for, and T.H. holl and one thing. I didn't know that "eng" meant "do." Because I, every time said, and when I found out that meant, I said, "I used to have fun that." But you wouldn't believe that this person, because what I know wasn't taught to me in school. I look back and sometimes and say, "How in the world did I come this far from where I was?" It's a job of miracles. That's a miracle.

Tell me about your upbringing, John. No, I had suspicion from the beginning when I couldn't find, when I couldn't find my people in the good book. And my great-grandmother had told me that this was the book of God, this was the word of God. But where were you raised? I was raised in, born in Union Springs, Alabama, raised in Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning. You know, and I made my living part as a, uh, I used to caddy for a major who later became a general and later became president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was a lost cause man. To, uh, be that as it may, be that as it may. But growing up in a predominantly Baptist environment and, um, becoming very curious about the Bible, I began to suspect very early, how early, that of 10 and 12, that I did not belong to any people who were inferior to anybody. Mhm. So then around 1930. But in your schooling up to then, though, wasn't the reverse implied? The reverse was implied. But I can say with great conviction, I never completely accepted it. Or were you going to a black school? And were you getting, I was going to a black school where the teachers would sneak in black history. They could sneak it into mathematics, they could sneak it into anything. But it was in the fifth grade that, um, I ran into a great teacher, Evina Taylor, who was a deity to me to this day. When she saw me cutting the fool and trying to get accepted by playing the fool, and she called me aside and closed the door and read the riot act and told me that, "I will never let you be less than your best self. You are going to get it."

Gentlemen, it's obvious that we can't, um, unveil the whole story of our history and, um, experience in these two hours or three. But maybe you can just sort of say some things to our viewers, especially young people who are in need of some academic shaping and direction. I suspect you would all agree. What would your prescriptions to them be? Gil, let me say it this way. And I don't, I don't support the system, but I think that one of the things we have to learn, in order for me, or I hope I'm speaking for two gentlemen, and this is for parents. Our parents, you can't, can't fight the teacher and learn. There's a discipline in study. And we have to learn the damage that has been done to us and still being done. But we ourselves got to take this with all the bad things that are going in the classroom. And I went through it. You got to be able to count. You got to be able to write. You know what I mean? You got to know science. You got to be able to equate and evaluate. And you can't fight the teacher doing it. Parents can't come down to fight the teacher. Bad teachers, get them out of the neighborhood. We have to go through the principle of educating ourselves. And our parents got to do it. I'm sure your parents did it. And now the parents did it. There is a discipline we got to go back to. And I said that the basic thing we have to do is to stop letting the damage, what he's talking about, about to continue by saying, "I'm not going to the classroom because they're going to say this." You don't have, when you, you go to the classroom, you're going to have racism. Don't care where you go, you're going to find racism in the system. The system is racist. But you got to get in there to count, you know what I mean? To learn, to read, and so forth. So that you got to get that bad with the good. And lastly, don't care what degree you get in or no degree. Most of us think that degrees make you something. A degree hasn't made me anything. I was a proud man before any degree and continue to be. A degree only gives you some ways to get in and get a better bread. But if you depend and and think that that is it. And we've got to last. I figure what has happened is if you, Gil, had taken the attitude, "I made it, to hell with everybody else in Harlem or wherever," then we would not be able to express the things that we are expressing to the whole larger community. We, some, a lot of us got to stop moving away far from the other. When we move, remember that the other one is still there. Because I must say something, and then here, and for others, is that if men like Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, and, and others had moved away from us, and you notice I use Malcolm X and, and, um, and King, I said Garvey and the Bo. I said, or Rob. You, you, what I'm doing, I'm matching people in the same society that may have differed. Mhm. I see this myth about celebrating King's birthday but not Malcolm, by asking for a holiday for King but not Malcolm, but ask him for one for Du Bois but not, not Garvey. Keep us separate. We have to know that we decide who fought for us and who are our heroes. The largest society can't tell us who they are. Let me say one thing in conclusion. I feel that we have to realize that when we relate, when we speak of Blackness, Blackness must stand for excellence, as it did in early Africa. We are black, for example, among the Egyptians, with the color of divinity. We must not assume, however, that merely because someone is white or European that they are monstrous, because the Western European exploitation. We must not use this simply as a crutch. We have to see it in a certain perspective. It must not be considered as innate to the European, because if it is innate, there can be no change. We have to believe in the capacity for change in the world. The black man is in a terrifying situation, largely due to the European exploitation, to those centuries of history. But if we are to come out of that, we have to change our consciousness, as well as the consciousness of those who have enchained us. So we have to change our evaluation of our own Blackness, as well as our evaluation of whiteness. Yes. What I say to my students is that we have to find that compass that we can use to locate ourselves on the map of human geography. And we must find that clock that tells us our special time of day. We must know what history is supposed to do for you. History has the function of your watch. It divides up time and tells you where you are, and gives you a general idea how much time you have to get where you still have to go. History is a, a kind of a guide and a stimulant. And no matter what you're going to study, even engineering, you need a sense of definition of yourself and relationship to history, and how your people related to the history of the world. So history is the bottom line. Yes. And we need to stop thinking by ourselves as a minority, because between the Caribbean islands and Brazil and the United States, in Africa itself, we are the third, if not the second largest ethnic group on the face of the Earth. And we got a piece of geography over there, maybe 13 million square miles, that's ours. And when I say ours, I don't mean north, south, I mean all of it, every blade of grass, every grain of sand. And that's the inheritance of our children and their children still to come. And we don't have to go to any Bible to make any claim, because our claim is all-prevailing. And the map of that continent is stamped on most of our faces.

Let's go to our bibliography. List full screen. And for our viewers at Kelty, and in the matter of color, "Matter of Color" by A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. Professor Clark recommends you read "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" by Walter Rodney, "Stolen Legacy" by George G.M. James. And Professor vanera recommends you read his Journal of African Civilizations, volumes 1, 2, and 3, and "African Counts" by Claudia Zaslavsky. So, what I seem to be getting from all of you is that, um, you have found a particular, your particular steel, all of you, has been derived from that which you have learned. And that perhaps before that infusion of the historical, um, metallurgy, shall we say, into your systems, you were sort of lost and unclear about who you were and what you had to do and what your role was on this planet. Yes. I, I would say definitely that my readings and most of my travel, particularly when I went to Egypt, it changed my world.

Thank you all. So ends, for a while, our exploration into our history, a history that has shaped AP the world and supplied the very foundation of civilization and culture. If what you have heard is revelatory, would you call it a, um, archaeological and anthropological period? The pre-dynastic period, the dynastic period, because unfortunately, people forget that many African civilizations had dynastic periods besides Egypt, or other nations along the Nile. I would also, uh, break that up to Africa before the coming of alien peoples, and then I will go on to that Africa up to the beginning of the encroachment, as to the colonial period, and then I will go on to AR in the current period. Now, you could break up African history into various forms depending on what you plan to do. All right. Well, let's.

Move swiftly in the limited time that we have. Uh, let's start with the archaeological period. The archaeological period will be that period in which you're talking about the artifacts and fossils. The artifacts, the like the, um, the stone equipment, stone implements, and so forth, and the fossil period being the human finds. And that will bring us back to the Zantus period, uh, all the way up to what we would today call man, man, man as we know him, using agriculture and so forth. Mhm.

And how far back in time are we talking about now? Based upon the latest findings, we're talking about, uh, at least 3 million and a fraction into 4 million with, uh, a fossil called Lucy. And then we're talking to a much later fossil by the name of Zenopus Boise, and that will bring us down to about 1.7 million to 2 million years ago.

Is there any, any question about the fact that, uh, the first human life occurred in Africa? Is that incontestable? To date, the oldest human find has been in Africa. To date. Now, what will happen tomorrow may be something else. Mhm.

All right. Uh, let's move forward now with man coming out of this period. We have, we see him going down the Nile. And the reason we're using the Nile as the example in that the oldest records of human behavior where man left his record has been found in that specific area. Why is that? Well, for many reasons, but the most specific: man along the Nile built in stone. He built in masonry material, and therefore that material outlasts men who were building in wood or other such, uh, perishable material. And, and that's primarily, uh, the basic reason. So it's not that in that part of the world, um, of Africa, that there was a greater expertise or technology or anything like that. It's based upon anthropological and archaeological findings. They have been, uh, very old period. For example, in South, uh, Southern Africa, in Swaziland, there is a 43,000-year-old iron mine found there. So that would indicate we're talking about 43,000 years, meaning that since we are dealing with historical records, it, it, it matches most of the things that we find along the Nile. And most specifically in Egypt, where we go back to the civilian period. The civilian, the, the first and second period in Egypt will be about 125,000 BC, uh, back to 300,000 BC. The second period would be 125,000 to 25,000. So in between here, that mine was being, uh, used. Meaning then that the Africans in the southernmost tip of Africa, otherwise then called Monomotapa, the earliest name when the Europeans came, it was called that, were involved and engaged in iron mining at a time when it wasn't so done in Egypt. Because the civilization or high cultures traveled down to Egypt from the central part of Africa. And every archaeological evidence shows that it equally traveled down from the central part of Africa to the other tip, the southern tip. So the civilization seems to have, uh, uh, started around the, uh, major lakes.

Why do the features of the Egyptian, as we see on the, the stones and whatnot, seem to differ so much from our classic impression of African features? Well, because what has happened is that most of the Egyptians you, you see in textbooks are the Egyptian pharaohs at the time when Asians or Africans had invaded Egypt, and their pharaohs, their people stood on the throne. So that when we say the word pharaoh, a pharaoh could have been one who had come from, uh, Asia, like the case of the Hyksos, or from, uh, Persia, or something like that in the case of the Persians. Or later, it could have been a person, one of the conquerors who had come from Greece or from, uh, Rome. Now, the ancient African pharaohs, they seldom show you, if ever. And more so, there is a myth that all Africans have thick lips like myself or heavy noses. There are tremendous, millions upon millions of Africans who have pointed features. So that, uh, the, the image of a pharaoh with a, with a what is called a Western type or pointed or aquiline nose doesn't mean that that person wasn't an African. Equally so, and many of the likenesses of those with African features were destroyed by, uh, European invaders, European and Asian invaders, but more specifically European invaders. Or when the nose didn't look the way that they thought it should look, the nose suddenly got broken. It's strange that the Romans and the Greeks who had more pointed noses, when you go to Alexandria and that part of the museum, not a single nose is broken. But when you get to the indigenous African, almost to the last one, the nose got damaged when that nose should not have got damaged on the basis of the length of the nose.

Uh, what about the structure in the early formings of civilization in Africa? What was family structure like? Well, in African families, you could say this would be typical. There are some things about the continent of Africa you can't say it's typical by virtue of the size and the variations of cultures and so forth. But there are other things you could say with typical. One of the typical things with Africa was the predominance of family value. And you would say that the matriarchal society, the society in which one inherits from one's mother, was more dominant than the patriarchal society. That doesn't mean, however, that the women ran the society, but that the source of the society, the source of the family, was of the woman. That, for example, the ancient Egyptians made it very clear that for the pharaoh to inherit legally the throne, he had to get it through a woman. Many of times pharaohs would then marry their daughter. Doesn't mean that they had sexual relations with their daughter, but they had that legal entanglement which was necessary. In West Africa, we saw the same thing. Was the woman's name passed on in marriage, or unlike what we know, the man's name has to predominate? Well, you didn't, because then since you didn't have time, family names, you know, this thing about it started in Germany with, uh, most of the early cultures didn't have family names. The Germans are one of the first to invent this family name business. Uh, uh, the, the, in West Africa, you see the same thing. The Ashantis, the king inherited his title from the Queen Mother. I see. You see here, you got it from one end of the continent to the other end of the continent, showing the commonality of culture. They found then there was a second thing that involved is the interrelationship of family, clan, and village. That the, the individual, there was no African individual as such, like we would say in the States, "I'm an individual, I'm doing my thing." You couldn't be that type of individual. And that put me to the mind of saying something classical here is that the myth that, uh, prostitution started from the first man and the first woman. I don't know which first man and first woman they're talking about. It's obviously not, not Africans, because the African society made it so that there couldn't even be a single woman. You couldn't have a single woman living by herself. All people were attached to family. Uh, if a woman became widowed, she either go, went back to her own family or to her husband's family. They were, you were always attached to someone. Uh, therefore, most of African society started on a communal basis. One was related to one's family, immediate family, then to the clan, then to the village, then to the state. So that each individual had a combination of families one was attached to.

Is that why there's not much in recorded history about, um, disciplinary problems with the children? Sure, you can't have a dis, when all adults is over the, the juvenile. An adult doesn't necessarily mean 21 as against two or three. Adult could be three as against five. Three-year-old has against five. It means that you're bound to respect the older person than yourself. So that if a family had 10 children, the first child would be the one relating directly to the family. From that first child on, that child would be then carrying down the order. And very rarely the mother or father has to do any other disciplining. The first child becomes the senior child, right? And therefore, the law goes down. Now, from that child, let's say that you, the first child, now become 40, and and the parents are in their late 50s, early 60s, and that first child gets married. The authority of these parents still goes down to that child and to the husband on both sides. And it was this kind of continuity that was the basis of the, um, the great civilization that came out of our, our experience in Africa. Yes, that is what was destroyed with the coming of the European and the Asian. That they destroyed so that the, the decentralization of, of the African, uh, family and the strength of the African culture, uh, that, that we see now destroyed so much that in Africa, we see them imitating everything. And here, and the Caribbeans, and elsewhere, started to be destroyed at that point. And it is at that point that we ought to stop. And when we come back after this break, uh, Professor John Henry Clark will pick up about that destruction process. Stay with us.

Invaders, uh, or outsiders who came into, uh, Africa, were they slavers? No, we're talking about Europe specifically right now. Um, what we have to deal with is a little-known invasion of Africa by the Greeks. And that is the intellectual invasion by, uh, Greek scholars, 450 BC, by Herodotus. And, um, this invasion was a compliment because Herodotus was a great reporter, and he traveled extensively within Egypt, down to what is now Ethiopia, and along the coast of what is now East Africa. Egypt, Kush, these nations had been invaded by one Asian after another for state. He described the colors of the people, the customs of the people, and he was such a good reporter. When the Africans told him something, he didn't believe. He said so. Is it fair to call them invaders then? It seems like they were nonviolent. No, these, this was Greek curiosity. That would be the preface to the invaders later on. Now, my point that I'm getting to is that the information that Herodotus brought back to Greece, where did the curiosity of other Greeks, and Alexander's teacher, Aristotle, introduced him to the works of Herodotus? And Alexander, um, when he invaded Africa, 332 BC, had a kind of respect for Africa that no invader has had before our s. You mean Aristotle's writings and thoughts were based on an African route? Yes. And a lot of his so-called philosophy, which was more African. But we won't get into Aristotle as probably the world's first plagiarist, almost mass plagiarist. Now, Alexander came into Africa with great respect. He wrote his mother and he said that he had come to the, literally, the home of Greek culture, especially our Greek religion. He tried to affect a wedding between young Greece and old Africa in decline. Now, Africans were seeing Europeans as invaders for the first time. This is 332 BC, and seeing them physically for the first time. There is nothing that happened in Africa before that that the European had anything to do with at all. And remember, when they came for the first time, they came as invaders. And except for the Alexandrian period, that is more or less positive. All relationships between Africans and Europeans from that day to this day has been negative.

All right, let's talk about that second intrusion or invasion. No, the, the intrusion that would be aggressive would be the Punic Wars. Hannibal's father warned him of those people across that water and told him, in essence, you got to take the battle to them before they bring it to you. Now, Hannibal was cautiously trying to guard that front door of Africa from a rising, a hungry Roman people. Now, the Carthaginians had had good relationship with the people of Sicily. And, um, the people of Sicily did not want to join the other Romans in a fight against Carthage. But Rome wanted the trade in the Mediterranean. They didn't want to share it. They wanted all of it. And a jealousy grew among them about the city of Carthage to the point that they greeted each other in the morning and added, "Carthage must be destroyed." They opened the Senate and added, "Carthage must be destroyed." They said goodnight to each other, said, "Carthage must be destroyed." Yes, Roman citizen, Carthage must be destroyed. And so when Hannibal got a wind of that kind of a thought process, he said he took the battle to them before they could bring it to him. And for a generation, that old lion held Europe at bay and saved Africa from European aggression. Finally betrayed by two Africans, Scipio Africanus and Masus. He knew that they had not protected his right flank or his left flank, and that Roman army was coming down on him. Then he told his steward, "Send me the wine," and he took some dependable African poison. But, uh, there's much more to this life than that. This was probably the finest physical soldier the world has yet to know. He never asked his men to do anything that he wouldn't do. With the demise of Hannibal, what happened? That's when the demise of Hannibal, the Romans came aggressively, destroyed the city of Carthage, brick by brick. And this was the beginning of European aggression in Africa, and European aggression in the rest of the world. And I maintain that the total relationship of Europe to non-European people from that day to the present day has been negative, and that they have done the world, through their invasions, more harm than good.

Give me a date when that onslaught began. The onslaught began with, uh, the defeat of Hannibal, and we're dealing around 200 BC or thereabout. All right. Now, and, um, with the defeat of Hannibal and the establishment of the Romans in North Africa, Rome now had a breadbasket for its future empire. If it wasn't for the agriculture of North Africa, there would have been no Roman Empire, because they would have had no means of feeding that vast army and their own population.

Let's talk about the rationale, the mental process that went into the whole rationale for enslaving a people. Where did the Europeans come up with that concept, or was that an original idea? No, it wasn't an original idea, but the European introduced a kind of slavery that had never existed in the world before, including the Arabs. Yeah. Well, the Arabs, that's a later day, uh, introduction of slavery, and they're not to be gotten off of the hook, but it, it has no direct relationship to the period that we're dealing with right now. All right. Where did that rationale come from? It came from the mind of the, the European. And if you read some of the early writings of, uh, Aristotle, Aristotle was really the first person to do a philosophical essay on, on, on race and a kind of a justification for the aggression of Europe still to come, to say that we, there are certain people endowed by certain traits, you know, to rule over, over other people. Most of the so-called Greek philosophers believed in, uh, in slavery and, and had slave slaves. But when they came under the influence of the, uh, teachings in Africa, they were in serious trouble. This is why Socrates, uh, had to be put to death, and why he wouldn't even, uh, recant. Now, what we have to hurry and do is to establish the fact that this first European aggression, and mind you, I'm letting Alexander off the hook for my own reasons, and I'm putting the aggression solidly on the heads and hands of the Romans. That this first aggression gave Europe the means of feeding itself and to expand for the first time beyond its shores and sustain itself with profit. The motive for slavery? Profit was the motive for slavery. And, and, and a form of colonialism. Now, profit and bread, see, capitalism in the present sense didn't exist then, although the profit motive was a part of man's psychological, uh, makeup. But the justification for the Romans being was that they were endowed by certain traits, in spite of the fact that once they destroyed Carthage, they could not even build it back the same way because they didn't have those master architects that the Carthaginians, or that the Carthaginians had. Now, Rome would sustain itself in this part of the world, and Roman taxation ultimately would force the Africans and the Asians to question old gods and look for new gods. This questioning, this wondering whether that gods had deserted them, would make them look into their folklore, their literature, and bring forth the beginnings, the formal beginnings of a religion that we might later know as, as Christianity. Not that the religion was new, but that particular formation of the ideas of the religion was new.

All right, let's pause here, Professor Clark, and we'll continue with the African presence in the so-called New World right after this.

As far as the African presence in this hemisphere, was that premise for coming here, uh, economic, or what? Curiosity, or what? The initial, um, movement here was an accident. How did that happen? This happened, uh, first of all, I must give a dating, um, schema, because there was not just a single visit. There were several, at least half a dozen visits of which we have, for which we have evidence. The very earliest is one, um, that involves a people known as the Olmec in America, um, between 948 and 680 BC. We do know a date because we found, they found a ceremonial platform, a wooden platform in the Gulf of Mexico where the Americans worshiped. They were able to carbon-date it. They found, um, four of a dozen stone heads with African features rooted in the wood of this carbon-dated platform, and they were able to give it a dating of 814 plus or minus 134 BC. Now, that is a very interesting date indeed, because that is a time when something very unusual was happening in the Old World in Africa. A war was going on, both a hot and cold war, which lasted a very long time between the powers of Asia under the Assyrians and the Egypto-Nubians. I say Egypto-Nubian because Nubian and Egypt were, were linked in that period, very strongly linked. In fact, because the Nubians had, um, from about the 22nd Dynasty, they were involved with Libyan powers in, um, Middle Egypt, and then they moved up and took control of Egypt from the Mediterranean right down to Khartoum and beyond. And in this period, the military and commercial navies were moving west of the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic. They normally were not involved in the Atlantic. The Egyptian navies and the Phoenicians, who were very much involved with Egyptians, um, carried a lot of trade into the Pacific. We even have Egyptian hog-flots in early Hawaii. But in this period, the Asiatic routes, sea routes, were blocked by the Assyrians. They blocked off the Egyptian sea routes as a consequence of a great deal of the metal trade, the search for. But how would you get from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, though? Um, no, no, they had, um, the Red Sea and other routes, and they had, they went into the Indian Ocean and various things. Oh, I see. Okay. So they had trading, Egypt had trading in other parts of the world. But in this particular period, while they had trade in the Western Mediterranean, this particular period became tremendously intensified. We even have evidence around 800 BC of Phoenician ships up in the near the British Isles, they're trading in tin. Tin was critical to Egypt because that was the Bronze Age, and tin and copper were critical to, to the making of bronze. And you have a lot of movement in that area west of the Mediterranean. Now, there seems to have been an accident involving at least seven ships. The American, the Native Americans record black-skinned people coming in seven wooden caves under water from the East, and they do record this. And lots of people are not aware. They got lost at sea, or they got lost at sea. All so-called discoveries of America were initially accidents. Columbus had no intention of coming here. He got lost at sea. He was going, um, towards India, as he thought. He struck out for the latitude of Japan, hoping to land in India. Even in the case of 1500, where Alvarez Cabal came to South America, he had no intention of coming here. He was lost at sea.

Is it not true, though, that Africans, in their mathematics, endeavors, concluded that the world was round, and that there was land beyond the horizon? Was not an accident that they came to the? They concluded that the world was round, just as much, much later, Columbus concluded that the world was round. But knowing that does imply then that, no, it does not. It does not. Knowing that the world is round does not imply a landmass here. That is the reason why Columbus, when he landed here, thought he was in Asia, because you would not know where the landmass is. This could have been Asia. That's why, in fact, it was called India, it wasn't called America. But just to pin you a little bit, uh, down to this, was the African lost at sea? The African mariner lost at sea and was blown across the Atlantic, or did he, or she set out deliberately? No, he did not set out deliberately in this voyage. There are voyages in which the Africans set out deliberately to come to America. We know of two such voyages. We know, for example, in the case of the Mandingo in 1310 and 1311, where the Africans were convinced there was a landmass in the South and set out deliberately. A whole fleet was fitted out for that. And when that fleet did not return, one of their kings, Abu Bakr II, actually set out as a commander of the fleet and, and moved into this area. You also have evidence in the late pre-Columbian, that is around 1450 AD, we have evidence where Africans not only deliberately came, but came back, and we have African things found in America, as well as American things found in Africa, as evidence of a trading going on in that time.

What was the nature of the African, um, um, contact with the people who are indigenous to the land here? Who? It depends on the period. In the, in the case of the Olmec period, which is the pre-Christian period, which is the, the 948 to 680 BC, we have evidence that some very extraordinary things begin to happen that coincide with the, the stone heads with African features, which are found in the Gulf of Mexico at the, the terminus of currents coming from Africa. Now, one very important thing to understand is that there are three major currents that take things from Africa. They are so powerful, these currents, that it's like a gravitational field. You cannot, yes, you cannot escape coming to America once you are caught 100 miles off the African coast and enter either the, the current off the Cape Verde, off the Senegal coast, or off the southern coast of Africa, you have to come here unless you're caught by the fish. It's, it's inevitable. And in fact, I do remember, uh, when I was a boy, when I was about 11 years old, I lived, uh, most of my early boyhood was spent on a river, the Essequibo River, which opens out onto the Atlantic. And I, this is in South America, Guyana. I was caught in one of the currents that Africans call the river in the middle of the sea. It's quite different from normal currents. You, if you're caught in a normal current, you could dive beneath the current. But in this current, it is like a whole new river pulling you out of the river. And I screamed my head off because I was 7 miles from coast. I had fallen asleep on a raft. I spent lots of times in the rivers, and nobody could hear me because I was too far until the current, which was going, taking me into the Atlantic, came across a place called Kai Island, and that was close to shore. As the current moved off, you were on your way home. Yes, or back home. Well, the fish would have got me in this particular case, knows. But I was picked up by a speedboat. But this has happened several times. From Africa, we found several things in the American world that are African. I want specifically to touch on the Olmec, because there, they, they present peaceful here in this hemisphere. Yes, with the exception, we have one instance where we have battles between the Africans and Americans off Quara, where they found that the Africans were fighting, they had a settlement, and they were fighting with Native Americans. But in the case of the Olmec, where they made their most tremendous impact, the, the evidence is that it was a peaceful affair. The Olmec incorporated them into their priest caste. They found the skeletons of Africans, 13.5% among the ruling class in America in that period, that pre-Christian period, where Zinszky, the Polish skull expert, showed that it was a high percentage. And even 200 years later, it was only low, like 4.5%, but not among the common people, among the ruling class. They were incorporated.

In this return voyage process that you described, using these currents, were any Native Americans brought back to the African continent? Yes, yes. We have evidence of a Native American village in North Africa. We have evidence of an accident occurring the other way in the circular current. This is, of course, late pre-Columbian, before Columbus. But just about, about 50 years before Columbus, we also have something which has been checked out of something around, uh, 62 BC, where seven American Indians seem to have been shipwrecked off the coast of Europe, and they were picked up by the Germans or Suevians, and they were taken to the Romans and given them as a gift to Quintus Metellus Celer. And we have, they came in an oar boat. Boat, M, oar. But they also found the American pineapple in the ruins of Pompeii, which could have been brought in by those shipwrecks.

Okay, let's stop here, Professor Van Cera. Let's take another break, and then we'll continue with a collective look at African history right after this.

Frustrated because I thought we were going to be giving ourselves a lot of time, but two hours is nothing. We haven't covered a lot of ground. Let's go one by one to some areas that you still feel are hanging by the individual segments that we've covered. Professor Clark, I'd like to go back to that first European presence in Africa and what happened to it. Um, the European, especially the Roman, uh, tax collection and exploitation, uh, forced the Africans, uh, uh, part of the Asians too, to, um, pull from their history and their folklore and their, um, a new religion. This was, was the former religion that the Europeans would distort later on and call, uh, Christianity. And as this religion, uh, got underway, the Romans did not take it too seriously. They didn't expect much to come out of it. And after a while, they began to entertain themselves on Saturday evenings by killing, uh, uh, Christians. And that the Romans, uh, literally killed Christians for almost, um, 150 years before strategically and for political reasons, they adapted this, um, this religion. And because it had became very popular among the, uh, Europeans of that day. But something else, uh, had happened because the European has a paranoia about being ruled by other people. When he adopted the religion, then the European declared war on the African Christians for control of, of the church. Now, the fight was for control. And when they formalized it at the treaty, at the conference at Nicaea, about, uh, three, um, 325 AD, when they formalized the religion, when that, uh, degenerate Constantine adopted the religion and made it the official religion of the, um, Roman Empire, he did this for political reasons, and it has been for political reasons ever since then. Why you call him a degenerate? Because, because he was a degenerate, really, really. The man was an unspeakable, you know, uh, degenerate with naked women hanging around the court and, you know, fornicating all over the place, you know, and then, then he, uh, switching from one to the other until these people called the Essenes sold him on this, uh, religion. In fact, Catholicism was set in motion by Constantine, that degenerate. And Protestantism was set in motion by Henry VIII, another degenerate. That's hard, but I stand by it. As a teacher of history, I stand by the word, uh, degenerate, as as applied to those two men in relationship to, to the religion. But that's not the point I'm getting. No, I was just, the main point that I'm getting to is that the assumption was that Christianity would hasten the decline, what, of the Roman Empire? Would, no, would halt the decline of the Roman Empire. But it, it hurried the decline of the Roman Empire because this religion did not fit the, the temperament of the Europeans then. Does not fit that temperament now. They simply could not live by a religion as placant, as kind, as, as humane as, uh, as this, and they had to establish power by violating it. But about 600, um, or thereabouts, the management of the church had so disgraced the religion until the people in this area began to ask some serious questions again. And a camel driver, uh, who later emerges the Prophet Muhammad, first asked for reform. Failing to get reform, he asked for the making of a new religion. And with the help of, uh, Zaid ibn Harith and Bilal, two Ethiopians, he brought Islam into being. And Islam, as a military force, pushed the Europeans back into Europe, and, uh, they would not emerge until the 15th and the 16th century as a power threat to the rest of the world again.

Professor Ben, what was there in the African character that allowed this invasion process to take place? I don't think we could say it's allowed, because the, the point is this, that what had happened, the, the Greeks coming and the Romans coming into, uh, ancient Africa, was the last phase of ancient Africa. We have to look at the fact that as early as 1675 BC, which would put the Africans in the 13th dynastic period. May I state that the period of time I'm speaking about now, there is no Adam and Eve. Mhm. The Adam and Eve theory is introduced into the world by the Hebrews or Haribu. The first of the Haribu or Hebrews is Abraham. He isn't born until that same 13th Dynasty. Meaning then there is no Judaism, thus there's no Christianity, thus there's no Islam. Yet the Africans along the Nile had already religion, the worship of the god Ptah, subsequent to that, the worship of the god Amun-Ra, the worship of Amun-Ra's son, Osiris, and so forth, and Osiris's son, Horus. The, the fundamental laws of behavior, of morality, of ethics, long before the Ten Commandments. These Ten Commandments coming from these laws called the Negative Confessions. And they, now, in that 13th Dynasty, for the first time, a non-African people would come in there. Most of the major things that you have in Africa are already constructed. M. The major pyramids. What I am saying, before there was an Aryan mention anyway, the pyramids that you see at Giza were already constructed. That's in the Fourth Dynasty. The Pyramid of Saqqara, the Step Pyramid, was already constructed in the Third Dynasty. Now, those people who were the first to come in as conquerors were Asians, not, not Europeans. They came in in 1675, calling themselves Hyksos, under the leadership of a man called Salitis. They were eventually forced out by the Thutmose and others. Had Moses's daughter? The next thrust of Asian invaders, invaders, not people that was asked to come in, with weaponry, they came in and, under the, the Ians, when that would be in 714, at the time when they came in, the Africans from Ethiopia was ruling Egypt, called the Ethiopians were ruling. Now, they came in as a result of, under the leadership of a man called Ashurbanipal. They were repulsed. These Asians from Assyria, repulsed. And then came another group of Asians, the Persians. Now call Ians, the Persians came in under the Cambyses, who was replaced by Darius in 525. But the Persians were so bad in terms of their behavior to the Africans there in the Delta, all of this has happened in the Delta. They're not penetrated upwards in the southern part of Egypt, with is up, see, down is north, and up is south, because of the terrain. Now, they were so willful, destroying everything they could find, because they didn't know what to do with what they built. It wasn't their culture. The Africans then, for the first time, going to get in trouble with, with, uh, cleavage. They negotiated with the Greeks because the color question isn't here yet. M. The, because the Persians were giving help to the Greeks also, so the Greeks were allowed to come in in groups. Now, we're talking about 525, to help with the Africans against the Persians. When the Persians were defeated, the Greeks decided not to go, because where they going back to? They're now in the land of honey, so they're not going to leave honey to go back. They said to the, well, look now, you're weak because you've been fighting the Persians so long. We're stronger. You, we're not going. And so the, the Greeks remained there. This is how they get to stay. But the subsequently, from that time, by the way, to now, to this very day, only one African has ruled over Egypt, a man by the name of Najib Muhammad Najib, born in Egypt of Sudanese parents, both mother and father. The one that Sadat withdrew after he defeated Farouk. So, but it was after the Greeks were defeated by the Romans, then the Romans came in because, and then caused the Byzantium period. And you're saying at that time, Africa was in decline? Oh, it's, it's been in decline from the time the Persians came. But that's my point. What was causing this decline? It's like anything else. You start to, you get to a point where there's nothing, nothing else you feel that anyone else could offer. You got careless, and then people come in and take you. You let people in, you train them about what you're doing. Most of what you're doing, they become a fifth column within the system, and they undermine, and they undermine. Where about the only people who come, 40 million or so in a nation within a nation, it doesn't undermine because we have been co-opted so well. See, if the ancient Africans should have taken their books, their religious books, and brainwashed everybody in there, like the Africans are now brainwashed everywhere else, and then we would have supported the system against our interest. But they didn't do that. They, they could not, because at the time, they even called these people ignorable people, people are uncivilized. And they went about to, I say, civilize them. But the same people that civilized, Professor Clark used a term, the, um, the guests that invited the guests, and they became the dinner for the guests. So, but this is the whole thing. We, we must understand, I think, too, the culture of the African. You know, Gil, if you got a home, you got your wife, your family, and you have a certain behavior pattern that you, you don't mistreat little children, you don't do this and that. And someone comes in, knocks down your wife, takes over your house, he's a dead man. He's a dead man today. But in those days, you didn't know. You believed that when you saw that man, you saw a man who came in with the same moral values that you have. You have no other, the point of reference that this comes. You don't know that this man is going to rape your wife, because nobody rapes people in your place. You don't have a word for rape. So when the man comes in and rapes your wife, you're stunned. You say, "What kind of behavior is this?" Do you see what I'm saying? So when the Africans saw the Asians and Europeans coming at that particular time, he knew that they had enough land. Even in the Jewish Bible, it says the Torah, in the book of, uh, Genesis, the Jewish first book, that when the Hebrews came in, when Abraham and his family came in, they gave him some of the best land. It was a, a cultural thing. The same thing happened when Henry the, so-called Navigator from Spain, from Portugal, came in West Africa. They gave him land. When the, when the, the Dutch and the Huguenots from, from, uh, from France and so forth came down, they were given land in Mona, now called South Africa. Given land. They were given even women. They were shared because they needed women. These men.

Is there any record, uh, outside of Hannibal, of Africans being aggressive on other soil to colonize? Or unfortunately, yes. Africans went all the way to the banks of the Ganas as fighters and carried into there, India, into India. And that is where you get your Dravidians from, a group of people in India still called Dravidians, some of them in now Malay and so forth, which Africans were those? They a combination of Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Nubians. A combination force because at the time, the three entities were one. There were times when you couldn't tell the difference between India, Egypt, and, I mean, Nubia, Egypt, and Ethiopia. That was ruled by, when, when one Pharaoh ruled in here, you ruled the entire, uh, length of the Nile Valley.

When was this that they, this put us? It's claimed, some claim it's during the time of Hatshepsut. Some claim it is during the time of, of, um, um, Cyrus II. It all depends on the view, which one. Now, those Africans had conquered all the way to India. And when they were forced out, by the way, it is because of them you have the golden calf, the worship of the goddess Hathor. Hathor was the, even the Jews, one time before Egypt, um, Abraham, worshiped the golden calf. They call it the golden calf in the Old Testament, book of, of Genesis, but it was not called the golden calf. It was called the goddess, symbol of the goddess Hathor. They knew what it was and did not mention it as such. The Indians adopted Hathor. Then they, the, the, the virgin thing, the, the Horus child and Ar Krishna. The Krishna group, the Christians adopted that symbol. Isis becoming pregnant by immaculate conception, giving birth to her son Horus by a virgin birth. This story is there still at the Temple of, of Horus at Edfu. You could see it written all over the walls. They adopted this. The, the, um, the obelisk. The obelisk was in memory of the penis of, uh, of Horus when he was, uh, destroyed and cut up into 14 pieces.

Let's push this a little further about the character of the African. Uh, Professor Vanoda, you mentioned that there were wars, some wars that took place between Africans and Native Americans in early history. I wouldn't, um, define them as wars. There was, um, in the situation that I particularly mention of Quara, there you have a settlement that was encroaching, um, from that Quara into parts of the Native American territory, and therefore a clash occurred. And we do have cases of both of them taking prisoners. Was there an aggressive character to the African that came to this? We don't have any clear evidence of that. We do have, um, trader types coming in the Mandingo period, and they were warrior types as well. They had to be. They had to be extremely cautious moving through, um, new and and potentially hostile territory. But we do know that in the Olmec period, um, we do not have evidence of this. And, and, and I want to return to that period because lots of people are not aware of the enormity of the evidence. One of the things that that startles me is that nobody has mentioned the terra cotas, the clay sculptures of Africans. I have been, um, twice recently to Mexico and looked at them. There were literally hundreds of these with African, not just the African features, but beards, textures of hair. You could see the evocation of the texture of hair, which is quite distinct from the Asiatic type, coming across the barren streets to early America. The, the skeletal types, one mentions that Zinszky, um, has mentioned. And then last year, the Science Digest brought out something on me in September. It's September issue, in which they asked an authority in Mexico about these heads, which I say have African features, and he said the reason why they look African, why they have broad noses and thick lips, is because the tools were blunt. Now, that is one of the most ridiculous, um, defenses I have heard from the establishment, because he actually went as far as to say, this is Michael, co-author of a major book, he's the major authority in Mexico, ancient Mexico. He said that if they had sharpened the nose, if they had got thin noses, it would have broken off. Uh-huh. And when you go and you look, you could put your fingers, the edges of the lips, even where they are very full lips, you could see the extraordinary skill. These are 3,000-year-old heads. They're done with fine tools, because close by, you can see figures done in stone with a different type of nose, different types of lips, the, the Native American type. And I, I wanted to ask, when I was first told of this by Boyce Rensberger, who wrote the article, if you ask Co, if they used blunt tools to make these types, and they use sharp, they then sharpen their tools to make the native types. This is the.

Let me just intrude for a minute, gentlemen, and just, uh, go to our viewers for a minute and let you know that it is now almost the end of the hour, and as promised, we want to bring to you a, a full-screen, as we call it, bibliography list of materials that you can go to for more information. From Dr. Ben, he recommends that you read "The Destruction of Black Civilization" by Chancellor Williams, "African Origins of Civilization" by Cheikh Anta Diop, "World's Great Men of Color" by J.A. Rogers, and "Black Man of the Nile and His Family" by Professor Ben-Jochannan and himself. Uh, Professor Clark recommends that you read "African Glory" by J.C. de Graft Johnson, "Capitalism and Slavery" by Eric Williams, "Before the Mayflower" by Lerone Bennett, and "Slave Trade and Slavery" by John Henrik Clarke and Vincent Harding. And Professor Van Cera recommends that you read "Africa and the Discovery of America" by Leo Wiener, or is it Wiener? Wiener. "Unexpected Faces" by Alex Von Wuthenau, "Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America" and "Chinese in America" by R. Jasob, Jasboy, excuse me, and "They Came Before Columbus" by Ivan Van Sertima. Mark that well. And if you want more information, I know we're going to get swamped. I hate to make this offer, but I've got to do it in the interest of your interest. If you want, uh, us to give you that bibliography, write us and let us know, and we'll, uh, supply it for you. In the few moments that we have remaining, what then are we saying in the broad canopy that we've only really skated across, uh, about the whole involvement of the African character on this planet? It has tended to be, in the for the most part, as I can delineate from you, non-aggressive and humane, and, uh, more than just.

How would you respond to somebody though who would say now, that's a racist statement? And you're, no, no, it's not a racist statement. It's an honest statement. And, um, the victims of racism have a difficult time being racist. And I wish somebody would remember that, you know, uh, when the victim responds to, to racism and responds to the negative attitude toward his own people, he's not, he's not, um, he's not racist. I'm saying that the African character, the African personality, has given the world a kind of humaneness and his relationship to other people that can rarely be found among, cannot be found at all among the Europeans. That's it for this hour. Uh, we will continue with, uh, the final chapter next week. Be sure to tune in. We'll catch you then. Thanks for joining us.