2:02BAll right, I’m happy to meet you as well. I want you to move straight up to the microphone so we don’t miss any of that valuable information. you’re going to share with us. Now, um, what do I want to ask you? We’re closing off Women’s History Month. As you know, March is Women’s History Month. Can you summarize any major aspect of African history you’d like women who are listening to know about?
2:31CWell, there’s so many, many things that we could say about women of African descent and women in general. regarding March. One thing I might add is many people are familiar with the movement in the ’50s and ’60s, but they’re not really familiar with the central role that women played in the Montgomery bus boycott. Most people think they know about Dr. King and Rosa Parks, but that’s not really the case in most instances. For example, there’s a book called The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. So people should know about Jo Ann Robinson, who headed the Women’s Political Council that helped to lead the boycott for more than a year in Montgomery because the buses disrespected Black people who had to pay their dime and then get off of the bus and enter through the back.
3:18CBut Jo Ann Robinson’s role was absolutely central in, uh, in moving the boycott forward. She had, uh, posters already made that said, another Negro woman arrested. Also, Rosa Parks’ role is usually distorted. People think about her as some individual person who refused to give up her seat in December of 1955, when actually she was not only a member of the NAACP, but she was the legal secretary that was quite familiar with their strategies of trying to break down the system of segregation in Montgomery. So the role of those 2 women are absolutely essential, and we should know about those roles because they have played a critical part.
3:58CAnd then here in the U.S., what’s also important because of the great movement for civil rights and human rights in the ’50s and ’60s, because of that great thrust by people of African descent, women in general, particularly white women, have benefited from the black struggle. So they -- so what became the code words is to give opportunities to so-called minorities, and minority became not just those of us who are in the minority in terms of numbers, but anybody who had been left out, including white women. So they became the minority and they were able to benefit from the inroads that we actually helped create. And now the term is diversity.
4:35CAnd in many cases, diversity means everybody other than us in many instances. But if we look at women, those things are absolutely crucial about what women have contributed. And also we should know too, because I look at ancient history, many people, if I go to an audience and I start a sentence, they can usually finish it with false information. So if I say, What was -- what’s the oldest, oldest profession among women? And usually somebody in the audience would say it’s prostitution. And this is a common idea across the country that has nothing to do with facts, because the original cultures had nothing to do with prostitution or any type of system to belittle women.
5:16CWomen were basket makers, they were fishers, they engaged in fishery. They hunted to some degree, but they gathered fruits and berries. They took care of children. And so they had many, many roles that had nothing to do with this kind of demeaning activity. But yet, that’s what many people would say if they’re in a history class, because that’s all they’ve been taught. And I wonder what men have benefited from that false idea.
5:42BOh, well, wow. We can do a whole program on that. We can do a whole interview on that. But because Dwayne came all the way from Orlando to talk to you. I know he has a lot to ask. So Dwayne, please let our listeners know what you have in mind for Dr. Ampim.
6:01DGood morning, Dr. Ampim.
6:02CGood morning, Dwayne.
6:03DOkay, so the first question I wanted to ask was how and why did you become a researcher of African history?
6:08CI appreciate the question. Well, actually, I was about 20 and a half, and I remember one day I called my father who had left our house when I was about 13. And I called him and he told me to come over and look at some books he wanted me to look at so I could better understand what he was talking about. So I remember one Saturday back in 1984, I went by his apartment. The only thing I remember about that fateful day is that we embraced at his door and he walked over to his closet, opened up the closet, and I was frozen. I was stunned.
6:36CI was absolutely stunned by what I saw because it was self-explanatory. Books like The Destruction of Black Civilization, books like Ethiopian and Missing Links to African History. Books like The African Origin of Civilization, Myth or Reality. And when I saw those books, I was stunned. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I unfrozen or thawed myself out, took a handful of books home that day, and things have never really been the same since that time. So I decided to later pursue Africana studies in a formal way. And I did that at Morgan State University to learn the tools and techniques of firsthand or primary research.
7:18CAnd then since that time, I’ve done research around the world to really take it from the academic arena to actually in the field, to help us to learn about African tradition, culture, and history by going to archives and museums, institutes around Europe that had stolen African artifacts, and then doing fieldwork at pyramid sites, temples, tombs and ancient residential sites. So for me, it was a journey that took about 5, 6, 7 years to really entrench myself as a professional historian. It’s one of the greatest decisions that I’ve made, but I didn’t really choose the mission, the mission chose me. It’s what I needed to do at that time, and I had no idea when I was a young student that that would be my fate in embracing the mission to help us to know, recover, and to relive our history and traditions.
8:04DOkay, great. So of course, you know, I’m sure you’ve encountered this. Some people would say that knowing history isn’t important because it happened so long ago and it’s not relevant to our present situation. So what is your response to people who think that way?
8:20CWell, you know, they need help, and these individuals need help, but they really don’t understand. They’re really naive if anybody thinks that way, because Europe really understands the importance of the past. For example, I mean, even when people don’t have a history, like the Germans had no real memory of their history, so they created Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Even though these are fairy tales, but it was some way to try to grasp their historical experience of the distant past. But not only that, the people always look to have some kind of foundation. But if you look at Greece and Rome, these civilizations have laid the foundation for the development of the modern Europe and modern America.
9:03CSo like the Roman Senate is the exact, uh, model for the U.S. Senate. And if you look at the days of the week, for example, you look at the days of the week and these are days of the week that come from the European tradition, whether it’s, uh, Tews, that’s, uh, for Tuesday, or Wudensday or Wednesday, or Thorsday Thursday, or Friestay Friday. It doesn’t really matter, but you look at these, uh, days of the week. We look at any field in, uh, in, in, um, in science. For example, like in California, every 10th grader has to learn geometry, and they learn that a squared plus b squared equals c squared, the so-called Pythagorean theorem, when in fact the theorem had nothing to do with Pythagoras.
9:43CThe theorem was in existence thousands of years before even his mama knew him. So clearly he didn’t create this kind of, um, knowledge. But nevertheless, this is presented, and it all centers around a European tradition. So those that really don’t understand the importance of history, they really miss an important fact, that is that today is built on yesterday and tomorrow’s built on today. So we cannot continue to be suspended in midair. We need a foundation. That’s why we have to look at classical African tradition, not to go back and build pyramids in Florida, but to go back and learn the principles and practices that allowed Africans to be great and use those principles and practices to rebuild in the current environment that we’re in.
10:26CAnd that’s absolutely important for us to do that, because otherwise we won’t have any real direction. So we have a tradition. And I’ll just say this other point about this, is that many people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, and I know in certain cities in Europe where African people are trying to solve our problems, they have rites of passage programs. But those rites of passage programs were not thought about by some great scholar or intellectual. These rites of passage programs have been borrowed from a much larger African traditional system. So the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood is only one of 5 major initiation rites that come from the African tradition throughout the continent.
11:10CSo these rites are really from birth to death and beyond, and not just the rite of passage from from adolescence to adulthood. So even while we have attempted to solve our problems by helping to guide and direct young people, that rite of passage effort is part of a much larger system. And so we had worked out social problems in African culture long before we were brought here to this hemisphere. So it’s really important to know that our tradition has answers for us today. We don’t have to try to make up some kind of wild imaginative idea about how to solve problems. We’ve solved problems in our tradition, in our past.
11:52CSo if we look at our culture, then we can figure out how to work out and solve certain problems today. But there’s many reasons why we should look at the past as a foundation for the present. And anybody that separates the two, they really are fooling themselves. And besides, we can’t simply go back to our experience here in the U.S. or the Western Hemisphere, because if you go back just to slavery, the best you can be is a good slave. So we have to go back beyond the Atlantic Ocean and look at African culture as a foundation for our redevelopment today.
12:26DOkay, um, I know one of the problems with that, one of the reasons why a lot of us don’t want to reconnect to that African history, is because we have a lot of misconceptions and, uh, negative myths that have been given to us. about Africa, and that kind of, you know, makes a lot of us now want to go back to Africa. And I know based on my own experiences that one of the challenges you encounter in trying to research African history are those same misconceptions and distortions. So my next question is, in the work that you’ve done, what are some of the misconceptions and distortions that you’ve encountered?
12:58CWell, there’s so many of them. I’m so sure as you’re aware of it, but, you know, we have ongoing misconceptions. For example, anybody that gets a degree in history and looks at historiography or the study of historical writings, they have to look at Arnold Toynbee. And Arnold Toynbee was a British historian who just passed a few decades ago. And you have to always look at what Arnold Toynbee has to say. But he said of the 26 countries, 26 nations that have developed any kind of civilization and that has contributed to to humanity, the only primary race that has not contributed to any of these nations was the black race.
13:38CAnd it’s an absolutely extraordinary fabrication by Arnold Toynbee. So when you’re studying history and get a degree in the field, we don’t necessarily learn that part of his thinking. We learn about his conceptions of history in general. But there’s so many misconceptions based on that. So when I take people to Africa or do fieldwork, most people want to know about a safari. So I can’t help you there. I have no idea what you’re talking about, because most times people think about Africa and animals and nothing more than that. Not the people, not the culture, not the science, nothing like that. So we have those kind of misconceptions to deal with because most people think about Africa and some kind of aid, uh, developmental aid, whether it’s AIDS or some kind of health problems, and not African tradition and culture.
14:21CThat’s why movies like, um, uh, Hotel Rwanda -- Uh, Rwanda could be so popular? Why would this come out and just look at Africans killing each other? What about the Central African kingdoms and kingship in the area? What about the independent African rulership that had an extensive trading network and an elaborate culture in Central Africa? That’s not discussed. That’s not presented in those kind of movies. So the misconceptions are so deep that most people don’t even think about the kind of propaganda that comes out regarding Africa. regarding Africa. But the misconceptions continue. That’s why you can have courses at the academic level, and they have a very short chapter on human origins in Africa, maybe some West African kingdoms right before slavery, and the rest of the course is on slavery, the slave trade, and the effort to kick out the colonial puppets that are there controlling African resources.
15:18CSo, How could that be that the majority of a book or course is simply dealing with Africa’s derailment and downfall? If people knew about the old tradition, there’s no way that anybody can write a book or teach a course or have a documentary that focuses exclusively or to a large degree on Africa’s derailment. What about the apex of human achievement that gets left out? And that’s what we’re fighting on a regular basis, is to correct the record. from these kind of systematic distortions of African tradition. And then the other thing is that people will, if they want to talk about African civilizations, they want to separate the northern part, Egypt, from so-called south of the Sahara, as if those are 2 different regions in some kind of way.
16:04DSo there’s many misconceptions that we continue to fight and overturn over the All right, I’m glad you mentioned Egypt actually, because the next question is on Egypt. And what I’ve noticed is out of the African civilizations that I’ve studied, perhaps Egypt has been distorted the most, to the point where many academics for generations didn’t even want to acknowledge that Egypt was an African civilization. And when I was in high school and we were studying world history, in the world history textbook Egypt was actually placed in the section that dealt with Middle Eastern civilizations. Egypt was separated from the African section of the world history textbook. So my question is, do you think mainstream academia is becoming more accepting of this idea that Egypt is an African civilization?
16:48CYes, but it’s with a twist. So since the Cairo Symposium in 1974, mainstream Egyptologists, they argued systematically that Egypt was not a part of Africa. So what they did is they took Egypt out of Africa and then took black people out of Egypt. And made it some kind of Middle Eastern, or as they call it, a Near Eastern civilization, anything other than African. So what these people were arguing before this symposium in 1974 is that there were somehow some travelers that came in from Western Asia, or the so-called Near East, today we call it the Middle East, and created pyramids in Egypt that they couldn’t build at home.
17:27CSo this is faulty logic, to say the least. There was no loanwords brought in, no pottery, no culture, nothing. So just some kind of immaculate conception that these people came and just started creating civilizations in Africa, particularly Egypt, that they couldn’t build or create at home. So after that symposium, Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga, 2 African scholars, overturned this idea and clearly indicated that Egypt was fundamentally an African civilization. So those that were arguing that it was not, They changed from saying it was a Caucasoid civilization to, yes, admitting that the culture was African, the way of thinking was African, the language was African, but the people themselves were mixed.
18:13CSo now the new rhetoric and the new propaganda is that, yes, it’s an African civilization, but the people themselves are not really African. They’re mixed. And that’s the official position of Egyptologists. And so it makes no sense because documentation beats conversation, but -- and they have no documentation, but they do have a whole lot of conversation about a somehow mixed population. So they moved from a population of people being of Caucasoid, as they would call it, descent, to now a mixed group. And they had evidence that they had no evidence for either position. So yes, so for them, African civilization doesn’t mean African people. or black people or Africoid people.
18:54CIt means something completely different to mainstream Egyptologists. So that’s their new backup position. And it’s almost like intellectual acrobatics. Any excuse will do. So when they want to reach a conclusion, let’s take African people out of their own history, then if there’s roadblocks with an insurmountable amount of evidence, they turn somersaults and flips and do cartwheels over the evidence to get to an illogical and irrational conclusion. That’s why I say that the fact that Egypt is an African civilization with black folks, it is beyond all sane rebuttal. Anybody can give an insane rebuttal, and those insane rebuttals today makes it a mixed population without any real evidence to support that.
19:32DOkay, and another distortion that’s very common when you study the history of African people is what they do with the civil rights movement, particularly Martin Luther King. And I’ve -- I saw that you wrote your master’s thesis actually on Martin Luther King. So I want to know if you could speak a little bit on what that thesis was about and exactly what it was that you were trying to correct when you wrote that in terms of King’s legacy.
19:56CWell, I appreciate the question. So back in ’89, I finished my master’s thesis called The Revolutionary Martin Luther King, and I decided to choose that topic because I wanted to make a contribution for the ages. I had, I had heard a couple of Dr. King speeches that were completely out of the norm. If somebody didn’t know that was Dr. King, they would probably think, and some people did, thought it was Malcolm X speaking. And I also, I had read some works of his, some writings, and so I said, you know what, I want to do a master’s thesis that actually makes a contribution. So I went to the archives.
20:31CThat’s when I really was fine-tuning my skills in doing primary or firsthand research. So I went to archives, I went to the King Center in Atlanta, I went to the Mugar Collection at Boston University. I went to the FBI headquarters, and what I was looking at is that the biggest file, the biggest file that Dr. King had in his archives was a file on Africa and the decolonization movement. And that’s not really discussed or talked about or written about very often. So Dr. King saw the movement in the ’50s and ’60s in 2 periods. He saw the first period as what he called the civil rights period, or And then the second period was the human rights period.
21:08CThis is according to him. After -- so that first period was from 1955, beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, to 1965, the passing of the Voting Rights Bill. After the Voting Rights Bill, Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, their position was basically that Congress signed the civil rights movement out of existence. And that’s how they actually saw it. So in ’66, they started focusing on human rights and acquiring power. for black people. And so for King, there’s 2 distinct periods in the movement. And anybody who’s talking about Dr. King and civil rights after ’65 have distorted Dr. King. So I use a wide array of firsthand sources from his press conferences, his speeches, his articles, his interviews, and his 5 books.
21:53CBecause in ’66, when the hot coals hit his lips and he’s criticizing everybody and he embraced the Black Power movement, not as a slogan but as a movement, this became very significant. So my work was really to look at Dr. King, who emerged as an international leader and not somebody who had a dream sleeping, but one of the great activists in the 20th century. And I tried to show that in my thesis on Dr. King, which was quite a number of years ago.
22:20DSo, um, the final question that I want to ask is, um, A question on the steel pan and on African musical traditions in general. One of the things that fascinates me about the steel pan is that in a sense it symbolizes the creativity and the genius of African people, you know, being able to create a musical instrument out of essentially nothing. So the question I want to ask you is, what other examples can you think of of African music demonstrating the creativity and genius of African people?
22:49CWell, we find it right here in the U.S. for sure, because I mean, Black people have always used They’ve always used song and music to help with the work, or even if we’re involved with any kind of struggle. So if we go back to the movement in the ’50s and ’60s, I mean, they used Christian songs and they used them for inspiration, motivation, and fortification to actually advance the movement. So many people know We Shall Overcome, but they also should know the creativity, because when the Black Power movement began in June of 1966, they stopped singing We Shall Overcome. They start singing, we shall overrun.
23:24CSo they use kind of the same rhythm, the same cadence, but they change the words to represent where they were as the struggle continued to move forward. And it also kind of reminds me of an image that some people might be familiar with, but there’s no evidence on exactly how the pyramids were built, for example. But you see a huge scene in the tomb of Djehutyhotep, a colossal statue being moved by 172 men. And it’s interesting because there’s a man right on the legs of this huge statue as men are pulling this large statue, and he’s singing, he’s clapping, he’s providing rhythm for the workers.
24:01CSo we’ve always used it in a way that’s functional for us within our cultural framework. And so music and Black culture have been synonymous since the time we can actually look at people going out farming or whatever they’re doing in everyday life. When you look at the early cultures, that’s what they do at night. No TV, no radio, but they certainly have rhythm, and that rhythm is passed on to the youth, and that’s what they learn -- the songs, the dances -- and they learn the oral history of the people centered around music. So steel pan to me is in that tradition.
24:32BWonderful, wonderful. Oh my goodness. You know, Dr. Ampim, um, I find quite often we don’t have access to the kind of information that you are sharing. So those stereotypes and those misconceptions are perpetuated. They can -- so it’s very challenging and often difficult to get people to be thinking in a more logical and reasonable fashion. Do you find that with your students?
25:10CVery much so. You know, I have students of all age groups. I remember on my way here yesterday from California, one of the older students, he’s 60, he’s -- the first day he was kind of struggling with learning about Africa, but he, uh, now he’s a fan. He brings me home every day, and his wife, even though I haven’t met her, she knows me too now. And so, but I do see students who sometimes struggle, but they’re open enough to want to learn, to grow, and to make the adjustments. But the -- and many want to go visit. And I think the more opportunities that we can create for people to see the African world is the better.
25:48BOkay. I know you have an event this evening in Cocoa. You want to tell listeners about it so those who are in Brevard County could come out and check it?
25:58CWe would love people to come this evening. So at 5 o’clock at the Essence of Knowledge Bookstore, I’m going to be presenting some of my latest fieldwork, which was last year. And really the focus and the theme is Southern Origins of the Ancient Kushite Civilization. So it’s my fieldwork in Ethiopia and Sudan. That’s going to be this evening at 5 o’clock at the Essence of Knowledge Bookstore.
26:22BOkay folks, and Essence of Knowledge Bookstore is obliquely -- I don’t have the exact address, but it’s obliquely opposite the Cocoa Police Station in that plaza over there. So if you’re in Brevard County and you need to have some more clarity and information on the African experience, take advantage of Dr. Ampim’s visit here with us in Brevard County. And I’d like to thank you very much --
26:51CThank you.
26:52BFor bringing that clarity and demystifying our traditions and even addressing the legacy of, of Dr. King that many of us don’t know much about. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dwayne.
27:06DNo problem.
27:07BIt’s great having you here. I’m gonna have you back.
27:10DLook forward to it.
27:11BBoth of you.
27:12CAppreciate it.
27:13BAll right, well folks, it should be remembered that before domestic workers or maids came from abroad, whether it was the Caribbean, Central, South America, Philippines, wherever they came from, most here in the U.S. Maids or domestic workers were descendants of enslaved Africans. Just remember that. They take care of all the families, every aspect of the family, even nursing the children that they didn’t bear as mothers. So they paved the way. Those domestic workers, they paved the way for immigrants from all over the world to come here to the United States, and we ought to be grateful. they laid the foundation, and foundation is always very important. Taking us home on this glorious Saturday is one of the finest steel orchestras today, Phase 2 Pan Groove, doing Billie Jean from the album Treasure the Pan. And from all of us, stay strong, stay focused, be encouraged, have a wonderful day. May God bless you all. Happy Easter!
