1:13BThat’s all right, take your time. Back to --
1:16AI mentioned about that wall.
1:20BBenin?
1:20ADid I pronounce that right?
1:23BBenin?
1:24AOkay, yes. I’d like to -- it’s got to be a place somebody’s probably had. If it’s probably still standing, it’s pretty nice.
1:38BIt’s not -- there are parts of it that are still standing, but it’s been severely destroyed because I mentioned that in the book. When the British came to colonize Benin, they destroyed most of the city. So much of it was destroyed in the assault on Benin. And just from years of not being preserved properly, it’s also collapsing. I was going to say, that’s the other thing that they did too. They went into African societies, which were large cities then, and they’re described as a large walled city with polished houses. So these weren’t people living in huts and, you know, what huts in that image is. But what happened was Europeans went in there and they destroyed the city. So part of the process of destroying our history is that Europeans went in there, wiped out the civilizations, and then they told us that we didn’t have civilization because they’re the ones that destroyed it in the first place.
2:42AYes, Nigeria. How many different -- we got the Igbo, the Yoruba. What’s the other groups of people there?
2:51BIgbo, Hausa, and Yoruba are the main 3, but Nigeria’s got hundreds of different tribes.
3:13AIt’s this, that’s why I need to read. I’m glad you wrote these books because this is not the record that I’ve gathered that now during my studies, that my studies are so far removed from this, so much older.
3:33BYeah.
3:35AI think sometimes I think about studying, it would be nice to narrow my focus, focus on maybe sometimes focus on one thing, one people, one place, rather than focusing on the whole, the big picture, so to speak.
3:56BThat’s why my approach to writing my books is to be as detailed as possible but as concise as possible. So I don’t write a whole lot of I’ll write many small detailed books.
4:07AThese are good. Like I said, I read it and I have to read it again because as you were speaking, it reminded me of the idea of seeing the numbers, the counting system, the mathematical way of counting, how did we approach that. And it was clear, I mean, I understood it as soon as I was reading, but it’s a little different. And then I looked back at the Kemites and their math, and they also had something similar that they did.
4:37BIn terms of how they, uh, yeah, like I said, um, I wrote this book first and I began studying Lingala from the Congo, and I found that they had a similar system. So one of the things that you’ll find in Africa is that you start studying one region and then you’ll find similar concepts, similar ideas in other parts of Africa. So as vast and as diverse as Africa is, there’s a lot of cultural similarities throughout the continent, which is why, um, Cheikh Anta Diop, he wrote that book, The Cultural Unity of Africa. That’s what he’s referring to. So things that you might find in Egypt that you think are just, you know, solely Egyptian or Kemetic, you’d find in Nigeria and South Africa, Central Africa.
5:18AYeah.
5:23BI know even with us here in the diaspora, we have certain aspects of our culture that we think are unique to us, but then you go to Africa and you find people, you know, using some of the words that we use, eating some of the foods that we think are unique to our culture.
5:36AYeah, I was going to go further than that because when I was living in Michigan, at Fort Morton, there was a lot of A lot of Indians in this country that works at Motorola, especially in computer science, computer -- I can say computer science and information technology. And we were dealing with some people in Chennai, a big, large information technology center in Chennai. And we were doing a project It had to do with counting some of the things recorded on a grid. And one of the things that I learned when I was a kid was the word we used was nil.
6:36BZero, right?
6:38AZero. And when I saw that written on the grid that they sent back to me, I’m thinking, that’s English. I’ve been over here in America. I’ve been doing this ever since I was in the South, since I was small. But don’t do it anymore because I don’t use it. I say zero, no. Well, really zero. It was going to be no. I thought we might have missed a blank when I saw it in there. I’m like, okay, that’s --
7:12Bhow?
7:13AAnd then I had to stop and think that even though they are that far away, the origin of certain, you know, speaking, or even certain terminology, spread it off from one place. So That kind of brought me back to, and also understanding a bit about their history too, and their movement, people moving across the land, and the similarities, like you just said, similarities in culture. There is a, I don’t have to read this book, I mean, I know I have one of his books I don’t think I’ve read it, and that’s about Diopalo Benya, who’s from the Congo, and he was a linguist. But I need to read the book because he points out a lot of those similarities, especially in language.
8:13BYeah, he was a student of Cheikh Anta Diop, so a lot of Diop’s ideas he built on. And yeah, language was a big thing that Diop focused on too, similarities Between the Wolof language of Senegal and the Egyptian language.
8:48AI’m purchasing one of each, and I got to purchase 2. I need 2 of Marcus Garvey. I need one for my grandson. This roots are Jamaican. His dad is Jamaican. So I want him to know, even though he was born here, he’s 14 years old now, or 11 years old now. I want him to know that his That much is Jamaican history. He’s gonna probably --
9:17Bthey should get him, um, because I’ve done a couple books on Jamaican history, like the one that you’re currently reading, but, um, Caribbean essays. There’s a lot of Jamaican history in that one as well.
9:28AYeah, he’s special. He’s special character. He’s probably gonna get to -- but I’m -- we’re gonna give him the lead this one while he’s -- oh yeah, I should add, like, I’ll wait till he get 15, 16, when he get it for him. Before Christmas, but I’m also ready at myself once, so I have to refresh myself.
9:47BYeah, that’s an interesting thing about Marcus Garvey is I feel like even if you’re not Jamaican, because Garvey was Jamaican, but his influence impacted African people throughout the world to the point where if you’re of African descent, there’s a good chance that some part of your history was influenced by Garvey. For example, the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Garvey influenced that, or civil rights movement. here was influenced by Garvey. Kwame Nkrumah leading Ghana to independence, Nkrumah’s biggest influence was Garvey. So apart from Jamaicans, I think all African people need to read about Garvey because he had such a massive global impact on all of the struggles. I mean, even when you look at a lot of African countries have the red, black, and green flag as their national flag.
10:29AAbsolutely.
10:34BI mean, it’s interesting that Garvey had such a massive impact and a lot of people don’t understand who Garvey was or what kind of impact he really had on our struggle for freedom.
10:47AYeah, we have a lot of our elders, some have survived, some have gone through ancestors that had so much impact on our culture. Shame on us because most of our people don’t have no idea what’s going on. Just do not know. I don’t know. They don’t know whether or not -- the question is whether or not they care. That’s the main question.
11:14BBut it is a common -- I think it’s a little bit of both because yeah, a lot of them don’t care, but at the same time a lot of them don’t know. And I mean, I know from my experience when you start really studying history, finding out who you are as a people, you’ll be interested. It becomes like a desire to learn more when you find out that everything that you’ve been told about who you are is a lie. So I think some people you can reach if you just give them little tidbits of history. It’ll inspire them to want to learn more.
11:40AYeah, I agree. I absolutely agree.
11:43BBecause then, I mean, it goes back to what I was saying about the Great Wall of China. Most people know about the Great Wall of China. Most people could tell you a little bit about Asian history. Even people that don’t really follow history, they could tell you a little bit about European history. They can’t tell anything about African history because we’re taught to believe that there’s nothing.
11:59AIt will be also taught in this country and even in the diaspora. African history, education system, they are not taught history. Even now, I thought their history is taught.
12:16BEven on African continent, A lot of people don’t realize a lot of Africans born and raised in Africa don’t know their history. So some of them -- I mean, it’s so bad, you have some Africans, they can’t even speak their own indigenous language because everything there is so Eurocentric that parents teach their children English, French, European languages, and they don’t even bother teaching their children their own native language. So a lot of languages in Africa are actually becoming endangered because it’s not being passed on. And like I pointed out in the book, we Traditionally, we are people that are very grateful for passing on our history and our culture, whether it’s like I said through written means, or even where written languages didn’t exist, we memorized it, we passed them orally, because we understood that to keep our history, keep our culture alive, you have to keep passing it down through the generations. So that’s within our tradition, that’s the kind of people that we are, and that’s one of the main things about ourselves that we’ve lost is that tradition of passing on That’s the hour story to tell everyone that it’s true and it’s lost forever.
13:18AThere are still groups that still do that. Oh, I don’t -- I’m not gonna say they’re here in this kind of land, but there’s still groups. Definitely, there’s definitely groups in the modern world that don’t have the real program. Yeah, the real.
13:33BYeah, that’s it. Yeah, we have read a great book on the real story.
13:39ARight.
13:39BThey still have those, um, and that’s the thing too, they have that advantage of maintaining those elements of their culture. So even though it’s a challenge for them to maintain history, they still have people there that memorize the history. Now our challenge in the diaspora is that they’ve wiped out so much of our culture, we don’t have a tradition of food like we are. So we have to -- we had to develop that along the way. So we produced historians like John Henrik Clarke, like, you know, Carter G. Woodson. So those people became griots, and they became that out of necessity, not because of the tradition that’s passed on. I mean, to some extent, what I’m doing became history out of a necessity to inform people of our history, not because I’m trained in the tradition of being a griot.
14:19AYeah, I agree.
