1:57AOur history did not begin on the slave plantations of the United States and of the West Indies. So one of the reasons why many Black people don’t want to associate themselves with Africa is because since the ships dropped us off, we’ve been constantly fed this propaganda about Africa, Africa being the dark continent, being a continent filled with cannibals, with savages, with very primitive and backward people. And after generations of being indoctrinated with this kind of teachings, many African people really believe that the continent that their foreparents came from was this backward place and that we were actually better off enslaved here in the Americas than we would have been as free people back home in Africa.
2:37ANow in recent years, the narrative has changed a little bit. So Africa is associated with civil war, with famines, with starvation, with corruption, and it’s still a very backwards, negative, one-sided image. And Black History Month typically has not helped with this because, as Malcolm said, usually when the history is presented to us, the narrative begins during slavery, does not begin back in Africa. So the first topic that I wanted to discuss tonight is African civilizations and some of remarkable aspects of African civilizations. Africa was the home to some of the earliest institutions of learning in human history. For example, the University of Timbuktu in Mali was one of the earliest universities in human history.
3:22ANow today when we hear Timbuktu, it’s usually associated with this far-off, obscure, very unimportant location, but at one point Timbuktu was actually leading center of learning in the world. University of Timbuktu produced over 700,000 manuscripts which were on different topics such as geography, medicine, and theology. The greatest scholar to come out of Timbuktu was a man named Ahmed Baba. He wrote over 40 books. Now, I’ve written 13 books myself, so I still have some time to go before I catch up with him and the 40 books. But, um, So aside from the education, Africa was also the first place where humans smelted steel. Two men named Peter Schmidt and Donald Avery -- they discovered in Tanzania that Tanzanians were smelting carbon steel, which was over 1,000 years old.
4:13ANow what was significant about this discovery was that the methods that they were using to produce the steel was actually more advanced than anything Europeans had been doing until the 19th century. So in other words, they discovered a method for smelting steel in Tanzania that was centuries more advanced than anything in Europe. Africa is also a land of great architecture. Obviously, we can look at the Sphinx and the pyramids in Egypt as an example of that, but what is lesser known is that there’s a civilization called Nubia, which is located in the present-day Sudan, that was located south of Egypt. Nubia actually has more pyramids there than Egypt does.
4:50AWe could also look at Ethiopia. Ethiopia has the famous churches of Lalibela. Anyone here familiar with those? Mm-hmm. These churches were actually carved out of solid rock. In Nigeria, there’s the Walls of Benin, which are estimated by many people to actually have been longer than even the Great Walls of China. And to show how African history really isn’t taught the way it should be is that, like I said, these Walls of Benin are actually -- some people estimate them to be longer than the Great Walls of China. Now, most people know of the Great Wall of China, and they’re considered to be one of the great marvels of human civilization, but lesser known are these great pieces of architecture that Africans have built.
5:30ABut also speaking of African civilizations, though, I think the core element and the most important element of the civilization isn’t so much the structures that Africans built, but the value systems that Africans put in place to rule the civilizations that they built. One of these value systems was the type of governments that Africans produced. Today in Africa, we see all over the continent very poor government. There’s a lot of corruption, a lot of leadership that’s really not accountable to the people. But this was different in traditional Africa. For example, in the Empire of Ghana, the king had a tradition where every morning he’d ride out on horseback.
6:09AAnd what he would do, he would ride through the village, And he listened to the problems of the people. So the people could come before the king, and if they had any issues, they could address that with the king. And the king had a tradition of not only would he listen to these problems, but he would actually ensure that the problems were solved. So he was directly connected with the people. Among the Zulu people of South Africa, King Cetshwayo was one time interviewed by the British, and they asked him about changing some of the laws in the society. His response was that as king, he couldn’t change the laws without having full consent of all the different chiefs of that society.
6:45ASo what we find in traditional African societies is although it was a monarchy and there was a king, the king did not have absolute power, and the king was obliged to take care of his people. So much so that in most African societies, the king couldn’t decide himself to become king. He had to be elected by a council. Typically, it was a council of elders that elected the king. And this same council that elected the king could also overthrow the king if the king was ruling in a way that was harmful to the people. So again, the king had full accountability, couldn’t abuse his power or do whatever he felt like doing, as we often see today in Africa.
7:22ASo aside from this, Africa was also a society that had no jails or prisons. It was a society where, rather than having an emphasis on punishing wrongdoers, such as locking them away. The focus is more so on healing the victims of the crime. Perhaps the best example of this that I’ve come across is a system known as mato oput by the Acholi people in Uganda. What this system is, is a system in which the wrongdoer was urged to empathize with the victim, to make amends with the victim of the crime, and finally the dispute was resolved by both parties drinking the bitter herbs from the opu tree, and this was to symbolize drinking away the bitterness of whatever issues they had between the 2 parties.
8:06ANow, the reason why the Acholi people created the system is very interesting, and it’s based on their history, because in their history they had a dispute between 2 brothers known as Labango and Jipir. Labango received the traditional ancestral spear from their father, And what happened was one day an elephant had come into the village. Jepere ran out to chase the elephant away and he picked up a spear and he threw it at the elephant. It stuck into the elephant and the elephant ran off, but what had happened was he accidentally threw the ancestral spear into the elephant. Labango heard about this and he was infuriated.
8:44AJepere pleaded with him to accept a replacement spear, but Labango refused. He told his brother -- that he had to go out and find the spear and not to return home until he found it. So Djipeir left and he spent months trying to find this spear. Eventually he did find it and he returned home with the spear, but he remained furious with his brother. And the animosity between them never healed. So what happened is some time had passed, and during his journey Djipeir had acquired some royal beads from an old lady that had assisted him during his quest. One day, Labango’s daughter had accidentally swallowed one of those beads.
9:24ALabango pleaded with his brother to accept a replacement bead, but I’m sure you guys can see where this story is going. Jipir said no, he didn’t want a replacement. He wanted the same bead, and he wanted it immediately. So what they end up doing was they cut the child open, and that’s how they got the bead, and the child died subsequently. And it’s out of this history that the Choli people recognize the importance of forgiveness in resolving conflicts. African societies were also very communal and hospitable societies. This is something that foreigners that traveled into Africa have written about very often. For example, one Greek writer who went to Nubia wrote that the Nubians lived in houses that didn’t have doors and no one stole any of the items that were left out in the streets.
10:09AThe Arab travelers that went into Mali, which is in West Africa, they also frequently wrote about the lack of theft and the security they found there. In South Africa, Europeans that lived among the Zulus made similar comments about the security and the lack of theft there. So wherever foreigners traveled into Africa, they found a society that was very well organized and in which there was great security and great hospitality. These weren’t savages running around in the jungle eating people as we so often see. In cartoons and movies. So, um, the interesting thing though, African societies were very hospitable to the point where Europeans often accused Africans of being very lazy because they shared everything, especially food.
10:51AIt’s actually very commonplace that in many African societies, a man’s social status was partly judged by the amount of food and drinks he could provide to guests that happened to wander into his house. The communal nature of African society also made it particularly easy to be conquered. I came across one example of this in the Congo. There was a chief named Mujimba. Mujimba had heard that some Europeans were traveling into his country, so being the gracious host that he was, he decided he was going to put on his traditional outfit, get in some canoes with his people, and go out to meet the Europeans. Now these Europeans that were coming saw Mujimba and his people coming in canoes, And they assumed that they were coming to fight, so the Europeans immediately opened fire on Majimbo and his people, forcing them to retreat back into the village.
11:38AAnd the Europeans subsequently followed them into the village and proceeded to plunder the village. And these were the kind of people that took it upon themselves to go out and civilize the world because they saw these Africans here and they assumed that these Africans were savages that needed to be civilized. And it was this kind of thing that happened to African society over a period of 500 years that subsequently resulted in the decline that we see today. And one of the most damaging things that happened to Africa was the slave trade. The slave trade is actually how many of us even ended up here in the first place.
12:12AAnd there’s many myths and misconceptions about the slave trade, starting with the whole terminology, because it didn’t initially begin as a slave trade. What we know now as the transatlantic slave trade actually began in 1444 When the Portuguese launched a raid along the west coast of Africa, this is how the slave trade started. They were just going to the west coast and raid. Eventually they realized that it was easier to just trade in slaves rather than have to go and fight people and raid a village to acquire slaves. So that’s how it became a trade. Africans didn’t really accept this, and we find very many examples of Africans resisting both slavery and the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic.
12:55A2 of the most famous examples of African monarchs to resist the slave trade in Africa was Afonso and Nzinga. They both ruled in the region of Africa that’s present-day Angola and the Congo. Now, Afonso was initially involved in the slave trade. He had sold some of his criminals and some of his war captives to the Portuguese slave traders. But what had happened was eventually the slave trade got out of his control and the slave traders actually started kidnapping some of his own people. Some of his relatives were actually even kidnapped and brought to Brazil to be enslaved. So Afonso took steps to attempt to suppress the slave trade in his country, but the Portuguese weren’t having any of that, so they resisted and even made an attempt to assassinate Afonso on one occasion.
13:40AAnd Nzinga, this was an African -- great African warrior queen, and she is known for fighting a war against the Portuguese that lasted nearly 4 decades. Now unfortunately, she wasn’t able to successfully defeat them, and the conflict resulted in a truce between both parties. But she’s remembered in African history as being among one of the great warrior queens and someone who fought relentlessly against the slave trade. Now there were also, like I said, we fought on this side of the Atlantic as well. There were hundreds of slave revolts throughout the Americas. In Guyana, where I’m from, There was a particular slave rebellion led by an African man named Kofi, although in Guyana his name has been anglicized to become Coffey.
14:25AKofi led a band of Africans who fought the Dutch, who at the time were in control of that colony, and they actually managed to establish an independent nation of their own within Ghana. And this was actually very commonplace throughout the Americas when slaves fought, typically they weren’t only fighting for their freedom, they were also fighting to take over the countries in which they were enslaved. The best example of this is Palmares in Brazil. The Africans there established what they call the Maroon Society, which is a society established by runaway slaves. Palmares was a separate nation of itself within Brazil, so they had their own system of government, they had their own economy, they even had their own language.
15:10AIn Jamaica too, we find Maroon societies, and similar to Palmares, they were able to establish these runaway societies. But the difference is, whereas in Palmares the Portuguese were able to destroy that society, the Maroons in Jamaica were actually able to fight off the British and maintain their independent settlements. Now aside from the Maroons, Jamaica also has a history of rebellion. We see rebellions such as one led by a man named Tacky, another one led by Sam Sharpe. Sam Sharpe’s rebellion is particularly notable because it was the largest slave rebellion in the British West Indies. This rebellion was so large and impactful that it actually forced the British government to end slavery much earlier than they had originally planned to.
15:54ASam Sharpe’s revolt also was the last in a series of revolts that were taking place in the British West Indies, one of which was in Barbados led by a man named Bussa. Bussa too was attempting to completely take over the country. Other slave revolts we find in the West Indies is one led by a man named Julien Fedon in Grenada. In Saint Croix, there was a revolt led by a man named Buddhoe, who as a result of his slave revolt actually forced the Danish government at the time that was in control of Saint Croix to abolish slavery much faster than they had intended to. See, what was happening is European countries were beginning to realize that they couldn’t hold these Africans as slaves forever, so they wanted to gradually abolish slavery, but Africans fought and kept fighting until slavery was abolished as quickly as possible.
16:45ANow we can’t talk about slave revolts in the West Indies without mentioning Haiti, Haiti being the only place in the West Indies where Africans were able to successfully overthrow the slave masters and establish a republic of their own. Now, the slave revolts in South America and the West Indies tended to be more organized and larger than the ones that we find in the United States. But in the United States, there’s also a very long history of revolting against slavery. There was a movie that came out last year. I don’t know how many of you saw it. It was called Birth of a Nation. And this movie was about the revolt led by Nat Turner, which was one of the bloodiest slave uprisings in the United States.
17:25AOther slave uprisings in the United States included one led by a man named Madison Washington. He was on board a slave ship that was transporting him, and he just -- he managed to take control of the ship and then have the ship sail to the Bahamas. Now, at the time, slavery was already abolished in the Bahamas, so he essentially took control of the ship and sailed into a country where he could spend the rest of his life as a free man. There was also the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, which actually predated the American Revolution. So here in the United States, we actually have Africans fighting for their rights, for liberty, and for freedom even before, you know, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the other so-called Founding Fathers were fighting for their liberty.
18:09AAnd the largest slave revolt in the United States actually took place in New Orleans in 1811. So there’s this long tradition of rebellion, and when we’re talking about rebellion against slavery in the United States particularly, we can’t talk about rebellion against slavery without mentioning a woman known as the Moses of her people because she liberated so many Africans. And this woman was Harriet Tubman, who was herself a slave. She ran away from the slave plantation, but it wasn’t enough for her to secure her own freedom. She made multiple trips back to the slave plantations and she freed multiple slaves. She also fought in the Civil War.
18:48AShe was a spy for the Union Army. Now, there’s a lot of misconceptions about the Civil War, one of which is this idea that the war was fought to end slavery. Now, if you read Abraham Lincoln’s own words on the war, he specifically says his goal is to preserve the Union, and he says if he could preserve the Union without abolishing slavery, he was willing to do so. Harriet Tubman held a different view. She said, God won’t let Abraham Lincoln win this war until he abolishes slavery. So subsequently, what ended up happening was Abraham Lincoln did announce the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery in the Confederate States.
19:26AAnd subsequently, the Union did win the war. But like Tubman said, Lincoln did not win the war before abolishing slavery. Thank you. Now Tubman had joined a man named Martin Delany during the Civil War to recruit for an all-black regiment that Martin Delany had proposed. Martin Delany is another interesting person in the history of revolt against slavery. Not only was he an abolitionist, he was also a very intelligent man. He was the first black field officer in the history of the American Army and also one of the first black people to be accepted into Harvard’s medical program. Now, when I’m speaking here about rebellion against slavery, I don’t only want to speak of it in terms of forceful rebellion or violent rebellions, which is one of the reasons why I mentioned culture.
20:16ACulture was one of the ways in which Africans had rebelled. And despite the attempt to strip African people of their culture, a lot of African culture still remained. Now, how many here are blues fans? Blues fans? OK. So I’m sure you’re familiar with Robert Johnson and the whole legend behind him selling his soul to the devil. Now, most people would hear the story -- and for those of you who aren’t familiar, the legend is that Robert Johnson, this famous blues player, had sold his soul to the devil in return for his great music skills. So most of you will hear the story and think that the devil involved in this transaction Is Satan, the Satan of Christianity.
20:56AIn actuality, the devil being referred to here is Legba, a West African spirit. See, the legend goes that Robert sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Legba, in the West African religious tradition, is the guardian of the crossroads, the crossroads between the living and the dead. Moreover, the devil at the crossroads is always depicted as an old man that walks with a limp. Legba is also depicted as an old man that walks with a limp. And finally, the reason why one would sell their soul to the devil or this Legba to get musical skills is because within the West African tradition, Legba was the most talented of all the spirits in terms of playing instruments.
21:37AHe could play any instrument. So it’s in little subtle ways like this that we see how the African culture has survived in the diaspora. Despite the attempts to suppress their culture. One of my favorite examples that I’d love to speak on about this is the Creole dialects that we have. How many of you here speak a Creole language? Creole languages are mostly spoken in the West Indies, although in the United States, in the southern states, we have an English Creole called Gullah, and Louisiana has French Creole languages. Now these French Creole languages are essentially a blend of the European language that Africans were forced to speak and the African language themselves.
22:18AAnd as such, we find a lot of African influence in these 3 languages. For example, in the West Indies, when you’re bidding farewell to someone, we would traditionally say, walk good, as a means to tell them farewell. This is actually a very common phrase in West and Central Africa. For example, in Lingala, you’d say, kende ke malamu, which means go good. Another example is the word nyam, which means eat. We use that in West Indian Creole as well as in the Gullah Creole. This word exists in many West African and Central languages. And in those languages, the word also refers to eating or to food.
22:56ASo let’s use Lingala as an example again. And I use this often because that’s the African language I’m most familiar with. But in Lingala, the word nyama means meat. Another example is the word uno. Uno is a word used in Jamaican Patois and in Gullah Creole. That word means you all, and it’s an Igbo word coming from the Igbo people of Nigeria. And also in the French Creole languages, we find this influence. In many West and Central African countries, and I mention West and Central Africa because that’s where the majority of enslaved Africans came from, In those societies, there typically wasn’t -- what we’d have here is that we separate the pronouns in terms of gender, so we have, you know, he and she, separate words for those pronouns.
23:46ABut in those societies, they had what they’d call a gender-neutral pronoun, which was one word for both pronouns. So again, to use Lingala as an example, a means either he or she. So if I were to say -- A. As a li, I’m talking about he is or she is, depending on who I’m speaking about in that speech. Now, this tradition survives too in the French Creole languages that are spoken in a number of locations such as Louisiana, Haiti, Saint Lucia, Martinique. Even Trinidad actually does have a French Creole language. In those languages, they would say either li or i, and again, this is a gender-neutral pronoun that means either he or she depending on who you’re talking about.
24:29ASo we see how African culture survives in many subtle ways that aren’t completely apparent. There’s a musician from Trinidad named Choktas. Choktas said once that you don’t have to take a plane to Ghana to see Africa. And the point he was making was that we brought so much of our culture with us that we had essentially brought Africa. with us. So if you really want to see Africa, you didn’t have to basically go to Africa. For example, you could go to Congo Square, which is in Louisiana. Or you can go to the West Indies during the carnival time. And there you’ll find Africans participating in what’s essentially the traditional festivals that you’d find all throughout West Africa, including Nigeria.
25:18AOK. And not only did her culture survive, but her connection to Africa survives. Earlier I mentioned Martin Delany. Martin Delany had partnered with a man named Robert Campbell who was from Jamaica. What they had done is they went on an exploration throughout Nigeria. They were looking for a settlement established for Africans in the Western Hemisphere to return back home to Africa. Now Martin Delany ultimately lost interest in these plans for resettlement because the Civil War had broken out in the United States. So he’d come here and involve himself in those politics. But Robert Campbell decided that he was going to return to Africa and live there permanently.
26:00AAnd among his endeavors that he undertook while he was living in Africa, which included -- he had established a scientific academy to educate people there on scientific discoveries. He’d also established many businesses, including a brick-making business. And Robert Campbell wasn’t the only African from the Western Hemisphere to return back to Africa to make a contribution. There was another African-American woman named Emma White. She went to a place called Opobo, which is located also in Nigeria, and she established a school there and became a teacher. She also changed her name to Emma Jaja in honor of King Jaja, who was at the time king of Opobo. Ethiopia is actually a very common country for Africans that wanted to return home.
26:51AAfter the Italians had defeated -- excuse me, after the Ethiopians had defeated the Italians, making Ethiopia the only African country to successfully defeat European colonizers and retain their independence, many Africans came to Ethiopia to use their skills to contribute to developing that country. Some examples of this included a man named Benito Sylvain. He was a Haitian who served as somewhat of an ambassador to Menelik. He represented Menelik at the Pan-African Conference that was held in 1900. They had a very famous Pan-African Conference in England that year, which the purpose of the conference was to unite people of African descent throughout the world. So he served as Menelik’s representative at that conference.
27:40AAnd there’s another man named Joseph Vettalian. He was from Guadeloupe. He served as the director for the Menelik II Hospital in Ethiopia, that being the first hospital established in Ethiopia. Now we can’t speak about the connection between Africa and Africa diaspora without mentioning Marcus Garvey, who had an organization called the Universal Negro Improvement Association. This was the largest Pan-African organization ever established. His organization had branches in over 40 different, different countries throughout the world, many of which were in Africa. Now the interesting thing about Marcus Garvey is that he never set foot in Africa, yet he had a profound impact there. One of the examples of his impact in Africa is, um, he had designed a flag, the red, black, and green flag.
28:32AI’m actually wearing some of the colors right here. And he designed this to be the colors of the African race. And today, a number of African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and South Sudan actually have those colors in their national flag. Burkina Faso’s national flag has red and green because the president, Thomas Sankara, figured that they’re already in Africa, the black in the flag isn’t necessary because, you know, Burkina Faso being a country of black people. So that’s the way that Marcus Garvey was able to influence Africa. Now, something that we often forget is that the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the 1950s and 1960s, actually coincided with Africa’s independence movement from colonialism.
29:18AAnd here too we see the continuing impact of Marcus Garvey, who Although he did not live to see it, he always spoke of one day Africa being liberated from colonial rule and united. The man who had most been impacted by Garvey’s teachings in this regard was Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Nkrumah had essentially spearheaded this movement towards independence of Africa, and Nkrumah wasn’t just satisfied with the independence of Ghana, his own country. His vision was the complete independence and unification of Africa. He dreamed of the United States of Africa. And Nkrumah said that his biggest inspiration was Marcus Garvey. Now again, this is a man born in Jamaica who never stepped foot in Africa, and here he is essentially inspiring one of the most important political movements to come out of Africa since colonialism.
30:13AIdeas of Pan-Africanism, of African unity, and reconnecting the African diaspora with the African continent also impacted many figures in the civil rights movement. Malcolm X, for example, after he broke with the Nation of Islam, established an organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which was modeled after the Organization of African Unity. Malcolm’s goal with this organization was to unite the different people of African descent throughout the Western Hemisphere, because as he defined the term Afro-American, not only being the Africans in the United States, but Africans throughout the Americas, because, you know, the Americas isn’t just the United States. We have a North America, Central America, and South America.
30:55ASo he wanted to unite people of African descent across this hemisphere and then link up those people with Africans. To achieve this goal, one of the things that Malcolm did was actually he held meetings with various heads of state in Africa, including Kwame Nkrumah. The two had a meeting. And again, we see the profound impact that Marcus Garvey had because Malcolm X, his parents were members of the Garvey movement and he grew up around that environment. Later on, when he established his own organization, Malcolm consciously connected what he was, what he was doing with what Marcus Garvey had attempted to do. So as a people, although we’ve been separated from Africa for about 400, 500 years, that connection had always been there.
31:42ASo in conclusion, I hope you guys leave here tonight with a different understanding of African history. Not only from the perspective of the accomplishments that African people have made within American history, but also the accomplishments that African people have made throughout the world because we are a global people. And as Martin Luther King once said, We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. We are a proud people with a great history from Africa to the Americas. Thank you. Thank you.
