What if our public and private schools taught African history and African-American history as vigorously as they fill our heads and hearts with European history? Would the world be a better place?
Many sociologists, economists, political scientists and historians have traditionally deprived African Americans of a role in shaping their world. Self-hatred is so invasive in our community. Millions of black youths are tragically disconnected from the American mainstream.
Is it the negative cultural attitudes and public policies that most directly affect the lives of black people, or is it a lack of knowledge of black history? Self-hatred can devastate a person and their desire to learn their history, and totally destroy the desire to teach our youth.
To understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics and culture in the African-American world, we must place a motivating grasp on black cultural studies, past, present and future.
What if the children of the Blaxploitation and Superfly era knew of the accomplishments of their ancestors? Would they have embraced Mansa Musa in place of Shaft or The Mack? Would today’s youth aspire to be more like Imhotep rather than Eminem, or Amina queen of Zazzua rather than Queen Latifah? What about Kwame Nkrumah instead of Notorious B.I.G.? Would one of our heroines be Nzinga, queen of the Ndonga and Matamba, as opposed to Foxy Brown.?
The role Africans played in the development of modern civilization is essential to our survival. Perhaps Dr. Carter G. Woodson had the solution. He understood how important gaining a proper education is when striving to secure and make the most out of one’s divine right of freedom.
Woodson said, “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” He said, “The thought of’ the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.” He wrote, “To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”
We must also remember the words and actions of other scholars that use the power of teaching as an instrument of salvation and freedom.
Cheikh Anta Diop said, “Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.” He wrote, “A climate of alienation has a profound effect on the Black personality, particularly on the educated Black, who has the opportunity to see how the rest of the world regards him and his people. It often happens that the Black intellectual thus loses confidence in his own potential and that of his race. Often the effect is so crushing that some Blacks, Having the evidence to the contrary, still find it hard to accept the fact we really were the first to civilize the world.”
Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality was published in 1974. He proved that archaeological and anthropological evidence supported his view that Egyptian pharaohs were of Negro origin.
Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan said long before Adam and Eve there was an Africa and African people, with concepts that predated Abraham.
He said, “Your ancestors gave to the world the calendar in 10,000 B.C.E. (Before the common “Christian” Era). That is 8,000 years before Adam and Eve. And I will say again that there wasn’t a single European society in existence at that time.”
Perhaps if we read between all these lines we can overcome at least some of our problems and maybe even stop killing one another and perhaps make our ancestors proud.
Please listen the Bernie Hayes radio program Monday through Friday at 7am on WGNU-920 AM, and watch the Bernie Hayes TV program Saturday night at 10 p.m. and Friday Morning at 9 a.m. on KNLC-TV Ch. 24.
I can be reached by e-mail at berhay@swbell.net
Be Ever Wonderful!
Hotep!