“Africa’s re-emergency can’t be pinned down today, but as sure as the cycles of the sun, it is guaranteed.”
Moving on…
Whether we want to admit it or not, the world is deeply racialized, and that legacy still persists. The reasoning is fairly simple: the storytellers of history favour their kind.
They actualize history that was never there as long as it places them firmly at the helm.
However, their grip on the world is slowly diminishing. And their accounts are increasingly questioned.
I will not cite any resources in this text; I will leave that to you.
I will make statements based on human nature refuting one race’s superiority over the other.
Did you know that Mesoamerica was once a revered, mighty empire, the ruins of which still leave the world in awe? Did you know the same effect can be felt in Egypt, Persia and Rome?
And did you know that all of these nations primarily developed independently of each other despite having remarkable similarities?
How is that possible?
It is twofold; ideas are universal, and people have exchanged for aeons.
It is accepted within communities that two people could be worlds apart yet establish similar ideas and derivations.
It is a law of nature; ask around if you’ve never encountered this phenomenon!
This establishes the universality of ideas, which are precursors to inventions and systems.
What we today deem as the foundation of society is much more common than we’re comfortable believing.
You may be wondering about the connection between the title and the text so far. I will get to that.
There is an annoyance in our society that assumes that the ‘West’ is the cradle of civilization, an absence of which is just backwardness.
These people overlook that the world does not conform to, nor can it be Westernized.
Western is a fleeting concept already in doubt by its conveyors.
In the greater scheme of the world, it will remain in the history books alongside other past empires whilst the cycle moves onto a new paradigm aligned with the times at hand.
The world works in cycles, and civilizations come and go.
They are absorbed into the combined human paradigm without boundaries or separation.
When we think of Africa, we think of it comparatively. We compare it to the Euro-American experience and formulate conclusions from that.
We derive what Africa is from a standard called ‘the-west’. And this becomes a pervasive issue that we have to grapple with.
How Africans constructed boats, advanced maths, science, art, architecture, botany, astronomy, etc., is shadowed by the current perception of Africa.
I will unpack a bit about Africa and its centrality to the world.
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The cradle of humanity. The homeland of fire, the wheel, tools, human organization and the birth of villages.
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The home of the oldest art ever engraved on stone that required complex skill to carve on.
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The home of abstract thinking. Complex human thinking evolved here, which involved complex planning around hunting and preservation of food. The home of the earliest known food preservation practices.
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The home of language. Well, people had to communicate, didn’t they? This led to people such as Whitney Houston serenading the crowds with her singing many years later. She has these people to thank.
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The home of complex pottery making that symbolizes an advanced understanding of clay, granite, gold or whichever material was used. All were carved with grace as though they presented no difficulty at all to their masters.
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The land of the divine. Gods were first worshipped in Africa. We owe all our different faiths to these people.
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The land of the first writing. Ever heard of the hieroglyphs? Also, it is the land of the earliest uses of maths and science to construct the temples.
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The land of balance. Africans carry cultures that straddle the breadth and width of Human tolerance – From the Gabonese, who have mastered sacred practices and the Maasai with Human and Animal balance, to the Khoe, who just beam with humanness and custodians of ubuntu. The world will look to Mesoamerica and Africa for remnants of the human condition that will help our advancement.
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The land of Boat builders and explorers.
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The land of some of the earliest buildings ever constructed.
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The jewel in jewellery.
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Where culture first persisted.
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The home of medicine and people who treat and carry every ailment imaginable. The most diverse people on earth. Imagine the medicine invented here to cater for all these people.
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The land of agriculture. Pastoralism can’t possibly have started anywhere else.
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The oldest people on earth and the traditional teachers of humanity.
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People whose conquests (not always negatively) are inscribed in every corner of the world. So imposing that they(whoever they are) sought to diminish it.
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People to whom new patents are attributed to, formerly given to their rulers. From foldable chairs to new ways of ploughing the land. Africans invented many things. If the one-drop rule is strictly adhered to, then Africans have directly created everything.
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The first observers of the stars.
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A world endowed with the oldest knowledge carried by people. From spirituality to anything that you deem important[emphasis on anything].
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The mediators of world affairs. Whether the East and the West are at the brim of war, their shared interest in Africa forces them to cooperate.
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The people whose genes have adapted to all the environments of the world.
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Masters of Meroe, Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu and the Nile civilization, ending beyond Egypt.
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The first fisher(wo)men.
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The first storytellers.
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The first wood carvers.
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The parents to the Greeks and New World adventurers.
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The aliens to whom the conspirators attribute the Pyramids.
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The first governors.
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The first smelters.
If I am to compile all of the points streaming in my mind, then I will easily cross beyond two hundred points. But that is not the point of this writing.
I am alerting the world of their ignorance of Africa and, subsequently, parts of their history.
Africa has enough to function on its own.
Indeed, it is a world unfairly favoured and endowed with mineral wealth, a favourable climate, fruitful lands and more.
The same can’t be said about the world; they need this land’s resources to function. Although human ingenuity can work around any limitation.
Phones, computers, furniture and others are manufactured en-masse from the minerals shipped to China and the West daily, some of which I have seen firsthand. And even in those plants, Africans are ingeniously involved.
I am happy that ignorance is diminishing since its grip has been so disenfranchising. People deserve to know in order to negotiate a new world that is fair to all of us.
Africa is re-emerging; it has begun trading and will build a new civilization in a hundred years or so to come that will stun the world as much as Egypt did.
You may also be interested in one of my earliest posts: How Africans view China and what it means!
Bye.
