HomeOld_PostsThe black renaissance: Part One

The black renaissance: Part One

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THE word ‘renaissance’ literally means acquiring a new interest in something, especially a particular form of art, music and so on, that has not been popular for a long time.
This could apply to the art itself or the individual or people who have acquired this new interest.
Civilisation is like a relay in which the baton of development, sophistication and literacy and so on can be passed from one people to another.
In the beginning, blacks from East Africa began making fire, stone tools as well as hunting, gathering and rock painting.
From their knowledge sprang other civilisations in Asia and North Africa, particularly in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
There the achievements of the early humans were retained and cultivation, irrigation, construction, smelting, livestock rearing and writing were added to the list of human abilities.
When the descendants of the Egyptians and other groups in the Sahara migrated to sub-Saharan Africa, they retained most of what they had developed in the Sahara.
They found the early humans comprising the Bushmen still hunting and gathering and not exposed or in need of the skills that the blacks of the Sahara had acquired due to necessity.
This did not mean the Bushmen namely, the Khoi Khoi and also the Pygmy had no ability to learn but one should wear a shoe that fits.
The Egyptians, owing to scarcity of rain, had to cultivate and irrigate.
A population boom resulted and they had to rear livestock and construct buildings to house the people.
These projects required calculations and this led to the development of numerals and letters for recording purposes.
This is a gradual process that may not have been compatible with the people of sub-Sahara who had plenty of space, game, wild fruit and nut trees, among others.
The Egyptian civilisation did not only change or influence sub-Saharan Africa but also neighbouring groups like the Hebrew.
Exposure is a key tool to development.
Even white nations like Greece, which is remembered as the first white civilisation in history, acquired most of its knowledge from groups like the Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Babylonians and Indians.
These were black civilisations and only after Alexander the so called great, who also had black ancestry, colonised these lands did the Greeks get exposed to what the West revered them for.
They sent scribes to translate everything they could get their hands on in the places they colonised before they destroyed the original literature.
This would give them a head start and hold back other nations that were doing well prior to them.
This process was called ‘hellenising’ and even if one wanted to follow an art which was indigenous, they had to do so in the Greek language and this gave a false impression or illusion that Greeks were civilisers.
Alexander himself was so amazed at what he saw in Egypt, Babylon, Persia and India to the extent he never returned to Greece again but chose to live in Babylon where he eventually died.
There was nothing in Greece worth returning to.
Greek writing was rooted in Hebrew while mathematics and medicine were rooted in Egypt, among other sources.
Even the Greeks did not return to their homeland until they were eventually chased off militarily, further proving that they had everything to gain by leaving Europe for Africa and Asia.
After the Greeks came the Romans.
They inherited the knowledge that had been passed down gradually, beginning with the earliest humans in Africa.
Even religion was usurped from the area previously known as north-east Africa where the likes of Abraham used to stay.
From there came Greek Judaism and Roman Christianity which were attempts by these Western nations to fit in with the indigenous people who encapsulated spirituality in their cultures.
This was not considered religiosity until there came foreign entities that had to study this spirituality in order to understand it.
From this process came Judaism and Catholicism after the Greeks and the Romans failed to destroy the indigenous beliefs through hellenising.
Although the Greeks and Romans flourished after their exposure to eastern sophistication, there was a fall back of progress in development the world over.
The founders of the arts and skills had been stripped of their knowledge by a usurper who neither improved nor increased on their literal booty.
This was until the time of the blacks of Arabia called ‘Moro’ (black) by the Romans.
Most Arabians were illiterate and there was no Arabian alphabet or writing but a common Shemitic script which originated in western Asia and was the mother of Syrian Aramaic and Paleo Hebrew.
There was also a Sabaic script used by Judaic Sabaeans in southern Arabia and this had its origins in Paleo Hebrew.
It was only in the time of Prophet Muhammad that the Shemitic script and Sabaic were combined by Muhammad to express the Arabic language in the book now known as the Quran.
It was the first literal work from an Arabian in Arabic and its popularity led to the spread of Arabic to the places that the Moors reached, including Spain, Egypt, Syria, Iran (Persia) and Iraq (Babylon).
The Moors sought for world knowledge and achieved the first black renaissance because they brought back the knowledge that had been lost by the blacks to the Greeks and the Romans.
Not only did the Moors achieve this, but they also improved many aspects of civilisation and pioneered previously unheard of skills such as surgery.
In this period, knowledge and wisdom flourished in our continent and such historic constructions like the Great Zimbabwe were built in the same style as the Moors.
Even the conical tower which was called a minaret by the Moors was a key Moorish symbol which can be found on the top of Mosques such as the Dome Rock built in Jerusalem.
The conical towers and bricklaying techniques identical to that of Zimbabwe are found in southern Arabia (Sheba-Yemen), proving a link between the Moors and the Zimbabwean civilisation.
Timbuktu, one of the first institutions of higher learning, also had a symbol of a conical tower on top of a pyramid.
The Moors also reached as far east as south-east Asia and they brought back with them the inventions of China, including silk and the compass.
After the downfall of the Moors in Granada, Spain, in 1492 CE came what is remembered as the European renaissance.
The Romans had been trying to oust the Moors from Europe and the Holy site of Jerusalem since around 1000 CE in the time of Pope Urban.
This led to the crusades which were essentially military expeditions that the Pope ordered the Caucasian whites, known as Barbarians at that time, to carry out.
They were largely unsuccessful but eventually, when the Moors lost power in Spain, the Catholic Church tried once again to become the world rulers.
The Catholic Church carried out the Spanish Inquisition which entailed killing and enslaving any Moors who refused to convert to Catholicism and destroying all the Arabic literature they found.
This was reminiscent of Greek hellenising.
The Moors who escaped to western Africa from Spain and Portugal were eventually followed and shipped first to Europe and then to the Americas to become slaves.
This is when the decline of our once sophisticated civilisations began. Labour and brain-drain occurred for about 400 years as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave kidnappings.
The large number of blacks in the West is testament to the large extent to which our continent was robbed of its most precious resource — black people.
After the advent of Christopher Columbus and the invasion of the Americas, Spain and Portugal sought to dominate the world with the Catholic Church on its back.
However, they were overtaken by the English Barbarians who, likewise, based their civilisations on what they had been exposed to by the Moors of Spain.
Even the building of the US was done by the hands of the black captives who were, for the most part, descendants of the Moors.

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