WHEN Christopher Columbus set foot on Western lands, now called the Americas, he and his European counterparts, called conquistadors, found the lands already inhabited.
There were blacks both of wooly hair, as the typical African, and also straight haired blacks, like those found in India among the Tamil.
There were communities of Mongols who had crossed over the Bering Strait from the Far East, but these were thinly populated as they had come more recently.
The majority of Indians who were killed and some shipped to places like Seville, Spain, to be slaves were indistinguishable to the African and called ‘niggers’ once they arrived on European slave markets.
These blacks had the earliest history in the Americas and built ancient stone cities which contained notable colossal Olmec heads, pyramids, towers and mounds. They were known as the mound-builders and were rulers and priests of the land when Europeans arrived in 1492 CE.
These made up the Mayan, Arawak, Yamasee, Aztec populations and so on, which numbered in their hundreds of millions.
It is a myth that Red Indians were the sole inhabitants of the land and were completely annihilated.
The so-called Red Indians were Mongols who were not targeted for slavery and elimination and are akin to the Inuit Eskimos of Alaska.
These Mongols have been attributed a history of suffering by whites which actually belongs to the black-skinned Indians of the Americas whose surviving descendants have been convinced their history began with slavery and they were not indigenous to the land.
These black Indians are now mixed with the Africans who were eventually brought in through ships during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade period.
By the time slavery was legalised in 1600s CE, the indigenous blacks of the Americas had been killed or dispersed from the whites into hiding.
Both the indigenous blacks from America and those from West African coasts had their history and identity systematically wiped out so as to reduce them to slaves without a memory of greatness, but servitude.
In the Negro Acts of the US, blacks are called ‘niggers’ because of their colour, but those who were to be recognised as slaves were the descendants of the ancient Berbers who fled from southern Europe to West Africa after the fall of the Moors in Granada in 1492 CE.
These were tracked down and followed by Europeans to be taken away on slave ships from their new communities along the West African coasts.
The rest of the Africans were kidnapped when the demand for slaves increased and the business of slavery reached its peak.
Slaves could not read, for it was forbidden for them to do so, and these Negro Acts were meant for whites to picture any blackman in the US as a slave from Africa.
This was not entirely true because many blacks were indigenous, but this would not play out well in stipulating a clear social hierarchy that favoured whites in the US.
In places like New York – Manhattan, whites had not yet acquired all the land from the Indians even as late as the 19th Century and some of the Indian lords of the land were indeed black-skinned.
They remembered their history and tried as best as they could to teach it to their descendants.
Eventually, the last of these black Indians were forced to sell their land for trinkets to the whites after a lot of pressure and trickery.
One of the black Indians of Manhattan, which was formerly known as Shinnecock Bay, was known as Warren Cufee.
He taught his children that the whiteman had tricked them into selling Manhattan for decorative objects and items of jewellery of little value.
Before whites came, they had lived in that land for countless generations.
In Cufee’s time, the area called Wall Street today was divided, with whites settling on one end and Indians on the other until the latter eventually gave in.
However, to this day, descendants of these Shinnecock Indians still live in that area and are classified as blacks.
In the mid-1990s, a descendant of these Indians would make a mark in music and black history when he shot to stardom and retold history as he understood it from his up-bringing.
His name was Russell Jones, born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 15 1968. He would eventually be known by the alias ‘Ol’ Dirty Bastard’ (ODB).
His mother was the daughter of Warren Cufee.
Jones’ father was the son of a legendary black man called Reverend Millington who founded the first Baptist Church in New York after fleeing from slavery. Millington would relate the stories of the slavery days to his descendants and died at the old age of 103.
Millington’s son married the daughter of Cufee and conceived Russell Jones and his many siblings.
These two historic legacies gave Jones a double heritage which he often expressed in his song lyrics.
Ironically, Warren Cufee, the Shinnecock Indian, was much darker in complexion than Reverend Millington who was a descendant of the captives of Africa.
People like Jones who had Indian and Negro blood were recognised in the Negro Acts of the US as mestizos and classified differently from mulattos who had European and Negro blood.
Jones grew up in poverty like most blacks of New York.
His ancestral heritage was what he treasured the most.
As a youth, he swore to his mother he was going to take back Manhattan from the whiteman.
In the 1990s, Jones teamed up with like-minded black youths from his community and formed a rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan.
This group comprised Jones (ODB), Robert Diggs (RZA), Clifford Smith (Method-Man), Gary Grice (GZA), Corey Woods (Raekwon), Jason Hunter (Inspector Deck), Dennis Coles (Ghost-Face Killa), Jamal Turner (Master Killa) and Lamont Hawkins (U-God).
All these were lyricists and rappers and Diggs was the chief producer who composed most of their instrumentals.
According to Jones’ oral history, black people are the ordained gods or rulers of the earth.
The rest of his entourage had studied their history extensively and found what Jones was saying to be a historical fact and together, they went on a mission to educate the world about these things through rap music.
Jones’ worldview and perception of reality along with his slang (diction) and style of delivery were used as a blueprint and signature of the Wu-Tang Clan.
The Wu-Tang Clan members called each other gods along with other black men and they called black women goddesses.
They bragged about their blackness and spoke against white oppression.
They called whites devils from the Caucasus Mountains and cave barbarians in many of their songs.
On the closing of a popular black TV show called The Arsenio Hall show, Jones yelled repeatedly on the microphone: “The blackman is god!”
He repeated this at least seven times and is remembered by the black community of the US as the first person to be ever heard on national television saying those words.
With knowledge of their roots as indigenous Americans and ancient Berbers, the Wu-Tang Clan exposed the identity of the blacks of America.
They called themselves Afro-Asiatic and Islamic people, Moors, Hebrews and jinn (genies).
These terms were new to most blacks, but had been uncovered by the Wu-Tang Clan members through research guided by oral history that the likes of Jones possessed.
Unlike most other blacks, they did not believe black history began with slavery and returned to a more liberal way of thinking which put blacks at the very top and whites at the bottom.