By Nthungo YaAfrika
LET us look at the word ‘modern’ from the colonisers’ perspective.
It means relating to the present or recent times or using the most up-to-date technology, marked by a departure from traditional styles and values.
Modern history – history from the end of the Middle Ages to the present – starts, ironically, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (5th Century) to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or more narrowly, from 1000-1453 AD.
Where do modern Africans fit in the above description of the word ‘modern’?
What is glaringly clear to me is that Africans calling themselves ‘modern’ do so because they have departed from traditional styles and values of their ancestors.
The race, Caucasians, which is setting the pace today, was so ignorant and blind to geography in 1427 that they thought the world only consisted of Europe, Asia and just a part of Northern Africa, meaning they were not sailors of note.
They did not know that the Americas and Australia existed, from the time of the Middle Ages, the beginning of what they call their modern history.
It means that their understanding of world geography started during the time of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, in the 15th and 16th centuries.
That is why they called their voyages ‘discovery’ because they were discovering themselves and how they related to the world.
This is the time they realised that the world was a globe.
Our race, being the first to be created, was well-aware of world geography.
That is why black people are found in all continents of the globe.
Greeks, who are the darlings of the white race, the foundation of white supremacy, who the world still think are the founders of civilisation, were just copycats, educated by black Africans and, in the process, stealing their legacy.
The so-called Greek philosophers — starting from Thales, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Xeno, Heraclitus, Pythogoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, among others — just plagiarised black African philosophy.
How many modern Africans know this?
Many will profess ignorance, saying they never majored in history.
One can never claim to be ‘modern’ if one does not know his/her history.
This is the painful, undiluted truth.
In a nutshell, without self-knowledge, one can not claim to be a modern person.
The Greeks never created philosophy.
They stole it from the Egyptians who were black people.
Now let us go back to the so-called modern Africans who have willingly discarded their culture and heritage for a foreign one.
How many of them know about the Dogon of Mali?
According to two French anthropologists, Doctors’ Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who had contact with the Dogon from 1931-60: “They live in the Homburi Mountains near Timbuktu.
At the centre of their religious teaching is knowledge about a star, the Sirius Star, that is invisible to the eye and so difficult to observe — even through a telescope — that no photographs were taken of it until 1970.
The Dogon say they received their knowledge from visitors who came to the earth from another star system.”
Our race is being led by ‘false prophets’; Western academics and intellectuals who only mimick the master’s voice.
I will argue the Dogon are more modern than the so-called ‘modern Africans’.
They (the Dogon) have original knowledge which modern science is struggling to understand.
They will forever be ahead of our generation that is fond of praising and
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mimicking, while denigrating themselves.
The story of the Sirius Star was brought to the attention of the West by Doctors Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen.
How many in Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa know why The Great Zimbabwe was built?
And how many in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa know that Axum contains the Cathedral of St Mary of Zion, one of the world’s oldest Cathedral, dating to the 4th Century.
There would be no xenophobia in Southern Africa if people were taught that the land mass from South Africa to Mozambique was under one Emperor called Mwenemutapa.
The current borders were arbitrarily imposed on us by whites.
We are actually one people.
Africa was modern before the white people came to our continent.
This is what Europeans said about Africa 500 years ago: “What is this town with wide straight roads, its houses of two storeys built in a style that instantly arrest the eye?
I am completely bewildered.
What is this civilisation, sufficiently assured, a manner and style of its own?”
This was extracted from When we Ruled the World by Robin Walker.
Professor Leo Frobenus, in his works which appeared in 1936 Histoire de la Civilisation Africaine, writing about Guinea 500 years ago: “For days they travelled through a country of magnificent fields inhabited by men clad in richly coloured (clothes) of their own weaving.
Further south in the Kingdom of Congo, swarming crowds dressed in silk and velvet, great styles, flourishing industries, civilised to the bone and marrow.”
The Portuguese researcher, Cavazzi de Montecudolo, in his book Historical Description of the Three Kingdoms of Congo, Matamba and Angola (published 1687), said hieroglyphics were used in these States.
In the 14th Century, Great Zimbabwe housed 18 000 people comparable to that of London of the same period.
The building housed warehouses and shrines.
Its industries included 4 000 gold mines, iron smelting, copper and bronze manufacture.
Our ancestors, we are so fond of despising and denigrating, had a glorious history which the ex-slavers and colonisers envied, could not understand it, therefore destroyed it.
The whiteman’s history says Africa had no indigenous writing systems before he arrived because the whiteman, in his ignorance, thought Egypt was not part of Africa.
In Cameroon, the Bamum Palace has over 7 000 documents, many of which predate the arrival of the first European in 1902.
The documents are written in African languages and transcribed in an indigenous African writing system – the Bamum script.
One book chronicles the Bamum perspective, the arrival of the first German military officer and trader.
Other books are devoted to traditional medicine, the art of love and the founding of the Bamum Kingdom and the religion that fuses Christianity, Islam and African religion.
Clearly, those whom we deem uncivilised, backward, unsophisticated or pagan were, and are still, ahead of this self-praising generation of our time, who are ignorant of our glorious past, which is still way ahead of us.
Has this generation achieved anything of note for the past 62 years after Ghana’s independence, the first sub-Saharan country to attain independence?
The so-called modern Africans are always saying they are part of the global village – the global village that is sucking us dry through unfair trade policies, holding us in perpetual bondage and humiliating poverty.
It reminds of what the late Malcolm X said to his fellow black Americans: “You call yourselves Americans, but you do not enjoy the benefits of being an American.”
No self-respecting African can deny that we are the doormat of the global village.
They elevate some of us to the top, to do their dirty work for them on the continent, but the so-called ‘modern Africans’ are totally blind to what is happening around them, hearing not and seeing no evil around.
The so-called ‘modern Africans’ claim to be religious and our continent has more prophets, churches, mosques, sheiks, preachers and apostles than any other continent on this planet, yet they don’t practice James 1 verses 26-27: “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.”
Our ancestors were more advanced than we will ever be.
Their science and religion is today propelling the white race to dizzy heights we so envy.
But the white race is not using that technology the way it is meant to be used.
Science and technology that is not humane and is based on profits, making the majority poor and destitute, destroy nature and is anti-Creator.
Modern yes, but this modernity is harming and making the only place we call home, the earth, very sick.
Our ancestors left us a healthy African continent.
So how modern are we?
Nthungo YaAfrika, aka J.L. Mtembo is a Hamite who strongly believes in the motherland renaissance.