Professors J. P Clark, Hope Eghagha and Ebun Clark

Europe, Not Africa Was the “Dark Continent”:

As has been noted, the Roman Empire completed the destruction of the Egyptian Mystery System. As the career of General Julius Caesar showed, Europeans and Romans were envious of the extraordinary achievements of Black Africans as epitomised by the grandeur of ancient Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia. For more than 3000 years when the African civilizations ruled the world, there were no nations and intellectual traditions in Europe. The Greeks who were the first European people to know civilization were students of Egyptians. The Romans took over from the Greeks and copied and adapted what the Greeks had learned from Egypt. Thus, every European military power that arose was determined to possess Egypt. The African American professor of history, Henrik John Clarke explains how the glories of Africa dazzled and awed Europe:

European have always been in contact with Africa, that is, Northern
Africa. The names of Esop, Memnon of Terence and Cleopatra are the
names of Africans who have featured in the legend and literature, the
arts and history of Greece and Rome. Indeed, the land of Africa was a
land of wonders for ancient Greeks and Romans; and this is to such an
extent that among them it was a proverb that out of Africa is always
something new. The concept of “darkest Africa” refers to the
comparative ignorance of Europeans over the last four centuries…
(“Introduction” to J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color, p. x).

The determination to subjugate Egypt was the reason why two Roman emperors – Theodosius in the 4th century and Justinian in the 6th – issued imperial edicts to impose the Christianity on all the Roman Empire which did not want a rival moral and intellectual order to challenge its supremacy. The imperials edicts also proscribed and abominated the existence of the Egyptian Mystery System which had prevailed globally for nearly 4,000 years. Consequently, all Egyptian Temples, Universities, and centres of learning and research were shut down. Their priests-professors and scholars were hounded and driven into exile and eventual extinction. Professor George James has a more graphic narrative of the demolition process:

…Ancient Rome,…through the edicts of her Emperors Theodosius in
4th century A.D. and Justinian in the 6th century A.D. abolished the
Mysteries of the African Continent; that is the ancient culture system
of the world. The higher metaphysical doctrines of those Mysteries
could not be comprehended; the spiritual powers of the priests were
unsurpassed; the magic of the rites and ceremonies filled the people
with awe; Egypt was the holy land of the ancient world and the
Mysteries were the one, ancient and holy Catholic religion, whose
power was supreme. This lofty culture system of the Black people
filled Rome with envy, and consequently she legalized Christianity
which she had persecuted for five long centuries, and set up as a
state religion and as a rival of Mysteries, its own mother. This is
why the Mysteries have been despised; this is why other ancient
religions of the Black people are despised; because they are all
offspring of the African Mysteries, which have never been clearly
understood by Europeans, and consequently have provoked their
prejudice and condemnation. In keeping with the plan of Emperors
Theodosius and Justinian to exterminate and forever suppress the
culture system of the African continent, the Christian church
established its missionary enterprise to fight against what it has
called paganism. Consequently, missionaries and educators have
gone to the mission field with a superiority complex, born of mis-
education and disrespect: a prejudice which has made it
impossible for them to accomplish the blessings which missionary
enterprise might otherwise have accomplished. For this reason
Missionary enterprise has been responsible for a positive injury
against the African people; which consists of the perpetual
caricature of African culture in literature and exhibitions which
provoke laughter and disrespect…(Stolen Legacy, pp. 154 – 155)

The Advent and Spread of Islam in Africa:

Cultural life in Europe was still in absolute darkness in the 8th century A.D. when Islam spread to Africa through Egypt and North Africa. Islam had been founded by Prophet Mohammed in 622 A.D. in Saudi Arabia. He claimed that the divine call to establish the faith was delivered by Angel Gabriel who also features in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity. The vision of equality of peoples and races that informs Islam shows that it shares roots with the ancient Egyptian Mysteries and the ideology of humanism in Black Africa. Prophet Mohammed devoted his religious movement to the emancipation of the oppressed and exploited masses of Arabia. This focus on the humanitarian issue of salvation from the yoke of oppression and servitude helped Islam to grow and expand in the Arabian peninsula. Like early Christianity, Islam employed the means of warfare and conquest to grow. This partly explains why the new religion was swiftly embraced in many places where the masses of the people yearned for liberation from poverty and class discrimination. As the Australian professor of history, Professor Blainey reports warfare was employed to take the Islamic religion within ten years of Mohammed’s leadership. By 632 when Mohammed died, Islam had spread to lands covering over 5,000 km from its place of nativity, adding that “after the death of Mohammed, his religion and his sword ruled from the fringes of Afghanistan in the east to Tripoli in the west.”

But in its formative years, the fortunes of the Islam were helped tremendously by the ingenuity of a black African Ethiopian, Bilal IbnRahab. Of all the early converts of Islam who were tortured by the Arabian authorities to recount and denounce Mohammed, Bilal was the only one who remained steadfast. He provided the early intellectual and artistic resources for the mobilisation of new converts to defend their faith against Arabian state terrorism. Described by J. A. Rogers as “a tall, gaunt, bushy-haired Ethiopian slave” Bilal was Islam’s high priest, poet laureate, and first Muezzin (Treasurer of Minister of Finance) of the world-wide religious empire. It was Bilal who composed the Islamic call to morning prayers (Allah, Akubah, “Allah is Great”) which is listened to every day by about one billion believers. He also composed the Islamic image of paradise, making it more alluring and tantalizing than that of Judaism and Christianity from which it is derived. The Islamic paradise does not only flow with milk and honey, it has, according to Rogers, “sumptuous palaces of pure gold, with great banquet tables to which thousands of attendants bore the choicest food on golden plates. Each (dead convert) was entitled to 300 dishes put before him at once, and he could eat of all of them without becoming sated or being subject to the usual demands of nature. In Rogers’ account Bilal used his poetic skills to create enchanting verses, adding that whenever Bilal “prayed, the crowds sobbed aloud. After listening to him the soldiers of Mohammed, whipped to frenzy, were ready to hurl themselves against any foe” (World’s Great Men of Color, p. 144). Before his death, Prophet Mohammed chose Bilal to be his successor, but he deftly declined and yielded place to Mohammed’s brother, Abubakar. Islam so valued the contribution of Africans to the growth and development of the religion that one of the books of the Holy Koran is named after Lokman, a black African genius of Ethiopian origin. His works of wisdom and proverbial lore numbered over 10,000 and they were copied, adapted, and plagiarized by European scholars such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Shakespeare for centuries.

As already noted Islam made rapid progress in Africa, because like early Christianity, it emphasized the equality of all people. Mohammed himself from a humble beginning promoted the dignity of all human beings and trans-class
brotherhood. As the editors of Modern World History(2001) observe, the “…belief in the bond of community and the unity of all people led to a tolerance of different groups within the community. Muslims were required by their religion to offer charity and help to those in need. Under Muslim law, rulers had to obey the dame laws as those they ruled (p. 14).

In Africa, the armies of the Islam encouraged inter-marriage between Africans and Arabs. This process produced people of mixed race or colour known as Moors in history. These Africans dominated the intellectual and military history of North Africa and the Mediterranean world for centuries. The English playwright, William Shakespeare wrote the play Othello: The Moor of Venice on the career of one of these black generals. The Moors took Islam across the Mediterranean to Western Europe from the seventh century A.D. These African-Arabs were in charge of religion, government and intellectual development of Western Europe; they established cities and the first universities in Europe in places such as Servlle in present-day Spain. They controlled much of what are now Spain, Portugal, and southern France. Through the agency of these African-Arabs Egyptian knowledge systems and Arabic scholarship was spread in Western Europe up till the 16th century when the Christian war of Crusades pushed them back to Africa. The original aim of the Crusades was to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control. There were six Crusades declared by Christendom and they lasted for 400 years. During those centuries of warfare and political turbulence, all of Europe remained largely a “dark continent”.

Islam in Africa did not only absorb African traditional systems such as polygamy in order to gain roots; Islam also developed intellectual centres as it did in Western Europe. The Alhazah University in Cairo, Egypt, and the University of Fez in Morocco are about 1000 years and are Africa’s oldest in the Christian era. By the 13th century Islam established centres of learning and universities in West African Kingdoms of Kanuri near Lake Chad, Mali and Songhai. The best known Islamic universities were those of Sankore and Timbuktu along the River Niger.

European Christianity, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade & Colonization:

From the 9th century A.D. Arab-Africans returned to their mother continent to enslave and plunder. The Trans-Indian Ocean slave trade lasted for several centuries. The inter-racial mingling arising from this tragic encounter has left its marks on the East African coastline, especially with the development of Swahili, a hybrid language from Arabic and Bantu languages. Genres of poetry and written literature in Swahili grew from this cultural exchange. About 50 million Swahili speakers are to be found in the countries of Somalia, Tanzania, Kenya, and the island nations in the area.

Europe awoke from its dark ages in the 15th century with the cultural movement known as Renaissance. This became possible only after the bloodshed and instability occasioned by the Crusades. Historians refer to the era of the Renaissance as the age of “Discovery” and “Enlightenment”. Through the Greeks, Romans, and Arab-Moors the excellent traditions of African scholarship and science had reached Europe. With the Renaissance, these ancient scientific and philosophical theories invented and perfected by Egyptian civilizations 4000 years earlier were plagiarized and revived. The thaw in conservative Christian superstition enabled scholars to question old orthodoxies, leading to the emergence of scientists like Galileo of Italy who invented the telescope. He reproduced the theory of the revolution of the earth around the sun. he was detained by the Pope and compelled to recount; but his ideas survived to guide trans-ocean travels of “discovery” such as that by Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492.

The European “discovery” of the Americas transformed the economic and political fortunes of European sea-faring nations like Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Holland. The wealth derived from the plunder of the American colonies swelled the economies of these nations, enabling them to invest in more education, scholarship, and industrial development. This was the age of European capitalism and it led to the holocaust of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that lasted for 400 years, 1450 – 1850. The African victims of the barbaric trade numbered 12.5 million. The church was fully involved in the slave trade and capitalist plunder of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. One of the Catholic Popes proclaimed the Papal Bull of Demarcation to divide the new worlds between rival Portugal and Spain. The law empowered the two nations to enslave anyone who refused to be converted to Christianity. For Europeans, the lure of profit overshadowed the moral injunctions Christianity and the ideology of humanism and equality of all preached by Jesus Christ. The slave trade horror dovetailed into the brutalities of colonization and massacre of indigenous peoples in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia. The accounts of these disasters are fairly well known. The African-Caribbean historian, Walter Rodney has a brilliant documentation in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

The end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 19th century ushered in the third coming of Christianity to Africa that cleared the way for European colonialism to take root. Starting with the Germans in the 19th century, the European intelligentsia designed fantastic theories of racial inferiority for Africans, their erstwhile teachers and master 5000 years before. Through these inhuman and unscientific postulations, Europeans dismissed Africa as a “dark continent” whose inhabitants were only good for enslaving, colonizing, and plunder. Leading European thinkers and church clerics laboured to justify the slave trade and the exploitation of African and peoples of other lands. Even Karl Mark (1818-1883) whose mother was from Algeria was victim of this ideology. He and his followers developed a theory of revolution of socialist overthrow of capitalism by the working and oppressed people. But they did not acknowledge Africa’s heritage in revolutionary reconstruction of oppressed and exploited peoples such as the Amarna socialist revolution in the second millennium B.C. led by Pharaoh Akhenaton of Egypt. That radical change in governance transformed social relations in ancient Egypt, spread welfare to the masses, and abolished the system of wars of conquest and plunder of victim nations. That revolutionary regime made Egyptian war generals and the exploiter priest castes idle and jobless; and they combined forces to defeat Akhenaton and his institutions of justice and welfare.

It should be understood that the racist ideology developed in Europe reached their most bizarre levels in the slave societies of the Americas. The long struggles of Africans against racial discrimination in Europe the United States of America and South America produced excellent traditions of Afrocentric scholarship and thinkers such as OlaudahEquinao, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, Elijah Mohammed, Toni Morrison, and Jesse Jackson. The emergence of Barrack Obama as the first elected African American President of the United States in 2008 marks an epoch in the ceaseless struggle for ultimate redemption of the African heiritage.

Nigeria’s Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a pivotal role in the ideological conquest of Africa through the weapon of Christianity. Ajayi Crowther had been sold to slavery in the Iseyin area of the Old Oyo Empire after the slave trade had been officially abolished in England in 1807. British naval ships patrolling the West African coast to stop slave trafficking freed AjayiCrowther. He was trained in Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, as an evangelist and linguist/interpreter. He was sent to Nigeria to head the Niger Mission of the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) now the Anglican Communion. The Church brainwashed the returnee African slaves to believe that it was the paganism of their ancestors that made them to sell their children into slavery. Ajayi Crowther and his peers came back, therefore, for vengeance against their “inhuman ancestors”. This explains why he was such a zealot in evangelisation. According to the British Marxist historian, Basil Davidson, Ajayi carried his task to excessive levels by entering temples and shrines of traditional places of worship and veneration to break and burn symbols and insignia. All new converts were required to denounce and denigrate whatever was indigenous African belief, idea, philosophy, tradition, mode of dressing, marriage, education, science, technology etc. in favour of European and Christian ones. This was how indigenous culture and traditions of knowledge of Africa were further marginalised and suppressed. The education system completed what the church could not destroy.

This anti-Africa hysteria still holds sway today, several decades after nominal independence by African nations. It should be noted that the Arabs brought Islam to Africa and encouraged the establishment of scholarship and universities. Christianity, in contrast, did not engender similar developments in science and higher education. For example, the first secondary school in Nigeria, C.M.S. Grammar School, Bariga, Lagos, was opened in 1859. But the church did not invest in university education until the 21st century in Nigeria. The first European-type University in Africa would appear to be the University of Cape Town in South Africa established in 1856. The Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, was later developed into a campus of the British University of Durham. But during the European colonial era, higher education was not encouraged. When they were set up after the Second World War in the late 1940s, the Universities were poor replicas of Western European ones. Thus the University of Ibadan opened in 1948 was a campus of the University of London. For decades the University of Ibadan gave premium attention to the pursuit of irrelevant degree courses such as Classics where only Greek and Roman languages and ideas were taught. The Department of Classics at Ibadan still runs these courses 67 years after Nigeria gained independence in 1960. The idea of classical studies does not accommodate ancient African religions and philosophies that were the mother of European classical traditions! The academic colonization of minds started at Ibadan spread to other Nigerian universities from the 1960s.

The discipline of philosophy exhibits the disease of disorientation more tellingly. The great names featured as philosophers are the Greeks who were undergraduates of Egyptian priest-professors over 3000 years ago. In literary studies, Homer the Greek narrator of the Iliad and Odyssey is treated as a deity of epics but it is not indicated that Homer attended institutions in ancient Egypt. Many courses in drama and theatre erroneously assign the origin of written dramaturgy to Greeks like Sophocles and Aristophanes, yet written drama, poetry, and fiction were developed to high degree in ancient Egypt 2,000 years before these Greek dramatists were born. In literary discourse the book Poetics by Aristotle is the theoretical foundation of aesthetic knowledge. But as shown by Professor George James in the sources cited in previous sections of the lecture, Aristotle could not have been the original author of this aesthetic theory; he was involved in the looting of Egyptian intellectual property and he plagiarized many of them now published in his name. The course on General Studies in Nigerian universities is a blatant insult against the heritage of African people. The history of science treated in the course assumes wrongly that Europeans of the post-Renaissance era originated scientific inquiry.

The Imperative of African Redemption:

Let me attempt to conclude the lecture by invoking the immortal words of Cheikh Anta Diop and George James on the imperative need to undertake a revolutionary programme of African redemption from 5,000 years of European intellectual imperialism. In his 1991 book, Civilization or Barbarism, Professor Diop urges us to note that,

Insofar as Egypt is the distant mother of Western culture and sciences…
most of the ideas that we call foreign are sometimes nothing but mixed
up, reversed, modified, elaborated images of creations of our African
ancestors, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, dialectics, the theory
of being, the exact sciences, arithmetic, geometry, mechanical
engineering, astronomy, medicine, literature (novel, poetry, drama),
architecture, the arts, etc…

Consequently, no thought, no ideology is, in essence, foreign to Africa,
which was their birthplace. It is therefore with total liberty that Africans
can draw from the common intellectual heritage of humanity, letting
themselves be guided only by the common notions of utility and
efficiency (p. 4).

Professor George James wrote in a lyrical and evocative style in defining the redemptive purpose of the knowledge of Africa’s contribution to world civilizations. He urged that the African must “be given the special training in language, customs, and ideals of Africans, in order to make him cultivate an attitude of respect for the culture of the African Continent, seemingly the oldest specimen to have been developed by mankind;”

…because that continent is the birthplace and the cradle of Ancient
Mysteries. With a world enlightened as to the real truth about the
place of the African Continent in the history of civilization, false
tradition and belief should cease to be effective, disrespect and
prejudice should tend to disappear, and race relations should tend
to be normal and peaceful. This brings us to the final problem of
African redemption…

…our philosophy of redemption is a psychological process, involving
a change of belief or mentality to be followed by a corresponding
change of behaviour. It really signifies a mental emancipation in
which the Black people will be liberated from the chain of
traditional falsehood, which for centuries has incarcerated them
in the prison of inferiority complex and world humiliation and insult…

Being liberated from inferiority complex by their New Philosophy
of Redemption…Black people must face and interpret the world
according to their new vision and philosophy… (pp. 154 – 155)

Professor James urged that education should be the instrument to achieve the mental emancipation he advocated. He also called on Africans to boycott missionary literature and exhibitions that disrespect and humiliate Africans. But James was emphatic that Africans must mobilise the Church in this struggle, adding that
“…the entire church of Christ on earth should be united in
this racial reformation, and carry to the mission field a practical
gospel of happiness; that is happiness that must begin while we
are here on earth; a gospel that is interested in the total welfare
of the people. A gospel which ignores the social and economic
rights of the natives and emphasizes only happiness in an unknown
world is one-sided, misleading, and contrary to Christian tenets and
practice….

It is evident that the benefits of religion are intended to be coextensive
with human needs and unless the Christian religion changes its
missionary policy with respect to the Culture of the Black people,
it would be difficult for them to obtain complete emancipation from
the social injuries created by Ancient Rome (p. 162).

Professor Godini G. Darah (of Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta State University, Abraka), delivered this Faculty of Arts Distinguished Lecture, University of Lagos, on 28 March, 2017. Tel. 234-803-608-8913; Email: [email protected]

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