Our esteemed wiseman and teacher John Henrick Clarke reminded us in one of his lectures that no group of people have come among Africans to benefit them. From time immemorial outsiders were invading Africa. Some of the invaders included the Hyksos, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and the Modern European nations. Each of these invading entities took much from Africa and its people.
African lands were plundered while its people were brutalized and raped. This process of exploitation has a very long history and continues in the modern world as new players on the global scene like China sinks their claws into the African continent in an attempt to siphon off copious amounts of mineral wealth while giving African governments a pittance in compensation.
The great Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney wrote an entire book chronicling how the modern nations of Europe helped under-developed Africa. Central to Rodney’s argument was the lost to Africa of its population via the slave trade and the daylight robbery committed by Europeans during the colonial period and its aftermath. Africa and Africans have truly been transformed into servants in the tents of other nations and people.
The role played by Africans and the other darker skinned people of the world seem to have been set in stone when the wine loving Bible patriarch Noah uttered a voodoo curse on Canaan the youngest son of Ham. This voodoo curse though not directed specifically at Ham and his other sons was used as a carte blanche by Jews, Arab Muslims, and European Christians to inflict unholy hell on all the descendants of Ham in perpetuity.
Blessed with great inventive ingenuity, the descendants of Ham proceeded to build some of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Historians marvel at the four river valley civilizations that emerged in Africa, Mesopotamia, India, and China. Racist European scholarship would have us believe that all these river valley civilizations were developed by Caucasians. As archeologists and anthropologists peel back the layers of the ancient past, the history of these great civilizations just keeps getting darker and darker.
Both the Bible and modern science places the origins of humanity on the African continent. Ethiopia is mentioned in connection with the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Famed anthropologists Richard Leakey discovered human fossils dating back to over a million years in East Africa. The congruence of the Bible and science on the African origins of the human family offers great support for the much maligned and criticized concept of a Black origin for human civilization.
The untold story of prehistoric times and certainly the prevailing narrative since man started keeping written records is one of Black people building civilizations which were later appropriated by others. The trend of Black achievement being appropriated by others is faithfully chronicled in the Bible. The inventive Hamitic Canaanites built a glorious civilization in the land of Canaan. When the more primitive Semitic Jews arrived in the land of Canaan, they found great cities with walls that looked as though they reached up to heaven. The deity of the Bible simply commanded the primitive Semitic Jews to engage in some off-the-chart genocide enroute to taking possession of the cities built by the Hamitic Canaanites.
Foreign invaders did the very same thing in Egypt. After true blooded Africans built a civilization in Egypt that still continues to fascinate the world today, invaders from the Levant, Asia, and Europe simply appropriated the Black civilization and called it their own. Both Arab Muslims and European Christians pretty much followed the Jewishy script by taking over African land and cities after putting many Africans in chains or to the sword.
This history of outsiders and their Machiavellian mischief against the children of Africa should serve as an object lesson to African and Caribbean governments today. Already in the Caribbean we have seen a demographic shift in the oil rich Caribbean states of Trinidad and Guyana. History seems to be repeating itself as more recently arrived Asians seek to control Black territory that neither they or their ancestors suffered to build up. Asians, Middle Easterners, and Europeans have always been shrewd enough to take over the best and most mineral rich land of Black people.
Trump’s anti-immigration crusade could very well become a boon to the Caribbean with its declining Black population. African migrants should be welcomed into the Caribbean as a part of the strategy of uniting a family that was separated by the triangular slave trade. An influx of new Africans to the Caribbean would also help to keep the Caribbean Black. The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of our enslaved African ancestors have sacralized these little islands of the Caribbean and transformed them into outposts of Mother Africa.
Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Rebirth of Black Civilization: Making Africa and the Caribbean Great Again.
