It was necessary for Europeans and United states to attack Africa at the very core in order to advance the curriculum of European supremacy, else neither enslavement nor colonialism were possible. But we have being the negation, the United State, the black population, to the negation of our history. So, we have overturned, conformed of the racist by questioning their morality and their facts. This has been the long struggle. On the other hand, Africa, the continent and nations in it, represent the original sapiens homo of the human species.
It is easy to say that Africa is not only the home of the mother and Father of Humanity but the home of the mother and father of civilization. The oldest math calculator found in the world of Lebombo bone in Swaziland (now Eswatini) 28 thousand Year ago, Africans began to mark the period of woman. In Congo, the Ishango bone, twenty thousand years ago represent the second of the oldest mathematical calculators that we have in human history.
The main trope of the imperialist and European supremacy was colonialization of information and not simply the colonialization of people and territory but of that information of that territory. Africa, in order to establish a curriculum, must resist these tendencies even more now. The curriculum in Africa must be the one that starts from the beginning.
So, we must start from the beginning, we must start with chronology, that is essential. We must understand that Nubia and Kemet are to Africa as China and India are to Asia and Greece and Rome are to Europe. You have to start there as an African university, if you don’t start at Kemet, which is an African name for Egypt. Egypt is a Greek name for the land. If you don’t start there, with Kemet and Nubia, you cannot start properly with the African curriculum, it does not exist. Because what we find in Africa is that most of university start with Greece.
This is problematic, Twenty-Five Hundred years for before this era, two thousand years for before this era, the African have completed building of the Pyramids. Twenty-Five hundred years ago for before this era, its just like almost five thousand years ago, the Pyramids were up. Twenty-Five Hundred BC, if you have to use that designation, there was no Greece, it did not exist. Twenty-Five Hundred BC, before this era there was no Rome, it did not exist.
So, why would an African university start its curriculum from the Greeks. You think the African were waiting around for the Greek before they built the pyramids. You know, people say the Greeks are not here we can’t do anything. We have to wait until they come, and when they come, they will give us wisdom and knowledge or teach us geometry. No, that is not the story. The story has to be, that at the very beginning of the history of the African civilization, African people on that continent itself, had already by Twenty-Five Hundred BC, finished the last great of the pyramids. They are up, started around Twenty-Nine Hundred BC, by Twenty-Five Hundred they have finished.
There is no Greece, there is Chinese Dynasty of the Shia, there is Oropus and Mohenjo Daro, there is Nubia and there is no Greece. It does not appear; it appears in the Thousand BC (1000 BC) when hear the first voice of intelligence from the Greeks and that’s Homer. And it was not very deep stuff for that, is not serious but it is s elevated, 1000 BC. This is like fifteen hundred years year after the pyramids finished.
So, then you got Homer. SO, everything starts now, this is a false chronology. No civilization amongst the Greeks, predated Nubia, or Kemet. So, why would African universities start there.
On literature, one of the argument people like that they have made … You know Africa they don’t’ have any literature. There is more ancient writing in Africa than ancient Greece or Rome. You can combine both ancient Greece and Rome and not have the writing literature at Nile valley. If you take the ancient writing of Nubia and Aksum, and Kemet, you have far more writing than you get from the Greeks and the Romans.
But if you trying to deny the Africa its place in the Sun or the African people their humanity you must try hard as you can to wipe them us out.
Fundamentally, I have written Seventy-Two books, but I wrote early books, on African culture and history. And, in one of the books, I wrote about ancient African philosophers, whose names we rarely hear a Imhotep, Ptah-Hotep, Dwarf, Amenemhet, Merikare, we know maybe Akhenaten, Khnumhotep, these were philosopher that lived fifteen hundred years before the first Greek philosophers. Who was the first Greek philosophers, Thales of Miletus, and where did he go to school? In Africa. In fact, when Pythagoras, was 19 years old went to Thales, and said to him … teach me what know about philosophy. And Thales said to Pythagoras, you must do what I have done and go and learn philosophy in Egypt. That is the story.
But why do we start with Thales and Pythagoras, why don’t we know Dwarf, and Amenemhet. Why have we not read Ptah-Hotep on aging. And if you have an African university and the African universities are not engaging into these processes and then what process is university is engaged in, except the promotion of the white supremacy. No, I am a great negation of this, I have always been. I think this is the problem with African education.
Plato studied in Sais. Herodotus, in the fifth centuries, wrote about Egypt in the histories, if you go and read a copy about Herodotus you will be amazed that all the things the Greeks really got from Africa. In fact, this is why Goerge James write in his book, stolen legacies, this was a Ghanaian professor who wrote a book in the 1950’s that there is no Greek philosophy, that if you look at the Greek philosophy system what they did was to distort African philosophy, Stolen legacies.
- Dr Molefi Kete Asante
Where from here? To add on what Dr. Molefi Asante, we know the Lydenburg Heads Found in Mpumalanga province estimated to have been buried there around 500AD show a thriving and complex society of Ngoni and Bahurutse people that would have been living there earlier than 500BC. I think he is right and totally agree that we have to get the chronology corrected when we review or structure a curriculum in African universities.
Let’s have a conversation. Tell us your thoughts!
