LITMIR.BIZ

      Upper: A masterpiece of pre-historic African art found in South Africa and now in the Pretoria Museum. Done about 30,000 years ago and by flint instruments on rock.

      Lower: Reconstruction of the skull of an African who lived in the same region about the same period and very likely the type of artist that made this drawing. Modern art critics marvel at the skill and accuracy of these Stone Age artists and declare that nothing finer has been done since. (See Sex and Race, Vol. I, pages 26, 35. 1942.

AFRICA’S GIFT TO THE WORLD

       “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.” (Out of Africa comes something always new) — Ancient Greek saying quoted by Pliny, Roman historian, 23-79 A.D.

       “He who has drunk of the waters of Africa will drink again.” — Ancient Arab saying.

       “I speak of Africa and golden joys.” — Shakespeare, II Henry IV, v. iii.

       “There is Africa and all her prodigies in us.” — Sir Thomas Browne, English physician and author, 1605-1682.

       “It is one of the paradoxes of history that Africa, the Mother of Civilization, remained for over two thousand years the Dark Continent. To the moderns Africa was the region where ivory was sought for Europe and slaves for America. In the time of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), as the satirist informs us, geographers in drawing African maps would fill in the gaps with savage pictures. Where towns should have been they placed elephants.” — Dr. Victor Robinson, Ciba Symposia, 1940.

       “The African continent is no recent discovery; it is not a new world like America or Australia. … While yet Europe was the home of wandering barbarians one of the most wonderful civilizations on record had begun to work out its destiny on the banks of the Nile. …” (History of Nations, Vol. 18, p. 1, 1906)

      To ancient Europe Africa was for fully two thousand years the civilized world. “How low the savage European must have looked to the Nile Valley African looking north from his Pyramid of Cheops,” says Professor Dorsey. When this Wonder of the Ancient World was some two thousand years old, Greece, first part, of the European continent to be touched by civilization, was a wilderness. Athens, later to become the leader in world culture, was as late as 1500 B.C., totally unknown. Civilization came to Greece from Egypt by way of the island of Crete, as Sir Arthur Evans, has shown.

      And this civilization was Negroid. For this we have the word of Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), who travelled in Egypt and saw the Egyptians of his day. In Book Two, Chapter 57, he says they were “black” and in Book Two, Chapter 104, they were “black and wooly-haired.” The hair of the Ethiopian he said was “very wooly.” He adds that in other parts of the Near East he visited he saw other nations with the same racial characteristics as the Egyptians. “Several nations are so, too,” he said.

      Two thousand years later another famous traveller, Count Volney, said on his visit to Egypt in 1787, that what Herodotus said had solved for him the problem of why the people were so Negroid in appearance and especially the Great Sphinx of Ghizeh, supreme symbol worship and power. Reflecting on the then state of the Egyptians compared with what they had been, he said, “To think that to a race of black men who are today our slaves and the object of our contempt is the same one to whom we owe our arts, sciences and even the very use of speech.” Of the blacks he saw in Upper Egypt among the ruins of the colossal monuments there, he said, “There a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and wooly hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” (Oeuvres, Vol. 2, pp. 65-68. 1825; Ruins of Empires, pp. 16-17. 1890).