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defyfear
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 18:42 |
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Is this a ploy to use Africans to learn about hidden knowledge of certain Africans by Western media and scholars or is it spawned out of genuine curiosity and concern?
Issues and Events
Astronomer Unearths Evidence of Scientific Tradition in Africa
Thebe Medupe, a rising star in South Africa's astronomy community, hopes his work will attract other young blacks into science and technology.
April 2006, page 30
Schoolhouse visit
Part of apartheid involved destroying people's aspirations," says Thebe Medupe, a South African astronomer. "Imagine being a black child and all the time reading about other peoples' histories and other peoples' way of doing things. You start having doubts about whether you played any role in human history."
Medupe grew up in a rural village in northwest South Africa. When he was 13, he built a telescope. "I remember the first night I pointed the telescope toward the Moon," he says. "It was amazing to see the craters, the valleys, and the mountains. Since that time I knew that my career was going to be in astronomy."
Today, Medupe, 32, who earned a PhD in physics at the University of Cape Town, is a researcher at the South African Astronomical Observatory. On top of his research on variable stars, Medupe explores cultural astronomy and historical scientific activity in Africa. In the 2003 documentary film Cosmic Africa, Medupe visits indigenous peoples across the continent to learn about the form and significance that astronomy takes in their cultures. His latest project involves scouring ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu, Mali, for references to science and math.
This calendar circle
PT: How did you happen to build a telescope?
TM: When I was 13 years old, in 1986, Halley's comet was visible in South Africa in the night sky. Our school organized a theme around astronomy. That inspired me, so I went to our library and read a lot about astronomy. Eventually I came across a book on how to make a small telescope from things you can find at home. I used an old plumbers' pipe for the telescope. I borrowed lenses from our school. And I borrowed spray paint from our school workshop.
PT: How did you overcome poverty and racism to get where you are today—a professional astronomer?
TM: First and foremost it was my mother. She has been really my support and my inspiration in life. In spite of the fact that they were poor, my parents managed to send me to a very good school. It was integrated. We had people from all over the world, people of all colors.
We didn't have electricity or running water. But the night sky was beautiful, and every evening in summer we would go out and play, and sometimes sit around the fire with our grandparents to hear stories about the stars.
Also, I was born at the right time. Around the time I was going to university, apartheid was coming to an end. So all good universities in South Africa were opening opportunities for black people.
PT: What is your area of research?
TM: Asteroseismology. The main thing about the stars I study is that they are variable, their light output changes with time. That is because of the seismic waves—sound waves—that exist inside the stars. The ones I specialize in have strong magnetic fields. We use the sound waves generated inside these stars to try and learn about the makeup of the stars. We do spectroscopy to study phase velocity in these stars, or we use photometers to study the light-intensity variations.
We do the job with smaller telescopes, one-meter telescopes, because they are the easiest to get time on. And to avoid gaps in the data, gaps due to daytime, we get observations from different sites—Australia, South Africa, Chile.
PT: Do you use the South African Large Telescope?
TM: My dream is to use SALT to study dark matter in the universe. One of the things I have been thinking about getting involved in is the search for dark matter using quasars. I'd be moving from studying individual stars—stellar astrophysics—to cosmology.
There are only about 50 professional astronomers in the country, and many of them are quite senior. We need more young people to get into astronomy, and we need them in areas that can best use the large telescope.
PT: How did you get involved in Cosmic Africa?
TM: Going back a bit, when I was 15, I started to question why everything was Eurocentric. Textbooks were using European things and so on. So I used to ask myself whether it was because there was nothing Africa can offer. I refused to believe that. It remained a very big question for me for a long time, until I came across a review on African ethnoastronomy. I was very excited. I was thinking of writing a book about that, when, about a year later, I was approached by a filmmaker and a journalist about making a film.
We decided to select remote communities, where contact with the outside world was minimal, but also living communities where you could clearly and graphically show that astronomy was an important part of their lives. That's why we selected the Bushmen, who live on the border of Botswana and Namibia, and the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa. The Dogons still live the way they did 500 years ago. They were dignified, and very hospitable. At the beginning, it was not easy to get information from them—that's how they protect their culture from being eroded. But once we won their trust, it was very pleasant to live among them.
We also read about a stone observatory—stone structures in the Sahara desert in southern Egypt that were erected more than 6000 years ago; that's more than a thousand years before the Pyramids. The stones were erected to mark the directions of north and of the summer solstice sunrise.
I spent a week with the Bushmen, three weeks with the Dogons, and a week in the desert. It was amazing. It was fun, but it was also very harsh—temperatures were 48 °C.
PT: What's an example of how astronomy is important for the Bushmen or the Dogon people?
TM: One evening with the Dogons, I went with two old people to look at the stars. I asked them what was the most important constellation for them. They said the Pleiades, a star cluster, which is very important throughout the whole of Africa, actually. The stars are used for planting and agriculture. I asked this guy [for] positions of the stars, and he gave me the rising times and positions at different times of the year. I checked with my laptop, and he was very much correct. To me that proved he knew what he was talking about.
The Egyptian stones apparently contain alignments similar to those done a thousand or so years later at Stonehenge in Great Britain, but they are smaller in size. The Bushmen made out constellations just like the ancient Greeks and other peoples. To me, it shows the commonality between Africa and the rest of the world.
The whole point about the film is that this topic was never covered before. No one knew that African people were involved in this kind of thing, so it was very special for us. And it's a great message. You can tell kids that truly astronomy and the rest of science is a human activity, and it belongs to all of us. It makes it easy to attract young African children into science and technology.
PT: Do you do this sort of educational outreach?
TM: Yes. Because of the film, I get asked to visit schools and gatherings to interact with young people and to try to get them into science and technology. We have a great shortage of scientists and technologists in South Africa, generally. And the problem is even worse when we talk about black scientists and technologists. With the film, we hope to contribute to addressing that problem.
For example, we want to take the film to rural schools in South Africa. This model was used in England last year. I was invited to take the film there to motivate young black British kids to go into science and technology. I went to 20 schools over two weeks. We want to implement this here. After screening the film, you get a role model to talk to the kids, and select a group of them, maybe 30, and have a session on how to make a little telescope. They enjoy that a lot, because they get to use it and keep it.
I am also involved in a special program, called the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme, which is hosted at the University of Cape Town. Every year I go and teach the theory of stellar structure at the master's level for one month. It's an intense course. We are trying to increase the number of people with a master's or PhD in astronomy. It's for everybody, but we try to make things as representative of the South African population as possible—South Africa is 80% black.
PT: What's your next project?
TM: In addition to continuing my studies in astronomy, one of the projects I am very excited about is on Timbuktu. It was one of the major cities of West Africa from 800 until just over 400 years ago. It was very prosperous, and had many learning centers, with people collecting and writing books on law, poetry, astronomy, optics, mathematics. This history of scholarship in Africa extended over large parts of the continent. Ancient manuscripts are found all over West Africa and even in East Africa. They are written in Arabic and in local African languages.
These books have resurfaced in government and private libraries. In Mali alone, there are around 200 private libraries, and literally hundreds of thousands of books.
The project I am working on is a search for astronomy books in this collection. It's very exciting—it shows that science didn't come to Africa 200 years ago with colonization of the continent. There were always places where science was taking place, even before in Europe.
PT: Have the manuscripts been studied by others?
TM: Yes, for example, a professor from Northwestern University has been studying Islamic texts from western Africa. He was not searching for science specifically, but by coincidence he has found a very interesting recording of a meteor shower in 1583, written in the margins of one of the books. So these texts potentially contain a lot of interesting things. Some of it could be recordings of astronomical events, some of it could be explanations of how people determined the Qibla, the direction of Mecca, and all kinds of aspects of Islamic astronomy, Islamic mathematics, and so on.
Our effort is the first to search specifically for science in these manuscripts. A team of five of us, including a historian, another astronomer, a mathematician, and a photographer, will be doing this in conjunction with a team of scholars in Mali itself. The idea is to reconstruct the status of scientific research at the time when Timbuktu was at its peak, and to document that and make it accessible to universities and schools, so our people can take pride in knowing that their ancestors were interested in science.
For me, all I need to find to make me very proud is to show definitely that these people were aware of what was going on—that they were aware of the hottest topics in astronomy of the day, the same as other scholars everywhere.
Toni Feder
Schoolhouse visit. Thebe Medupe shows the telescope he made as a kid to students in a rural classroom outside Cape Town, South Africa.
CREDIT: Cosmos Studios/Cosmic Africa SA (Pty) Ltd
This calendar circle, or cromlech, was made by nomads around 4800 BC. Other astronomical sites in the Nabta Playa region of the Sahara desert visited by Thebe Medupe in Cosmic Africa include multi-ton sculpted rocks arranged in lines extending over a half kilometer or so and oriented toward various bright stars.
CREDIT: J. KIM MALVILLE
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 18:43 |
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Under African Skies
Astronomy in Africa's past and future
—By Bennett Gordon, Utne.com
April 27, 2006 Issue
A relative lack of ambient light pollution in much of Africa makes it a logical choice to study astronomy. That's why the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, the Southern African Large Telescope, was recently erected on the continent. But according to Keith Snedegar of Utah Valley State College, "cultural astronomers have paid relatively little attention to Africa." Ethnoastronomers, scientists who study celestial knowledge in culture, are only recently beginning to realize what many people have known for centuries: that Africa is the perfect place to admire the stars.
In the documentary Cosmic Africa astronomer Thebe Medupe traveled the African countryside in search of traditional astronomy. One of the groups he encountered was the Dogon, an ethnic tribe primarily in Mali. The Dogon are well known for their knowledge of stars, and are actually the target of some controversy. One of the traditional beliefs held by the Dogon is that Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the sky, was actually made up of two stars, one of which was invisible to the naked eye. That discovery was not made by Western scientists until the late 19th century.
In an interview with the New Scientist, Medupe confirms the vast celestial knowledge of the Dogon people. He recounts the story of an old man from the tribe who could describe one constellation in such detail that Medupe was forced to check the information on his laptop. What he found was that the man was "spot on."
A post-colonial mentality may be one reason why traditional African knowledge has been largely obscured. As Medupe explained, "During apartheid the whites commonly said that black Africans had always been dependent on them." Research into ethnoastronomy is proving that contention untrue. Medupe hopes that connecting modern science to an African tradition will inspire young black people from around the world to study science. One of his major goals, he told Physics Today, is to "tell kids that truly astronomy and the rest of science is a human activity, and it belongs to all of us."
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 18:49 |
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Astronomy and the legacy of apartheid
* 15 January 2005
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* Curtis Abraham
Subscribe to New Scientist
Thebe Medupe grew up in a poor South African village near Mafikeng, about four hours north-west of Johannesburg. He went on to gain a doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Cape Town, and was presenter and associate producer of Cosmic Africa, a feature documentary about traditional African astronomy released in 2002. He is a researcher at the South African Astronomical Observatory, where he is participating in a programme to encourage black South Africans to take up astronomy. He is writing a book, in the Setswana language, on ethno-astronomy
How did your love of astronomy develop?
In 1986, when I was 13, Halley's comet came to our part of the sky. It made big news and our school, Mmabatho High School in Mafikeng, organised an astronomy theme week. I remember our English teacher asking us to write essays about living on another planet. I was inspired to want to know more. Later that year I came across a book in our library on how to make a small telescope from materials you can find at home. I built myself a 2-inch refracting telescope from cardboard boxes and lenses I borrowed from the school. I remember the first night I pointed my telescope at the moon. I was captivated. I started mapping the moon, and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. I also learned from my grandparents how to appreciate the night sky. We used to sit around the fire and look at the sky and listen to all kinds of stories.
What kind of stories did they tell you?
My grandfather used to tell me about an important star called Naka. Naka is quite bright and marks the beginning of winter. When people see it in the early mornings they know it is time for young boys to leave their mothers and fathers to attend initiation schools. Naka in Setswana means horn star, and it is called this because long ago people used to blow cow horns to announce its first sighting, and there were celebrations in the village. I later learned that Naka is known by astronomers as Canopus, the second brightest star.
You recently spent months travelling among the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert and the Dogon people in Mali, listening to their astronomical legends. What were you doing?
In 1998 I was approached by film makers from Cape Town who wanted to make a documentary on traditional African knowledge of the night sky. We signed a co-production deal with Cosmos Studios, an American film company owned by Ann Druyan, the widow of the astronomer Carl Sagan. The film is called Cosmic Africa. It is a documentary partly about my journey as a young boy growing up in a village in South Africa and how I developed an interest in astronomy that led me to build my first telescope. But mostly it is about my journey throughout Africa searching for Africa's relation to the cosmos. It was released in 2002, and has been showing in South African theatres and film festivals in the US.
What made you choose the Bushmen and the Dogon?
The aim was to film living societies that still depend on stars in their daily lives. The Dogon were especially good for this because their culture has changed little in the past few hundred years. The same with the Bushmen, who are Africa's oldest people.
What did they tell you?
The Bushmen have many stories. For example, they believe the Milky Way was made by a Bushman girl who wished for a little light and threw wood ashes into the sky. She created different coloured stars by throwing different coloured burning roots into the air.
There's another one about two of the stars of the Southern Cross, Alpha and Gamma Crucis. It goes like this. The creator had two sons called Khanka and Khoma. One day the two boys went hunting with a family of lions, but the treacherous lions ate the boys. In his anger and despair, the creator made fire and hid it in a meteor disguised as an eland's horn. The creator called down the meteor and it hit the lion and killed it. His heart was calmed and there was fire for everyone. Khanka and Khoma are Alpha Crucis and Gamma Crucis.
The Bushmen have many other stories. For example, that seven daughters of the sky god (Pleiades) were married to a hunter. One evening the hunter went hunting the zebras (the three stars of Orion's Belt). He was such a bad hunter that his arrow missed, and because he was afraid of the nearby lion (Betelgeuse) he left the arrow where it lay (now known as Orion's sword). The unlucky hunter was too embarrassed to go back home to his wives because he did not have meat to bring to them, so he stays out there in the cold as the star called Aldebaran.
What did you learn from the Dogon?
It is striking how integral the stars are to their daily life. They use them to predict the coming of the rainy seasons and to work out when they can start planting. Their knowledge of the stars is extremely precise. I was with an old man in a Dogon village who told me about the positions and times of the rising of the Pleiades cluster in great detail. When I checked what he had said with the sky software on my laptop I found he was spot on. To these people, knowledge about the movement of the stars is a matter of life and death.
They also use a lunar calendar. Their month is subdivided into six weeks, and each week into five days. Their month actually consists of 29.5 days, meaning that each year is short of 11 days compared with the solar calendar. After three years this accumulates to 33 days or about a month and some societies intercalate - for example, they add a 13th month to their calendar.
Was it hard to get the Dogon to share their knowledge?
The way Dogon society is structured sometimes made it too time-consuming to find information. They have a caste system whereby each member of the society has a particular role to play in the village. This means that, for example, a blacksmith cannot say anything about music because that is not his role. So when we first met the village elder and wanted direct answers about how connected they are to the stars, he just told us to go and study how the villagers live their daily lives, and that way we would get our answer. It turned out he was correct. But it meant we had to follow their pace.
Was there ever conflict between you and these traditional African communities?
There was one time when we planned to film the Bushmen at the time of the partial eclipse in June 2001. We were interested in how they would react to the eclipse and whether they had stories about previous eclipses. We wanted to record their reactions to what was for them an unpredictable event. But we made the mistake of talking to them about it a couple of days before it happened. The Bushmen regard eclipses as bad omens. On the day of the eclipse, they were quite unprepared for it and were clearly alarmed that we had previously been asking questions about it. "Something has eaten parts of the sun," they said. "How could this happen? It must be these film people, it must be Thebe and his telescope which he was pointing at the sun."
We realised we were in trouble, and at the least we owed these people an explanation of what was going on. I explained to them that we could not control cosmic events, that our telescope was just a fancy magnifier. They appeared to understand this, and all the tension was released with a dance in the evening. I believe that some of them internalised our scientific explanations of cosmic events. We were driving down from the village on our last day, and we asked the village leader what the sun and the planets looked like up close. He answered that they were round balls.
What is the value of bringing traditional knowledge and beliefs to a wider audience?
It is important because it makes young African children aware that our ancestors were keen observers of the sky. It is a way of demystifying science and bringing it closer to our people. During apartheid the whites commonly said that black Africans had always been dependent on them. One commonly used propaganda myth said that our ancestors were incapable of harnessing nature for our own benefit and survival. We were told that we could never dream of becoming anything other than gardeners and maids for white South Africans. Cosmic Africa clearly shows traditional societies basing their lives on observations of movements of stars. It aims to instil some pride in our youth, using African history to show that science, and astronomy in particular, belongs to them as much as anyone else, and that it's OK for them to make careers in science.
One of the things that really got to me was the belief among western astronomers that black people are somehow different from the rest of humanity in that they have no interest in astronomy. That was a typical response when they were asked why there aren't more blacks in astronomy. I wanted to prove this stereotyping wrong.
There have been papers on the cosmic beliefs of African societies in the University of Cape Town library since the early 20th century. Why has it taken so long for this knowledge to become public?
I believe it was part of the effort of the old regime to deny black South Africans knowledge of their past that could liberate them. Remember that it was everyday policy to limit our aspirations. We could not even imagine ourselves in careers that would advance our economic and spiritual position. They understood very well that if they allowed black people to use their history and culture to believe in themselves, then it would be impossible to control us and apartheid would no longer be sustainable.
What was the reaction to the film in the US?
I think it has reminded African Americans of their bond to Africa, and they have seen how history can be used to attempt to heal wounds. Some of them mentioned how much they identified with my quest to reconcile my career with my African heritage. The film starts with my quest and my visit to various African villages, and ends with me teaching schoolchildren how to make telescopes, and using these to observe the moon. This last part is very positive and emotional. It gives me hope that we can use our heritage to answer a serious question that prevails in Africa, America and the Caribbean: "How do we attract black kids into science and technology careers?"
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 18:52 |
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Western scholar...
Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News
Archive
ESSAYS FROM ARCHAEOASTRONOMY & ETHNOASTRONOMY NEWS, THE QUARTERLY BULLETIN OF THE CENTER FOR ARCHAEOASTRONOMY
Number 32 June Solstice 1999
ESSAY | NEWS NOTES | PUBLICATIONS AND WEB SITES
Sub-Saharan Africa: Cultural Astronomy's Heart of Darkness
by Keith Snedegar, Political Science and History Dept., Utah Valley State College
There is no more deeply primeval experience than to gaze overhead at the Milky Way arching from horizon to horizon on a pitch-dark African night. And with good reason: our species originated in Africa; it was from there that our ancestors first looked up and pondered the mysteries of the cosmos. It should strike everyone as odd, then, that cultural astronomers have paid relatively little attention to Africa. The eve of a new millennium is an appropriate time to revisit, or for many of us to contemplate for the first time, the astronomical heritage of humanity's home continent before it is too late.
With the spectacular exception of ancient Egypt, Africa has not been well served by scholarship on cultural astronomy. The disruptive consequences of slavery, colonialism, and racism imposed upon Africans in modern history, and perpetuated in a real way by continuing discrimination, at times of a quasi-scientific "Bell Curve" variety, are inescapable. There are those who would say that cultural astronomy has precious little to do with race relations, but surely the African lacuna in our multidiscipline-which embraces so many societies and time periods within its global domain--is more telling than coincidental. On the other hand, it must be said that the Afrocentric backlash against academic discrimination and neglect has had, at best, mixed results. For instance, sensational claims of advanced astronomical knowledge for the Dogon people of Mali have given African cultural astronomy an "ancient astronaut" sort of reputation. New Age enthusiasts continue to be inspired (Andoh 1999). Not only is more responsible scholarship called for, more judicious if sympathetic presentation to wider audiences is sorely needed.
In terms of research, cultural astronomy's origins as a subdiscipline of archaeology have contributed to the neglect of Africa. Quite naturally archaeoastronomers have a strong predilection for material culture, especially monumental architecture. To be somewhat unfair one might say the more monumental the architecture, the better. The relatively unimposing nature of Sub-Saharan monuments has not attracted a great rush to document astronomical alignments, symbolic geometry's, and celestial iconography's. But perhaps the breakthrough study has just been made. In 1997 McKim Malville identified some very suggestive alignments at a megalithic complex in the southern Egyptian desert at Nabta, a site of seasonal habitation for nomadic pastoralists between 11,000 and 4,800 years ago (Malville et al. 1998). One stone circle exhibits a line-of-sight 'window' at an azimuth of 62 degrees; the rising mid-summer sun would have been visible in that direction circa 6,000 years BP. This is quite fittingly the oldest astronomically aligned structure yet discovered anywhere on the planet.
Another well-known megalithic site, Namoratunga II, near Lake Turkana in Kenya may well have aided calendrical observations around 300 B.C. (Lynch and Robbins 1978). Unfortunately, in recent years no other Sub-Saharan monuments have been surveyed for their archaeoastronomical potential. Numerous sites merit such investigation: the Senegambian stone circles, the Central African Republic's Bouar megaliths, and ruins in the Great Zimbabwe tradition. With the prospect of discovery we should no doubt expect many negative results. I am personally skeptical that any alignments could be found in the irregular architecture of the Zimbabwe sites. At all events, someone should look for them. If only there were more copy cats of Lynch, Robbins and Malville than of high-school shootists!
However, the lion's share of Africa's astronomical heritage is not locked in silent stones; it exists in still-living and exceedingly rich oral traditions. For among nonliterate peoples knowledge is passed from mouth to ear. Western scholars only began to appreciate the realm of African orality after Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa(1970). (Ironically, Finnegan is best known for her erroneous claim that there was no such thing as African epic poetry-since the 1970s dozens of African epics have come to light.) Astronomy in the African oral record remains an undeveloped subject, although its potential can be gauged by the achievement of the only monograph to date on African cultural astronomy: Muusa Galaal's Stars, Seasons, Weather in Somali Pastoral Tradition (1992). Conducting his research in the 1960s Galaal relied entirely on oral texts as the Somali language did not have a standard written form before that time! Who knows what information could be had from the griot of West Africa or the isibongi of southern Africa? Or even from common folk who remember the stories their grandparents told them. Oral tradition, sadly, is an endangered resource; the indigenous societies that had created and sustained it have, in this passing century, been negatively transformed. On a recent visit to the University of the North-West in Mmabatho, South Africa, I heard from a professor that the local people had forgotten most of their sky lore but had a great appetite for cell phones and NBA t-shirts. It is hoped that a student research project in Setswana oral knowledge will be initiated within the next academic year.
There are other positive signs. Members of the United Nations Working Group on Space Sciences in Africa have expressed an interest in recovering indigenous astronomy's for purposes of promoting culturally relevant science education. Meanwhile, Thebe Medupe, one of the leading black astronomers in South Africa, is participating in a TV documentary "Cosmic Africa" on indigenous knowledge. Much more could be done. It goes without saying that others should join in the great enterprise of recovering Africa's astronomical heritage. After all, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead."
References
Andoh, Anthony K. 1999. Creation Secrets of the Dogon Shaman, the Star Sirius and the New Age Prophecies. North Scale Inst. Pub.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. London: Clarendon Press.
Galaal, Muusa.1992. Stars, Seasons, Weather in Somali Pastoral Tradition. Niamey: CELHTO.
Lynch, B.M. and L.H. Robbins. 1978. "Namoratunga: The First Archasoastronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa." Science 200: 766.
Malville, J. McKim, and Fred Wendorf, Ali A. Mazar, Romauld Schild. 1998. Megaliths and Neolithic Astronomy in Southern Egypt. Nature 392: 488-490.
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 19:02 |
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| This is great stuff Defy fear. I always wished more of us would get into sciences and studying things as opposed to reading and revelling that our ancestors once did 1000s of years ago and finding false contentment in that. It's time for us to start doing again. This is good inspiration!
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Posted: Friday May 12th, 2006 21:21 |
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Fantastic read..thanks for posting it
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Posted: Saturday May 13th, 2006 01:17 |
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| I wish we would pay more attention to what traditional Africans knew and making written documents of the older generations knowledge before we lose our connection with the past. When Niane wrote "Sundiata" after years of research with various griots in Mali, French universities labelled him a fraud because what he found was an epic tradition in Africa and before then, the white man claimed that Africans did not have epics. I think we should all know by now that whites will try to deny us any and everthing. This is why we shouldn't be concerned with what they think of our attempts to document our history. These people think they are the only ones who ever discovered anything worth discovering and will deny anyone else their due, especially Africans. This is why we need to be very wary of white people.
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Posted: Saturday May 13th, 2006 01:36 |
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Aryek
I think sometimes that history thing is way overemphasised by us. Brothers walking around calling themselves kemetic names and saying hotep and whatnot... where is that getting you?
The brother here seems to be pushing Africans FORWARD. The dwelling on the backward is annoying. Yes I realised the importance of history and this tale itself was a clear example of that beautifully. He had to learn about African study of the sky to find inspiration to be confident in going to learn himself.
But this is the thing.
So many people are not making that crucial step. They get caught up and wrapped up in the mysticism of the ancients and learning folklore and so on. Worship of the past. We aren't doing as this brother did and taking that inspiration to more forward and study. What good is knowing black people 5000 years ago had this or that if nobody today wants to advance on the this and that?
I might not be communicating exactly what I mean here but it's extremely frustrating to me.
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Aryek
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Posted: Saturday May 13th, 2006 19:43 |
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| DM, I too don't like how some of us get too stuck in our history and do nothing to move ourselves forward. I'm not at all proposing that all we do is focus on African history. I just think that we shouldn't be afraid to claim it and us it as this brotha has without being afraid of what whites will think. I think there are a huge number of us who are afraid to look at our own past and use that knowledge to aid our present situation. I think some of us try too hard to impose European ideals on themselves and other Africans because they see that as being more legitimate. This is what I have a problem with.
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