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Having been accepted by Annapolis and all three Ivy League colleges to which I applied (with full tuition scholarships), I can perhaps speak with some conviction if not authority. At the time, an application depended upon the College Boards, an application form for each Ivy School and a personal essay. I have no insight into the committees who evaluated my applications. The Annapolis offer of a nomination was likely based on my Captain-ship of my HS football team, my honor society membership, my two All-Nassau Football Team elections and perhaps most important my football coach’s recommendation. My football coach was Joe Scanella who went on to be Special Teams Coach for the Oakland Raiders under Madden. But he was only a HS coach at the time, who had been in the Canadian Footbal League as a young man. He knew his football! Annapolis and the Ivy League are looking for raw talent and leadership potential. Your recommendation letters are perhaps the most important ‘proof’ of your leadership, and they should be anonymous, so you have little actual control of their wording other than how you have impressed the writers. I can not say that I was truly a ‘great leader’ as a HS student, but I showed evidence of potential. I was my HS class treasurer for 1 year, then I was elected President of the HS Student General Organization. I was also appointed Co-captain of my HS Football Team as mentioned above by my coach. In retrospect, I can not say I did much leading but I did get some experience talking in front of our football team and school assemblies and going to School PTA meetings as GO President. I guess that impressed my teachers who gave me good recommendations (I imagine). In general I would recommend anyone wanting to get recommendations for leadership to get involved, speak up about your opinions that you have thought through. Students who speak up about a topic often get appointed to deal with those topics, … that is the beginning of leadership. In sports, be good, know the rules and you may be chosen to lead the team in some respect. By knowing how to take a proper stance as a lineman and to block well, I was asked by the coach to demo that skill. If that happens often you become a leader.Anyone who stands in the background, in most instances, does not want to be a leader and will rarely be asked to be a leader. Step forward and volunteer if you want a leadership roll. It will become a habit. Local community leadership counts as well, as long as you have someone who can serve as a reference and can attest to your leadership. Starting early is important but start if you want to be a leader, otherwise be a good team member. Being a good follower is also essential to a team and society in general. Some evidence of being a good team member will also add to an Ivy League application.

Leo Frobenius said it all.HistoriographyLeo Frobenius (1873-1938)Leo Frobenius, Histoire de la Civilisation AfricaineWhen they the first European navigators of the end of the Middle Ages arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and landed at Vaida, the captains were astonished to find the streets well cared for, bordered for several leagues in length by two rows of trees; for many days they passed through a country of magnificent fields, a country inhabited by men clad in brilliant costumes, the stuff of which they had woven themselves!More to the South in the Kingdom of Congo, a swarming crowd dressed in silk and velvet; great states well ordered, and even to the smallest details, powerful sovereigns, rich industries, -- civilized to the marrow of their bones. And the condition of the countries on the eastern coasts -- Mozambique, for example -- was quite the same.The idea of the 'barbarous Negro' is a European invention which has consequently prevailed in Europe until the beginning of this century."What these old captains recounted, these chiefs of expeditions -- Delbes,Marchais, Pigafetta, and all the others, what they recounted is true. It can be verified. In the old Royal Kunstkammer of Dresden, in the Weydemann colection of Ulm, in many another 'cabinet of curiosities' of Europe, we still find West African collections dating from this epoch. Marvelous plush velvets of an extreme softness, made of the tenderest leaves of a certain kind of banana plant; stuffs soft and supple, brilliant and delicate, like silks, woven with the fiber of a raffia, well prepared; powerful javelins with points encrusted with copper in the most elegant fashion; bows so graceful in form and so beautifully ornamented that they would do honor to any museum of arms whatsoever; calabashes decorated with the greatest taste; sculpture in ivory and wood of which the work shows a very great deal of application and style.What was revealed by the navigators of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries furnishes an absolute proof that Negro Africa, which extended south of the desert zone of the Sahara, was in full efflorescence which the European conquistadors annihilated as far as they progressed. For the new country of America needed slaves, and Africa had them to offer, hundreds, thousands, whole cargoes of slaves. However, the slave trade was never an affair which meant a perfectly easy conscience, and it exacted a justification; hence one made of the Negro a half-animal, an article of merchandise. And in the same way the notion of fetish (Portuguese feticeiro) was invented as a symbol of African religion. As for me, I have seen in no part of Africa the Negroes worshipping a fetish.….https://www.jstor.org/stable/41856846THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHARACTER OF PRE-COLONIAL STATES IN TROPICAL AFRICAThea ButtnerThe peoples of Africa are presently engaged in writing their own history. They have the right to discover the whole truth about their historical past.In the pre-colonial period, many peoples of Tropical Africa (varying in locality) attained a relatively high standard of development which, by every measure, compared favourably with that of other peoples. In the region south of the Sahara there existed for many centuries before colonial partition many important state formations. The most important of them being: Ghana (climax 9th-llth centuries), Mali (13th and 14th centuries), the city-states of Ife and Benin on the Guinea Coast as well as Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Sofala etc. on the East African Coast (13th- 16th centuries, and in some cases earlier), the feudal Ethiopian Empire (from the 13th century), Songhai, Bornu, Kongo, Loango and Lunda Empires, Monomotapa (i.e. Mwene Mutapa and also Monoemugi (climax 15th-17th centuries) as well as the recent feudal creations of the 18th and 19th centuries, viz. the states of Buganda, Rwanda, Urundi, Dahomey, the Fulani and Toucouleur Islamic states, Futa Toro, Futa Jalon, Massina, Sokoto and not the least - to mention a few- late tribal organizations of the Zulus, Matabele and Ashanti - testify to the relatively high standard of the development of the productive forces, of economic and social differentiation and culture.There was significant heterogeneity in political centralization across African ethnicities before colonization (Murdock (1967)). At the one extreme, there were states with centralized administration and hierarchical organization, such as the Shongai Empire in Western Africa, the Luba kingdom in Central Africa, and the kingdoms of Buganda and Ankole in Eastern Africa. At the other ex treme, there were acephalous societies without political organization beyond the village level, such as the Nuer in Sudan or the Konkomba in Ghana and Togo. The middle of the spectrum occupied societies organized in large chief doms and loose alliances, such as the Ewe and the Wolof in Western AfricaHowever, like in other continents, the development of the African peoples progressed along contradicting lines and attained varying levels. Like in all pre-capitalist social structures, peoples and tribes of entirely different socio- economic standards of development were able to live together on the same territory and at the same time. Beside the formation of properly organized states in this period, there remained and, to an extent, there still partly remain, a few tribes and peoples of Africa who live in their communal forms of clan organization, chieftainship and in village communities without being able to cross the primeval communal social borders of the mesolithic and neolithic periods of human development.The existence of many African tribes and clans still living under the primitive communal order must not however lead us to the conclusion that Africa has always remained backward and under-developed. The conscious and unconscious focus on historically backward areas, noticeable in many works of social anthropologists undoubtedly still contains vestigial forms of an unvarnished, colonial-historical mentality and approach. W. R. Bascom and M. J. Herskovits, two leading American anthropologists, remarked that the Pygmies and Bushmen, who are not typical of Africa and are numerically unimportant, were better known in the U.S.A. than for instance, the Ashanti, Hausa, Fulani, etc.Without doubt, the introduction of iron played an important role in the social progress of many peoples with regard to the creation of city-trading centres along crossroads of external trade. Since the first millennium of our time such trade had acted as a catalytic agent for the formation of states.In West Africa bronze and brass casting flourished in an astounding manner. Here again, archaeologists and art-historians have confirmed that the bronze- statues and sculptures of Benin, which originated between the 14th and 16th centuries, stand well above European bronze products of the same period in the quality of casting and the careful processing of the bronze products. The relatively high standard of development in agriculture and craftsmanship also necessitated more highly developed systems of ownership than could possibly have been evolved in a primitive-communal order.……In the Eurocentric discourse, Africa has two histories: before and after slavery.As someone put it : “The whole continent of Africa was taken over, its wealth exploited and its people dehumanized through enslavement, all in the name of Jesus Christ, Allah and civilization.THE DESTRUCTION OF THE KINGDOM OF KONGOThe Portuguese, for their part, continued to be impressed with the African kingdom. They recast the Kongo court in the image of the late medieval world: Kongo nobility were designated dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, and barons; their servants major-domos, chamberlains, squires, and cup-bearers.The Portuguese christened Kongo with Portuguese names: in their mouths, Afonso became Fusu; Bernardo, Mbelenadu; Pedro, Mpetelo; and Cristina, Kitidina. In translation much, inevitably, was lost: in the Lord’s Prayer, the word the Portuguese chose for “our daily bread” was nfundi, which was actually a starchy gruel; when the Portuguese used the word nkisi they meant holy, not fetish; when they said nganga they meant priest, not sorcerer; and however much they wanted to impress their hosts, when they spoke of Nzambi Mpungu, they definitely meant the Christian God, and not, as the Kongo at first assumed, the King of Portugal.In 1508, when a young black woman arrived in Scotland, (off a wrecked pirate ship, possibly), King James IV held and won a royal joust in honor of “that ladye with the mekle lippis.” A century later, Shakespeare and Rembrandt gave to their portraits of Africans an intelligence and dignity that later centuries would scarcely credit, and dozens of lesser painters of the Italian and Northern Renaissance sprinkled their canvases with images of blacks that were no more or less condescending than their image of Europeans.In the fifteenth and sixteenth century the Pope and the secular kings of Europe welcomed African potentates to their courts, and treated them with all the deference due royalty.But slavery needed a myth to sustain and justify itself.So in the bedrooms of the Brazilian sugar estates, where oriental drapery wilted from balustrades in the humid air, and from the lecterns of the cathedrals that the missionaries built on the fetid islands of the Atlantic, stories took root of the African as a tom-tom player and a devil-worshiper, an uncivilized savage, a sex-fiend and cheerful submissive. “The people of Guinea,” wrote one German scientist in the eighteenth century, “are more insensible than others towards pain and natural evils, as well as towards injurious and unjust treatment. In short, there are none so well adapted to be the slaves of others, and who therefore have been armed with so much passive obedience.”And Thomas Carlyle proclaimed, dizzily, “Before the West Indies could grow a pumpkin for any Negro, how much European heroism had to spend itself in obscure battle; to sink, in mortal agony, before the jungles, the putrescences and waste savageries could become arable, and the Devils in some measure chained up!”In this ideological transformation the Kingdom of the Kongo played a pivotal role. For it was with the discovery and exploitation of the Kongo, coming hard upon the establishment of the Atlantic sugar plantation, that the European demand for slaves was re-kindled, and the identification of slavery and race made explicit. In the century prior to 1482, the number of black slaves taken annually from Africa numbered, at most, in the hundreds.Most worked in Mediterranean Europe as household servants, hospital orderlies, garbage collectors, or in similar, menial positions. Color at that time was no bar to servitude: Greeks, Turks, Russians, Slavs, and Cretans were also enslaved, and most of the very first slaves shipped to Brazil were white. But after 1482, the number of slaves coming from Africa rose dramatically. By 1550, a Portuguese ditty could sum up Europe’s changing perception of Africa, and of the Kongo in particular:uns aos outros se vendem;& ha muitos merdadores que nisso somente entemdem;& hos enganam & prendem;& trazem aos tratadores.(They sell each other there are many merchants whose specialty it is to trick and capture them and sell them to the slavers.)Thus the question of who could enslave whom, and under what conditions, which had been a topic of lively debate in the early years of the European discovery and conquest of the New World, received a decisive answer.The die was cast: even today-some three hundred years after the Battle of Mbwila—thriller novels and college bars still borrow the Kongo’s name for its suggestion of the primitive. The old kingdom, its territory neatly bisected by the border between present-day Angola and Zaire [DR Congo], continues to exert an atavistic attraction, like an out-of-the-way theater in a once-fashionable neighborhood, where, on sporadic afternoons, the lights darken and the silent films still run.…….The following passage is taken for the best-selling book: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is a 1995 book by James W. Loewen, an American sociologist.Historians have chronicled the rise of racism in the West. Before the 1450s Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized.Amnesia set in: Europe gradually found it convenient to forget that Moors from Africa had brought to Spain and Italy much of the learning that led to the Renaissance. Europeans had known that Timbuktu, with its renowned university and library, was a center learning.Timbuktu: History of Fabled Center of LearningTimbuktu is a city in Mali, in West Africa, that was founded 1,800 years ago. During Europe’s Middle Ages, it was home to a rich writing tradition that saw the creation of millions of manuscripts, hundreds of thousands of which survive to present day.'From here to Timbuktu'In the West, the city has become synonymous with mysterious isolation, the farthest one can travel. However, for centuries this was a major trading hub and a center for scholarship. The city reached its height in the 16th century when it was controlled by the Songhay Empire. “[I]t has been estimated that Timbuktu had perhaps as many as 25,000 students, amounting to a quarter of the city’s population,” write John Hunwick and Alida Jay Boye in the book "The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu" (Thames and Hudson, 2008).Timbuktu - learning at the heart of Africa | IOL NewsIt was known for its gold and paper - two valuable commodities that would secure its place in history.Later it was an intellectual hub where the famed manuscripts captured prevailing thoughts of the day about a variety of topics, including medicine, mathematics, religion and astronomy.Ron Eglash: African FractalsRon Eglash brings up the binary code’s history in Africa, showing how it originally came from the twelfth century, when Hugo Santalia brought the code from Islamic mystics to Spain, where it then entered the alchemy community as geomancy, or divination through the earth. Then different people adapted this method and used it in their own unique way until binary code was translated into the digital computer…..Not only Africa had advanced civilization during the Triangular Trade, but several African kingdoms had embassies in Europe and in Brazil.https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/208299-african-kingdoms-ebook-.pdfThe Kingdom of Kongo was long one of the most famous West African kingdoms in the world. From the moment that the Portuguese navigators led by Diogo Cão arrived at the estuary of the Congo river in 1482, the Kongo kingdom embarked on a prolonged engagement with American and European peoples that would endure for centuries. Kongo ambassadors would be despatched to the Vatican to plea for more Catholic missionaries, to Portugal, and to Brazil.The first Bishop of Útica, Dom Henrique, was appointed by the Vatican in 1521, was the son of the king of Kongo, known as the manikongo. For all these reasons, and many others, Kongo was in many ways Atlantic Africa’s first truly globalised kingdom; its Atlantic global links emerging at around the same time of the growing transnational links of Songhay covered in the previous chapter.Beyond the reciprocal cultural influences, African diplomacy was a commonplace. In the late 15th century, the Jolof prince Bumi Jeléen visited Portugal to seek support for his claim to the Jolof throne in Senegambia; Jolof ambassadors resided in Portugal for much of the 16th century, where there were also ambassadors from Kongo and from the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo.In the 17th century, Kongo expanded its diplomatic initiatives with ambassadors at the Vatican and at the Dutch court in north-eastern Brazil in the 1630s and 1640s, and frequent exchanges of correspondence with the States-General Assembly of the Netherlands throughout the first half of the century.Other West African kingdoms followed suit: in what is now the republic of Benin, the kingdom of Allada sent embassies to Spain in the 1650s, and had some diplomatic engagement with England; in the 18th century, Dahomey – a successor state to Allada – sent several embassies to Brazil.…….Portrait of Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo - WikipediaThe painting is a portrait of Don Miguel de Castro, a cousin of the Count of Sonho, who was sent as an envoy to the Dutch Republic to ask the Dutch stadtholder for mediation in a conflict the count had with King Garcia II of Kongo.The Dutch West India Company had conquered Loango-Angola in 1641 from the Portuguese, and they had heavily relied on the assistance of the Count of Sonho.Don Miguel de Castro travelled with a few servants to the Dutch Republic via Dutch Brazil, where they had been received by Governor John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen. On 19 June 1643, Don Miguel de Castro arrived in Flushing, where he was received by three directors of the Zealand chamber of the Dutch West India Company, and who provided him with accommodation in Middelburg. Eventually he was sailed by yacht to The Hague on 2 July 1643, where he had an audience with stadtholder Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange.….Portrait of Don Miguel de Castro (1643)The portrait depicts an emissary Don Miguel de Castro who was involved in peace negotiations between the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Kongo. He was the cousin of the Count of Sonho and the Dutch were reliant the Count of Sonho. The Dutch West India Company was fearful of the status of their newly conquered Loango-Angola possession from the Portuguese. King Garcia II of Kongo was willing to challenge any Portuguese or Dutch threat to the kingdom.The Dutch and Kongo alliance was a fragile one based on mutual hatred of Portuguese colonization. Don Miguel de Castro was most likely involved in high level diplomatic talks to keep the alliance secure. Very little information has been preserved about Don Miguel de Castro’s life, but there is more information on his travels. He went from Dutch Brazil to the Dutch Republic in Europe. With only a few servants he traveled three continents Africa, Latin America, and Europe. At the end of his long trip he was able to get an audience with Prince Frederick Henry of Orange.The portrait is oil on canvas and shows Miguel de Castro wearing European dress. It was thought that at one time Albert Eckhout was the painter, but scholars believe it could have been Jeronimus Becx. The portrait was likely painted in Middelburg during de Castro’s meeting with the three directors of the Zealand camber of the Dutch West India Company. There were a total of six portraits that were commissioned, which also include de Castro’s entourage. Such paintings demonstrate that at the time European states saw African leaders as equals. As the slave trade continued, race prejudice increased. Don Miguel de Castro portrait is evidence of how African states also used diplomacy to ensure their independence.…The major exports of the Kingdom of Kongo to Europe were Kongo textiles. There were textile manufacturing centers across the Kingdom. Kongo textiles were considered luxury items in Europe.The sophisticated economy of the Kongo empireImagination remains forever marked by the explorers’ narratives restored by the German historian Leo Frobenius, who described the inhabitants of Kongo as people “clothed in silk and velvet (…) civiliz ed to the bone marrow” [3]. Several palm trees were methodically cultivated for the purposes of the textile industry. Their fibers were used to make high-quality fabrics. Brocade was called Incorimba . Velvet was called Enzaca , damas called Infulas , satins Maricas , taffeta called Tanga , the “armoisins” Engomboshttps://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/kongo/blog/posts/kongo-textiles-renaissance-european-collectionsOne of the wonders of Kongo: Power and Majesty, on view through January 3, 2016, is the group of luxury textiles finely woven from golden palm fiber, then hand-cut and rubbed in the weaver's hands. The result is a rich interplay of tone and texture that reminded me at first of aerial views of crop circles cut into fields of ripening grain.The textiles, however, are far more complex as virtuoso pieces. Their making was described with admiration by Antonio Zuchelli (1663–1716), an Italian missionary to the Kongo. He notes how the local weavers finished their cloth "with a knife they cut the cloth in the proper spots and rub it well with their hands, so that it looks like patterned velvet." Europeans compared what they saw to luxurious Italian silk velvets with elaborate woven patterns, but they admired pieces that were "so beautiful," in the words of the Portuguese sea captain Duarte Pacheco Pereira (ca. 1460–1533), "that those made in Italy do not surpass them in workmanship." What really surprised them was the way in which Kongo cloths were woven not from silk but from raffia, which made them miraculously soft to the touch. The designs were less often a source of comment, although in 1656, John Tradescant the Younger (1608–1662) described a cloth in his museum in Lambeth—now in the Pitt Rivers in Oxford—as "A Table-cloath of grass very curiously waved."When one looks at these luxury textiles with twenty-first-century eyes, the timeless artistry of the design is particularly striking. Bands of sophisticated geometric patterns spiral across the textile surfaces, similar to the interlace patterns on Kongo ivory oliphants, which are carved from curving elephant tusks. Such repeating motifs were not merely decorative but had profound significance within Kongo society. Exhibition curator Alisa LaGamma explains in her introductory chapter to the exhibition catalogue how the spiral movement is a visual metaphor for the path taken by the dead, which is central to Kongo thought and imagining. That concept communicates through the finished designs, explaining why these were elite display pieces in Kongo society, and why they were an important component in diplomatic exchanges with the Portuguese from the fifteenth century.An interesting puzzle—and a prompt to further research—is the European format of the cloths themselves, which are shaped to European taste in their format and structure. Even the elaborately made pompoms at their corners imitate those made of silk or wool on European cushions. A fascinating insight into the status of luxury cushions within an Italian, early fifteenth-century context is provided by the Salimbenis' fresco from Urbino showing scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist.…Some of the finest surviving Kongo cloths are still to be found in collections formed in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Known as Kunstkammern, or "art rooms," these cabinet collections at first concentrated mostly on small-scale European treasures that were precious and intricate or demonstrated skill or virtuosity. But during the sixteenth century, in the so-called Age of Exploration, these collections diversified to explore all things curious, rare, and exotic that had been brought from an expanding range of global contacts. What were Europeans to make of what Shakespeare unforgettably called the "brave new world" opening up all around them?From Stockholm to Florence, London to Prague, Kongo luxury cloths were preserved in court and cabinet collections formed by rulers, princes, and urban elites. The first two recorded examples appear in Prague in 1607—in the Kunstkammer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Prague (r. 1576–1612), where they remain today—but the royal houses of Sweden and Denmark swiftly followed.Kongo cloths are also recorded in the seventeenth century as prize pieces acquired by doctors, scientists, and scholars. The Milanese physician Ludovico Settala (1552–1633) and his son Manfredo (1600–1680) formed one of Italy's most famous scientific museums, which included several examples. There is a drawing of a folded one, annotated as "a small mat to make a cushion to sit on, made of straw of rare beauty…made in Angola or Congo." Settala's scholarly network included the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), founding director of the the Musaeum Kircherianum in Rome, who acquired pieces described in 1709 as "four mats made with admirable skill in the Kingdom of Angola….they look like a silk cloth notwithstanding they are made of very thin palm threads."