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I will repeat this over and over again : the fake Negro stereotye only being found south of the Sahara and its related caricature were created by the worst enslavers of Blacks in order to get rid of feelings of inferiority towards the most powerful Blacks in world history : the African Moors, described as black as night, Nilotic Egyptians, a colony of Ethiopians and Melanchroes (Mela is the Greek prefix for black) and Kushite Horners. Kush refers to a land inhabited by Blacks.Yes, they were great. (splendor of ancient Egypt, greatness of Axum, the Immortal Kushite Empire, the Golden Age of the Moors, etc.).Someone said it all : Egypt is the measuring line by which we must sound the abyss of European history. To this day, Whites are stunned and stand in awe when they go and visit archeological sites in Egypt where the oldest Afro-combs were excavated.Queen Sheba of Ethiopia, the iconic ruler of Axum, one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, were building temples and monumental pillars when Paris did not exist and Arabs wandered in the desert. There were Moorish rulers on European soil from 711 to 1492 longer than any European power had a colony in Africa. Gibraltar is named after a Moorish general, Tarik, also known as the Conqueror of Spain.Yes, they were Africans. Egypt is in Africa, Barbary (Mauretania, Numidia, Cyrene) is in Africa. The Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia and Eritrea is located in Africa.But they were not “Sub-Saharan Negroes” we held in bondage for centuries. “Blacks are a race of slaves” is a constant historical narrative to keep “Negroes” in their place. Negroes do not exist. Negroes are Eurocentric creations. They only live in the minds of racist Whites.White supremacists created two types of Negroes:The servile Negroes, the detribalized sub-Saharan Africans who were the slave commodity/chattel as opposed to the the Whites, the slave masters of European descent. His name was Mutanda Nkashama when he was a free man in Africa. In the USA, Mutanda Nkashama, a Luba, becomes Turner, the Negro. His identity and history are erased. He is degraded as a non-human and demonized as a beast.The savage Negroes, the colonized sub-Saharan Africans who were the primitive stock as opposed to the Whites, the superior and civilizing people of European descent. Mutanda Nkashama, a Luba becomes Mutanda, the Negro. His humanity and history are denied. He is debased as a lesser human and diabolized as devil worshipper.Truth be told, Negroland, the “Land of the Negroes”, was the Songhay Empire. Someone noted that the Songhai empire (1493-1591), extending from the Atlas Mountains to southern Cameroon, rivaled the Aztec and Inca empires in terms of geographical extent, diversity of population, and natural resources. In addition, Congoland, the Kingdom of Kongo was a globalized kingdom with embassies in Rome, Lisbon, Holland and Brazil. Its main exports were textiles regarded as luxury items in 16–17th Europe.………………………..De-blackening the most powerful Blacks in world history into brown Caucasoids is a liberation strategy from feelings of inferiority. The African Moors, Nilotic Egyptians and Kushite Horners are Caucasoid people just like Whites. The Caucasoid race has always been the superior race. The written word of ancient times is crystal clear as to what African Moors, immortalized through the Moor’s head heraldic symbol looked like.Moor's Heads of EuropeIn which even the university of Cambridge admits that ancient Egypt was Black AfricanMusicians at a banquet. Mural from the tomb of Rekhmire, vizier under Thutmosis III (1490-1439 BCE) and Amenophis II (1439-1413 BCE). 18th Dynasty, New Kingdom, Egypt.————————————————-In order words, Africa, particularly Africa south of the Sahara, has two histories in the Eurocentric discourse : before and after the 15th, that is, before and after the Slave Trade.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…..Paul Gaffarel, a French scholar, wrote that Africa has always been the mysterious continent, the land of surprises and horrors, the land of unexpected contrasts, extreme barbarism and extreme civilization.There are marked contrasts between the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Ethiopian empire and the group of pigmies in the Congo. There are even striking contrasts within the same geographical area. The Kingdom of Kongo was a well-organized and sophisticated kingdom.The Tarzan image of Africa full of “jungle static primitives and bush savages is a racist imagining of Africa. Africa is really huge and has a lot of diversity. Here is the trick : they cherry-pick particular groups of Africans but silence or ignore regions of “great civilizations” and use the “jungle static primities” and bush savages to represent the whole pre-colonial Africa.……Kongo people - WikipediaDetailed and copious description about the Kongo people who lived next to the Atlantic ports of the region, as a sophisticated culture, language and infrastructure, appear in the 15th century, written by the Portuguese explorers.Later anthropological work on the Kongo of the region come from the colonial era writers, particularly the French and Belgians (Loango, Vungu, and the Niari Valley), but this too is limited and does not exhaustively cover all of the Kongo people. The evidence suggests, states Vansina, that the Kongo people were advanced in their culture and socio-political systems with multiple kingdoms well before the arrival of first Portuguese ships in the late 15th century.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.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."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."And all that came from countries of the African periphery, delivered over after that to slave merchants, . . .The idea of the 'barbarous Negro' is a European invention which has consequently prevailed in Europe until the beginning of this century.……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.…….The Specter of the Blackamoor: Figuring Africa and the OrientThe servitude of the Blackamoor both in narrative content (depicted as carrying trays, or holding other functional objects such as boxes, clocks, and lamps) and in artistic form (decorative domestic ornament) fixes its presence in courtly spaces as a foreign body redeemed only through the implied submissiveness of a servile posture. In many ways, the comforting fiction of the happily serving Blackamoor silently testifies to the West’s denial of Africa and Asia’s contribution to Europe’s own cultural and scientific achievements.Yet during long historical periods Europe was largely a borrower of science and technology: the alphabet, algebra, and astronomy all came from outside Europe, including Dogon astronomy, Chinese gunpowder, compass, and printing press. Prior to and subsequent to the Columbus conquest era, Iberian Muslim and Jewish thinkers led advances in navigation and cartography. Even the caravels used by Henry the navigator were modeled after lateen-sailed Arab dhows.4 Indeed, for some historians the first item of technology exported from Europe was a clock, in 1338.5 Within this longue durée of syncretism, the trope of the submissive Blackamoor constitutes a visual vehicle for rewriting history Eurocentrically as though all ideas and innovations originated alone and unaided in the West.Although cultural intercourse and racial mixing date back to antiquity, with modernity that history was rewritten through the grid of Eurocentric normativities. History was recast to conform to Eurocentric perspective, in the name of an eternal “West” unique since its moment of conception. Whole continents, in contrast, were turned into everlasting “slave continents.” In historical and discursive terms, the advent of colonialism inspired a retroactive rewriting of Asian and African histories and their relation to classical Greco-Roman civilization.In Black Athena, Martin Bernal distinguishes between the “ancient model,” which simply assumed classical Greek civilization’s deep indebtedness to both African (Egyptian and Ethiopian) and Semitic (Hebraic and Phoenician) civilizations—and the “Aryan model” that developed in the wake of slavery and colonialism.7 The Aryan model had to perform ingenious acrobatics to “purify” classical Greece—and by implication modern Europe—of all African and Asian “contaminations.” It had to explain away, for example, the innumerable Greek homages to Afro-Asiatic cultures, Homer’s description of the “blameless Ethiopians,” Biblical Moses’ marriage to a daughter of Kush, and the frequent references to the “kalos kagathos” (handsome and good) Africans in classical literature.8 Ancient Greece, supposedly the fount of universal civilization, was not then a proto-Europe; Greece, and for that matter the southern Mediterranean as a whole, was itself African, Semitic, and Asian, looking both east and west.The exotic Blackamoor is embedded in a “Eurotropic discourse”9 that has systematically degraded Africa and Asia as deficient according to Europe’s own arbitrary criteria (the presence of monumental architecture, literate culture) and hierarchies (melody over percussion, brick over thatch, clothing over body decoration). Yet even by these dubious standards, pre-colonial Africa was clearly a continent of rich and diverse cultures—the scene of high material achievements (witness the ruins of Zimbabwe), widespread commercial exchange, complex religious beliefs and social systems, and diverse forms of writing (pictograms, ideograms, object scripts such as Alele and Ngombo).Scholars have also established the complexity of Dogon astronomical knowledge: the sigui ritual, introduced by the mythical ancestor of the Dogons, Dyongu Seru, has been found to analogize and reflect the orbiting cycle of the star Sirius B.10 And the Moorish Spaniard Leo Africanus, writing in the early sixteenth century, described the “magnificent and well-furnished court” of the King of Timbuktu, and “the great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men . . . bountifully maintained at the King’s cost and charges.”11 The idea that Europe has somehow produced knowledge and culture sui-generis is therefore a myth, since such cultural interchanges always constituted inter-civilizational joint ventures.There had been considerable contact between Africa and Europe over the centuries, and the state of development of the two continents, prior to 1492, was relatively equal. Africa had a varied and productive economy, with strong metallurgical and textile industries. Africans developed ironworking and blast furnace technology even before 600 B.C., prefiguring techniques used in Europe only in the nineteenth century.12The textile exports of the Eastern Kongo, in the early seventeenth century, were as large as those of European textile-manufacturing centers such as Leiden. Indeed, in the early years of the Atlantic trade, Europe had little to sell Africa that Africa did not already produce. The “inferiority” of Africa and the African was thus an ideological invention. It demanded, Cedric Robinson puts it, the eradication within Western historical consciousness of “the significance of Nubia for Egypt’s formation, of Egypt in the development of Greek civilization, of Africa for imperial Rome, and more pointedly of Islam’s influence on Europe’s economic, political and intellectual history.Eurocentric thought is premised on denying its debt to other cultural geographies. Asians and Africans were a presence in Europe already in antiquity, at a time when Blackness was not yet racialized within the negative dialectic of colonial enslavements.15 Yet, the otherization of the Blackamoor has the effect of suggesting that both Blacks and Moors did not “really” have a history in Europe. Coupled with this axiom is the implicit notion of “pure White blood” and “pure European culture.” Under the tutelage of the West, dark bodies had everything to learn from Europe but Europe had nothing to learn from Afro-Asia. Blackamoor paintings and statues are hypervisible against the backdrop of the European aristocratic mansion, but they render invisible what the cradle of the Renaissance owes intellectually to Africans and Asians.The historically evocative tension between the stereotypical representation of the naked Black body and that of the over-dressed Moor is resolved, as it were, in the Blackamoor’s synthesis of the two traditional imageries. The visual grafting of flora and fauna on Blackamoors, ground their image in the trope of nature and naturalness.Medieval battles between the “Moros y Cristianos” are still reenacted throughout the Catholic world, in Europe’s Mediterranean region. Sicilian folk culture of the Marionettes and Puppet Theatre stages legendary episodes of the clashes between evil Saracens or Moors and heroic Christians, such as Orlando (Roland), one of Charlemagne’s knights, and the Norman knights of King Roger of Sicily.27 At times, contemporary festivals of “Moors and Christians” highly racialize the simulated duels. In towns such as El Campello and Alcoi, Spaniards parading in Moorish costumes wear Afro-wigs and black gloves, and paint their faces jet black in a local version of the blackface that literalizes the racial trope of “the Blackamoor.”Blackamoor enacts not only a denial of African/Moor/Arab/Muslim intellectual agency and its impact on European culture, but also a celebration of the Muslim’s defeat.