A certain quickening of the will is moving through the African-American group as the dawn of the new millennium approaches. This quickening heralds a process of cultural renewal, development, and the rebirth of mastery, greatness, and perfect equality for a people whose humanity itself has, by grace, survived what might have been utter devastation. The job of the 1900s is to leave four hundred-plus years of bare survival behind so that a new African being - in the United States and throughout the world - will cross the threshold into the year 2000.
Yes, the advance of the African group is marked by a profound new identity. No longer slave or homeless freed slave, no longer designated narrowly by race, we are now African-Americans: rooted and bonded to a continent and cultural heritage that comprise not only an accurate geopolitical identity but also an ancient and mysterious spiritual legacy. No longer excluded from the American economic and political mainstream, we are now African-Americans: builders of the wealth and the democratic foundation of this nation and her legitimate inheritors.
Following the new definition of this group, this new identity must be substantiated. This essay will probe the roles of history, identity culture, education, and political and economic empowerment in ensuring the progress that African-American group so earnestly affirms for itself at the close of the twentieth century.
Historical Perspective
The story of the African begins at the beginning - indeed is the beginning - of human history. For tens of thousands of years before the emergence of the Asian or European cultures, African people were pioneering the frontier of what it means to be human, establishing civilization on the earth.
Agricultural diversity, the domestication of animals, tool making, house building, weaving, and the fashioning of crafts from metals were all evidenced on Egypt by the time of the New Stone Age.
Effective organization of government and commerce, the blossoming of intellectual centers, and the amassing of great wealth characterized the three African states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. Of them, Lerone Bennett says:
Ghana, which was old when the Arabs first mentioned it in A.D. 800, dominated the Sudan for almost three hundred years, flourishing in the ninth and tenth centuries and reaching the peak of its power in the early part of the eleventh century.
[Mansa] Musa…came to power in 1307 [in Mali] and put together one of the greatest countries of the medieval world. Musa was best known for a pilgrimage he made to Mecca in 1324. He went in regal splendor with an entourage of sixty thousand persons, including twelve thousand servants. Five hundred servants, each of whom carried a staff of pure gold weighing some six pounds, marched on before him. Eighty camels bore twenty-four thousand pounds of gold, which the black monarch distributed as alms and gifts. Musa returned to his kingdom with an architect who designed imposing buildings in Timbuktu and other cities of the Sudan.
Mali declined in importance in the fifteenth century and
...
Read Full Article
|
