Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
ENLIGHTENMENT ERA LIARS
ENLIGHTENMENT ERA LIARS
Why was it necessary for certain “Enlightenment era” Anglo-Saxons, “whites,” to lie for so long, for so notoriously, so inaccurately about ancient Africans’ history, philosophy, mathematics, technology, and then, to continue lying about these forward for centuries?
Millions of Africans who were marooned from Africa, were transshipped across the Ethiopian Ocean ( renamed the “Atlantic Ocean” after 1800) emaciated, enslaved, from the fifteenth century through eighteenth century.
These African were the direct descendants of the ancient Africans who are celebrated by the classic authors as the “tallest, handsomest and most just of men, the favorites of the gods.”
They were already being held captive in the Americas in the 17th & 18th centuries. Their labor, know-how , ingenuity , creativity, elasticity, beauty, endurance & power, were already being exploited as slaves . African slaves had for centuries been kidnapped by credulous tribesmen, stowed in barracoons for European traders. Trades were made for slaves in the New World, then shipped overseas, by millions.
Did not centuries of African captivity and enslavement, cultural destruction, family separation, repeated resales into chattel slavery , forced illiteracy & innumeracy, more than prove the innate inferiority that whites’ enlightenment lies had claimed? Why did whites’ descendants further have to compound abusive misprision by lying, by consistently misrepresenting the truth?
These “white” men, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, were all said to have been learned men. As such, they would have been, at least, minimally, familiar with the great Greek and Roman classics of Homer, Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus of pre-Christian era.
Just as surely, were these early American Presidents, “our founding fathers”, aware of the works was of Plato, Aristotle and others . These wise Greeks, these ancient authors , wrote effusively of the Africans’ ingenious gifts to ancient civilizations, to whom all later civilizations were indebted; particularly the United States of America!
These enlightened men knew better. They had to have known better to have had the gall, the temerity to secede from England, the mother country! They knew; even if the tribally-locked-in Africans themselves did not know better of their own ancient black African forbears’ place in history!
Whether the enslaved Africans’ collective racial amnesia was due to brainwashing by later foreign conquerors; whether it was due to later forced migrations, to flee subjugation (as Dr. Chancellor Williams claims in THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK CIVILIZATIONS); or whether amnesia was due to the death of preexisting cultures of written recordation, instruction, or for others, forgetfulness of past, happened.
I must conclude, therefore, that because my surmise is that “the founding fathers” knew of the ancient Africans’ foundational contributions to global civilizations, by reason of their having been learned men who read the ancient classics where the truth is lain plain; which later tribalized Africans did not know of their forbears, America’s founding fathers feared that someday Africans might rediscover their true divine capacities, their former identities as the founders, of arts and sciences, not their flunkies; as the original leaders, not the “inferior” followers! Such knowledge may surely destabilize, destroy slavery, whose secret efficacy rests upon circumscribed minds, hearts, ambitions, behaviors in circumscribed circumstance.
That is why Thomas Jefferson lied in his book NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, “Query XIV” (1785) that was first privately published; generally republished since. He lied about black people’s allegedly innate intellectual incapacity and black women’s (whose sexuality he demeaned as akin to that of “orangutans”), despite his trysting with one such sister, Sally Hemings, his own enslaved woman, and slave breeder.
Thomas Jefferson’s lies were also doubly exposed by his famous 1791 exchange of correspondence with the great Benjamin Banneker, of Maryland, a free, self-taught black man, who was also an astronomer, mathematician, actuary, surveyor of African descent , who had completed the survey of Washington, D. C., after Pierre L’Enfant left the major work incomplete.
Benjamin Banneker had also constructed an accurate-time-keeping wooden clock, (America’s first). Banneker was also a landowner, farmer, who had famously published an almanac (with Jefferson’s endorsement) in five states, Maryland , Virginia , Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey for six years until death in 1806.
In conclusion, the enlightened founding fathers lied because it was in the nation’s economic interest to lie to Africans and to lesser whites and others about the utter worthlessness of the enslaved Africans, to justify their heinous Labor conscriptions.
Their lie is belied in books of integrity. But if one does not read, the lie ceases to be a lie; rather it becomes truth of our destiny!