posted
Post from the thread: U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111: ^I was wondering why you were lying about something that was on the very same page. I'm thinking, that's too crazy for even lioness.
Then I looked at my post again - that sure is a lot of text/reading I thought.
Then I realized you had read this: and was following the idea.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 If You Want To Hide Something From a Black Person... What’s that old expression? “If you want to hide something from a Black person, put it in a book.” (or some say, "write it down")
There’s long been a stereotype that Black people don’t like to read. The thinking is that Black folks prefer to rely on oral communication to document history and to communicate, in general. We supposedly don’t like to write and we don’t like to read.
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While acknowledging that truth - because I had experienced it.
I knew that it was NOT a "BLACK" trait, because I knew of, and experienced the exact reverse.
Not only that, but I knew from my own research that Black people were the inventors of Writing, and the the overwhelming majority of Black people of any educated level - loved to read!
So WHO are those Black people who have no use for Reading?
I suspected it was those of African descent, but having no proof, and not wanting to pour more fuel on the fire, I said nothing.
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Last week Munghana Lonene FM invited its listeners to reflect on a question that should preoccupy all black people: Why are blacks generally trailing white people?
There are indeed some "clever" blacks who think they are better; but, in reality, they are simply ignorant.
What kind of black person do we generally deem successful in our townships and rural villages?
It is a person who has a big Western-style house; the man who drives a Mercedes Benz, BMW and so on. A truly successful black person wears expensive suits, typically from Italy.
The life of a successful black person follows a particular pattern. From Monday to Friday he goes to work. On Saturday he goes to a funeral, if not to a shopping mall.
On Sunday such a person goes to church, or he polishes his shoes while listening to jazz. A few read newspapers - to learn about latest scandals. These are the sophisticated types.
Successful black people don't buy books. White people know this. When they plan shopping malls for black communities, they do not include book shops.
Go to any mall in any township, or to any rural town, you will not find a book shop. Where there are no whites, there are no book shops.
Exclusive Books at Maponya Mall in Soweto was the first shop to close down. Some ambitious white man had overestimated his capacity to re-engineer black people's cultural life. He was wrong.
Libraries in black communities are generally unoccupied, or used by pupils during exam time. Even teachers don't visit libraries. In some cases they are simply burnt down by black protesters.
Because they don't read, the "clever" blacks who fancy themselves superior to whites are not aware that there is a relationship between the Western-style houses they live in and books.
It is true that the soil used to make the bricks and mortar is African, but the concept of the house is European.
To be proud of the fact that we no longer live in an African rondavel is to acknowledge the superiority of Western ideas. It is to concede that African rondavels are a mark of backwardness.
If the "clever'" blacks are serious about their claim of superiority, why have they accepted Mercedes Benz as a symbol of prestige?
Before it became a car, a BMW was an idea in the head of a European. The idea did not jump into a European's head because he was lucky; it was a result of a very old intellectual tradition - the love of knowledge.
To answer Munghana Lonene's question, let us pose it differently: Why are white people superior to blacks?
In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama makes the observation that developing countries that are making progress today are those that had developed systems before they came into contact with the West.
These are countries that had a well-developed intellectual culture before they were invaded by Westerners.
China, today the second largest economy in the world, is a perfect example. Ask them, the Chinese will point to Confucius as one who embodies the best of Chinese thought, even though this philosopher died in 479 BC.
Confucius's principles of "personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity" are to this day the dye that gives colour to the character of Chinese society.
Even though the influence of Confucian philosophy was interrupted - particularly during the imposed legalism of the Qin Dynasty - Confucius's ideas did withstand the vicissitudes of Chinese history.
The vaunted professionalisation of the state and the modernisation of the communist party, generally associated with Deng Xiaoping, was in fact an atavistic step towards Confucianism.
In short, the Chinese have a well-established intellectual culture - meaning, a relationship with books.
A people who do not read books are bound to remain backward, not because they are unlucky, or because they were colonised.
Africans are not the only people who were once colonised, and the damage done by colonialism is not predestined to be fixed by the return of Jesus Christ.
We Africans are people of oral traditions, a people who transmit inferior knowledge through word of mouth.
The problem with knowledge that is based on the word of mouth is that, over time, it gets lost in the lies and ego of storytellers.
Eventually, a whole history disappears. The task of searching for African intellectual canon is not as clear-cut as it is for the Chinese, or for Europeans. Our intellectual gods are buried deep in obscurity, far beyond our daily knowledge resources.
Today we are battling to reconstruct Mapungubwe. Even though exhumed artefacts suggest the existence of a hub of scientific activity, there are no books written at that time about the place.
Socrates died in 399 BC, but the speech he delivered on trial has been passed on to us, in written form, by Plato. The now famous idea of "speaking truth to power" was first given practical expression by Socrates himself in classical Athens.
The answer to Munghana Lonene's question is that blacks don't read books - full stop.
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The guy identify the issues but I think he's wrong in his sentiment,Amos Wilson talked about this in one of his lecture,one is wrong values and the other is the intent for acquiring the skills sense the point of an education is to advance the group or you.
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posted
The guy identify the issues but I think he's wrong in his sentiment,Amos Wilson talked about this in one of his lecture,one is wrong values and the other is the intent for acquiring the skills sense the point of an education is to advance the group or you.
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quote:Originally posted by Thereal: The guy identify the issues but I think he's wrong in his sentiment,Amos Wilson talked about this in one of his lecture,one is wrong values and the other is the intent for acquiring the skills sense the point of an education is to advance the group or you.
. In order to properly participate, you need to post supporting material - such as excerpts from Wilson's article.
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My comment was about the prince guy him referring to their form of architecture in the rondavel no being valued amongst the Africans how malls are designed without bookstores,in SA the are having problems about tuition,if an education has so many benefits to the society than it shouldn't be difficult to educate and the expense of it shouldn't be that great.
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posted
Funny and I thought Africans were one of the first to develop the world's writing and reading scripts and alphabets and build the first universities and libraries such as Timbuktu/Mali....
The European albinos never created their own basic alphabet or reading or writing scripts until well into the middle ages....
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quote:Originally posted by Mindovermatter: Funny and I thought Africans were one of the first to develop the world's writing and reading scripts and alphabets and build the first universities and libraries such as Timbuktu/Mali....
The European albinos never created their own basic alphabet or reading or writing scripts until well into the middle ages....
. Damn MOM, you mean you have never even googled the Timbuktu library?
Wiki:
Timbuktu Manuscripts or (Tombouctou Manuscripts) is a blanket term for the large number of historically important manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, Mali. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as priceless copies of the Quran. The number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000.
The majority of manuscripts were written in Arabic, but many were also in local languages, including Manding, Songhay and Tamasheq. The dates of the manuscripts ranged between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan). Their subject matter ranged from scholarly works to short letters. The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and were mostly in poor condition. Most of the manuscripts remain unstudied and uncatalogued, and their total number is unknown, affording only rough estimates. A selection of about 160 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu and the Ahmed Baba collection were digitized by the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in the 2000s.
Clearly there is nothing worthwhile in the books. They imply Arabized Africans like Mansa Musa, fronting to impress the Ottomans in Turkey.
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Musa Keita I (c. 1280 – c. 1337) was the tenth Mansa, which translates as "sultan" (king) or "emperor", of the wealthy West African Mali Empire.
Mansa Musa holding a gold coin.
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Note that the buildings in the picture are Ottoman.Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Musa was a devout Muslim, and his pilgrimage to Mecca made him well-known across northern Africa and the Middle East. To Musa, Islam was "an entry into the cultured world of the Eastern Mediterranean". He would spend much time fostering the growth of the religion within his empire.
Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324–1325. His procession reportedly included 60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves who each carried four pounds of gold bars and heralds dressed in silks who bore gold staffs, organized horses, and handled bags. Musa provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. Those animals included 80 camels which each carried between 50 and 300 pounds of gold dust. Musa gave the gold to the poor he met along his route. Musa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, but also traded gold for souvenirs. It was reported that he built a mosque each and every Friday.
Musa's journey was documented by several eyewitnesses along his route, who were in awe of his wealth and extensive procession, and records exist in a variety of sources, including journals, oral accounts, and histories. Musa is known to have visited the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, in July of 1324. (The Mamluks were Slave Soldiers of the Ottoman Turks).
But Musa's generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest. This is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.
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posted
Just because you may not find them worthwhile doesn't suggest their couldn't be stuff of relevance,if the Turk khazars aren't translating the dead Sea scrolls than the issue falls on the Africans either not translating them or they are unable to spread the info efficiently.
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Here is the man Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca was supposed to impress.
Osman Gazi or Osman Bey or Osman Alp); (died 1323/4), sometimes transliterated archaically as Othman or Ottoman or Atman (from the contemporary Byzantine Greek version of his name, Άτμαν), was the leader of the Ottoman Turks and the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. He and the dynasty bearing his name later established and ruled the nascent Ottoman Empire (then known as the Ottoman Beylik or Emirate). The state, while only a small principality during Osman's lifetime, transformed into a world empire in the centuries after his death. It existed until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, or alternatively the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 or the abolition of the caliphate in 1924.
Due to the scarcity of historical sources dating from his lifetime, very little factual information is known about him. Not a single written source survives from Osman's reign. The Ottomans did not record the history of Osman's life until the fifteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death. Because of this, it is very challenging for historians to differentiate between fact and myth in the many stories told about him. One historian has even gone so far as to declare it impossible, describing the period of Osman's life as a "black hole."
According to Ottoman tradition, Osman's ancestors were descendants of the Kayı tribe of Oğuz Turks. The Ottoman principality was just one of many Anatolian beyliks that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Situated in the region of Bithynia, Osman's principality was particularly well-placed to launch attacks on the vulnerable Byzantine Empire, which his descendants would eventually go on to conquer.
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Timbuktu’s Destruction: Why Islamists Are Wrecking Mali’s Cultural Heritage
Ansar Dine, a radical Islamist militia, has set about destroying mausoleums and shrines in the historic Malian city of Timbuktu, which was once a great center of Islamic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries.
quote:Originally posted by Mindovermatter: Funny and I thought Africans were one of the first to develop the world's writing and reading scripts and alphabets and build the first universities and libraries such as Timbuktu/Mali....
The European albinos never created their own basic alphabet or reading or writing scripts until well into the middle ages....
. Damn MOM, you mean you have never even googled the Timbuktu library?
Wiki:
Timbuktu Manuscripts or (Tombouctou Manuscripts) is a blanket term for the large number of historically important manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, Mali. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as priceless copies of the Quran. The number of manuscripts in the collections has been estimated as high as 700,000.
The majority of manuscripts were written in Arabic, but many were also in local languages, including Manding, Songhay and Tamasheq. The dates of the manuscripts ranged between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan). Their subject matter ranged from scholarly works to short letters. The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and were mostly in poor condition. Most of the manuscripts remain unstudied and uncatalogued, and their total number is unknown, affording only rough estimates. A selection of about 160 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu and the Ahmed Baba collection were digitized by the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in the 2000s.
Clearly there is nothing worthwhile in the books. They imply Arabized Africans like Mansa Musa, fronting to impress the Ottomans in Turkey.
There is probably much worthwhile knowledge in some of the books in Timbuktu.
When I went to the University of Illinois my original goal was to perfect my Arabic so I could translate documents in the Yemeni archives. I studied area studies so I acquired many books on how to develop a reading knowledge of languages like Arabic, German and Spanish ( I already could read French). I had to learn to read German and Spanish because many of the articles and books I needed to read and write papers in my African History seminar courses were not written in English.
The U of I, had a very good language lab so I was able to copy tapes of many languages I later used to learn Chinese, Tamil and several other languages.
But alas I learned that you have to have money and support of the Establishment to get into research centers, archives and the basement of museums. I didn’t have this type of support so I never accomplished my original goal. Over the years I have neglected by Arabic, and learned so many different languages I could never perform the task of translating documents in Yemen and Timbuktu, today.
Moreover, the documents are located in dangerous places , like Mali and Yemen, places, that I would never visit.
The lack of money caused me to do most of my research at the University of Chicago Library and the Oriental Institute. I tried to use the library at Northwestern but it was hard to get papers to use the library, since I wasn’t a student. This caused me to give up the idea of doing advanced research in African Islamic literature.
Sadly, to do good research in ancient history and linguistics you need access to great libraries so you can see the primary data/sources. The boom in research has been the WWW, here many documents and pictures have been posted that we may never have seen without the coming of the internet.
I think the information in the books at Timbuktuwould be most interesting because it would provide information on the African view of the universe and sciences in general. The problem is that they have been examined mainly by Europeans so we don't really know how the Timbuktu scholars thought about the sciences.
African Muslims have a long tradition of Arabic scholarship. Many of their documents were written in Arabic, or in their own languages in the Arabic script. Dr. J. O. Hunwick (1962) has found over 400 African Muslim authors, who wrote 2000 books. But there are few inscriptions on royal tombstones or mosque in West Africa. Nor did the African Muslims mint coins .
Al-Zuhri, writing in Andalusia (Spain), in the Mid-12th century said that leading men of ancient Ghana made the pilgrimage (hajj ) to Mekka, this suggest that West Africans were also studying the zahir al-culuum branches of learning. Moreover, the Islamist Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d.1505) author of the Tafsir al-Quran, in his biography Tahadduth bi ni ´ma Allah , mentioned many of the West African shaykh (teachers/leaders) whom he taught in Cairo, Egypt.
The central Sudani system of teaching , popular in Nigeria was founded by the scholars at the University of Sankore in Timbuktu. Sankore was founded during the Mali Empire by Jedala scholars.
Sankore was highly regarded as a center of learning by Muslims around the world. The curriculum of Sankore consisted of 1) Faculty of Law, 2) Faculty of Medicine, surgery, pharm is probablyacology and allied subjects, 3) Faculty of Letters, 4) Faculty of Grammar, 5) Faculty of Geography and 6) Faculty of Industrial Arts. The leading scholar of the Sankore tradition was Ahmad Baba.
Given the respect afforded West African scholars I am sure there are probably many interesting books that could provide us abundant information on their literature.
It is sad no Africans or Afro-Americans have taken up the translation of these books.
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posted
Clyde, you say "I am sure there are probably many interesting books that could provide us abundant information on their literature."
And that may very well be. But interesting is not the same as important. If there was anything important in those books, they would have been translated to French by Africans as the changeover to French took over. And certainly, the books would have been collected and housed in a secure location, rather than scattered all over the place, with owners who didn't even know what was in their books.
It seems to me that those books are collected like old wine which nobody expects to drink. It's just for show.
Btw - I find it illuminating that though France colonized Mali for less than 100 years, the official language of Mali is french, not Arab.
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quote: Indeed, it has a rich and diverse heritage and a fascinating past. The city and its desert environs are an archive of handwritten texts in Arabic and in African languages in the Arabic script, produced between the 13th and the 20th centuries. The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu are significant repositories of scholarly production in West Africa and the Sahara.The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu are significant repositories of scholarly production in West Africa and the Sahara. Given the large number of manuscript collections it is surprising that Timbuktu as an archive remains largely unknown and under-used. Timbuktu’s manuscript collections deserve close study. It is a significant starting-point for reflecting on Africa’s written traditions.
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Timbuktu literature is written in arabic. How do you qualify that as indigenous African writing?
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In an interview with the BBC's Hausa language service, Mrs Buhari, a businesswoman and activist, suggested her husband's government had been hijacked by only a "few people", who were behind presidential appointments.
"The president does not know 45 out of 50 of the people he appointed and I don't know them either, despite being his wife of 27 years," she said.
Her decision to go public with her concerns will shock many people, but it shows the level of discontent with the president's leadership, says the BBC's Naziru Mikailu in the capital, Abuja.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has responded to criticism from his wife by saying she belongs in his kitchen.
On a visit to Germany, he said: "I don't know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room."
Mr Buhari was standing next to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who seemed to glare at him.
Aisha Buhari had said she might not back her husband at the next election unless he got a grip on his government.
Responding to questions by reporters, Mr Buhari said that having run for president three times and having succeeded at the fourth attempt, he could "claim superior knowledge over her".
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^ A sad political pawn like Buhari (and other African and American opportunists) should be put on blast about being a puppet and not even capable of naming his own cabinet.
The Mrs did the right thing by exposing her weak kneed husband. No one should have loyalty to a traitor, not even a wife. If he'd sell his country, he'd dam sure sell his wife.
Hopefully, other mates of these traitorous Negroes will start exposing other Negroes who are the dogs of other nations.
But Negroes worldwide are too dense to hold these traitors responsible and accountable. They do evil with no repercussions. Look how Al Sharpton was exposed as a FBI snitch, but Negroes still flock to him and give him money. T.D. Jakes is a flaming Homo, but his church is full with dead head Negroes. Obama has done nothing for Negroes in the 8 years he's been in office, but if he could run for a third term, these brain-dead Negroes would vote for the coconut again.
Albinos have succeeded in reducing the Negro mind to the 16 yo level. Made them inherently cowardly, with absolutely no ability to plan, prioritize, organize, and execute complex strategies.
Negroes worldwide are in dire need of intense brain enemas!
Posts: 4693 | From: Saturn | Registered: Apr 2012
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quote:Originally posted by Real tawk: Timbuktu literature is written in arabic. How do you qualify that as indigenous African writing?
lol Indigenous languages used Arabic calligraphy. Iranians use Arabic calligraphy as well in Farsi. It means that someone who understands Arabic will be able to recognize the script itself as Arabic, but will not be able to decrypt or decipher it. Just like France, Spanish, German, Dutch and English use the same calligraphy.
Begrijp jij deze taal, lummel? Deze taal wordt ook geschreven in een bepaalde stijl ,die overeen komt met het Latijn. Maar het is geen Latijns. Alhoewel deze taal uit het Germaans stamt. lol
Posts: 22244 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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