A Sharecropper's Son Excavates Africa's Glory
by Frederick B. Hudson
Nothing changes-that's what the "old folks say. Recent U.S. media
coverage has lamented the ransacking of ancient Iraq archaeological sites by post-war
looters as desecration of "the cradle of civilization."
A new exhibit has recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City entitled "Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. From
the Mediterranean to the Indus." This exhibit heralds the present Middle
East, in the words of a reviewer for The Wall Street Journal as the source of
"fragile remnants, many of them more than 4,000 years old,(that)…speak directly
to us about what it means to be human."
The reviewer continues to note that "commerce, worship, pleasure, luxury,
the development of technology, and daily necessities are all evoked, along
with literary and architectural traditions."
This identification of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia as the "cradle
of civilization" ignores the signal work of Dr. John Henrik Clark and other
scholars to properly credit Egypt and the Nile River as the progenitor of
"civilization" as we know it today. This awareness is even more disturbing when one
considers that Dr Clark and his colleagues have discovered that the oldest
civilizations were populated by persons of dark skin.
In his book The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa, Dr. L.S.B.
Leakey, the British anthropologist noted for his discoveries of primeval fossil
remains, states that:
"In every country that one visits and where one is drawn into a conversation
about Africa, the question is regularly asked, by people who should know
better: "But what has Africa contributed to world progress?" The critics of Africa
forget that men of science today, with few exceptions, are satisfied that
Africa was the birthplace of man himself, and that for many hundreds of centuries
thereafter, Africa was in the forefront of all human progress.
The opinion of the ancient writers on the Egyptians is more or less
summed up by Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) when he says, "By the almost unanimous
testimony of ancient historians, they [the Egyptians] belong to an African race
which first settled in Ethiopia on the Middle Nile: following the course of the
river, they gradually reached the sea."
The 4,000 year old Mesopotamian artifacts on exhibit at the Metropolitian
Museum of Art, however impressive, are minor when one realizes that when in
850 B.C. when Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey that Egypt had already gone
through 24 dynasties-10,000 years of history of the Egyptian child of
Ethiopia had already been lived!
Photo of
Dr. John Henrik Clark
courtesy of the author
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John Henrik Clark himself was in the tradition of learned men the most
unlikely of historians. Born in Alabama in 1915 to sharecropper parents, he
taught two generations of pupils before he obtained his formal B.A. , M.A., and
Ph.D degrees. But he was singled out by his fifth grade teacher as something
special. She told him: "it is better to be right and go to hell than to follow a
bunch of fools into heaven."
Inspired, the young Clark determined to make a presentation to his
classmates about the history of his people. He asked a white man in the community
for a book about his people's history. He was told that he came from a people
with no history. Undaunted, he began his lifelong search to dig up his past,
discover his dignity and to anticipate his future.
In the film, A Great and Mighty Walk, produced by actor Wesley
Snipes, Clark details his search in the Schomberg Library in New York City for
details of his African past. Not content with mere skin color distinctions of
heroic figures, Clark decided that black tells you how you look, but it doesn't
tell you who you are." He found that 'we are the only people who have lost
historical reference."
Clark's walk took him through centuries of turmoil in which Africa served
as the bread basket of Europe-providing raw materials for white industrial
development. He noted that both Europeans and Arabs took advantage of blacks'
desire to be free of servitude. But he cautioned that only a slave can set
himself free.
His close association with Malcolm X provided him with a model of an
African man in progress-in development of a strategy for liberation. Refusing to
be drawn into ideological debates of political correctness, he cautions that "a
strategy is not a way of life-you use it like an orange-when the juice is
gone, you throw it away."
Interestingly, enough since his passing on July 16, 1998 in New York
City, attempts to name schools after Dr. Clark have met with opposition from
critics who claim he was anti-Semitic for not holding the Judeo-Christian ethos in
the highest regard. But Clark defended Malcolm X against similar charges by
stating that Malcolm didn't hate anybody-he hated certain things.
Too large a mind to be captive to hatred either, Clark embraced and shared
the central concerns of humanity and identity as searching for answers to
central and life-enriching questions. Those questions are: "how will my people
stay on this earth, be educated, be schooled, be housed, be defended?" He saw
the answers to those questions as creating concepts of enduring responsibility
for us all.
He has provided those reference points that amplify an ancient Ethiopian
civilization where there ware no words for jails, for orphans, for old folks'
homes because all contributed, all were cared for.
The distinguished poet Robert Hayden wrote in his poem, "Frederick
Douglass," of "visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien." Dr.
Clark and his colleagues have brought awareness of millenniums of grandeur and
grace long before the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia sprang into being. It is
only for us now to remind a turbulent world of lessons ignored.
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