N.Y.Times, Aug.24, 1958.
National Geographic Magazine, Sept. 1960, has a picture of one skull, and quotes Prof. Leakey as saying that it was that of the first tool-making human; and that the discoveries “strongly support Charles Darwin’s prophecy that Africa would prove to have been the birthplace of mankind.”
Prof. Leakey has since discovered a still older skull “considerably more than 600,000 years old.” With it were other human relics, one of them a child. (New York Times, Feb. 25, 1961).
N. Y. Times, Aug. 24, 1959.
* * *
The age of the skulls is now set at 1,750,000 years. (New York Times, July 23. 1961.)
PREHISTORIC AFRICA
Map prepared by Albert Churchward, M.D. renowned British archaeologist and authority on the origin of races, showing where world civilization originated. It is the area marked “Home of the Pygmies.” Dr. Churchward asserts that Freemasonry originated among the Nilotic Negroes (upper right) and found its grand climax in the Great Pyramid. The map is from his “Origin and Evolution of Freemasonry.” (See especially Chaps. 4 & 5.) He gives the earliest known freemason signs. Other books by him on the subject are: Arcana of Freemasonry, 1915; and Origin and Evolution of the Human Race. 1921.
Part One
THE AFRICAN BACKGROUND
Upper: A masterpiece of pre-historic African art found in South Africa and now in the Pretoria Museum. Done about 30,000 years ago and by flint instruments on rock.
Lower: Reconstruction of the skull of an African who lived in the same region about the same period and very likely the type of artist that made this drawing. Modern art critics marvel at the skill and accuracy of these Stone Age artists and declare that nothing finer has been done since. (See Sex and Race, Vol. I, pages 26, 35. 1942.
AFRICA’S GIFT TO THE WORLD
“Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.” (Out of Africa comes something always new) — Ancient Greek saying quoted by Pliny, Roman historian, 23-79 A.D.
“He who has drunk of the waters of Africa will drink again.” — Ancient Arab saying.
“I speak of Africa and golden joys.” — Shakespeare, II Henry IV, v. iii.
“There is Africa and all her prodigies in us.” — Sir Thomas Browne, English physician and author, 1605-1682.
“It is one of the paradoxes of history that Africa, the Mother of Civilization, remained for over two thousand years the Dark Continent. To the moderns Africa was the region where ivory was sought for Europe and slaves for America. In the time of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), as the satirist informs us, geographers in drawing African maps would fill in the gaps with savage pictures. Where towns should have been they placed elephants.” — Dr. Victor Robinson, Ciba Symposia, 1940.
“The African continent is no recent discovery; it is not a new world like America or Australia. … While yet Europe was the home of wandering barbarians one of the most wonderful civilizations on record had begun to work out its destiny on the banks of the Nile. …” (History of Nations, Vol. 18, p. 1, 1906)
To ancient Europe Africa was for fully two thousand years the civilized world. “How low the savage European must have looked to the Nile Valley African looking north from his Pyramid of Cheops,” says Professor Dorsey. When this Wonder of the Ancient World was some two thousand years old, Greece, first part, of the European continent to be touched by civilization, was a wilderness. Athens, later to become the leader in world culture, was as late as 1500 B.C., totally unknown. Civilization came to Greece from Egypt by way of the island of Crete, as Sir Arthur Evans, has shown.
And this civilization was Negroid. For this we have the word of Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), who travelled in Egypt and saw the Egyptians of his day. In Book Two, Chapter 57, he says they were “black” and in Book Two, Chapter 104, they were “black and wooly-haired.” The hair of the Ethiopian he said was “very wooly.” He adds that in other parts of the Near East he visited he saw other nations with the same racial characteristics as the Egyptians. “Several nations are so, too,” he said.
Two thousand years later another famous traveller, Count Volney, said on his visit to Egypt in 1787, that what Herodotus said had solved for him the problem of why the people were so Negroid in appearance and especially the Great Sphinx of Ghizeh, supreme symbol worship and power. Reflecting on the then state of the Egyptians compared with what they had been, he said, “To think that to a race of black men who are today our slaves and the object of our contempt is the same one to whom we owe our arts, sciences and even the very use of speech.” Of the blacks he saw in Upper Egypt among the ruins of the colossal monuments there, he said, “There a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and wooly hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” (Oeuvres, Vol. 2, pp. 65-68. 1825; Ruins of Empires, pp. 16-17. 1890).
Upper: The Sphinx as it looked in 1798. (From a drawing by Baron Denon). Lower: As it looks today. Note the pronounced Negroid features.
Two other famous European scholars of that time who saw the Sphinx, Baron Denon and Gustav Flaubert, were of the same opinion. Denon, who made a sketch of it in 1798 said, “The character is African … the lips are thick. Art must have been at a high pitch when this monument was executed.” (Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, vol. 1, p. 140. 1803). Flaubert said (1849), “It is certainly Ethiopian. The lips are thick.” (Notes de Voyage, p. 115. 1910).
With the rise of white racism, whose real aim was to justify the enslavement of the blacks, certain noted scholars denied that the Egyptians were black. They were pure white, such assert. But Herodotus saw them. They did not. Moreover what of the Negroid appearance of certain Egyptian rulers such as I have reproduced in Chapter Three of my Sex and Race, Vol. One? Other leading white scholars, however, are of the same opinion as Volney.
Volney wondered why Europe of his time with Africa so near knew so little about it. The answer is that with the rise of European power chiefly after the earlier Caesars, Africa lessened in importance until it became a land of fable and legend. The blacks and mixed bloods of the north-west part of the continent had a resurgence in the eighth century when the Moors invaded Europe but the rest remained unknown and almost forgotten.
This was true even of Egypt, which had the only remaining one of the Seven Wonders of the World. For instance, the Temple of Amen, most colossal structure of its kind ever built, Together with the adjoining buildings it surpassed in grandeur the Acropolis of Athens and the Foro Romano but was so buried by centuries of wind-blown sand that villagers lived in huts on the top of it entirely oblivious of the architectural marvels beneath their feet. As for the Sphinx all that was seen of its 194 feet length and its 66 feet height was the head and that was being cut off by the action of the sand.
Interest in Egypt was not revived until its invasion by Napoleon in 1798. As for the other buried and decayed civilizations further south as Meroe, Axum, Gida, Zymbabwe, Dhlo-Dhlo in Rhodesia, they were forgotten until our own times. More are being unearthed even now.
As late as Stanley’s time, what was said of Africa was mostly wild imagination. It sounded very much like what the most ancient travellers said of parts of Europe and Asia they visited. Thomas Jefferson actually