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| Series Logo with Benin Bronze |
My minister
recently suggested to me the four episode series Lost Kingdoms of Africa, which is currently on Netflix. After
watching the series he commented on how little civilizational development could
be found on the Dark Continent. Curious, I decided to watch the series as well.
‘Lost
Kingdoms’ is a good description of pre-European Black African society because,
as the series painfully displays, all of the civilizations are still lost
(because they don’t actually exist). The series is broken up into four
sections: Nubia, Ethiopia, Great Zimbabwe, and West Africa. Each episode runs
about 50 minutes. Although the series was probably imagined as a great display
of organic Black-African culture and achievement I imagine that all of the
creators of the program have now been converted to racial realism after failing
to find any signs of Black African innovation on the second largest continent.
My minister said that after watching the series he became absolutely convinced
of Black-African intellectual inferiority (although he was already leaning in
that direction).
I
encourage everyone to watch the documentary because it actually manages to
achieve the exact opposite reaction of what it was created to produce. After
watching 200 minutes of endless speculation and fluff one will be utterly
assured that Black-Africans never achieved anything in the course of human
history. Lost Kingdoms of Africa was
created to impress the audience with Black achievements; instead the series displays
the complete lack of any Black innovation.
NUBIA
The
first episode details the Nubian civilization located to the South of ancient
Egypt. Before I watched this show I had
actually been under the impression that Nubia was far more impressive than it
actually was. Pictures of the pyramids of Nubia jutting from the Sahara sand
seem incredibly impressive, however, after the narrator walked up to some of
the pyramids in real time I realized that the structures are actually
miniscule. I imagine that given a year’s time, I could create a pyramid of the
same size and quality working solo. The most impressive temples in Nubia are
smaller then the average modern single bedroom apartment, and the hieroglyphics
are poor copies clearly ripped off their Egyptian counterparts. The episode
does not display a single element of uniquely Nubian cultural development.
The
program writers were so desperate to try to make Nubia something original that
they attempted to claim that a frieze of cows makes Nubian civilization somehow
more then a bad off brand version of Egypt. I was surprised that the program
openly admitted that the ancient Egyptians always referred to Nubia as a
miserable backwater kingdom that was only good for providing slaves (the word ‘Nubia’
is derived from the Egyptian word for ‘slave.’). No ancient source suggests
that Nubia was ever known for anything other than being the last point of
something resembling a real society before entering the vast savagery of sub-Saharan
Africa. Even Lost Kingdoms acknowledges
that the Nubians never developed anything resembling culture until after the Egyptians
had imperialized their lands.
While it is true that one Nubian dynasty did
overrun Egypt, the time of that invasion is long after Egypt’s glory days, and,
in fact, the Nile kingdom had been in terminal decline for centuries. As the
first episode clearly displays Nubia was not a Black African civilization, but
rather a result of Egyptian imperial ambitions in their southern sphere of
influence. Nothing of the ancient Nubian ‘achievements’ are uniquely Black, but
rather are poor imitations of what these peoples saw from their Mediterranean
Egyptian overlords.
ETHIOPIA
The show devoted to Ethiopia is barely
worth acknowledging because all of the Ethiopian cultural achievements
discussed in this episode are the result of Christian/Islamic importation. The
written language of the Ethiopian Church is a script created in the southern
Arabian Peninsula and exported to Ethiopia through Yemenis imperialism. The
episode shows off a castle constructed by an Ethiopian emperor, but also
mentions that it was only constructed in the 1600s in the Islamic and Portuguese
styles. The paintings covering the ceilings of imperial chapels are depictions
of Middle Eastern/European saints with White faces. The monolithic stone
churches of Lalibela are impressive, however, they are not particularly old
(late middle ages), and the Ethiopians only built them with the help of
northern Coptic outsiders who influenced the style of the buildings significantly.
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| Haile Sallassie I |
Nothing about Ethiopia is uniquely Black
African. Its entire culture, from religion to language, is a copy of Arab or
Christian developments. Besides this, the Ethiopians cannot racially be
considered purely Black-African. Ethiopians are almost entirely mixed with ethnic
Arabs and, in fact, many groups of Ethiopians speak a Semitic language. Looking
through portraits of the Ethiopian Imperial family clearly demonstrates this
fact. Judging by pictures of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Sallassie I, I
would imagine he is only about 25% genetically Black African. It is hardly fair
to consider Ethiopia a truly Black African kingdom if its population is not
truly Black African, and neither is its culture.
GREAT
ZIMBABWE
I sat with some friends as I watched
this episode. We spent the entire 50 minutes laughing at how horrible it was.
There is so little civilizational development in southern Africa that the first
half of the episode was devoted to an island off the coast of Madagascar whose
population became Black only after foreign traders had imported large
quantities of African slaves. The mosque on the island was built by Muslims
with forced Black slave labor (hardly a Black accomplishment). There is no
stone on the island so the traders constructed the mosque out of coral, which
once again proves that lack of resources has almost nothing to do with
civilizational advancement (a truly intelligent people will innovate through
any disadvantage).
The latter half of the episode details
two settlements in southern mainland Arica that contain stonewalls. The program
attempts to assert that these were constructed by Black Africans even though
there is no known Black African artifacts found at the sites. Among the
artifacts recovered were Arabic coins, Chinese items, and several strange
carved birds. The narrator openly admits that foreigners were coming to the
region to acquire ivory and slaves, but dismisses the obvious conclusion that
the stone forts were constructed by outside traders as ‘racist.’ The assertion
of Black construction almost becomes absurd when it is revealed that certain
kinds of grazing grasses had been introduced around the settlements for use by foreign
livestock types. The most obvious conclusion is that foreigners constructed the
forts for trading, and brought cattle with them, thus necessitating the need to
also begin growing grass in the region that their imported cattle could eat.
There is no documented example of primitive Blacks domesticating any kind of
animal, and even if they had, why would they import grass from another region
of the world so that their native livestock could eat exotic plants?
Furthermore, if a Black society truly did have the ability to construct such a
large fortress isn’t it bizarre that this same society couldn’t manage to
develop any other element of culture to leave behind?
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| 'Great' Zimbabwe |
Even if, against all evidence, Blacks
did construct the fortress settlement of Great Zimbabwe the structure is simply
composed of stacked stones. The wall is not even particularly large, and is
certainly not stylized or architecturally impressive.
Despite a lot of biased guesswork no
one knows when the fortress settlement was built, or by whom. The greatest
southern Black African civilization is still simply speculation built upon
speculation. My guess, it almost certainly never existed.
WEST AFRICA
The West African episode is about
nothing but the Benin Bronzes. The bronze friezes are admittedly interesting,
however, they were only constructed in the late 1500s after the Portuguese
inspired the locals to create them. The Black African natives melted down the
Portuguese gold and fashioned some reasonably interesting figures. The Benin
Bronzes are more the product of European contact then of any kind of Black
African achievements.
