Jesus, Buddha, Mozart, Shakespeare, Aztecs, were Black? Jesus, Buddha, Mozart, Shakespeare, Aztecs, were Black?
We need to know our history, not insert ourselves into the history of others. African history is rich enough and old enough not to... Jesus, Buddha, Mozart, Shakespeare, Aztecs, were Black?

See African Race and Linguistics 

 

They seem to claim everything but AFRICA these days — YouTube Comment

Skull Matching Science

What does Jesus1)Just because Jesus has brown skin is not definitive proof he was African. The criteria needs to go deeper than just subjective physical appearance. It may turn out he was African. Maybe the historical Jesus was from Ethiopia, but that needs research, not fantastical statements., Buddha, Mozart, Shakespeare all have in common? According to a lot of fringe scholarship they were all black men. Black like Nelson Mandela and Spike Lee. In the age of free-flowing information, is it any surprise that you can Google almost any person and find some YouTube video using “deep” scholarship to prove well known historical figures were really Black people. But what is a “Black”person well none of them bothered to define blackness so it becomes so elastic to include everyone one a little melanin that they like.

Native people of America

Unfortunately picture scholarship is not true scholarship. Comparative jewelry and nose widths is not verification of anything to do with identity. At best it proves subjective similarities which can be explained in a million ways. That is a parlor trick, not scholarship. And when we look at the work of people like Ivan Van Sertima, regardless of if we agree or disagree, we can see, in addition to comparative photos, there is a lot of deeper research going on. Not just matching features. And we have to remember that Ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians as well as many African groups do not have thick lips and broad noses, so if we discovered their monuments and paintings of themselves would lack of these physical features mean they are not African? This is where this kind of scholarship does African history a disservice. Because these type of arguments reduce African people to Eurocentric archetypes which exclude our diversity. We are not African because we have flat noses, or dark skin and curly hair. 2)African Race


EDUCATION LIES ABOUT OUR HISTORY

Sure the education system fails to teach true history. Sure there is a conspiracy but that does not mean Inuit in the arctic get to claim Ancient KMT by saying they did not teach that in school. So one statement does not mean we are the first people to build Teotihuacan. And here is another issue a lot of this pseudo-historians claim European scholars are liars and they hide this history. In the very next sentence they are talking about scholars have dated Teotihuacan to the 1st century AD. You mean the same scholars that you just told us are liars? You know they did do DNA test on these people of the Americas–oh but when we do not like the outcome it is back to calling it Eurocentrism. And where is your own scholarship on these things that you claim? Where are your primary source? How do you know any of this information in the first place? What they do is read what European scholars write and just inject themselves where it suits them. Sounds familiar?  Just like how Europeans injected themselves as the race that build Ancient Egypt.

Google Search is not research, it is just a search of Google. It is not scholarship.

See the hair!!! He is Black

Some people in the African community have been doing something for so long and have built up an audience around the discovery of new Black people, an expectant demand from their fan-base pushes them to keep discovering more and more Black people to remain relevant. They must go from shock to greater shock in order to continue their career in pseudo-history. It is the same with conspiracy theories, and scholars like Amos Wilson warned us about this.

Tewodros

What is worrying is – why do people do this? With all the rich African history, why look at other people’s history and try to insert yourself into it? Why complain about Europeans taking away African history and claiming it as their own, and then come and return the favor. Additionally, it speaks to the slave mindset of race envy. As opposed to seeking out and learning about Ancient Ethiopia, Mali, legends like Mansa Musa, Askia and Menelik, we would rather chase down the boast of Arabs, Asians and Whites 3)Why say Europeans lived in caves while we had civilizations when Minoans did not live in caves?  32,000 years ago Europeans lived in caves the same time we were living in caves in South Africa–so what is the point? It is then worse when we realize that while most of Europe was living in cities many of us did not even know how to make fabric or write with a script. So if we want to play this game–we easily lose. It is racism in black face, hardly the example we should be making. And And what we find is extremely worrying. before learning and loving our own. So they know nothing about Umar Tal, or Tewodros, but they’re busy proving Mozart and the Samurai were black.


WHAT IS WRONG 

Fulani African womenSo what is so wrong with looking at ancient statues and declaring them black men? Well, where do you want us to start? What is a black person? Well I can tell you one thing – if the first European builders were black, they did not call themselves blacks. Ok, what about people with black or dark skin? Well that is a whole lot of people who are not from Africa. Or is Africa the only continent that can produce black skin? What about curly hair? Is Africa the only continent that can produce curly to kinky hair? I think the climate does that, not the continent. So, any place with those climes would produce curly hair. What about people with broad noses? Oh, that makes you black? So, everyone with a broad flat nose is now a real Black person? But many native Africans from Africa do not have broad flat noses, yet people from outside Africa may have them. Chinese have flat noses, Ethiopians and people of the Sahel do not.

Skin color distribution

This photo shows the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba meeting King Solomon. We can see how the African-Ethiopians contrast themselves ethnically against other African people.

Ref4)This photo shows the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba meeting King Solomon. We can see how the African-Ethiopians contrast themselves ethnically against other African people.

Neither do the Masai or the Ancient Egyptians. Even in Zululand, not all people have flat noses. So where is this nose thing really going? Physical features are not African or not in isolation. Black skin is not what makes you African. If having dark skin made you African then you just denied the Africanity of a whole lot of Xhosa and Khoisan people. What you are setting up is a very problematic argument, especially when we know from DNA that Khoisan/San people are the oldest people on Earth. So living near to the sun does not make you more African than someone who lives in the highlands of Ethiopia, exposed to different climatic conditions.


POOR SCHOLARSHIP

One funny YouTube video compares earlobe extension on Nuba person from Sudan to those seen on an Ancient Buddha statue. The problem with this kind of scholarship omits the confirmation whether earlobe stretching is uniquely African. 5)The Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun is one of the earliest known rulers to have stretched ear lobes, however, so  do many cultures outside of Africa, from India to the Aztecs to Easter Island. And while its distribution is found more among African groups, like the Masai and Mursi, it has not proven to be exclusive to Africa. It certainly does not mean evidence of direct contact, genetic or via cultural transfer When did the Nuba start doing it? It is like looking at Maasai bead work and then seeing it in China and saying Chinese took it from the Masai. But Masai bead-work does not go beyond contact with Europeans, who brought those beads to Africa for trade.

How does this scholarship operate? Well it is classic tunnel vision. They have no concept of scholarship. So Ako is a name found in Japan, but also West Africa. So, we now know that Japanese are originally Africans.

Mozart was black? According to?

You cannot say Jesus was black, when black is still to be defined. What these guys are trying to say, when we cut it down, is that Jesus and Buddha and a whole lot of out of African cultures are you, and you are part of that greatness. It is not really scholarship as it has not even started to define the primary word in the subject–What is Black. Now you cannot switch black with African because we can do DNA and linguistic tests and find out there are Arabs in Palestine and North Africa who have more “African” DNA than these guys in Solomon Islands. Linguistically Arabic and Amharic are from the same source, the language of Amba has zero relationship to any African language. Genetically they are too different from native African populations to be classified as African. Looking like an African cannot make you African.

 


BLACKNESS IN ANTIQUITY

See African Race and Language

Blackness in antiquity is nebulous. It has no real meaning right now, what about back then? So, none of these people identified with anything we identified with. It is not like they pointed to the continent we call Africa today and said Ï am from there. And if you are unclear about this let us say Saladin vs Ali Mazrui, two different people, two different times. But both Mazrui And Saladin are connected because the identified with Islam, making them both Muslims. Although Saladin lived long before Mazrui. Shaka Zulu and Jacob Zuma have a connection despite the name change of modern South Africa and the fact that Shaka Zulu was not technically a Zulu, that came after him. He may have called himself by another ethnic name. But to pick a dark-skinned man based on a subjective picture from the middle of Asia and say he was black, with all due respect, is not scholarship but black mythology. Is the connection seriously coming down to nose widths and skin color? From a statue? Not even a Hi-Def 3D photo but a statue?


HIDDEN HISTORY

Ancient Egyptians could pass for Ethiopians

Ethiopians and Ancient Egyptians

We all know, beyond debate, that our history has been hidden, stolen, covered up, reassigned, destroyed, deleted and transferred. A case in point would be African contributions to Islam and the entire history of Ancient Egypt. So we know this. But is the solution to insert ourselves into histories we have no place in, just to compensate for the destruction done to our authentic history?

Scholarship must be rigorous, it must use neutral methods. It cannot use such subjectivity and one plane of observation to validate something as nebulous as identity. When we say Ancient Egyptians were primarily an African people, that is not because they had curly hair or flat noses, because many of them did not.  The argument for an African Egypt does not rest on these methods. Maybe Buddha was an African or a black man but it is not proven just by comparative picture scholarship. Some cultures use black paint to denote a religious state. They do not use black paint to be photo realistic.

We have enough history that needs to be discussed and learned. What is gained from talking less about Sokoto and Great Zimbabwe to chase down black people in Mongolia and Japan?

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References

References
1 Just because Jesus has brown skin is not definitive proof he was African. The criteria needs to go deeper than just subjective physical appearance. It may turn out he was African. Maybe the historical Jesus was from Ethiopia, but that needs research, not fantastical statements.
2 African Race
3 Why say Europeans lived in caves while we had civilizations when Minoans did not live in caves?  32,000 years ago Europeans lived in caves the same time we were living in caves in South Africa–so what is the point? It is then worse when we realize that while most of Europe was living in cities many of us did not even know how to make fabric or write with a script. So if we want to play this game–we easily lose. It is racism in black face, hardly the example we should be making. And And what we find is extremely worrying.
4 This photo shows the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba meeting King Solomon. We can see how the African-Ethiopians contrast themselves ethnically against other African people.
5 The Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun is one of the earliest known rulers to have stretched ear lobes, however, so  do many cultures outside of Africa, from India to the Aztecs to Easter Island. And while its distribution is found more among African groups, like the Masai and Mursi, it has not proven to be exclusive to Africa. It certainly does not mean evidence of direct contact, genetic or via cultural transfer
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Alik Shahadah

'Alik Shahadah is a master of the Documentary format and progressive African scholar. Shahadah uses film for social revolution. A multi-award winning recipient including the rare UNESCO award for his critically acclaimed film on slavery 500 Years Later.. He is best known for authoring works, which deal with African history, social justice, environmental issues, education and world peace. He states his primary motivation for making these films was being frustrated with "Tarzan's voice" as the central narrator in African stories. He noted that while scholarship challenges these issues, the common knowledge of the majority is generally unaltered, writing alone is not enough, the ultimate tool for re-education on a mass level is film

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