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ADVICE AND DISSENT
This section features discussions on education, learning and teaching, and language with particular focus on English. The primary subjects to be taken up here are notable advocacies and contrary viewpoints in these disciplines and their allied fields. Our primary aim is to clarify matters and issues of importance to language and learning, provide intelligent and useful instruction, promote rational and critical thinking, and enhance the individual’s overall capacity for discernment.
Is Africa, not Greece and Rome, the true birthplace of civilization?
The conventional wisdom in most parts of the world is that Greece and Rome were the cradles of Western civilization, but in “Original Glory not out of Greece,” a paper written by Dr. Kwame Nantambu of Cipriani Labour College in Valsayn, Trinidad, he propounds the contrary view that Africa is the true birthplace of civilization. Nantambu, a professor in Pan-African studies, cites ancient documents to prove that, among other historical truths, most of the things that are considered cornerstones of European civilization—including its philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and even the symbolism, teachings, doctrines and templates of Christianity—actually “came out of an Afrikan matrix, construct and experience, particularly distilled through ancient Egypt.”
But Nantambu says that in the 18th century, Eurocentric scholars began the process of completely expunging Africa from the “map of human geography” and world history, using the cornerstone notion “that nothing came out of Africa but powerless, defenceless, uncivilised, barbaric, primitive, nothing slaves.” In this ethnocentric enterprise, he says, German and British scholars produced the Great Books of the Western World—“a 37,000-page, 60-volume collection of ‘classics’ that includes no author of African ancestry”—and went on to influence universities in Britain and America with a course of study that “we now see was born in an atmosphere of racism and xenophobia.”
Read Dr. Kwame Nantambu’s “Original Glory not out of Greece” in Tricenter.com now!
Acknowledgment:
My sincere thanks and appreciation to Forum member Hill Roberts for bringing this article to my attention.
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