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Watch this video clip from youtube with Joe Rogan And Hotep Jesus and answer the following prompt:
In your opinion do you think that bringing more lost stories into to public knowledge will help change the trajectory of where we are within our social climate in regards to how we see race in America?
If so, how and why?
If no, why not and what are other ideas that we might explore in order to prevent ourselves from repeating history?
Comment your answers below.

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Africans Were in the Americas Before Columbus! - Hotep Jesus

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Creative Source
Rhetorical Situation:
- Writer: Black Culture Unlocked
- Text/Subject: This video Gives us a different perspective from the one that is typically taught in our education system.
- Audience: The audience is most likely African Americans that have only been taught one side of history within our education system. As well as anyone that would care to know the full story of how Africans made it to America, not just the most publicized version of the story.
- Context: It recalls history from the side of the Africans who rebelled on the slave ships and it also details a record of how some Africans were actually the captors in some cases, they even sold their captives to the Europeans in some cases.

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The Atlantic Slave Trade: What Schools Never Told You

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Informational Source- Africans Before the Atlantic Slave Trade
Rhetorical Situation:
Writer: A North Carolina History Online Resource
- Text/Subject: This is an article that details not only the history of Africans in western Africa before slavery but, also provides a record of how advanced those civilizations were.
- Audience: The general public, African Americans or anyone that is interested in the history of black people before slavery in America.
- Context: A record of the advanced civilizations in Africa before

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Western Africa begins where the Sahara desert ends. A short, erratic rainy season supports the sparse cover of vegetation that defines the steppelike Sahel. The Sahel serves as a transition to the Sudan and classic savanna where a longer rainy season supports baobab and acacia trees sprinkled across an open vegetative landscape dominated by bushes, grasses and other herbaceous growth. Next comes another narrow transitional zone, where the savanna and forest intermingle, before the rain forest is reached. Finally, there is the coast, fringed with mangrove swamps and pounded by heavy surf. The Sahara can be likened to a sea lying north of West Africa and the Sahel to its shore. The desert and the Sahel form geographical barriers to sub-Saharan West Africa that, like the Atlantic Ocean, contributed to the comparative isolation of the region from early Mid-east and European civilization until the fifteenth century.

Early History

Archaeologists know little about sub-Saharan West Africa before 800 CE. After that time, the rise of Islam made Arabic records available. Evidence from Dar-Tchitt, an archeological site in the area of Ancient Ghana, suggests agricultural expansion and intensification gave rise to walled villages of 500 to 1000 inhabitants as early as 900-800 BCE. By 700 BCE the settlement patterns changed to more numerous smaller, unwalled villages.

Jenne-Jeno, a second archeological site, was first settled around 250 BCE. Located around the inland delta of the Niger river, Jenne-Jeno probably started out as a place where local farmers, herders, and fishers brought produce to exchange with one another. Over time, the location became an interregional trade center. It might have been the first one in the region, but if so, others soon followed and several of these became the centers of a series of kingdoms and empires in the Sahel and Sudan. Eventually the region was densely populated by people who had a social organization based on kinship ties, political forms that are properly called states, and cities based on Saharan trade, at least as far south as modern-day Djenne. What we know about these states and cities comes mostly from oral traditions and literate Muslim Arab and Berber travelers, who made their first visits to the region in the eighth century. Oral sources included African poems, praise songs, and accounts of past events usually passed on through official oral historians such as Griots, who recite the histories from Ancient Mali and Songhai.

Medieval West Africa

When the Portuguese first explored the West African coastline in the 1400s, the cultures of African societies were highly evolved and had been so for centuries. In the thousand years before Portuguese exploration, three large centers of medieval African civilization developed sequentially along the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic scholars and African oral traditions tell us that all of these states had centralized governments, long-distance trade routes, and educational systems.
Ancient Ghana
The first polity that is known to have gained prominence was Ancient Ghana. Between 500 and 1250 CE, Ancient Ghana flourished in the southern Sahel north of the middle Niger and middle Senegal Rivers. From the work of two Arabic scholars -- Al-Bakri, writing in 1067, and Al-Idrisi, writing in 1154 -- we know that Ancient Ghana had a civil service, a strong monarchy based on a matrilineal system of inheritance, a cabinet, an army, an effective justice system and a regular source of income from trade as well as tribute from vassal kings.
Mali
As Ghana declined over the next 200 years, the ancient Mali Empire arose in the same area but descended territorially further along the Niger River. Mali encompassed a huge area stretching from the Lower Senegal and Upper Niger rivers eastward to the Niger bend and northward to the Sahel.

Its great size made Mali an even more diverse state than Ghana. The majority of the people lived in small villages and cultivated rice or sorghums and millets, while some communities specialized in herding and fishing. Trade flourished in the towns, which housed a wide array of craftspeople along with a growing number of Islamic teachers and holy men. The main commercial centers were its capitals Niani, Timbuktu, and Gao.

Mansa Musa is the most remembered of the kings of Mali. During Musa's reign (1307-1337), Mali's boundaries were extended to their farthest limits. Musa instituted national honors for his provincial administrators to encourage devoted service. He ruled impartially with a great sense of justice, relying on judges, scribes, and civil servants. Musa established diplomatic relationships with other African states, especially Morocco.

Mansa Musa established the Islamic religion in Mali and is remembered for bringing peace, order, trade, and commerce. Mansa Musa started the practice of sending students to Morocco for studies, and he laid the foundation of what later became the city of Timbuktu, the commercial and educational center of the western Sudan. Present-day Mande people trace their ancestry to the great thirteenth century.
The Songhai Empire
Around 1375, Gao, a small tributary state of Mali, broke away under the leadership of Sunni Ali. Over the next twenty-eight years, Sunni Ali built the small kingdom of Gao into the huge empire of Songhai. Songhai encompassed the geographic area of ancient Ghana and Mali combined and extended into the region of ancient and contemporary northwest Nigeria. The Mandinka, Wolof, Bamana (also called Bambara), and other peoples lived in the western reaches of the Songhai Empire. Hausa and Fulani people lived in the region that is now northwest Nigeria. All of these cultures still exist.

By the time Portugal and Spain embarked on exploration and conquest of the Western Hemisphere in the 1500s, Mohammed Askia I ruled over Songhai. Askia completed Mansa Musa's project to create a great center of learning, culminating with the establishment of the Sankore University in Timbuktu. Sankore teachers and students came from all over sub-Saharan Africa and from the Arabic nations to the east. Leo Africanus, an eyewitness, described Sankore University:

Leo Africanus was born El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyati in the city of Granada in 1485, but was expelled along with his parents and thousands of other Muslims by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella when they completed their reconquest of Spain in 1492. Settling in Morocco, he studied in Fez and as a teenager accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions throughout North Africa. During these travels, he visited Timbuktu. As a young man he was captured by pirates and presented as an exceptionally learned slave to Pope Leo X, who freed him, baptized him under the name "Johannis Leo de Medici," and commissioned him to write in Italian a detailed survey of Africa. His accounts provided most of what Europeans knew about the continent for the next several centuries.

Leo Africanus described Timbuktu as

a town full of exceedingly rich merchants and hither continually resort a great store of Negroes which buy cloth brought out of Barbary and Europe. It is a wonder to see what plenty merchandise is daily brought thither, and how costly and sumptuous things be.

The clothes that Africanus describes were European textiles traded for the Songhai exports of gold, ivory, and slaves.

West Africa, 1300-1800 CE
The Volta Kingdoms and the Asante Empire
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, three smaller political states emerged in the forests along the coast of Africa below the Songhai Empire. The uppermost groups of states were the Gonja or Volta Kingdoms, located around the Volta River and the confluence of the Niger, on what was called the Windward Coast, now Sierra Leone and Liberia. Most of the people in the upper region of the Windward Coast belonged to a common language group, called Gur by linguists. They also held common religious beliefs and a common system of land ownership. They lived in decentralized societies where political power resided in associations of men and women.
The Yoruba and Fon Peoples
Just below the Gold Coast lay the Bights of Benin and Biafra. (The modern nation of Nigeria has renamed the Bight of Biafra the Bight of Bonny, and you may see this name on some maps.) Oral history and findings in archeological excavation tell us that the Yoruba people have been the dominant group on the west bank of the Niger River as far as their historical memory extends and even further into the past. In the twelfth century, the Yoruba people began to coalesce into a number of territorial city-states of which Ife, Oyo, and Benin dominated. Old loyalties to the clan or lineage were subordinated to allegiance to a king or Oni. The Oni was chosen on a rotating basis by the clans. Below him was an elected state hierarchy that depended on broad support from the community. The people were subsistence farmers, artisans, and long distance traders in cloth, kola nuts, palm oil, and copper. Trade and the acquisition of horses were factors in the emergence of Oyo as the dominant political power among the Yoruba states by late fourteenth and early fifteenth century.

Dahomey, or Benin, created by the Fon ruling dynasty, came to dominance in the seventeenth century and was a contemporary of the Asante Empire. As early as the seventeenth century, the Oyo kingdom had an unwritten constitution with a system of political checks and balances. Dahomey, located in Southern Nigeria, east of Yorubaland and west of the Niger River, also claimed to have obtained kingship from the Yoruba city of Ife. Oyo and Ife not only shared a common cultural history but also shared many other cultural characteristics, such as religious pantheons, patrilineal descent groups, urbanized settlement patterns, and a high level of artistic achievement, particularly in ivory, wood, brass, and bronze sculpture.

West Central Africa, 1300-1800 CE

The people of the coastal kingdoms shared a common social structure. The provincial regions, districts, and villages each had chiefs and a hierarchical system through which tribute flowed upward to the King of the Kongo and rewards flowed downward. Each regional clan or group had a profession or craft, such as weaving, basket making, potting, or iron working. Tribute and trade took the form of natural resources, agricultural products, textiles, other manufactured goods, and cowries shells. The "Kongos" and "Angolas" shared a lingua franca or trade language that allowed them to communicate. They also shared other cultural characteristics such as matrilineal social organization and a cosmology expressed in their religious beliefs and practices.

Fu-Kiau, a renowned Kongo scholar, explained Kongo cosmology this way:

The Kongo cosmogram is the foundation of Kongo society. The circle made by the sun's movement is the first geometric picture given to human beings. We move the same way the sun moves: we wake up, are active, die, then come back. The horizon line is the kalunga line between the physical and spiritual world. It literally means 'the line of God.' When you have a circle of the Kongo cosmogram, the center is seen as the eternal flame. It is a way to come closer to the core of the community. If someone is suffering, they say 'you are outside the circle, be closer to the fire.' To stand on the cosmogram is to tie a social knot, bringing people together. Dikenga is from the verb kenga, which means 'to take care, to protect,' but also the flame or fire from inside the circle, to build and give life.

The Rise of the Slave Trade

Europeans did not introduce slavery to Africa. As African rulers rose and fell, their political opponents, people of high social status, and their families were sold to promote internal political stability. Poor people were sold to reconcile debts owed by themselves or their families. Chiefs sold people as punishment for crimes. Gangs of Africans and a few marauding Europeans captured free Africans who were also sold into slavery. Domestic slaves were resold and prisoners of war were sold. Africans themselves carried out the capture and sale of other Africans for enslavement -- few Europeans ever actually marched inland and captured slaves themselves.

The Cost of a Slave

Wars Over Slavery

As the slave trade continued, more and more wars broke out between African reconcile principalities. Whatever the reconcile ostensible causes of these wars, they produced prisoners of war that supplied slave factories along the West and West Central African coast.

The fighting between African societies followed a pattern. Wars weakened the centralized African governments and undermined the authority of associations, societies, and the elders who exercised social control in societies with decentralized political forms. Both winners and losers lost people from niches in lineages, secret societies, associations, guilds and other networks that maintained social order. Conflict brought about loss of population and seriously compromised indigenous production of material goods, cash crops and subsistence crops. Seventeenth-century Capuchin monks reported that the Angolan Ndongo slave catchment area was rapidly becoming a wasteland as countless people died in war or as slaves in transit to slaving depots, were exported as slaves, or fled the advance of slave-catching warriors.

Both winners and losers in the African wars came to rely upon European trade goods. Eventually, European money replaced cowrie shells as a medium of exchange. European trade goods supplanted indigenous material goods, natural resources and products as the economic basis of West African society. At the same time, Europeans increasingly required people in exchange for trade goods. Once this stage was reached, an African society had little choice but to trade human lives for European goods and guns -- guns that had become necessary to wage wars for further captives in order to trade for goods upon which the African society was now dependent.

The effects of the trade on African civilization and culture were devastating. African societies lost kinship networks and agricultural laborers and production capacity. The loss of people meant the loss of indigenous artisans and craftsmen along with their knowledge of textile production, weaving and dying, metallurgy and metalwork, carving, basket making, potting skills, architecture, and agricultural techniques upon which their societies depended. Africa's loss was the New World's gain. These were the same expertise and skills that Africans brought to the New World along with their physical labor and ability to acclimate to harsh environments that made them indispensable in the development of the new colonies and nations of the Western Hemisphere.

Source Citation:
Brown, Audrey and Ericka Hill. 2006 African American - Heritage and Ethnography: A Self-Paced Training Resource, Ethnography Program, National Park Service, Washington, DC. https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/intro.htm
[Excerpted and Adapted]​

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Western Africa begins where the Sahara desert ends. A short, erratic rainy season supports the sparse cover of vegetation that defines the steppelike Sahel. The Sahel serves as a transition to the Sudan and classic savanna where a longer rainy season supports baobab and acacia trees sprinkled across an open vegetative landscape dominated by bushes, grasses and other herbaceous growth.

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Creative Source
Rhetorical Situation:
- Writer: Mutabaruka
- Text/Subject: Mutabaruka is a well known Jamaican Rastafari dub poet, musician and educator. In the video he explains the history of slavery within Africa before the Europeans got there.
- Audience: Anyone that is interested in learning more about Africa and its history before Europeans came into the picture.
- Context: There is often talk about the enslavement of black people by Europeans however Mutabaruka explains that there was already slavery happening in Africa before the Europeans got there.

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Mutabaruka Speaks "The Arabs and Moors  Enslaved Africans Way Before The Europeans"

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Black America's Neglected Origin Stories

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Black America's Neglected Origin Stories

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Informational Source/ Study
Rhetorical Situation:
- Writer: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Text/Subject: Black America Neglected Origin Stories is a written perspective from author Gordon-Reed who details her recollection of her experience within the education systems during her younger days.
- Audience: Anyone that is interested in hearing more about the history about black people before being enslaved in America.
- Context: There are many records about the history of America but not as many records about what black people were like before slavery in America. This Article gives us a different perspective on history, one that is often missing.

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The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.

Gordon C. James

This article was published online on May 4, 2021.
When I was growing up in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, my classmates and I took Texas history twice, in the fourth and seventh grades. We learned about Texas's history in the United States, its previous existence as a republic, and its time as a province of Mexico. Among other things, we were exhorted to "remember the Alamo" and "remember Goliad," famous events in Texas's fight for independence from Mexico. Some other aspects of the state's history were less covered. I didn't need school lessons to tell me that Black people had been enslaved in Texas, but in the early days of my education, the subject was not often mentioned.

Some of our lessons did, however, involve the "period of Spanish exploration." And I remember hearing in those lessons stray references to a man of African descent-a "Negro" named Estebanico-who traveled throughout what would become Texas. Estebanico was described, according to Andrés Reséndez's book A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, as a "black Arab from Azamor," on the coast of Morocco. A Muslim, he had been forced to convert to Christianity and sold away from his home to Spain; he eventually found his way to Texas in the company of the famous explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He arrived in the area of the future Galveston, where Union General Gordon Granger would proclaim the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery in Texas more than 300 years later, on the day now known as Juneteenth. Estebanico's journey across Texas as an interpreter for Cabeza de Vaca made him one of the first people of African descent to enter the historical record in the Americas. He was part of a cohort of African people who predated plantation slavery in the Americas, and had stories and legacies outside that institution. And the time in which he entered the story of the continent-in the 1520s-is roughly a century earlier than when the most popular stories about Black people in America begin.

The arrival in Virginia in the early 1600s of "20. and odd negroes," as John Rolfe announced, is often taken as the beginning of what we might call Black America-from that 20 to nearly 47 million souls today. Historians study those earliest years to, among other things, pinpoint the beginning of American slavery. They also look to this time to see if they can discover how deeply ideas about race were embedded in the culture of the people who established the English colony in Virginia. From these histories, people create and curate origin stories, of both themselves and the ideas they hold. And what these stories leave out-including Estebanico, the period of Spanish exploration, and years of Black and Indigenous history on the continent-is as important as what they include.

Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and nations. They inform our sense of self, telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in. They usually carry, at least, a hope that where we started might hold the key to where we are in the present. We can say, then, that much of the concern over origin stories is about our current needs and desires, not actual history. Origin stories seek to find the familiar, or the superficially familiar-memory, sometimes shading into mythology. Both memory and mythology have their uses, even if they must be separated from the facts of the past. But in the case of Black people, the limitations of the history and possibility of our origin stories have helped create and maintain an extremely narrow construction of Blackness.

The two origin stories that American children are most often taught are those of Jamestown, Virginia, an English colony founded in 1607 as a moneymaking venture, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, where people escaped religious persecution in 1620. The latter narrative is more inspirational and more in keeping with America's sense of moral exceptionalism than the former, which is perhaps why it has tended to loom larger in the American mind. Both origin stories emphasize the triumph of amity over enmity between Indigenous people and English settlers, something very different from what actually happened. But Black people are absent in the story of Plymouth, and the role of Jamestown as a hub of chattel slavery is often minimized. For Black Americans, neither origin story is sufficient.

Related Stories

Another origin story might be more suitable. St. Augustine, Florida, was not at all a part of my early education, but it's where race-based slavery, as an organized system, began on American soil, established by the Spanish as early as 1565. Enslaved and free African laborers helped build the settlement and its fortifications. In 1693, the king of Spain offered freedom in Florida to enslaved people who escaped from the British colonies if they converted to Catholicism and swore their allegiance, and in 1738, the Spanish governor established a settlement for them in St. Augustine. The story of Africans in St. Augustine is rich, as documented in surviving parish records. The settlement of free Blacks existed in some form until the British acquired Florida in the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

I had heard of St. Augustine by the time I got to college. But even then, it was presented as a historical footnote. The English had "won" the contest against the Spanish in North America-in Texas and in Florida. What was the point of incorporating this story of Africans and Spanish people into the general narrative of American history or, more specifically, the history of African Americans? The same could be said of the French, in their beaver-trapping colonies near the Great Lakes. They were "also rans" in the race for the territory that became the United States. The French influence in Louisiana-its civil-law approach to marriage, its stratification of people of African descent into several social spheres based on white ancestry, the French Quarter in New Orleans, the arrival of Cajuns (descendants of the people exiled in the 18th century from the French colony Acadia by the victorious British)-has been treated as mere seasoning for a culture almost universally recognized as Anglo-American. Similarly, the brief period of Dutch slave ownership in New York is almost totally out of the picture.

The story of Estebanico is part of this historical marginalia. Estebanico came to the Americas with the man who enslaved him, Andrés Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca, two of the leaders of a 300-person expedition to Florida and lands west. A series of disasters-food shortages, illness, and skirmishes with Indigenous people-spurred them to cross the Gulf. The men built rafts and split up, 50 men to a raft.

Dorantes, Estebanico, and most of the men on their raft made it to Texas, as did Cabeza de Vaca and most of the men on his. The other parties landed south of them and died as a consequence of either attacks by Native Americans or starvation. Dorantes's party made contact with Cabeza de Vaca and his party. Many died during a cold and hard winter. Estebanico ended up in a small group with Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, and another man. Their ordeal moved into another phase when they were enslaved by Indigenous groups living along the Texas Gulf Coast. The men endured almost six years of slavery but eventually managed to escape. They then embarked upon an epic journey, walking for about 10 months across Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast.

Estebanico's talent for languages might seem to mark him as exceptional, but actually helps us understand the multilingual nature of slavery and enslaved people.

Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote a widely read memoir about the extraordinary adventure, noted that Estebanico had played a key role as the chief translator between the Spaniards and the Indigenous people they encountered along the way, because of his great talent for learning and speaking languages. Estebanico appears to have achieved a measure of respect among his fellow explorers, but that respect disappeared once he and his fellow wanderers came upon a group of Spaniards in what is now Sinaloa State, in northwestern Mexico. Once they were safe and back among a strong complement of other Spaniards, Estebanico's Spanish companions were again in their element, and Estebanico was, again, their slave.

Like Estebanico's journey, the experiences of so many other Black people and communities have been pushed to the sidelines, held in thrall to the prerogatives of white storytellers and the needs of white origin stories: The United States' own nationalist-oriented history focuses intensely on what happened within the boundaries of the British colonies, and on the perspective of English-speaking people. The world enclosed in that way leaves out so much about the true nature of life in early America, about all the varied influences that shaped the people and circumstances during those times. That focus prevents vital understanding about contingency-how things could have taken a different turn.

According to the conventional narrative with which most Americans, it is safe to say, are familiar, Black people came to North America under the power of the English from places that were never clearly identified, because where they came from didn't matter much. They went from speaking the languages of their homelands to speaking English. They worked on plantations, in the fields or in the house. This highly edited origin story winds the Black experience tight. To be sure, the institution of slavery itself circumscribed the actions of enslaved Black people, but it never destroyed their personhood. They did not become a separate species because of the experience of being enslaved. All of the feelings, talents, failings, strengths, and weaknesses-all of the states and qualities that exist in human beings-remained in them. There has been too great a tendency within some presentations of enslaved people to lose sight of that fact, in ways obvious and not.

We can see this tendency in the historical treatment of that most basic of human traits: the ability of enslaved people to acquire language and speak. Estebanico's talent for languages might seem to mark him as exceptional, but actually helps us understand the multilingual nature of slavery and enslaved people. For example, Dutch was the first language of the noted abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in Swartekill, New York, near the end of the 1790s. She almost certainly spoke English with a Dutch-inflected accent. Yet reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Black people, no matter where in the country they lived. Under this formulation, the experiences of growing up hearing and speaking Dutch had no effect on Truth. It was as if the legal status of being enslaved and the biological reality of having been born of African descent fixed her pattern of speech, almost as a matter of brain function.

When I was working on my first book, writing about the way historians had handled the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I noticed that one line of attack on the veracity of Madison Hemings's statements to the journalist Samuel Wetmore, in which he said that he was the son of Jefferson and Hemings, was to suggest that they were unreliable because they had been recorded in standard English. The notion that a formerly enslaved person could speak that way was treated as presumptively incredible. Even a brief thought about the circumstances of Hemings's life, viewing him as a human being, tells a different story. Hemings's recollections make clear that his older siblings-Beverley and Harriet-left Monticello to live as white people. Both married white people who may not have known that their spouses were partly Black and had been born enslaved. The communities where they lived evidently did not know that either.

How did Madison Hemings's siblings live convincingly as white if they spoke in the dialect applied universally to enslaved people? Why would Madison speak differently than his siblings? Taking into account the Hemingses' actual circumstances would have proved absurd the assumption that Madison Hemings could not have spoken in the way portrayed in his conversation with Wetmore.

A similar analysis, or lack of analysis, has often been at play in writings about the Hemings children's mother, Sally. As I have traveled the country talking about the books I have written about the Hemings family, I've been struck by the responses to the fact that Sally Hemings and her brother James learned to speak French during their years in France. On several occasions I have been asked, with seeming wonder, how they could have learned to speak French. How could they have gotten along there? Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

Perhaps there is something about French, for a long time the language of diplomacy and culture. It is considered "fancy" in a way that goes along with the country's cuisine and vaunted high fashion-haute cuisine, haute couture. What of individuals born at the lowest rung of society? Could enslaved people, Black people, ever lay claim to sophistication? More than a century after James and Sally Hemings's time in France, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, while contemplating a crisis in Haiti, exclaimed, "Dear me. Think of it. N*****s speaking French."

The fiction that has African Americans naturally speaking in a particular way, or unable to learn a language, slyly promotes the notion that Black people are somewhat less than human. At the very least, the ideas about Black people and language convey the supposed gulf that exists between the races. Editors and interviewers for the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives of the 1930s, which gathered the recollections of formerly enslaved people, engaged in a concerted effort to render the speech of the interviewees into stereotypical Black dialect. As a result, the accents and speech of all the interviewees-whether from Virginia or Georgia or Texas-appear exactly the same. The exaggerated dialect was supposed to signal "authenticity"-an authenticity defined by incapacity.
From the March 2021 issue: Clint Smith on the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives
I don't recall whether Estebanico's language skills featured in the fleeting mention that was made of him in my early education. I do wonder what difference it might have made to my and my classmates' understanding about the enslaved to have had a more fully realized example of someone who displayed such perseverance and talent. Estebanico was a flawed man-there were complaints about his treatment of some of the women he encountered, and he ultimately died in a hail of arrows, killed by Native Americans after he insisted on taking gifts of "turquoise and women" from them-but even these negative notes would have helped us see him as a human being with strengths and weaknesses. We would have encountered a known person, to substitute for the nameless people in cotton fields who, at least in my education, never broke out or appeared as anything other than fungible agricultural workers. Of course, I know now that the lives of enslaved field-workers were more complicated than portrayed during my childhood, and worshipping heroism, as typically defined, works against the idea that the lives of common people count and hold lessons for us as well. But learning that the Spanish explorers and the Indigenous people they encountered and lived with at times relied on Estebanico to help them speak with each other brings another dimension to our understandings about slavery and the people enslaved.

Even more, knowing that some of the Black people who came to the Americas with the Spanish went off on their own to lead expeditions in Mexico, Central America, and South America would have altered the framework for viewing people of African descent in the New World. Africans were all over the globe, having all kinds of experiences. Some founded free settlements, decades before the English arrived. Some, like Estebanico, were instruments of conquests. Some became bound to the institution of chattel slavery. But in all that, one thing is certain: Blackness does not equal inherent incapacity or limitation.

Over the past several decades, academic historians have emphasized that enslaved people in North America did more than work in the fields. The insights from this scholarship have filtered down to public-history sites where enslaved people lived and labored, changing the presentations at those places. If one goes to Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia, one sees actors portraying enslaved people who were skilled artisans of one sort or another. At Monticello, guides point out the work of John Hemmings, the carpenter and joiner who made furniture for Jefferson and worked on the physical structures of both Monticello and Poplar Forest, Jefferson's home away from home in Bedford County, 90 miles from his mountaintop mansion.

As has been said many times, Black history is American history. People of African descent, however, occupy a special place in the narrative of the rise and fall of European nations in North America. For all its problems, nationalist-oriented history presented a cogent telling of the origins of the United States, though a superficial one. It made some degree of sense to sunset the influence of the other European nations with which the English settlers contended for control of the continent. American culture continued under the influence of what had been, at the time of the separation, a British society.

But a closer look at the story of the 20 or so Africans who landed at Jamestown contains a hint of the broader nature of the origin story: The Africans, from the region of Angola, had been taken after a battle with a Portuguese galleon. The Spanish, and their Portuguese neighbors, had been enslaving Africans, working with elites within African societies, for centuries by this time. The English were relative newcomers to the practice. The field of Atlantic history, which studies the era of contact among the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the 16th through 18th centuries, began to take hold in the 1980s, when I was in college and law school. It has expanded further, as a challenge to inward-looking nationalist history. Thinking of these interactions as part of a global system makes even more clear that the origin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than many people like to believe.

Would it make sense for African Americans enslaved under English rule to think they had absolutely no connection to enslaved people who spoke Spanish or French? What enslaved Africans had in common, what really ordered their lives, was the experience of enslavement in a world where the notion of white supremacy was ascendant. National borders cannot contain the experiences shared by families enslaved across the Caribbean and the entire breadth of two continents. There is no reason for the people taken from Africa to define themselves strictly by the countries, languages, or societal roles their captors created. Even though the Spanish "lost" Texas and Florida, Estebanico and the Spanish-speaking Blacks of St. Augustine should be seen as a part of the origin story of African Americans. The echoes of that world reverberated from the 1500s through to my classrooms in the 1960s and '70s, and continue to reverberate today.
This article has been adapted from Annette Gordon-Reed's new book, On Juneteenth. It appears in the June 2021 print edition with the headline "Estebanico's America."

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. She is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History, and On Juneteenth.

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Black America's Neglected Origin Stories

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The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school. This article was published online on May 4, 2021. When I was growing up in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, my classmates and I took Texas history twice, in the fourth and seventh grades.

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Africa-The Birthplace of humanity and the cradle of civilization

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Africa-The Birthplace of humanity and the cradle of civilization

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Informational Source/ Article
Rhetorical Situation:
- Writer: Understanding Slavery
- Text/Subject: This is article explains that Africa is not only the birthplace of humanity but it is also the place where the very first forms of an advanced civilizations began to take root.
- Audience: Anyone that would like to further their knowledge of human history.
- Context: What some of the early civilizations in Africa were cable of before European colonization began.

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The African continent is now recognised as the birthplace of humanity and the cradle of civilization. We still marvel at the great achievements of Kemet, or Ancient Egypt, for example, one of the most notable of the early African civilizations, which first developed in the Nile valley over 5000 years ago.

However, even before the rise of Kemet it seems likely that an even more ancient kingdom, known as Ta Seti, existed in what is today Nubia in Sudan. This may well have been the earliest state to exist anywhere in the world. Africa can therefore be credited not only with giving rise to the many scientific developments associated with Egypt, engineering, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc but also with important early political developments such as state formation and monarchy. This demonstrates that economic and political development, as well as scientific development was, during this early period, perhaps more advanced in Africa than in other continents.

The African continent continued on its own path of development, without significant external intervention until the fifteenth century of our era. Some of the world's other great civilisations, such as Kush, Axum, Mali, and Great Zimbabwe, flourished in Africa in the years before 1500. In this early period Africans participated in extensive international trading networks and in trans-oceanic travel. Certainly some African states had established important trading relations with India, China and other parts of Asia long before these were disrupted by European intervention.

A North African conquest of the Iberian peninsular began in the 8th century and led to the occupation of much of Spain and Portugal for several centuries. This Muslim invasion re-introduced much of the knowledge of the ancient world to Europe and linked it much more closely with North and West Africa. It was gold from the great empires of West Africa, such as Ghana, Mali and Songhay, which provided the means for the economic take off of Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries and aroused the interest of Europeans in western Africa. Indeed it was the wealth of West Africa, especially as a source of gold, that encouraged the voyages of the early European explorers.

By the 15th century the African continent was already one of great of diversity. The existence of great kingdoms and empires, such as Mali in the west and Ethiopia in the east were in many ways exceptional rather than typical. In many part of the continent no major centralised states existed and many people lived in societies where there were no great divisions of wealth and power. In such societies there were generally more democratic systems of government by councils of elders and other kinship and age based institutions. As a consequence there was also a diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs. In many areas these beliefs remained traditional and stressed the importance of communing with common ancestors. The Ethiopian kingdom was unusual because the Orthodox Christian church, which was of ancient origin in that region, had increasingly important state functions. In Mali, and in some other areas of western and eastern Africa, as well as in throughout North Africa, Islam had already begun to play a significant role before 1500. Most importantly African societies were following their own patterns of development before the onset of European intervention.

Negative views

In the 18th century, racist views of Africa were most famously expressed by Scottish philosopher David Hume: 'I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences.'

Whilst some changed slightly over time, there were still some who continued to hold these derogatory views. In the 19th century, the German philosopher Hegel simply declared: 'Africa is no historical part of the world.' Later, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, expressed openly the racist view that Africa has no history, as recently as 1963.

Early achievements

We now know that, far from Africa having no history, it is almost certain that human history actually began there. All the earliest evidence of human existence and of our immediate hominid ancestors has been found in Africa. The latest scientific research points to the fact that all human beings are likely to have African ancestors.

Africa was not just the birthplace of humanity but also the cradle of early civilisations that made an immense contribution to the world and are still marvelled at today. The most notable example is Kemet - the original name of ancient Egypt - which first developed in the Nile valley more than 5,000 years ago and was one of the first monarchies.

However, even before the rise of Egypt, an even earlier kingdom was founded in Nubia, in what is present-day Sudan. Ta Seti is thought to be one of the earliest states in history, the existence of which demonstrates that, thousands of years ago, Africans were developing some of the most advanced political systems anywhere in the world.

Egypt

Kemet, more commonly referred to as the Egypt of the pharaohs, is best known for its great monuments and feats of architecture and engineering, such as the planning and construction of the pyramids, but it also made great advances in many other fields.

The Egyptians produced early types of paper, devised a written script and developed a calendar. They made important contributions in various branches of mathematics, such as geometry and algebra, and it seems likely that they understood and perhaps invented the use of zero. They also made important contributions to mechanics, philosophy and agriculture, especially irrigation.

In medicine, the Egyptians understood the body's dependence on the brain more than 1,000 years before the Greek scholars came up with the same idea. Some historians now believe that Egypt had an important influence on ancient Greece, pointing to the fact that Greek scholars such as Pythagoras and Archimedes studied there and that the work of Aristotle and Plato was largely based on earlier Egyptian scholarship. For example, what is commonly known as Pythagoras' theorem was well known to the ancient Egyptians hundreds of years before Pythagoras' birth.

The rise of Islam

The continent progressed on its own path of development without major external intervention apart from the Arab invasions of North Africa that began after the rise of Islam in the mid-7th century. Those invasions and the introduction of Islam served to integrate North Africa, as well as parts of East and West Africa, more fully into the Muslim-dominated trading system of that period and generally enhanced the local, regional and international trading networks that were already developing throughout the continent.

Although sometimes spread by military means, Islam's expansion was often facilitated by trade and the desire of African rulers to utilise Islamic political and economic institutions. The Arabic language also provided a script that assisted the development of literacy, book-based learning and record-keeping.

The empire of Songhay - which stretched from modern-day Mali to Sudan -was known for, among other things, the famous Islamic university of Sankoré based in Timbuktu, which was established in the 14th century. The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle were studied there, as well as subjects such as law, various branches of philosophy, dialectics, grammar, rhetoric and astronomy. In the 16th century, one of its most famous scholars, Ahmed Baba (1564-1627), is said to have written more than 40 major books on such subjects as astronomy, history and theology and had a private library that held over 1,500 volumes.

One of the first reports of Timbuktu to reach Europe was by the North African diplomat and author Leo Africanus. In his book Description of Africa, published in 1550, he says of the town: 'There you will find many judges, professors and devout men, all handsomely maintained by the king, who holds scholars in much honour. There, too, they sell many handwritten North African books, and more profit is to be made there from the sale of books than from any other branch of trade.'

The North African, or Moorish, invasion of the Iberian peninsula and the founding of the state of Córdoba in the 8th century had begun the reintroduction of much of the learning of the ancient world to Europe through translations into Arabic of works in medicine, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy, as well as through the various contributions made by Islamic scholars. Arabic numerals based on those used in India were also transplanted, which helped to simplify mathematical calculations.

This knowledge, brought to Europe mainly by the Moors, helped to create the conditions for the Renaissance and the eventual expansion of Europe overseas in the 15th century.

Slavery in Africa

Between the 7th and 15th centuries, the external Muslim trading demand for African goods also included a demand for captives.

Forms of slavery have existed on all continents at different times in history - for instance, as a means of exploiting those captured in war - especially where there were labour shortages and an abundance of land. Slavery was certainly present in some African societies before the rise of Islam. In ancient Kemet, for example, there are descriptions of European slaves being branded. Later, in other African societies, especially those that were powerful states, enslaved or unfree people could be found, although generally their status was little different from that of poor farmers. It may indeed have been similar to that of the serfs of medieval Europe, who were required to produce an agricultural surplus or perform other duties for a particular ruler.

But when an external demand for enslaved people arose, some African societies could and did supply slaves. There was, for example, an export 'trade' in enslaved people, taking them via the Sahara from West to North Africa, following a similar route to other trade goods, such as gold and salt. Enslaved Africans were also forced to go to parts of the Middle East, to India and perhaps even as far as China. The most well-known slave of East African origin is Malik Ambar (1549-1626) who was born in what is now Ethiopia. Enslaved at an early age, he eventually became the regent of the Indian kingdom of Ahmednagar, famous for his military campaigns against the Mughals.

The development of states in Africa, increased the levels of inequality - between men and women, rich and poor, free and servile. In fact, inequality and economic exploitation were particularly prevalent in some of the most powerful and developed states, such as the Ethiopian kingdom. Indeed, historians generally consider Ethiopia to be a feudal society with many features similar to those of feudalism in Europe - that is, economic and political power was based on land ownership and the exploitation of those who were forced to work on that land.

Trading systems and gold

nn18213 Before 1600, a massive regional and international trading system stretched from the coast of West Africa, across the Sahara to North Africa and beyond. It was sustained by the mining of gold in West Africa, as well as the production of many other goods there. For many centuries, it was dominated by powerful empires such as Ghana, Mali and Songhay, which often controlled both gold production and the major trading towns on the southern fringes of the Sahara.

A 9th-century historian wrote: 'The king of Ghana is a great king. In his territory are mines of gold.' When al-Bakri, the famous historian of Muslim Spain, wrote about Ghana in the 11th century, he reported that its king 'rules an enormous kingdom and has great power'. He was also said to have an army of 200,000 men and to rule over an extremely wealthy trading empire.

In the 14th century, the West African empire of Mali, which was larger than western Europe, was reputed to be one of the biggest, richest and most powerful states in the world. The Moroccan traveller Mohammed Ibn Batuta, when giving his very favourable impressions of this empire, reported that he had found 'complete and general safety' there. When the famous emperor of Mali, Mansa Musa, visited Cairo in 1324, it was said that he brought so much gold with him that its price fell dramatically and had not recovered its value even 12 years later.

It was gold from these great empires of West Africa that prompted the early Portuguese voyages of exploration.

Traditional societies

In the centuries before 1500, some of the world's other great civilisations, such as Kush (in present-day Sudan), Axum (in present-day Ethiopia) and Great Zimbabwe, flourished in Africa.

However, although the history of the continent before the transatlantic slave trade is often viewed as one of great empires and kingdoms, many of its inhabitants lived in societies with no great state apparatus. They were often governed by councils of elders or by other kinship- or age-based institutions. Religious and philosophical beliefs concentrated on maintaining communication with ancestors who could intercede with gods on behalf of the living and ensure the smooth functioning of society. (The Ethiopian kingdom was unusual because there the orthodox Christian Church, which was of ancient origin, performed increasingly important state functions.)

Many of these societies were small scale, occupied with farming, herding and producing enough from agriculture to survive and exchange in local markets. They could also be part of larger empires and, as such, were expected to produce a surplus or perform other duties for an overlord. In short, while these societies varied greatly and were governed in different ways, they were all developing according to their own internal dynamics.

The Igbo people, who still live in Nigeria, are an example of a society that was not part of a centralised state. They ruled themselves in village communities that, at different times, used slightly different political systems. As in many other African societies that used similar methods, everyone was taught rules and responsibilities according to age and groupings - men or women together in age sets - that cut across family or village loyalty. Sometimes the extended family was responsible for organising and training people and for liaising with other similar extended family groups, through councils of elders or elected chiefs. Therefore relationships based on age and kinship were often very important.

Even societies that had kings and more centralised political structures also used these other political institutions and ways of organising people. What is important about them is that they involved many people in decision-making and, in this respect, were African forms of participatory democracy. Religious ideas generally supported and underpinned these systems of government, most importantly giving people their own specific ways of understanding the world and the rules of their own society.

On the eve of the transatlantic slave trade

In most parts of Africa before 1500, societies had become highly developed in terms of their own histories. They often had complex systems of participatory government, or were established powerful states that covered large territories and had extensive regional and international links.

Many of these societies had solved difficult agricultural problems and had come up with advanced techniques of production of food and other crops and were engaged in local, regional or even international trading networks. Some peoples were skilled miners and metallurgists, others great artists in wood, stone and other materials. Many of the societies had also amassed a great stock of scientific and other knowledge, some of it stored in libraries such as those of Timbuktu, but some passed down orally from generation to generation.

There was great diversity across the continent and therefore societies at different stages and levels of development. Most importantly, Africans had established their own economic and political systems, their own cultures, technologies and philosophies that had enabled them to make spectacular advances and important contributions to human knowledge.

The significance of the transatlantic slave trade is not just that it led to the loss of millions of lives and the departure of millions of those who could have contributed to Africa's future, although depopulation did have a great impact. But just as devastating was the fact that African societies were disrupted by the trade and increasingly unable to follow an independent path of development. Colonial rule and its modern legacy have been a continuation of this disruption.

The devastation of Africa through transatlantic slavery was accompanied by the ignorance of some historians and philosophers to negate its entire history. These ideas and philosophies suggested, that among other things, Africans had never developed any institutions or cultures, nor anything else of any worth and that future advances could only take place under the direction of Europeans or European institutions.

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However, even before the rise of Kemet it seems likely that an even more ancient kingdom, known as Ta Seti, existed in what is today Nubia in Sudan. This may well have been the earliest state to exist anywhere in the world.