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Sankore University was located at Timbuktu and it flourished for at least 200 years more before it was again visited in 1525 By another famous world traveler who took the name of Leo Africanus because of his writings about Africa. This person was a Spanish Moor who wrote about his visits to Timbuktu that visit being made during the reign of Askia the Great, as a matter of fact, who wrote about that visit while on scholarship from the Medici Pope Leo the 10th in Rome. Leo Africanus writes this about the city of Timbuktu and about its intellectual interests: "Here are great score of doctors and judges and priests and other learned men that are bountifully maintained at the King's cost and charges, and hither are brought diverse manuscripts of written books out of Barbary which are sold for more money than any other merchandise.
Books were also written in Timbuktu. The Tarikh es-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, written in Arabic in the 17th and 16th centuries respectively and now translated into French and available for curious minds in the Harvard University Library are two such examples. These give a chronicle of the political regimes of the Mali and Songhai. Well we might go on and talk about other tropical states and cultures, some of them well-known like Bornu or Kanem in northern Nigeria and Chad or Congo in the time of the early Portuguese contacts, or about cultures that in fact are still shrouded in a great deal of obscurity. Like the culture that produced the great ruins at Zimbabwe in Rhodesia or the magnificent mosque at Kilwa the Tanzania coast. But I think by now my point should be made. So I want to pose the question then
what do we make of these facts? Why is it important to know about these things? Surely it seems to me Negroes have just cause to take pride in a heritage so rich with accomplishment. They have as much right and reason to do so as any individual has in studying any history. For it gives some indication of what his potential and capacities are and what adversity can be endured and in fact overcome. Now if Negroes can read this history with some special sense of pride and identification then what lessons and benefits does it hold for whites? They can and should read it for what it indicates of the sources of the civilization that forms us all, white or black. At least it indicates that civility itself suffers no threat from association with black people. More importantly however whites and negroes alike can find in this record an
indication of the creativity and the daring and the industry of humankind. A source of strength when our own burdens seem overwhelming. But after all, group achievements are usually really only individuals' achievements. Knowledge of them does not remove the need for individual drive or determination or hard work. But there is surely no excuse anymore or ever again for Negro children to feel defeated before they even start. Victims to a criminal neglect or suppression of their own group's place in history. They are after all denied a normal and healthy self-love because of group and not individual characteristics. No one need take offense then at the call launched some time ago but repeated now "Up up you mighty race". Negroes must never again sell themselves short. And I think to borrow the wisdom of another ancient culture, to conclude,
I'd state simply that if I'm not for myself then who am I? And if I am for myself alone then what am I? And if not now, when? [applause] [sustained applause] [applause ends] That has been something. At this time I'd like to bring Dr. Johnson back to the podium
and entertain questions from the floor. Yes? Dr. Johnson, I would like to ask a question. It comes as a surprise to me just how highly civilized ancient African civilizations were. And I wonder when these civilizations were destroyed by colonial powers, were there attempts to preserve records, are there museums in these countries, are there large libraries where these things have been preserved or is it pretty much a matter of diligent and exhaustive searching to find the sort of information you've presented here? Well it takes a great deal of searching. But I think the wealth of materials available at the front of the room indicates something of the search that has gone on. This would have been impossible just a few years ago. There is
an incredible amount of material that we just haven't yet got access to or studied. To try to go through that question in its various stages I think a great deal must have been destroyed at the time that not only European political control came in but just as a result of the disturbances that went on with the slave trade itself. And you have to realize that the slave trade is one half of a bigger process which also includes slave raiding. Part of that, a great deal of it, most of it, meant warfare among African groups to try to save themselves from being captured and to turn turkey on the other guy if possible and get him first. And that meant that you had a lot of destruction in the 17th and 18th centuries
that must have affected in some way the storehouse. But then there's another aspect and that is the fact that some of the materials have been kept in private holdings and private libraries that we've been unaware of until just now and perhaps won't become aware of until sometime in the future. I have a friend for example Who happens to be white who took the time to learn Arabic and who spent two full years in the old city of Kano trying to study the role of Islamic brotherhoods in that area and it was at the end of that two years only that he began to realize what a great source of wealth in terms of research materials existed in Kano as people began to bring out old dusty manuscripts and in fact he brought back over 100 manuscripts written in Arabic to this country to be photographed and put in deposit here in museums and libraries.
And obviously they haven't been read by by anyone outside those families so we don't know what they say. We know for example that copies of Aristotle were brought into Kano by a man named Dehegley in the 17th century. There must have been a rich tradition of writing in Kano and other Moslem areas. There was not a rich tradition of writing on the coast. The coastal peoples recorded their histories in other ways. They recorded it in folk literature, that is to say in song and in dance and in stories and African stories are very rich and are just now being studied for their historical content. And they recorded it the way Egyptians often recorded theirs, in sculpture. And African sculpture is only now being subjected to historical as opposed to artistic study. Even for Nubia, you know, one of the oldest of the areas there remain at least 200 sites that are identified,
noted, and ready for some bright, young, energetic archaeologist to go out and start digging and deciphering, we haven't even deciphered the script. So there is a great storehouse of information I'm sure that will come out. Another technique used now to study history that's never been used in Africa before is language. And we're learning a great deal from that. But a lot of it is lost unfortunately. We have to piece together the rest of it from what we can find. Why then was it referred to as the "dark continent" if it had, I mean-- Well someone says that probably the darkest thing about it was our ignorance of it. It was dark first because it was physical but I think that what you, you put your finger on is just a reflection of the the justification that Europe created for the slave trade. I think if you look at these early documents, Ibn Battuta's writings, Leo
Africanus or any number of even of European explorers who came in prior to the time the slave trade became such a dominant influence in western history, you don't find this kind of pejorative treatment of these people and an unwillingness to to be responsive to their own achievements. You find that only later in its development to no higher degree than among Americans particularly a man named Fichu who can tell you a great deal about how uncivilized dark Africa was. Of course he didn't know the first thing about Africa and obviously neither did we at that point. We had lost it too. Yes? I'd like to know the population of Africa now, and what percentage of blacks actually -- What is the population of Africa and what percent of Africa -- percentage of
African surface is habitable? Well the-- to answer the second part there's no way to answer that because you'd be amazed at where people can live. The Kalahari desert looks about as inhabitable as any place on earth but the Bushmen do very well there. We would not do very well there. There are over, I think 200 and 25 or 30 million people on the African continent now. Estimates are that black Africa alone both, that is tropical Africa and with some compromises, that i've already indicated, since we talked about Nubia and Kush, but coastal Africa let's say, West and East lost perhaps as many as 40 million people through the slave trade. That doesn't mean 40 million people became slaves in the world, a great many of them died in the process of being
taken. About half of them died in the way over. There are records that indicate maybe as many as 10 million went eastward into Arabia, India, and Asia. And what's happened to those 10 million soul brothers I don't know. [laughter] But we have to find them. [laughter] There is a record by the way I've come across of a black General in the Japanese army of the 16th or 17th century. So evidently some of them made good. There was a question over here. Yes sir? The question I ought to give to white people but the question I would like to know most, is the fact that 50 percent of the nation (inaudible) why did they not continue to progress as the Europeans? That's a fair question I think. The question was
if these civilizations were so great why did they not continue to progress as other civilizations progressed? Well Toynbee talks about 21 civilizations and he says that only 5 remain extant and only one of those is progressive. So that presumably there are a great many lost civilizations in the world. Or civilizations that are stagnant that have not undergone the kind of momentous upheavals that the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, and I think that we're really talking about the industrial revolution and what it did to Western civilization that makes it so distinctive. The um there is an answer to part of that. For example Songhai might well have gelled into a stable Moslem civilization, Afro-Moslem civilization.
But it was defeated by another North African Moslem civilization, namely Morocco, and you may recall that in 1961 when Mauritania was supposed to become independent, Morocco ups and claims Mauritania as part of its lost empire. It too wondered about why it hadn't gone on and continued to develop and they wanted to go back and pick up some of the pieces. Well then the Moroccan invasion of Songhai utterly ruined its days, there's no doubt about that. The intrusion of the slave trade and of European colonialism in West Africa and in in ultimately in all of black Africa certainly was sufficient to do it. There are parts of it that remain a base on which to develop now. Surely the Ebos are an energetic people and they they will do some great things there and we're
sure of that. If you talk about the will to develop the kind of psychological outlook for development, the need for achievement, as David McClellan at Harvard University calls it. In fact you'll find that the Ebos are the most highly motivated for achievement among peoples of the world and that's that proved to be so in his own test. So there are a variety of reasons, historical, the accidents of history, geographical to a large extent. It's just very difficult for a great many areas of Africa, for the Congo Basin for example or for the dense forest areas of the western coast to produce very very large political systems. Their artistic, religious, ethical
achievements may well outshine our own. We have only to learn them to find out. Their physical culture was not all of that impressive, Timbuktu is a large city but it did not build a Cologne, didn't have to. Indeed Cologne wouldn't survive in the Sahara Desert. What they built was suited to the region and it lasted. And this is the final thing I'd like to say about it, we have to Take time into perspective here too. After all Ghana started somewhere around the seventh or eighth century and flourished until the 13th. That's 500 years. The United States started when? Mali developed out of Ghana, carried on that tradition an flourished to the 15th century. That's a thousand years. How long has the US existed? Songhai
carried that on into the 16th century. Obviously the Egyptian civilization has been there five thousand years. So in a sense we may be premature in suggesting that we are going to be half as successful as any one of the ones I've already talked about. Yes sir? [inaudible] [inaudible] um There are bits and pieces, um we know that life in most of the localities of say Songhai went on as they always had gone on. People produce their own food and they threw up markets and they traded and so forth. And they didn't need any any style of labor any different than they have today which is communal
labor. Communal organization of their own land, farms and so forth. There were various guild groups that grouped the artisans. There was always, for example, a particular clan or at least endogamous group for the blacksmiths because iron working was a very central part of the power of the system. And they wanted to make sure that they always had iron workers available and those people were sort of fed a doctrine that they were separate, apart, distinctive, perhaps even inferior, I don't know, but they abided by those rules by and large and you find a kind of caste element that comes in that keep certain groups as blacksmiths and other people as carpenters and so forth. Then there was a system of tribute, retainership or clientship which Westerners have called slavery but which really wasn't that. Because there was
not the notion of ownership of people. For one thing Islam forbad it and we know that throughout the Moslem regions however there have been things close to slavery. So I wouldn't base it all on Islam but it just seems to be the fact that people whom we would call slaves did at least have the right to defend themselves in court, to marry, their children were always free. Slavery was not a status that you could pass on to your descendants. It was in effect the tribute that subdued kingdoms paid to the realm. Since there was perhaps not an awful lot of gold throughout the system, it was already owned by the Emperor, maybe they paid their federal income taxes by sending some of their people down to Washington. We send them out to Vietnam. [laughter] Yes sir? Would you like to make a choice? Why did the slave trade choose Africa, rather than other areas, like South America?
Well I mean I suppose you have to ask the Portuguese. I really, I don't really know a good historical answer to that other than the fact perhaps that Africans seemed to bear up a little bit better than the others. The Portuguese and the Spanish both tried to enslave other peoples but the Indians had a bad habit of dying off. And this was tried in the new world, they did attempt to utilize indigenous Indians for the plantations in the Caribbean and southern US and in Latin America. But the African stock physically lasted longer and was capable of hardier work. And I suspect that's the principal reason once the trade was underway it became its own justification. You found Pagan and Christian alike caught up in the process of extolling the
virtues of pressing people into slavery. For example one of the largest slave ports in Africa was located in Fernando Po which was under the direct rule of a bishop sent out from Portugal to Christianize the people. He got a 25 percent kickback on every one that he sent on. [laughter] There's no question but what it corrupted and once it corrupted, it fed upon itself. So I think I think probably for those two reasons with others that may have influenced it, secondarily, it became a monster. Well thank you very much you've been a very fine audience. [applause] [applause dies out] [people talking]
Series
The Negro in American Society
Episode Number
1
Episode
Old World of Negro Americans, The: Willard T. Johnson
Producing Organization
WGBH Educational Foundation
Contributing Organization
WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/15-21tdz92h
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Description
Episode Description
A community lecture series sponsored by Roxbury and Newton community organizations featuring six studies by eminent negro scholars and personalities tracing the history of the American Negro from the African experience to the present day.
Episode Description
Public Affairs
Created Date
1966-11-16
Genres
Event Coverage
Topics
Race and Ethnicity
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:23:16
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Credits
Producing Organization: WGBH Educational Foundation
Production Unit: Radio
AAPB Contributor Holdings
WGBH
Identifier: 66-0074-00-01-003 (WGBH Item ID)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Generation: Dub
Duration: 00:23:26
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Citations
Chicago: “The Negro in American Society; 1; Old World of Negro Americans, The: Willard T. Johnson,” 1966-11-16, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-21tdz92h.
MLA: “The Negro in American Society; 1; Old World of Negro Americans, The: Willard T. Johnson.” 1966-11-16. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-21tdz92h>.
APA: The Negro in American Society; 1; Old World of Negro Americans, The: Willard T. Johnson. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-21tdz92h