History of the Negro People; 1; Heritage of the Negro

[music playing] The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. [Man 1]: The people now called "negroes" are the most written about and the least understood of the world's people. [Man 2]: This term, "Negro” demoralizes us and is detrimental. I feel it doesn't give us, give us any association past the slave ship. [Man 3]: I think that the first tasks of people of African descent, whether in the United States or in Africa or elsewhere, is to get rid of this slave name, Negro. [Man 4]: This curious word Negro, uh, was seldom or never used in Africa itself and this word has no meaning or no worthwhile meaning at all in Africa. I would doubt myself if it has any useful meaning anywhere else. [Ossie Davis]: What is a Negro?

A simple question. But the answer's not so simple. [music playing] My name is Ossie Davis. I'm an actor and a writer and the narrator of our series of programs on the history of the Negro people. I am also, a Negro. What is a Negro? In Africa the word Negro has no meaning. In Brazil, the Negro is a man who is very poor and very black. And in the United States, a man who has any quantity of Negro blood or whatever that is, is considered a Negro. Are Negroes a race, a people or a condition?

Our programs are will be asking this question in many ways and in many different settings. Our odyssey will take us throughout the world: to Africa where we will explore the relationship of American Negroes to the land of their origin; to Brazil where we will ask,"Is Brazil a racial paradise?"; and throughout the United States. Our aim in this series is both a modest and an ambitious one. We will be asking many questions and perhaps answer only a few. For there is a vast ignorance of Negro history among whites and Negroes, and the job of filling this vacuum is massive. Do Negroes have a heritage and a tradition like the Greeks, the French, the Anglo-Saxons? Or are we something less, as others have portrayed us?

Everywhere we have looked, we have seen Negroes as savage and barbaric, humble and self-sacrificing, scared and childish and inferior. And I remember as a kid coming from some of the pictures, and we spent the whole time from the, from the Motion Picture House to home satirizing the Negro performances we saw in the film. Well it was also an admission that somehow or other this was to some degree what we were. Now these, these important and very, very, uh, impressionistic things that we got from these films did to some degree govern our behavior. When a Negro child goes into a movie, for instance, and sees himself or sees another Negro in an unfavorable light, he, he, he feels to some degree threatened. He feels uncomfortable and a great deal

of his laughing at that situation will be the kind of laughter that protects him. It's a, it's a nervous attack against him, his self, the way he looks at himself, the esteem with which he holds himself and how he will rate with his fellows in the street. You know, uh, it's, it's seeing something happen to you that you can't control, which leaves a scar, which leaves you feeling inadequate. You know, you don't feel loved, you're ashamed to look at yourself, ashamed to go home, ashamed to talk to the boys next door, ashamed even to ask these questions of your parents, although sometimes you do. It's a horrible situation and sometimes you never get over that. [Man]: As a Negro, I have honestly hard to believe that I was somebody and I've always fought during my life to keep that feeling that I did have some value. And I say value knowing what that word means

and it's been many a nights in my life when I went to sleep and known very deep inside me that I really wasn't worth much. [Woman]: I still do not really know what being a Negro is or what it means? It means that my skin is a little bit darker, it means that my cultural exposures have been somewhat different to other ethnic groups. It may even mean that as a human being I might be more sensitive to need and despair. [Man]: Oh yes, ah, you know, I wish I was white kind of thing, when you begin to sort of get the feeling, of uh difference, like maybe you're dirty or something's wrong, but there was that feeling, you know, so early that you can't even remember where it started. I know, but yet, it's part of my American heritage. [Davis]: We were told we were a people without a past and without a future. And Negro

boys and girls learned before very long that they were something special. [Woman]: You know at an early age, soon as you start school, you begin to catch on to the whole racial thing. But, uh, once you get into school you begin to know it and know there's a difference and that the difference is against you. [Man]: There's no real reference to me as Negro, or to my father or any of the other Negroes who have contributed so much to the growth of the United States. And I, I, I really can't understand it. [Woman]: I'll never forget the picture in the geography book, a couple of very ragged Africans, you know. Weeks before we got to the lesson, we were stealing ourselves for it, uh, some negro child would find the picture first in the book before we got to the lesson and alert everyone, look on

page 22. You'd see what's there and then we dreaded reaching that lesson because it was always something about the savages not knowing anything yet. We had to sit there and hear this and instinctively the white children would turn and look at the negro children, you know, while this lesson was going on. [Davis]: And so Africa became our shame and our torment. We were told that our past was barbarism and the white man, our redeemer. Slavery was not a sin, but salvation. If few of us had anything to look forward to, we were afraid to look back. In 1958 Lorraine Hansberry wrote a play, "A Raisin in the Sun," that showed the conflicts created for American Negroes by their African past. [music clip from "A Raisin in the Sun] [Ruth]: Well, what have we got on tonight? [Beneatha]: You are now looking at what a well-dressed Nigerian woman would wear. Isn't it beautiful? [George]: Hey, look honey, we're

going to the theatre. We're not going to be in it, you know. [Beneatha]: George, I don't like that. [Ruth]: Do you expect this boy to go out with you with you looking like that? [Bertha]: Well, now that's up to George. If he's ashamed of his heritage. [George]: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Here we go again, a lecture on our African past, on our great West African heritage. In one second, you know, we're going to hear all about the great Ashanti empires; the Songhay civilizations; the, the sculpture of Benin; some poems in the Bantu; and then the whole monologue is going to end up with the word heritage. Let's face it baby, your heritage ain't nothing but a bunch of raggedy spirituals and some grass huts. [Beneatha]: Grass huts! Oh, you see George, you see you would rather stand there in your splendid ignorance and know absolutely nothing about the people who were the first to smelt iron on the face of this earth, while the Ashanti were performing surgical operations when the English were still tattooing themselves

with blue dragons. [Davis]: At the heritage program of, "How You Act," a federally sponsored effort to develop better opportunities for Harlem's Negro youth, a new version of African history is being taught. Robert Moore is a visiting lecturer. [Woman]: Mr. Moore, do you think the social, so called Negro, will dignify his identity by associating himself with his ancestral background from Africa? [Robert Moore]: After some three or four hundred years of trans- plantation from Africa into America, it is obvious that we are not Africans anymore. We are Afro-Americans, Americans of African ancestry and that and that connects us, basically with our original heritage and culture. [John Henrick Clark]: The accomplishments of Africa before and after ... [Ossie]: The director of the program is John Henrik

Clark. [Clark]: this accomplishment is generally glossed over or neglected in human history. A lot of this, the misconception of Africa and the distortion of African history is involved in a word that is relatively new. The word Negro, a kind of nick- name that grew out of European laziness, the inability or the, ah, lack of a desire to give Africans their proper identity. In the period when the Europeans had to justify the exploitation of Africa and the demeaning of a whole people, they systematically started the effort to weed the African out of human history. [Basil Davidson]: A great deal of our ignorance of African history sits upon the old conservative, racial discrimination and prejudice, which we have had in the [Davis, speaking over Basil Davidson]: Basil

Davidson is a British writer and historian on Africans [Davidson]: United States, it's still sits upon the belief perfectly unscientific, quite un-based in any scholarly discipline that the Africans, that is to say, if you like, the Negroes, are people of some sort of inferiority to others and therefore have not been able to develop in the same way. Now, you know, the great myth of the colonial era, the great myth took the shape of saying that the Africans, the Negroes are are children and because they are children, its said failing to develop, we the Europeans, you the Americans must go in there and show them the way they should go. Civilize them, introduce them to the blessings of orderly life. One of the misunderstandings you see, about Africa is the apparently primitive material nature of their civilization. You look at these people living in these villages

and you wonder what is there past? Do they have a past? What lies behind the door. They have nothing but a few straw buildings, nothing but a few cattle. It seems quite inconsiderable to think, for example, they have no stone in their country. They have almost no metal, half their country is under water half the year. They cannot build, and could never possibly build an imposing material civilization, but their achievement was of course to learn how to master their environment. And this they have done with quite outstanding success. So that the outside picture of, the superficial picture is, gives no indication of the depth of their country. These are the people who have mastered the problems of taming this difficult, vast continent with all its extraordinarily great obstacles to living: its swamps, its desert, its mountains and its prairies. The story of Africa over the last 2000

years has been one of quite epic dimensions. [Davis]: Africa, Endless deserts, scorching and wind swept by day, bitterly cold at night. And the Sahara, the world's largest desert, the harsh bleak expanse of land challenging anyone to cross it. Snow capped mountains near the equator, gigantic waterfalls and the jungle mists and rain almost daily. These were some of the barriers to penetration. To the outside world, it was the dark continent, a land of mystery where stories were spread of giants and dwarfs, of people's whose heads

grew under their arms, of monstrous animals. [music playing] It is here in this forbidding other world that what may be the remains of the first man were discovered. In 1959 in Tanganyika, a scientific expedition had been digging for weeks in the sun baked earth looking for traces of the earliest man. Then in July, Dr. Lewis Leakey and his team found what he called,

“zinjanthropus,” nicknamed “the nutcracker man” because of the strength of his jaws. He was about 600,000 years old and maybe the creature that makes Africa the real cradle of mankind. The records of ancient Africa began with Egypt about 3000 B.C. Its spectacular achievements are the monumental pyramids and brooding Sphinx, have always been credited to Asia and the Mediterranean. But there is growing evidence that Egypt holds more than originally thought to the land to the south: Cush, the land of the Negroes. About 700 B.C., Cushite kings conquer Egypt and become the 25th dynasty. Little is known today about the land of Cush, but in the ancient world it was highly respected.

In 1791 the French philosopher, Comte de Volney wrote of the Cushites, a people now forgotten, discovered while yet others were barbarians, the elements of arts and and the sciences. Then in about 325 A.D. Cush is attacked and destroyed and disappears from our view. For the rest of Africa, there is little we can say for certain. Except for the Cushites, Africans had no writing. They kept in their memories, the history of their people, stories narrated down from generation to generation. This oral tradition must tell us much of the history that will fill the gaps in our knowledge. In the western Sudan, Negro kingdoms arise in the medieval periods of walled and fortified cities, markets and fairs.

Ghana is the earliest of these civilizations going back to 300 A.D. In the 8th century, an Arab writer tells us that the Arabs sent an expedition to this pagan land of gold. African markets, the main source of gold before the discovery of America. Then about 1067, Arabs from the North fired by their new faith, storm into the western Sudan. [music playing] After years of fighting, the Arabs conquered Ghana and settle there.

From this time on, trans-Saharan caravans trade flourishes and with the trade comes Islam. Islam spreads through West Africa. When Europe was going through a so-called Dark Ages, Muslim culture is the main advancement of human knowledge. Most important of all, a written language comes to the west in Sudan. Almost all that we know about these kingdoms was preserved for us by Arab and Negro scholars of that time. Around the 12th century, Ghana gives way to the empire of Mali. In 1324 King Monsa Musa makes a pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan of 60,000 people. An Arab traveller arriving in Mali in 1353 wrote, the negroes have a

greater abhorrent of injustice than any other people. Neither traveller no inhabitant of this land has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence. Could the same be said of the 14th century England or France? The kingdom of Songhai, most famous for its university, the fabled Timbuktu. Students and scholars from all over the world came here to study. A moorish traveller wrote, more profit is made from the book trade than from all other branches of Commerce. [Davidson]: If we ask ourselves a little more nearly, what have been the cultural contributions of African people to the rest of the world, then of course we are faced immediately with the remarkably original and outstanding quality of their plastic arts. The most important art in Africa has of course been

dancing. And dancing has passed into the folklore of the whole of the rest of the world from its African origin. So if you're go to places like Brazil or the West Indies or the southern United States, you will find African dances is still being danced there. Though, of course, in different circumstances and therefore in somewhat different ways, but the whole concept of rhythm as being an expression of the personality and not simply a wiggling of the body, and a wiggling of the body is all that most Europeans can achieve. But an expression of the personality this comes from the African concept of dancing. More obvious is the tradition of plastic art. A large number of African peoples have developed forms of sculpture in wood or in stone, or in ivory or in brass or bronze, or iron or gold

which are of great effectiveness and great originality, and this too, of course, is past into the general Western tradition of pictorial art and to some extent of plastic art as well. [Davis]: The remarkable art of Benin and Iffe. The bronzers of Benin was said to be worthy of Chiliene. Europe was was amazed at the discovery that Africans could perform such an impressive creation of bronze casting. African sculpture burst upon the European art world. It became a major influence in the modern movement. Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Lejer, Degas found in African sculpture, a freedom and a vitality they had been searching for. Here was no slavish imitation of nature, something the camera could do better,

but a new and fresh way of looking at the world behind the appearance. We have only skimmed the surface of the history of African civilizations and there are wide gaps in our knowledge. Among the riddles of ancient Africa are: Where did the Negro come from? What happened to the Cushites after their defeat? Where did the sculptors of Benin learn their remarkable skills? We haven't even begun to penetrate some of these mysteries. Yet growing knowledge and interest in Africa is rediscovering a world we never knew and many negroes are examining for the first time the values that were lost. [Yule Missy]: My name Yule Missy and and I am addressing my question to Mr. Clark. I want to know what happened to the so-called Negro culture in America? [Clark]:The most tragic

destruction of African culture was the destruction of the African culture brought to these shores, brought to American shores. Now the first thing they did was to forbid the drum, forbid all African ceremonies, forbid African ornaments, literally to destroy a people in such a manner that they had to be remade in an American image. This was not exactly true in the West Indies. It was slavery, make no mistake about it, but because it was on an island, many of the Africans could communicate with each other and maintain some of the African culture. While in the United States, it was impossible because as they arrived, mother, brother, sister were split up and they went in opposite directions. Then they were resold; they

might have been resold, within a matter of days after they were sold the last time. So it was difficult for relatives to keep track of each other and it was difficult for a continuity to be maintained in African culture. This was the beginning of the fragmenting of our family in this country. It was also the beginning of the demeaning and the, uh, negation of the masculinity of the black males in America. This demeaning of our culture, this weeding us out of the commentary of human history has left deep psychological scars. What we are trying to do now is a massive job of rebuilding the inside, the spirit, the hopes, the history,

the culture of a people. We're trying to restore those values that have been taken away and we're trying to get across to black youth that they have a part to play in the making of a new world. They have the imagination. They have the energy. You must first restore that part of yourself that has been negated by oppression. It is as essential to you as bread and water. It is part of a food that must feed your spirit in the world of tomorrow. And it is part of what you will have to transfer to your children. [music playing] [music playing] This is NE

NET, the National Educational Television network. [There is no sound in this line]