What They Never Told You In History Class (2004) | Dr. Runoko Rashidi Lecture

Thank you baba my name is uh brother heru my title is baba heru tahute mesh i'm with the african international rights and pastors universal collective and in philadelphia we have a tradition of bringing a lot of elders teachers and scholars to teach our young people what we've been doing over the past few years is running african center rights To passage systems in the philadelphia school district and after school programs and also in weekend academies so some of the young men that you may have seen in the hallways and those who are now in our advanced

academies are only about five percent of all the students that are served in the school district we have a confederation of seven organizations that run these programs And so during the week we had elda baba renoka rashidi being hosted by an organization called the praxis institute and in that program they run rights of passage in about three schools per day some middle schools and some are high schools ranging in students from anywhere from 20 to 50 in the session that program has been doing a tremendous job thanks to calvin gadson who's on his way Back

he's been back and forth he's one of the directors mr virtus muhammad mrs marlena muhammad and also prince badar endow who's with us in the front here and in those programs running african center cultural workshops work sessions and forums because even though there is a mainstreaming process to try to put black african-centered culture into all Of the curriculum in the school district it seems that it's not really having an effect so a lot of outside groups and community based groups and community of faith partners are going into the schools trying to assist with the process

for example you may have been watching the news where a lot of our students are being shot their students being stabbed students being raped by other students and of course the media will always show Some of the horror stories going on the one percent or two percent of the activities that young people seem to get involved with but when there's a program like this you won't see a lot of programs like this on the news even though different media outlets were informed about the program baba rashidi has been going around to these schools all throughout

the week going to 14 of the schools also performing different interviews on The radio what he has done is very tremendous a lot of times excuse one second a lot of times we pick up textbooks and different historical books and read the fantastic work that some of our scholars have performed and make the comment i wish i could have met this person i wish i could have just been at one of these people's workshops or pres or Presentations i mean a lot of young people are now getting back into malcolm x and there are some

people using their cd and dvd burners putting together different malcolm x pieces and a lot of young people were like oh that brother is deep who is that a lot of older people like what do you mean who is that and the key thing is we can't assume that by sending them to the public School that they're going to be educated on who he is and so the one thing that i say to a lot of our revolutionary people me being one of them is you shouldn't always run to the public who's complaining about what

they're not teaching our children if they are really your enemy you can't really send your children to your enemy and expect them to educate your children the way they're supposed to be educated okay So what we do is a technique we use of course this is being recorded so this might give up the uh technique we use a technique where we find the scholars and then we bring the scholars to the young people that way it grows up in them so that when they get ready to act in an adverse manner hopefully something in their

mind will click and will stop them from pulling that Trigger like the five students we now have in the hospital after being shot yesterday in three different locations not involved in anything any nonsense they were just going home there was other people involved in shooting they were just caught in a crossfire okay so the thing that we try to do is to show them that there are black people Like them all around the planet despite what the tv shows them because the minute we hit what they call black history month the first thing they start

to stop with is slavery they don't go anytime before then they don't go to any time after that and they and they always portray if you watch pbs how happy and and involved and motivated the slaves were and what's tragic about it believe it or not some Of the students that were in the program and they'll tell you made comments even the ones from directly from the continent about how good slavery was or colonialism was because they would not have come to where they are now if we had not been uh attacked and kidnapped and

enslaved and hijacked now that's coming out of young people Who who are in the sixth seventh eighth and ninth grade do you have any doubt what type of adult is about to be produced so we're glad to have our teacher our scholar with us he has traveled the world going to more than 50 countries tracing the history both with oral tradition and also with photography Of the global african presence and so the workshop today is entitled global african presence what they never told you in black history class baba rashidi has co-edited numerous books and he's

also the author of a new book called travel notes by renoka rashidi he has them on sale up here up at the front listen to the man hear the man Talk about the black people around the world that are not ancient relics that have gone out as dust in time these people our people are still here you want to see some of them the next time you watch any story on the news about what's going on in the so-called middle east look in the background and see a couple of those black people running and dunking

yeah there's a lot of them there's just a couple at that Particular moment that unfortunately for some people the camera caught go around the corner you would have seen the rest of them that they knew not to go around the court at that time okay so without further ado our leader in knowing the global african presence a teacher and a scholar professor renoko rashidi good afternoon sisters and brothers Are for that very gracious introduction probably more than i deserve but i have a very good relationship with baba heru and there is nobody that i respect

more and of course it's not just baba heru but he is i guess representative of the body of people that i've been working with in philadelphia for the last several years they include prince endow they include some of the sisters and Brothers from mata the bridges norm bond calvin gatson gary young karen james so many people in fact i could name essentially everybody in the room i always have a very warm reception when i come to philadelphia and i'm pleased to be here although it has been a long week when you go to 14 schools

and one of them twice and you are dealing with young people all too often who have a very low sense of self-esteem It's difficult it's demanding and then it's black history month too and what we are doing now is let me see if i can clip this on so i don't have to hold it we're trying to crowd so much can you still hear me trying to crowd so much into this 28 or 29 day window it's always struck me as ironic that we have the coldest and the shortest month of the year And then

this is a month where you have a lot of holidays too george washington's birthday president lincoln's birthday all of these folk so it's a lot now i have been i left home on the 28th of january and i'll be back on the 29th of march you know this month i lecture in 10 different states i've already lectured in five states already and then two weeks from today i'll be Just about this time sitting down in bamako mali and then i leave from there and i speak at a big conference in wagga dugu i know you

know where that is but kino faso i come back to the united states for the ascat conference i think we have some members of ascak here association for the study of classical african civilizations and then i take off the day after the Ascat conference for europe i'm going back to greece i was in greece last may but when i was there the national museum was closed for renovations they were getting it ready for the olympic games and that was one of the major reasons i went in the first place so i have to go back

for that and then from greece or from athens i fly to an island called crete Crete is important because this is where the first so-called european civilization developed and it was initiated by african people and then i'm going for the first time to a country called jordan there are some ruins in jordan i've wanted to see for a long time and i'm very fortunate to have been able to identify an african community in the capital of jordan a pla a city Called armand i'm very excited about that i've got i know the community now and

i have somebody who's going to take me there an african who's going to introduce me to the black people of jordan i come back to the united states and i do a few talks in michigan and then i take off and i escort a group of african americans africans in america to cambodia and vietnam so that's my life right now i love what I do but it's very demanding so if you see me just take a seat and sit and talk don't be shocked because one learns to pace oneself as time goes along otherwise one

does not exist and that's going to be easy anyway because today's presentation is going to be like most of my presentations a slide presentation um i'm going to be showing Visuals i brought two carousels now some of you all have seen me before and of course when you again when you're mentioning the people responsible for bringing you here you always inadvertently leave people out you know baba hebrews already talked about praxis and the african rights and passage organization but i would be remiss if i did not mention individually brother percy white who's also a key

factor in this whole Thing people have seen me speak before and i almost always do visuals well this time i decided that i was going to do a whole new presentation so during january i spent a lot of money to get a lot of brand new 35 millimeter slides and it'll probably be the last time i do that because everything seems to be digitized now and people are going into a powerpoint mode But i'm going to do perhaps one of the last times an old-fashioned slide presentation now some of the young people who are here

have seen me in their schools over the last week and a few of the slides you will have seen but a lot of them are going to be brand new and some of these pictures i know for a fact have never been published in any book anywhere so it should be a very good presentation And it's free of charge okay so there's no excuse it's not snowing it's not raining outside at least it wasn't when i came in so we're going to turn off the lights and brother lawrence who i consider one of my students

now is going to use the slide projector operate it i wonder if it's possible we can get every light turned off even the ones on the stage Y'all ain't afraid to be in the dark are you most of us are in the dark anyway we just don't know it we're already in the dark now a lot of um my work has i was talking to brother gary young who was quite a collector and a scholar and a researcher in his own right here in philly Um [Music] a lot of this a lot of you may

know me i had an introduction in a sense through working with dr ivan van cerderman in the 1980s i was in los angeles at the time i worked at compton college and we would bring ivan out every every year sometimes two or three times a year And then i began to travel a lot especially in the late 1980s i went to india for the first time and then um in the 90s i started to travel to egypt with dr ben and then i went a few times on my own i took a group there last

year and then in this decade in this millennium i've traveled almost constantly almost never unpack a bag okay And that's probably why i'm divorced twice because i never slow down but this is my work it's my life and i love what i do so today what i'm going to do for the most part is just show you some of the images that i've been collecting over the last year and a half two years in particular and one of the places that i've been to a whole lot i think 15 times now is europe And i

go to europe not because i like europeans i go to europe because you do have an african presence there and you have the african presence in the museums of europe for example this piece right here takes me to uh the ashmolean museum at oxford university i think the british probably stole better than any other europeans there's probably more of our stuff In the uk than any other part of the world in october i went back to england and i lectured and i also went to several different cities that i had not been to before i

went to oxford i went to cambridge i also went to wales for the first time and i went to scotland looking for the african presence this year i'm going to go back but i'm also going to go to ireland this time And we're not going to leave any stone unturned uh this one is called the scorpion king and what you see is a vase actually it's a mace head and um you see a king here with a crown on and there's a big scorpion in front of his face and this is i guess the image

that inspired the movie the scorpion king with the rock at least they got somebody dark in there I guess rock is a black man right okay good it's kind of hard to tell but anyway he didn't look like john wayne and that's a step in the right direction so let's go the next slide this takes us to the um [Music] the pre-dynastic period and this is the very end of the phase that ushers in the period of the pharaohs Now this is a photograph that my tour guide in egypt gave me when i was there

in may we hit it off quite well his name was waleed ekram and this is one of the images he gave me and this is horror market or the great sphinx and this is the closest close-up i've ever seen now you've seen this monument many times i know it has the body of the lion And the head of the king but i am pretty much willing to bet you that you haven't seen this one before now the history tells us that this was damaged on more than one occasion initially by a group of white slaves

in turkey called mamluks and then the most notorious example comes during the time that napoleon bonaparte the emperor from corsica in france Went to egypt in 1798 and trained his artillery on the face of this monument now what i found out even the last time i was in egypt i was surprised to find out just for the first time in fact i even saw for the first time some of the fragments from the face of [ __ ] market in the egyptian museum in cairo they're right there anybody can see them i think they're not

labeled though so if you don't know what you're looking at You just see a massive stone and some of the rest of it is in the basement of the british museum in london but if you just look at these lips that should tell you the whole story right there let's go the next one lawrence this one is from a museum where did i get this from this is either in copenhagen denmark or it's in leiden in holland i forget which because i went to both countries On the same trip and this is from uh the

pyramid age now you will notice if you haven't already because i know a lot of you all are very well read and very knowledgeable that many of these have the noses either missing or partially damaged and one of the theories is i think chancellor williams talked about it in his magnificent destruction of black civilizations That this was done by people who invaded egypt much later prince badar and i have had some very interesting discussions about the noses on the people the noses on the statue and i hope i hope and pray that you get a

chance to go to his tour of the university museum today nobody does it like him he gives a very refreshing perspective what the idea being from what i understand is that you cannot understand Ancient egypt unless you understand contemporary africa and that part of our problem is we have a tendency to use european sources even the best of our scholars have a tendency to use european sources for an understanding of african phenomenon and it just doesn't work that way anyway it seems to me that the ones with the noses knocked off makes them look even

more africoid let's go the next one Now this is an image it's not the sharpest in the world but i went to great lengths to photograph this because it was behind a piece of glass and i'm not a great photographer and so the problem is it was poorly lit you couldn't use a flash and it was behind a piece of glass so it was almost impossible not to get some glare but i have looked for this piece for 20 years i found this in a book when i worked at compton college i think it Was

called middle kingdom art middle kingdom art being the middle phase in dynastic egyptian history or chemetic his uh egyptian let me slow down it covers the period from around 2000 bc to about 1700 bc and traditional egyptologists call that the middle kingdom and i found a copy of this in a black and white book and i wanted to see the actual piece So i had to go all the way to edinboro in scotland to photograph this this is in the um i think it's the royal museum of scotland let's go to the next one that

man's name is ned pepin rod mental depth ii now does that look sharply focused to you all i'm close to it so it's hard to tell lawrence try to focus in anyway and just see what happens Yeah okay this is um i've had a black and white of this for a long time too and i wanted to go and find the actual piece which turned out to be a very small piece this is from dynasty 12. a dynasty is simply a family of rulers one member of the family coming after the other for an extended

period of time that's my definition of a dynasty and um there are 30 dynasties of 30 royal Families most of which were indigenous african and this is my number one all-time favorite hero or pharaoh from ancient kimit this man's name is namah ray eminent iii and this is in the fitz william museum at cambridge university so on one trip i went to the oxford i went to the ashmolean museum in oxford and the fitzwilliam museum at cambridge and wouldn't you know it the egyptian collection in the fist William museum was closed the first disappointment was

they said you couldn't take pictures in there but i had a small camera in my pocket anyway and i figured the worst that could happen is they would say you can't take any pictures after i've taken a few rolls and then the other thing was the egyptian collection was closed so i went all that way and struck out but i didn't take no for an answer And so i was able to stick my head a rather large head but i got it in there anyway underneath the partition blocking off the egyptian section and what i

couldn't photograph and i wasn't supposed to be photographing anything i was able to get a lot of in museum catalogs and postcards and that's a tricky thing too because all too often the most africoid Pieces they will not have a postcard of they usually will have the most european looking uh images in the form of postcards and sometimes even if they have the images that you're looking for in a book the book will be very expensive 50 75 100 but i really like this piece and i was able to get a hold of it and

one of the things that you notice about the figures on this king particularly this piece are those big old ears Apparently the idea was the larger the ears the more you could hear the more you could hear the more knowledge you would have and the more powerful you would be this brother's on the throne for 48 years let me show another image this one here and this is in a museum in copenhagen denmark hardly any of these are in africa this is in a museum in copenhagen called The night carlsberg glyptotech museum and the same

person that founded that museum is the person who was the founder of the carlsberg brewery anybody ever drink carlsberg beer or hear about it a beer company and the brewery is right across the street from the museum so i flew this time from paris to copenhagen i'd never been in denmark before to go to this museum and i got there and wouldn't you know What the egyptian museum the egyptian section was closed and i walked in there anyway and somebody a big fat white man said sir you can't be in here and i said i

flew all the way from new york i added a couple thousand miles to the story i flew all the way from new york to be here they said well if you come back in an hour you can at least go to the front of the section and peep in So i waited 55 minutes and wait for an hour until i saw the workmen working in the collection going in there and i walked right in there like i was working in there and i shot up two rows of film and they put me out of that

museum too now i took a picture of this the same person nama raymond at the third but it was a poor picture and i was frustrated i was grumbling they said oh don't worry About it it'll be open in six months or i wasn't going back to denmark six months later so what happened was about six months later in fact not even that long more like about five months later i went to back to london and i went to another museum that was closed and on the way to that museum i found an art gallery

and since the museum that i wanted to See was closed i figured well what the heck i'll go in this art gallery in the art gallery they had a special collection a special exhibit from that museum in denmark and the piece was in there and this is how i got the photograph how about that next this is from another museum in europe this is all of the same king and these images are very interesting to Me he managed to keep his nose somehow but there's always a kind of a sadness that you see associated with

this particular figure and the big ears and the nimez cloth the light piece of cotton cloth i better not spend too much time about kemet because i don't want to steal prince badar's thunder let's go to the next one but you got to do something about egypt i mean if you ain't going to talk about egypt something's wrong any scholar has To address that any student has to address that this is in the brooklyn museum of fine arts and this is from that same period of time and about 4 000 years ago dynasty 12 and

once again notice the large ears this is either an official or a scribe of some sort next focus it lawrence I gave you this job because i knew i could count on you give this young man a round of applause okay now how about this one this is from that museum in cambridge 2. and this is a sarcophagus the body would have been placed in there perfectly black from what i've read in ancient egypt black was considered the color of god i had to really work with the students on That one that was very difficult

for them to internalize because that's a shock to their nervous system to even imagine that one time black was considered the color of divinity the holy color the sacred color and for some of us it still is but most of us are not aware of that and you can also see the metal nature the divine speech the so-called Hieroglyphics next now look at these now i tried to show one of the one or two of these to the students and they just couldn't handle it now i have about five of these and these images that

i reproduced were given to me by the great doctor aza g hilliard iii i consider aza hilliard one of our greatest living scholars and one of our greatest educators and he Shares stuff he's down at georgia state university he's a fuller e calloway professor in atlanta and the thing about aza that i like one of the many things about him that i like is he might be showing a picture and i'll say asa that's fantastic you want a copy and sometimes we'll actually give you the original that's a rare scholar now these are from dynasty

17 and 18 And these are africans who have died been mummified the mummies unwrapped and photographed so here's one next let's go the next one one more and let's do the next one now can you look at these and come to any other conclusion about the ethnicity of these folk that are on this screen but the children laugh Because they're not used to seeing that next this is an image of a warrior king reminds me of baba hero this is tedmost iii he is on the this is a nephew of hapshetsut he was on the

throne for 54 years tradition says he conquered 17 nations i'm sorry he led 17 military campaigns in person and conquered 105 nations Next this is one of his descendants this is a rare picture an image of a man named amenhotep ii we don't see many images of him next this is queen tai now this this is not necessarily my um a grade slide uh presentation but these are very new images and i think they are good ones indeed queen Tai is the mother of agnatin and king tut she is the wife of amin hotep iii

and you've probably seen the little wooden head of her that's in the museum in germany this is in the louvre the national museum in france next and this is her son her oldest son this is akhnaten look at those lips the lips don't lie The words may be false but the lips don't lie agnathan is sometimes called the world's first monotheist a man named sigmund freud certainly thought so james henry brested regarded him as such he inaugurated a revolution in art and this is from a museum in walking distance of the british museum in london

and this museum is called the petrie museum let me show you another one next Now look at the soldiers here this is during the middle of dynasty 18. the art is very different and let me show you two other images of that artistic trend next here next and this one this is doing the what egyptologist traditionally called the amarina period this is the age of agnaten and nefertiti next Now this is also in the louvre in paris now you know that's the sister i didn't show this one in the school next next this is a

figure named ramses iii now ramsay's the great ramses iii who was great himself he is on the throne for 31 years doing dynasty 20. we don't study dynasty 20 very much and this is the lid of his sarcophagus or coffin he is important to us because he Repulsed two invasions of egypt by peoples called the peoples of the sea now this is the lid of the coffin let me show you what's inside his tomb these figures right here this is in egypt this these this is one of the few images from actually still in egypt

and this is in the valley of the kings in luxor next this takes us to the tail end of the dynasties this is an african woman named Ahmanier dis she is governor of the largest most powerful city in the world called wasset the greeks called it thieves and this is a part of modern day luxor it's from the term luxor that we derive the modern term luxury and the perhaps the most one of the most important things i tried to instill this week and i do all the time is the importance and stature of african

women And how they were highly respected you could not dare disrespect the black woman in antiquity next this is her nephew and i took this photograph myself this is in the british museum in london and this is the man named taharka who led at least two maybe three armies to jerusalem to save his jewish allies when he was a prince he led an army all the way from the nile Valley to spain that's in ancient spanish documents as a king when he was coronated he sent for his mother way down in inner africa to come

and see him coordinated king of upper and lower egypt i'm very touched by the sentiment there and dr john henry clark one of our greatest scholars one of our greatest ancestors said that this man took us on our last great walk in the sun next This is from kush or nubia this was on display in the british museum in london in october and you see a queen mother called the kentaka k-e-n-t-a-k-e with an african goddess i was in one of the schools and there was a brother from the sudan and he kind of looked at

me funny as if to say how come you didn't talk about nubia how come you didn't talk about kush I don't know if he was here today but i mentioned i would show at least one or two slides from there next this one is also in the fitzwilliam museum in cambridge and this is a nubian wrestling with of being attacked by a crocodile and apparently the brother is not letting him sweat it not letting the croc sweat him too much it doesn't seem to be a big deal i made A real special effort to photograph

this one too i waited until nobody was looking and then i photographed it three or four times i'm prepared to go to great lengths to get these photographs offering bribes whatever it takes so i can come to philly and share these next these are the gods and goddesses some of them of ancient africa this for example is a real buff version Of the god name amen and it's from the name amen that of course in the judeo-christian tradition we derive the expression amen next this is the god known as pata and he is the patron

of the me of craftsman he is the patron of artist and there's a whole trinity that focuses on him and his wife sekhmet painted black next this is hetero Or the house of hero the queen of heaven the golden one she's identified with the sycamore tree apparently she comes from inner africa and she is one of africa's most ancient goddesses and you see her associated with also with the cow and she has these cow horns she is a mother god it's a nurturing goddess and the greeks are later to take their goddess aphrodite and Develop

a relationship between aphrodite and head hero and the romans take head hero and identify her what their god is called venus but her character changes with the culture next this is the eye of hero not baba hero's eye but this is a beautiful feyen's piece next And then you have this one now this isn't new i show this all the time you can put this in my coffin with me because i'm gonna be showing it on my way to wherever i'm going when this life is over put a slide projector and a screen in there

and i'll be all right this one is one of the most important ones and a lot of the students have a hard time with this Now we're not supposed to be taught my religion in the classroom and so i say that this is a historical document i photographed this one in egypt in the coptic museum not far from the egyptian museum in cairo i wasn't supposed to have a camera again i had one i waited until i didn't see anybody i pulled out the camera i focused i was about to click i felt a firm

tap on my shoulder And a voice in my ear saying sir no photography allowed it was a museum official i gave him a dollar he said okay i gave him another dollar he says why don't you use a flash to get a better picture this is called christ and that's a true story this little elaboration this is called christ in glory it's an image of jesus emerging from his tomb after the crucifixion If you look closely you can see blood in his hands where he was supposedly nailed to the croc i don't care if you

believe in historicity or not my point is our perception of the color of god is fundamental and that is what i'm trying to indoctrinate people with our perception of the color of god is fundamental if white people want to worship him or her as a european as a caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes i don't have a Problem with that but don't expect me to follow lockstep with that i want to believe that when we look in the mirror we are seeing a reflection of god in ourselves people will tell you and i heard

it all week but i wasn't taking any prisoners i heard it all week dr rashidi the color of god doesn't matter my response was consistent why is he White all the time then if it don't matter it does matter me show you another very powerful image and the children had a few problems with this too i would start off by asking them for the most part what do you think of when you think of africa and some answers would be very constant consistent there would be wild animals people with diseases especially aids and hiv Starving

people poverty and slavery and so i said really and so i would attempt to break down each one of those myths each one of those perceptions now this is a photograph that i saw in another art gallery in scotland in edinburgh in october and then unfortunately they wouldn't let me take a picture and they were serious this time And there was no postcard and it wasn't in a book so all i could do was look at it and write some notes down and then lo and behold the next country i went to turkey i found

an expensive book and it had this picture in there so i reproduced the book for your i reproduced the photograph for your perusal What you have is a painting about 300 years old and it supposedly is a slave market in cairo we're still in egypt but you have a little difference here the slaves are white women the auctioneer is a black man and a turban and the person who's purchasing the slaves are white people and so my point was Slavery is not confined to africans and when you think of slavery you should not think of

black people and they had a bit of a difficult time with that one but you could see some of the children clap their hands with glee next now these are two or three images from outside of the now valley this image i got in athens greece in the bernanke's museum and this is called moses the ethiopian Next this is an image from one of the churches in ethiopia in gandar and what you find in ethiopia too is a disturbing trend there is more of a tendency to have white images of jesus and in the churches

the brothers tell you that most of the people come here are from europe and they bring these paintings and we hang them on our walls because we have to survive So i went all over the place in ethiopia handing out the pictures of the black christ and they were very happy to get them next focus it and this one is from nigeria i haven't been to nigeria yet and most nigerians will tell you if you haven't been to nigeria you haven't been to africa next these are the people of africa And i usually when i'm

in the schools show lots of photographs she is from the next country that i'm going to visit and that country is called mali next she is from nigeria that's where um they claim no reverse it go back lawrence uh-uh you're going the wrong way one more Yeah she is from the country that president bush your president claimed that saddam hussein was going to get the yellow cake uranium to blow up the united states in niger next she is from chad and these are postcards that i picked up the last time i was in paris Chad

is in central africa and it's an interesting country you got blue black africans there which i look i wish i wish i look like and uh cause that's fair skin to me and chad is also a country where you found the oldest archaic human remains you find bones in chad within the last couple years seven to nine million years old of human antiquity next these are children in ethiopia Now i went to ethiopia last march and i really really really came close to just breaking down and crying like a baby people tell me sometimes one

of the criticisms we have of you african-centered scholars and they put me in that category is that y'all just talked about egypt all the time what about the rest of africa isn't ethiopia an ancient country too And so when i got the opportunity to go to ethiopia free of charge i might add i jumped at the opportunity all i had to do was give a few lectures and i was happy to go i would have paid to go but if you don't have to you can save that money for something else and after a day

or two i was literally overwhelmed you travel around the capital artist and then you go to the north you go to lolly Bella you go to gandar you go to the simeon mountains and whenever you pull up in your vehicle you are immediately surrounded by little children raggedy dirty flies all over their eyes runny noses and they are begging for anything and everything a penny a nickel a pencil an empty plastic bottle and when you see so much of that it really takes hold of you Some people have said that ethiopia is the haiti of

africa and that because of the um tradition of benulic thrashing the italian army at adora in 1896 the europeans decided to make an example of ethiopia and the poverty for me was overwhelming perhaps the the worst part about it was that a colleague of mine who was a physician Took it upon himself to examine the hands i don't know why and i can see why he would examine the eyes of the children so he would examine the hands in the eyes and one of the places we went to he lifted up the eyelid of a

five-year-old child and it was a big dead fly underneath there and so we had a dilemma what do we do do we give them everything we have and create a culture of begging and dependency Or do we just try to be strong and pretend that we don't see what we're seeing and it was really really difficult so when we finally got back to artists the capital the people in the hotel the hilton hotel remembered us and one of these sisters asked me how did you like the northern part of my country and i said it

was horrible And i could tell i deeply offended her and i said i liked the country but the poverty was very difficult and at that point i really came very close to cracking i had to just get away from the group and i went in my room and cried for a long time i'm a 50 year old man but i admit i cried like a child i could not control myself now i can see that kind of poverty in india and kind of halfway deal with it Because i've seen it much worse there but when

you're in africa and people look just like you and then the question they would ask us is why have you abandoned your sisters and brothers why have you turned your back on us as rough sisters and brothers and these are the children of ethiopia i think you can see the sadness and their faces and these children were much better off than most of the ones we Saw next and here's one more right here and you don't even have to say anything next this image is from a postcard that somebody in france gave me and it's

from ethiopia but it looks like it could also be niger or somewhere in west africa next from djibouti in the horn of africa next and from south africa Now i know these look like a lot of folk that you know in south philly and north philly and germantown isn't that a wonderful photograph right here next from namibia in southwest africa let's go the next one and this child is from algeria a lot of us are not even aware that you have black people in this part of africa in tunisia and algeria in libya Et cetera

next these this is a sister from mauritania mauritania niger sudan in particular are countries that still where slavery is still practiced and african people are bought and sold where is the public outcry next these are all images of black women in mali and mauritania in northwest africa next next Now these are a few african heroes this is kwame nkrumah from the incrima memorial in acrona next and this is a photograph of a very important african i bet most of you all don't know who he is his name is thomas ankara from bikini faso the name

bikini fossil means the land of the tall standing men and i'll be visiting burkina faso after i leave mali i'll be speaking at a big conference there with malefice asante Next uh oh this is renoka rashidi i'll be in um on one of azer hilliar's trips on my first trip to ghana uh two years ago and this is me doing my thing with my camera my nice all mixed shirt gary young eat your heart out i know you want it and then the lake up there this is lake buswanti well something i think that's how

you pronounce it and it's a lake that's sacred to the asante people next And i think the last picture of me in this section of it is i got talked into putting on this robe simply because i went with aza hilliard to a village called moncronso and asia said this is my colleague they wanted to make me a chief i had to give that a lot of thought but they insisted that i put this um robe on and these sandals that i found to be Very uncomfortable and march in a grand derbar or procession and

it was hot and i was carrying a parasol and the robe was falling off my shoulder and the sanders were hurting my feet and every now and then i would look up at asia and give him the evil eye and even now he says ronoko i owe you one maybe that's why he gave me those photographs from kim and early on next Now this takes us outside of africa for the first time and these are this is an image from ancient lebanon and this is from a place called beers nimrud now not only do you

see a lot of the noses missing from the statues in kemet but you see that to some extent in europe and asia also this is i'd say about 2700 years old next and this is a black woman in a country Called yemen yemen is just on the other side of the red sea across from somalia and eritrea and you have african people who have been there for a very long time in fact most of us believe that this was a part of the domain of the queen of sheba next and a brother also from yemen

on the other side of the red sea in the arabian peninsula next I clipped this one from a final call newspaper and this is a black woman in palestine in fact both of them look like they're black to me but certainly this sister is unmistakable and there's an image of yasser arafat so you have africans all over the world and that's the other message we're trying to get that we are global people we're not a minority and you should see yourself as a global person next This takes us to a very important place that i

visited in november and this is from turkey and this is from the anatolian civilizations museum in the capital of ankara and this looks like it is from kemet and so you can see the ancient influence next and then you also see the influence of african people in the ottoman empire and one of the things that the ottoman turks did is they practiced castration And they would take boys many of them were black and castrate them when they were very young cut off their genital organs to some extent or another most of them would die but

a small percentage of them lived and they were used to guard the harems of the ottoman turkish sultans now you have black eunuchs and you have white eunuchs don't worry i didn't show any of that in The schools you have black eunuchs and white eunuchs because i want to come back again and the black eunuchs achieved a higher status in fact the chief of the black eunuchs was considered the fourth most powerful person in the ottoman empire and he was the only person the chief of the black eunuchs who had access to the sultan 24

hours a day seven days a week After their service for the sultan they would retire to egypt where it was said they lived a golden existence so let me show you a few images and these are very rare photographs and these are i got in istanbul next next next and here's one with the sultan next now you also and then you have a series of what appear to be black men Behind this image i think this is sulaiman the magnificent and you can see what appears to be a whole royal brothers back there next and

then you have the women in the harem now i know black women beautiful as they are black women are beautiful are they not give them a round of applause give the sisters around as well we have to work on that too in the Schools because of the perception of beauty there's the clear perception that the lighter you are the more attractive you are i mean that's almost unwritten but unmistakable and you can even see the body language of the students they get fidgety sometimes and the lighter skin students tend to have a more of a

smug self-assured look on their face And the darker skin skin students seem to have a sense of inferiority for the most part like they want to be and these things become very clear to me when i'm in the classrooms we have hundreds of years of damage to undo hundreds of years of indoctrination to repair now in turkey however in the harems the african women seem to have generally had a subservient position For example this sister who's about to throw down is a dancer in the harem next and then you have images like this of black

women as servants but this sister is beautiful to me and i really like the color that she has next and then you have images like this these are all from the turkish harems in istanbul next and then you have something else interesting i went to a part of turkey Called cappadocia or cappadocia and this is an area where a lot of christians went to because they were trying to escape persecution from the romans or by the romans and a lot of them actually lived in these caves and some of them actually dug entire underground cities

sometimes 500 feet deep in the earth and lived there when the romans were trying to get after them and what i drew from that was this is The people serious about liberation and that's what we have to be we have to be serious about liberation why isn't this auditorium full this is a free event it's a saturday afternoon it ain't snowing a lot of people don't want to know and that's the scariest thing of all you confront that too it's one thing not to know but it's another thing not to want to know And that

is an evil that we are also confronted with let's go to the next one and then this was an interesting one i think it's out of order though this is called mary's house and the people in turkey believe that this is where mary mother of jesus went after the crucifixion of christ supposedly john took her there and she lived there for the last eight years of her life now i didn't believe that i was very skeptical And i kept telling my tour guide i don't really want to go there if we could find something else

to do and he would say okay i'm going to revise the itinerary he would give it back to me and there would be certain things that were changed that would be changed but mary's house was never one of them it would always be there and i kind of said who's paying for this me or you and it would still be on the itinerary So one morning after i thought we had resolved the issue my guide pulls up and i said where is this he says mary's house and i kind of looked at him like i

don't speak turkish but i thought we made this clear he said oh you're going to like it you're going to like it i said yeah yeah yeah yada yada i only had one roll of film left and i had one more city to visit And so i said should i bring my camera and he said well yeah why not so i brought the camera and we went to mary's house now the door was open and there was a nun white nun young lady sitting right there pilgrims were lined up to get in there people from

all over the world even the pope has gone there and they really believed that this is mary's house But i was skeptical it was a big sign once again no photography and they were looking at me and then there was another sign said no conversation allowed in mary's house so once again i said you know what are we here for and he said just come on let's see it so we went inside mary's house let's go the next slide and i'm looking around And all at once on this altar i saw this black statue so

i talked to my guy i wonder how old it is and he says wait a minute i'll go action i said don't do that don't do that he said no i'm gonna ask her so i said okay and actually i followed him thinking well she might say something that might be interesting so we walk over to the nun and she don't even raise up her eyes and look at me i Don't exist she's talking to the white man the white turk and he says my employer wants to know how old this statue she says there's

no talking in here he says but he's a scholar he says well if you want to have a few brief words we can go outside so we went outside and she said she thinks it's about she's still not looking at me now Like i'm a pet and i don't want attention and so she says it's about 500 years old it came from egypt to ethiopia i think and that the black the color black represents something profound i was satisfied with that and ready to go but it seemed like she now wanted to show us how

much she knew so she started talking about the crown and the arms and the clothes and how she Was holding the baby and i said just to break the monotony as if this is a segue to saying thank you very much adios amigo i said you know i've seen a few of these and she looked at me for the first time she says really i said yeah i said i saw one and two of them in russia i saw one in spain i just saw one in front really i said yeah says well this one

came from egypt to Ethiopia but it was most recently in france i said is that right i said where in france she said a little boy i said let's pray i said i've been trying to see that black madonna for 20 years she said really and so the people started to gather and i looked around i was rusty i hadn't given a lecture in a couple weeks i figured this was my opportunity now here i am Outside of mary's house and i'm giving a lecture and i said well you know joan of arc used to

pray in front of this madonna every day and the second crusade was launched from the side of lupe [ __ ] really and she's getting really excited and turks and greeks and italians and spanish and japanese started to gather around and i'm just feeling myself now i'm giving reference scripture and verse And so all at once she got very excited she ran in mary's house got the madonna and brought it outside i couldn't believe it and i said can i photograph it she said yeah i said can i touch it she said yeah so this

is the photograph let's go to the next one you can see and then she put the statue down and ran back inside mary's house Now the first thing i'm thinking was you know i was thinking i'm wondering if this will fit in my knapsack and would i be able to get to the airport before the turkish army came after me but there were too many people around and so she came back and she had a bunch of religious literature she went back inside and came back with a bunch of religious literature and held my hand

Like a lover for about five minutes and would not let me go and says we are this catholic order we're getting ready to go to africa we need advice and we don't have any black people in our order and can you take this information and spread it to the black community now you know the first thing i'm thinking was how can i get rid of this right quick but i took it anyway just as a souvenir And that's a true story this is the black madonna child from mary's house in ephesus and turkey next next

but that's not the most fascinating thing that happened to me in turkey and i went to turkey because prince badar said it was a good place to go i went doing ramadan by myself during the war with iraq okay that's the kind of person i am so i can deal with the philadelphia public Schools but the most exciting thing was i found black communities in turkey i did a lot of research i did a lot of praying i talked to the guys i told them i was gonna give you a big tip the head of

the tour come and they found black people for me we drove a long way from a city called ishmael to a place called kusadasa and on the way we stopped here and there and we asked every person we could are There any black people here and we finally able to find a little boy who said i know of a house where these black women live this was a saturday morning it was raining so the little boy got in the vehicle the suv with us and we drove a long time and finally the driver and the

little kid got out and knocked on the house knocked on this house and they told me to stay in the car they didn't have to tell me twice And next thing you know i'm looking to see what they're doing and i see these two black faces pop out of a window and they looked at me like an extraterrestrial had landed and i waved at them and they waved at me and they started to smile and rub their eyes as if could that be a black person and so the guy came back and he says they

wanted they said you can come in if you want to i couldn't wait to get out of the car So i went in went to the door took off my shoes and i spent half a day with these sisters i asked them all kind of stuff that they said they had never met an african-american before and so this this is not her house this is one of them i said wait a minute i'll be right back and she left me and the guy with her granddaughter and grit with her daughter and great-granddaughter That's how much

confidence she seemed to have in me and said i'll be right back and so i talked to the young sister they served as tea and coffee i said have you ever met a black person from the u.s yes but no never so these are the black women in turkey next next this sister said i look just like her dead husband I don't know if i should take that as a compliment or i should hurry and get my tea and get out of there and they said all their husbands were dead and then they looked at

me and smiled i said where are you from they said we are from the sudan and we came here about 150 years ago as enslaved people and i said well my ancestors came to the united states to enslave people and we Both started to cry they told me that about two years before that a delegation from some from sudan had come there and met with them and made a big deal out of it the media was there the press everybody was there but they never heard from them again and so they kept saying please don't

forget us don't abandon us they didn't have anything they were agricultural laborers and they said they were exploited and discriminated against Based on their race and finally well let me show you one or two more pictures next now this was the sister who owned the house and i asked her i said what is the future she said hopeless and that was really really a painful thing to hear and so i got ready to go but before i did that i asked them if i could give them some money i believe people should be able to

keep Their dignity and these people didn't have anything i didn't want them to ask me i wanted to be able to say can i help you can i do anything and i think i gave each of them about fifty dollars for women and the young woman too let's go the next one this is the grandchild i mean the daughter she's married to a white turk whose father was i mean who's his father was in prison i never found out why and I didn't cry and they all just cried for a long time and they kissed

me and asked me not to leave it was a really really really emotional experience and of all the things that i do it's one thing to see an object in a museum but it's quite another thing to be able to interact with african people who've been away from africa for a long time and have a sense of being isolated and alone and this is one of the greatest Travel experiences i've ever had in turkey so i'm going back in october now you also have people who are a bit more mixed but you see some of

those folk look like they just got off the boat and this brother was a taxi driver and one of his parents was african and then this is his son next and then this one a picture that is not Very good this brother claims to have come from egypt about 200 years ago and i spent an afternoon with his family so you have people who say they come from egypt ethiopia and sudan and their survivors are in turkey right now i'm going back in october next and then next year i want to organize a tour can

you put the next carousel on just take that one off me know that india is very big to me That india has the largest concentration of black people in the world something like 300 million and this is a phallic symbol from india i photographed this in a museum in pasadena next focus it now this is a nice picture right here and i picked this this was a postcard i picked up in amsterdam Of a black child in india next these women are in northwest india they live in a state called rajasthan and i think that

these are black untouchables in the northwest next this man is from another group of black folk in india they're from a group called the cds not like compact disc cd the people s-i-d-d-i-s and these are africans who were actually enslaved and brought to india within the Last 12 1400 years and these are new pictures next next these are the cds of india who say they remember africa and have kept the tradition of africa alive they speak african languages and and it has been said they are the best singers and dancers and drummers in india surprise

surprise next Now this is an interesting one this is from sri lanka and these are people who were affected by the tsunami a lot of folk are not aware that of the 300 000 or so people who died i would say two-thirds of them were black people these are tea pickers they live in sri lanka this place used to be called ceylon and they come from south india and they pick tea Next let me show you a close-up you can see next from bangladesh next and this is a black woman from a place called the

andaman islands the ottoman islands is a remote archipelago in the indian ocean in the bay of bengal these are little black people like this with big behinds and happy to be nappy Hair and they want to be left alone now one of the things that has happened always happens when you have a disaster or catastrophe you have to find something positive and one of the positive things about that whole experience is that research was done and scientists concluded based on dna that these people are relic population who left africa maybe 60 000 years ago i

Suspect much longer than that the scientists say they look like they believe these are the exact words they look like they belong in central africa but instead they're in the indian ocean and they concluded that this is what the first people of asia look like very profound but nobody's talking about it next from cambodia now the statue i don't know it looks White but the features are clearly africord i suppose it's just the choice of stone look at that big old nose you can suck in a lot of air look at those lips this is

in a place called angkor wat in cambodia and i'll be taking a group there in april next from thailand next from china This is an image of a bronze tiger holding a black child but it's not in china it's from the earliest dynasty in china but it's in the chinuchi museum in france in paris which is closed it's supposed to open in july guess where i'll be in july next yeah shang dynasty and there's a close-up of it this is in china now next And this is from central china this is just an article i

found in the new york times and this is an image from a buddhist grotto in central china and the story goes there are about 4 500 of these statues in central china next this is from japan and this doesn't look africoid to me but it's painted black And that's a start this is of the figure called bodhi dharma dharma is supposed to have been the buddhist monk from india who brought buddhism and martial arts to china and japan and this is in a museum once again in copenhagen denmark next from the philippines next i'm going

to finish up right quick from australia that's where i was for my 50th birthday My fourth trip there next and i was able to get this image which i think is adorable if you want a good film about aboriginal australians there's a film that came out about two years ago and so you can get the dvd it's called rabbit proof fence excellent film and a lot of these essays and even a few of the photographs are in my book there next and the videotapes now here's a good one this is tasmania Perhaps you've heard of

tasmania i went to tasmania i've always referred to tasmania as the ghost land because most of our people were killed off there tasmanian aborigines and this is what it actually looks like it's a beautiful place next and here's another image it looks almost other world it looks tropical but it snows it gets really really cold and i when i was going through these Forests i tell you no lie i felt like i could look out of the corner of my eye and see one of the tasmanian aboriginals like hiding behind the tree it was a

strong sense that i had that they were around me and they were checking me out next now this is an image of a sister i usually show her a lot but i show her as an old woman her name is truganini these people were cut up cut in half Roasted alive castrated skinned alive boiled in oil kept in cages kept as sexual slaves you name it the worst atrocities you could imagine was done to these people and all of the books tell you that all of the all the tasmanian aboriginals were wiped out well i

found out that wasn't true that only the full bloods were wiped out that certain of these black women were kept as sexual slaves by white men who Hunted seals they were british and they kept them and raped them and children were produced from those unions so when i went to australia i met with the descendants of those original black people once again i really really emotional experience next and then this was her husband who was murdered before her very eyes His hands were cut off with axes by three white men and then they raped her

while he bled to death that's true story now look at the hair and then look at norm bond i wonder if he didn't pose for this and then you have she's wearing he's wearing seal skin tasmania is a small island off the southeast coast of australia next and this was the last residence of the tasmanian aboriginals All the full bloods were kept here the ones who survived until they died in 1876 and i went there and that sense that they were watching me became really really strong i had a good time in tasmania i learned

a lot it was just like when i went to ghana for the first time and i went in those dungeons at first it's a dreadful experience but afterwards you seem like a burden has been lifted from you And it seemed like you could have a better sense of appreciation for what your ancestors went through well it was the same thing here this is the first concentration camp in the world and also i actually did see a tasmanian devil when i was in australia no it wasn't a white man it was an actual four-legged beast that

interestingly enough was painted black next From new guinea somebody told me last week that looked like theodore pendergrass he used the word old school now next from new guinea this big island in the pacific next from fiji fiji one of my favorite places these people jump up in your face and say we come from africa where are you from and if you say i'm from africa too you Have got a a family member for life you come from africa we come from africa and then they say have you been to africa yeah i've been to

tell us we want to go isn't it refreshing to find black folk who are not ashamed of their place of origin in fiji but there are some interesting things happening fiji i've been there a couple Times let's go the next one this is an island chain in the pacific and one of the places we were going to we encountered this little boy now i was the leader of the group guy i could do almost anything i wanted to do and we had to stop at a village somebody wanted to use the bathroom somebody wanted to

stretch their legs somebody wanted to smoke a cigarette somebody wanted a beer we were going from one place in fiji to the other so all of us Got off the bus and we were all doing our respective chores and this little boy walked out and everybody stopped what they were doing to gather around this child what's your name you so cute can i take your picture here some money and then after we left we got on the bus young brother said ronoko or dr rashidi something what kind of message did we just send to those

people i really had to think about that now i Thought consciously that i was drawn to this child because he looked different or is that really why i was drawn to the child is it that deep in our psyche we do believe that the lighter you are the lighter your hair is the lighter the more attractive you are and we are drawn to people like that because we have been taught to believe that One of the things that travel does is it causes you to confront yourself it causes you to look sometimes deep within at

values and concepts that you didn't even know you possessed next next now where do you think this lady is from north philly huh nope how about anybody else from new zealand these people are called fangan whanganui Maori and after i left tasmania i went to new zealand and these are some of the pictures that i came up with now this woman looks like she could be from any part of the african world but from new zealand and they are the maori who live on the northern island on the other side of auckland Let me show

you another one even better than that next how about that from new zealand you know what she reminds me of native americans so aren't these fantastic photographs they say seeing is believing and a picture's worth a thousand words next from hawaii now the people of new zealand tomorrow Reclaim that they come from a place called hawaiika and they see themselves as polynesian people and this is a little girl from hawaii and i bought a book as i was leaving hawaii in november i spoke at a conference there and it's from the cover of a book

called and then there were none because most of the original hawaiians have been killed too next From europe brother gary this is in the national history museum in vienna austria this is probably the oldest figurine in europe and you just look at the hair and we can turn around you can see the hips black people are the aboriginal people of the planet including europe let's go to the next one This one i saw in a museum in france it's about half the size of your index finger it's made of ivory look at the hair from

ancient europe next this is an interesting one this is the rock of gibraltar and this is what separates europe from africa and this is named after an african named tariq Who was the head of the moorish army and that's where they stopped on the way to the invasion of spain in 711ad i think it was called the pillars of hercules before then and now it is called the rock of tariq or the rock of gibraltar next and these are the moors i don't know if i was here uh when brother norm and um the mata

folks Brought me here the last time i don't know if i showed this slide but anyway it's okay to show it one more time these are moores in france the moors introduced uh to my understanding algebra apples and oranges and the concept of hygiene into europe white people at that time in spain white spanish christians seem to believe that it was a sin to take a bath that bathing was a form of vanity And some of these folks prided themselves that they never bathed in their entire lives okay so it would not be inaccurate to

say that africans taught white people to take a bath whether they did a good job or not i don't know next and this is a more in prague in the czech republic From the 17th century the more the word more means black nemours are described as black is pitch black is a raven black is a crow black is ink nothing white about them but their teeth and after spain and portugal they dispersed over much of europe and some people say and i'm sure they're correct that many of them even came to america before columbus now

this is from a book that i purchased In prague in the czech republic i went to austria and i had a free day i could either go to um hungary or um the czech republic and i went to the czech republic i went to prague and i didn't like it first of all i wasn't the place for an african to be i think as muta baruch said it's not good to stay in a white man's country Too long it was a white country a few senegalese there trying to make a living but it was not

a comfortable place people were not friendly now in order to get there you had to exchange a little money 20 25 and i had this money in my pocket and i couldn't find anything to spend it on so i bought a little book and there were six people who left vienna and went on this trip i was the only brother And there was a little jewish lady in the car who never stopped talking going or coming when i put my uh headphones on she was still talking i could see her lips moving like that so

she said what do you got there and i said well i bought this book what kind of book i said it's a book it's a book on the czech republic can i see it okay She said i didn't buy anything like this everyone to say what's bothering me for but i'm trying not to be nasty and so i said would you like to buy the book i don't really want it but i didn't want to just have this check krona i said okay so we worked out a price and so she's getting ready to put

the book in her bag and her purse i said but before you do it let me just thumb through it and i found this photograph and another One and i said well i'm sorry but i can't sell you this book and this is a more in chains in the czech republic in the 17th century next here you have this is an interesting one this is a man named ibrahim hannibal or abraham hannibal he is an african who ends up in europe at the beginning of the 17th century he is given as a gift to the

czar or Kaiser or emperor of russia peter the first who takes a liking towards his child i would like to think it was innocent he sends the precocious little boy he sends the kid the child to friends for an education and he becomes a general in the russian army now apparently he knew he was going to have a military career because next he adopted as his emblem go to the next slide An african elephant now peter gave him the name petrovic or son of peter which is the russian tradition but he took the name hannibal

the most illustrious african military figure he could identify with now that's got to be an african consciousness there that was all the things he could have picked he picked an african elephant and took the name hannibal next This is one of his children next but the most famous of his ancestors or his descendants is alexander sir david pushkin who became the father of russian literature who bragged about his african ancestry he was always talking about his great granddaddy and he prided himself on that on his african identity he had a vocabulary of 20 000 words

He is the russian equivalent to shakespeare next and then you see in his study is an image of a black man breaking the chains of slavery 200 years ago he was anti-slavery he was pro-african imagine that the consciousness that these brothers must have had you give my point next this is a statue of pushkin next black and this is another statue of him in the City of i think saint petersburg he's called the russian atom the russian springtime next here's an interesting one also from russia this is saint george and the dragon now when i

was in england people told me you know st george was black right i said sure send me a picture and they sent me a picture now i don't know you see the dragon down there you Heard of saint george st george and the dragon there's the dragon now i don't know if st george is black or not but i do know that the artist didn't have any problem painting that horse white if he was trying i mean he didn't have a problem with the concept of the color white and it seems to me he could

have painted st george the same way next I thought you all would have thought that was humorous but you did not this is ira aldridge the african-american shakespearean actor who spent time in russia next this is too late to laugh now this is from um the capitolini museum in um italy in rome you have a black fertility figure that's there before the people call it romans next i'm trying to hurry up this is the black Virgin of paris this is an image of a black madonna in a church uh a small church behind a big

cathedral on the outskirts of paris i got this the last time i was there you see jesus with a little frizzy afro it's blonde but it's frizzy and what she's holding is the national symbol of france this is called the black virgin of paris and it's the most important of the madonna figures in France at least in paris next this is another image in that book that the jewish lady in the czech republic wanted to buy and this is another black madonna next this is a cameo i got this one in austria next this is

an image of one of the three wise men in the european middle ages it was a popular thing to paint the Youngest of the three wise men as an african you can go to new york and go to the bronx this is in a museum called the cloisters collection affiliated with the metropolitan museum of art that's my picture next and here's a close-up next now here's an interesting one this one is also from england and this brother's name is john blanc and this is a painting in the early part of the 16th century this was

The greatest trumpet player in europe he was the personal trumpet player of henry the eighth and he won music awards in westminster england in 1511 a.d 500 years ago you had a brother blowing people away with his trumpet in the uk before miles davis before lee morgan before wooden marcellus was a twinkle in anybody's eye and there he is for you to see next This is also in england this is a black saint on the cut on the uh side of westminster abbey cathedral this lady is from southern africa she was martyred for her faith

in 1928 and this is a statue of a black saint on the side of westminster abbey in england she looks like angela bassett next the chevalier design george this is a black composer this brother is born in guadalupe in the caribbean on christmas Day 1745 he is a fencer you can see the sword in his hand he is a violinist a real ladies man they tell me he died broke i'm sad to say there's a lesson to be learned from that possibly and he is a composer he is sometimes called the black mozart next these

are black children in whales i always wanted to go to wales so i went and these are black children this is a postcard i got from like the 1930s and Whales they're either from guyana or jamaica but you have a lot of folk from the english-speaking caribbean in that part of the world next and then you have this is an image i got in the museum in the liechenstein museum in vienna austria next from holland next look at these statues it look like these people are live these are statues in 19th century europe next Look

at that sister this is done about 1850 next look at this brother i know the ladies like that y'all ain't gonna say nothing but i know you do next and this is mary seacole this sister is from jamaica she became a nurse she worked with florence nightingale but you never hear about her from jamaica mary seacole or perhaps It's pronounced c coley sicoli s-e-a-c-o-l-e next from england next this is the desk of sigmund freud in vienna austria look at those egyptian figurines up there freud was fascinated by egypt the so-called father of modern cycle analysis

and one of his students actually went to Africa a man named carl jung went to kenya and in his memoir i said i feel like ancient voices are calling me that's sigmund freud freud what a book wrote a book called moses and monotheism where he talked about agnotin sigmund freud next and then this is what's happening in the uk now and in france in europe in general this concept that you are not black You are not white you're just british we don't want to hear that black stuff that sounds familiar to you you're just a

person you're just a human being and i ran in i had a lot of problems with that they had a lot of problems with me because i'm an african before i'm anything at least that's how i see myself I have a race first philosophy that means i believe we should spend money with other black folk whenever possible that we should marry black folk all the time with no exceptions now you should live in a black community that you should strive to uplift your community i am what i like to call myself a race man next

All right we're in the americas we're going to finish up gary this is a new picture never been in a well i saw it in one book but not this particular variation of it this is from belize in central america this is a national museum in belize and this is a mayan bowl it's about 1 300 years old it's from the lake classic mayan period and it shows five black men in full body armor going To war in mayan history black people came to america before columbus then the information is there should be in the

school books already next from mexico actually this is a funny story this is probably the last story i attempt to tell with humor in it and what happened here i got this in a museum in Orange county in in outside of la the bowers museum they had an exhibit they were advertising called the queen of sheba so i was in la for a couple days i rushed i got a friend of mine to drive me there paid their way to get in and then bought them lunch none of the images of the queen of sheba

looked black it was 20 to get in per person i was pretty mad And then they were rushing you so this museum normally has pre-columbian art and i happen to be thumbing through this book and when nobody was around i tore the picture out i thought of it as reparations and that's how you that's how i got this slide next i'm not encouraging you to do that but you you know got to make your own decisions next i made mine and i'm Comfortable with it from costa rica this is another black madonna in a place

called los angeles costa rica all you can see is the face next here is one from guatemala and you see these native americans in a procession holding an image of a black christ next this is tusala overture i got this on the cover of a calendar in france the Liberator or one of the liberators from france i mean from haiti along with desolate and kristoff next here's one you might like this is a black saint from brazil and he's standing on this white man i don't know who it is but i figured you guys will

like it just because okay this is a black thing from colonial brazil next a black man in colonial mexico next benjamin banneker who designed the city Of washington d.c a lot of the children knew benjamin banneker next a black girl from a group called the garrigano dugoriganu are africans who claim they were never enslaved they live in honduras guatemala costa rica uh belize next also a sister from these are my own pictures these black people live in a place called [ __ ] creek you know that's a black community but White people own all the

stores in [ __ ] creek next from columbia next from panama next from belize next from mexico today and this is the last slide this is a sister i think who doesn't get much play her name is Queen mother audie moore have you ever heard of queen mother moore a garveyite a reparations activist and i know if she were here today she'd be working with praxis and the african rights of passage organization and she'd be a member of mata and she'd be down in the front row saying where is all the people and i wanted

to end with that we started in africa and we worked our way to the Americas now i didn't show all these slides in the classrooms but i showed some of them some of the ones that i thought were most appropriate it has been an honor and a privilege and a blessing to be in philadelphia this week okay sometimes i like everybody else you get frustrated you get tired but you never throw up your hands you Never give up because these children are our future and a lot of the reasons they have problems is because we

haven't done the job that we need to do that doesn't mean you abandon the job that just means you analyze it and work harder so sisters and brothers thank you very much and i hope it's not the last time we get a chance to have this discussion thank you very much [Applause] Uh baba hey roo do you want to and brother norm i don't know if you're gonna make a comment don't forget my books and tapes and stuff i don't know we don't have one more time can anyone still hear me yes okay let's give

elder baba renuka rasheed another round of applause as a reminder this was part one for those that want to see the egyptian mystery system demystified Prince badar endao of the jollof empire were about to go around the corner to the university of pennsylvania museum of archaeology anthropology you should have been there when all the scholars from the university of pennsylvania were trying to talk about what the hieroglyphs were saying on the pillars and baba badar came in and started talking and they said what are you saying he said oh i am properly Interpreting what is

being said you are incorrect then he proved them left to right right to left top to bottom bottom the top they went back got their books oh he's right let him do the tour okay so we have yes sir everybody so we have baba rashidi's books lectures dvd cds tapes up front you want to come up uh book signing the bus is on its way it's almost here for Someone who asked earlier the bus is free so if you want to leave your cars parked here we're going to get on a cheese box it's only

six blocks away go around the corner go to the museum and the bus will bring you back because in university they're knocking down buildings left and right there's no parking so you may want to leave your uh your vehicles here i also want to once again acknowledge the monta table there I want you to look at their products and i also want to acknowledge young brother lawrence here who is a member of the rights of african rights of passage who operated a projector thank you very much definitely look at the mata network table when i

was on the radio with the brothers a couple weeks ago one thing is key 30 million black people since the 60s of course of course it's Probably like 75 85 million now but they say there's 30 million black people let's say 30 million black people legally and illegally employed right everybody donates one dollar in a week that's 30 million dollars two weeks that's 60 million dollars three weeks that's 90 million dollars four weeks a month that's 120 million dollars in one year that's one billion Four hundred and forty million dollars for black people you can't

have a better education system for your children all right we'll build our own schools we'll raise our children get them scholarships let become teachers come back and teach in the schools you can't have mental health care let's see vacant lot hospital hospital hospital daycare center elder care center we'll take care of our own so As philosophical as that sounds that table and that table is where it starts okay that table and that table is where it starts because you go to this table you will have your your mind nourished you go to that table you

will have your hair care and other products that do not have side effects y'all see the commercials you can take zolox don't take zolax if you have fear of Having liver disease you may lose your bowels you may have sexual dysfunctions you might go crazy you're going to have nausea check with your doctor to see if it's okay for you if you're okay with all that then come buy from us nah okay so once again thank you very much mata network table right here on the first landing baba rasheed table right here and we should

be taking off on the bus in about 15 20 minutes thank you