A thread on the Ancient Egyptian population from Cheikh Anta Diop:
"Falkenburger reopened the anthropological study of the Egyptian population in a recent work in which he discusses 1,787 male skulls varying in date from the old Pre-Dynastic to our own day.
He distinguishes four main groups' (p.421). The sorting of the predynastic skulls into these four groups gives the following results for the whole predynastic period: '36% negroid, 33% Mediterranean, approximating either to the Cro-Magnoid or to the negroid'.
The proportion of negroids is definitely higher than that suggested by Thomson and Randall MacIver, though Kieth considers the latter too high.
'Do Falkenberger's figures reflect the reality? It is not our task to decide this.
If they are accurate, the Pre-Dynastic population far from representing a pure bred race, as Elliott-Smith has said, comprised at least three distinct racial elements----over a third of negroids, a third of Mediterraneans,
a tenth of Cro-Magnoids and a fifth of individuals crossbred----to varying degrees' (p.422).
The point about all these conclusions is that despite their discrepancies the degree to which they converge proves that the basis of the Egyptian population was negro in the Pre-Dynastic
epoch. Thus they are all incompatible with the theories that the negro element only infiltrated into Egypt at a late stage.
Far otherwise, the facts prove that it was preponderant from the beginning to the end of Egyptian history, particularly when we note once more that '
Mediterranean' is not a synonym for 'white', Elliott-Smith's 'brown or Mediterranean race being nearer the mark'.
Elliott-Smith classes these Proto-Egyptians as a branch of what he calls the brown race, which is the same as Sergi's "Mediterranean or Eurafrican race."'
The term 'brown' in this context refers to skin colour and is simply a population which was negro, barring an infiltration of white nomads in the proto-dynastic epoch."
A thread on the social ritual and verbal art of ancestor veneration from Ayi Kwei Armah:
"Practically all the invocations,utterances, addresses, and remembrances that we can group together under the rubric of African verbal art are part of a social ritual designed to keep
members of the remembered community connected, even though they may be separated by great distances and centuries of time.
The obsessive patterns of these acts of communication constitute, I think, a recognition of the fact that memory, enduring memory, is a social acquisition,
not a natural gift; that time and the natural decay of all that lives both tend to work against memory, so that a society that wishes to remember its values must work out deliberate ways of countering the normal, inertial slide into forgetfulness.
A thread on Mansa Musa and the African aristocrat class from Ayi Kwei Armah:
"Admittedly, European explorers looking for African resources to exploit did not have to create an African steward elite from scratch. The aristocrat as free rider already existed in African society.
The rule of kings and queens in Africa is as old, at least, as the dynastic age in the Nile Valley.
Dynastic rule meant the takeover of community resources and assets by a small group. The takeover was normally accomplished through a combination of force and guile—physical and
intellectual violence.
Once accomplished, the shift of social property into minority ownership was rationalized by the usual propaganda of aristocratic rule: The royal family is special; it is the best; the king is the best, because some power no human will can resist wills it
A thread on Race in Brazil from Dr. Abdias Do Nascimento:
"Until very recently, the norm was to nullify Black identity by placing Afro-Brazilians indiscriminately in the category of "Brazilian people" or "the working class," in order to avoid Black people's specific problems
emerging as a serious social question.
The attempt was to silence millions of Brazilians of African origin with the illusion that, by solving the dichotomy between rich and poor or between worker and employer, all racial problems would be automatically resolved.
This position of the white Eurocentric ruling elite was taken to the extreme of elaborating an ideology called "racial democracy" whose goal was to proclaim the virtues of Brazilian race relations, presenting them as an example to be followed by the rest of the world.
A thread on African integrationists, liberals, ADOS, FBA, condo kneegrows from Dr. Kobi Kambon:
"The integrationists Africans will invariably rise up against this notion and any Africentric paradigm when it signals any signs of gaining a foothold of popular acceptance
among the masses of Africans in America.This psychological posture also explains their great difficulty in drawing the logical connection between the labels of Black and African in reference to our people.
It gives them so much difficulty, in fact, that they want the country/government/American society to disavow all racial-ethnic-cultural labels altogether.
A thread on the etymology orì and òrìṣà from Modupe Oduyoye:
"A Yorùbá man worships his òrìṣà is cognate with Semitic words meaning "head"; the Yorùbá worship their head.
Sounds like mere syllogism, but the reasoning actually happened. Each of the statements is true.
But how "true" is the last statement? Do the Yorùbá worship their head?
Much theology has been deduced from the use of the word orí "head" in Yorùbá religious discourse. For "Oh me!" a Yorùbá man says orì mì ò! "Oh my head!"
An ill-fated is called olórí burúkú "a person with a bad head." Luck is called orí ire "head of goodness."
From these ideas of good head and bad head has come the idea that it is possible to cleanse a man's luck and change his ill fate by ritually washing his ---- his what?
A thread on Archie Mafeje critiquing Marx, Historical and Dialectical Materialism:
"It was Marx who dispensed with the separation between economics and history by introducing dialectical materialism and historical materialism.
Epistemologically, dialectical materialism did not recognize the division of knowledge but also the view that all scientific knowledge was reducible to finite nomothetic propositions or universal laws.
In this context ideographic knowledge became a matter of detail or of so many forms which could be grasped by a single concept. Not only was this an historic challenge to positivism but was also a direct attack on the empiricist tradition within positivism.