THE GLOBAL AFRICAN PRESENCE--SLAVERY, SLAVE TRADE AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES BY RUNOKO RASHIDI DEDICATED TO DRS. ASA G.

HILLIARD III AND IVAN GLADSTONE VAN SERTIMA "Perhaps the greatest crime that one can commit is to teach a child that their history begins with slavery."

--Runoko Rashidi
Perhaps, the worst of the terrible consequences of the massive enslavement of African people by Asians and Europeans is that it made Africa and the world forget that Africans had a history before slavery. It has caused the world to forget that African people had a history before invasion, occupation, colonization, and the scattering of Africa's children around the planet. This lack of knowledge of who Africans were before Africa was subjugated is arguably the greatest stumbling block today, the most severe and debilitating obstacle, towards real progress for the African continent and African people. This paper and presentation seek to briefly examine Africa itself and African people before and after slavery. It looks at African extensions in early Asia, Europe and the Americas. It will especially look at the Eastern African Diaspora--Asia and, to a much smaller extent, Australia and the Pacific Islands. AFRICA: MOTHER CONTINENT AND BIRTHPLACE OF HUMANITY Both humanity itself and the world's first great civilization began in Africa. We now know, based on recent scientific studies of DNA, that modern humanity originated in Africa, that Black people are the world's original people, and that all modern humans can ultimately trace their ancestral roots back to Africa. If not for the primordial migrations of early African people, humanity would have remained physically Africoid and the rest of the world outside of the African continent absent of human life. For a long time the cradle of humanity was "placed" in Asia. This was apparently done for at least two basic reasons: the ancient presence in Asia of all three major human ethnic types (Black, White, and Yellow); and the discovery of Homo erectus in Asia at a time when Africa had not yet become a significant target for palaeontological research. The Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa produced the first modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). According to Cheikh Anta Diop: "The man born in Africa was necessarily dark-skinned due to the considerable force of ultraviolet radiation in the equatorial belt. As he moved toward the more temperate climates, this man gradually lost his pigmentation by process of selection and adaptation." As the direct result of migrations then, African people came to populate the rest of the world. There were different routes with varying degrees of difficulty that the migrants could have taken as they left the Great Lakes region. These routes include the Nile Valley, the Suez Isthmus into Asia, and the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe. It is in the light of these routes that the presence of modern humans in Asia, Europe, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and, ultimately the Americas, can be traced. This is the first and most ancient of African Diasporas and is clearly not rooted in slavery. AFRICAN CIVILIZATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE Although it was Africa's Upper Nile Valley--the highly regarded Ancient Ethiopia ("land of the burnt-faced people"), that gave birth to the world's oldest monarchy of which we are informed (Ta-Seti), it is in pharaonic Egypt (ancient Kmt), the greatest nation of antiquity and Ethiopia's most celebrated offspring, that the tremendous volume of historical inquiry has been made. The world is enthralled by Kmt. And why should it be otherwise? When we examine Nile Valley civilization we examine perhaps the proudest and loftiest accomplishments in the whole of human annals. Her list of achievements is extremely long and strikingly notable. Kmt (Ancient Egypt) has been, and probably will continue to be, the primary focus of our studies for some time to come. These studies are demonstrating with rapidity and increasing precision that not only were Kmt's origins African, but that through the mass of her dynastic period (3250 to 341 B.C.E.), African people endowed with dark complexions, full lips, broad noses, and tightly-curled hair were dominant in both the general population and the reigning elite.

THE FIST PEOPLE OF ASIA The earliest modern human (Homo sapiens sapiens) populations of Asia were of African birth. Here we are speaking of the Diminutive Africoids--the much romanticized family of Black people phenotypically characterized by: unusually short statures, skin-complexions that range from yellowish to dark brown, and tightly curled hair. We find their descendants today in the Andaman Islands, the Philippines, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. Moving slowly and sporadically from their African birthplace, beginning perhaps 100,000 years ago and continuing through the ages, untold numbers of Diminutive Africoids began to people Asia. EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Certainly, traces of Blacks have been found in both the prehistoric and historic periods throughout East Asia. A Japanese proverb states that "Half the blood in one's veins must be black to make a good Samurai." We have knowledge, in Japan, of Sakanouye Tamura Maro (ca. 800 C.E.), the Black general who led the Japanese armies into battle against the Ainu. Tamura Maro's successful generalship ultimately made him the first shogun of Japan. In China an Africoid presence is visible from remote antiquity through the major historical periods. The Shang, for example, China's first dynasty, apparently had a Black background to the extent that the conquering Chou described them as having "black and oily skin." The famous Chinese sage, Lao-Tze (ca. 600 C.E.) was described as "marvelous and beautiful as jasper." Funan is the name given by Chinese historians to the earliest kingdom of Southeast Asia. Its builders were a Black people known as Khmers, a name that loudly recalls ancient Kmt (Egypt). In remote antiquity the Khmers established themselves in Myanmar, Kampuchea, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. A Chinese observer described the Funanese men as "small and black" and noted the Khmer's impressive libraries and high regard for scholars. The story of Southeast Asia's Black kingdoms is essentially the story of the Black people in early Asia itself: the first people and the creators and innovators of powerful kingdoms, only to be overwhelmed in the end. WEST ASIA Sumer (the Biblical land of Shinar) was the formative civilizing influence in early West Asia. Flourishing during the third millennium B.C.E., Sumer set the tone and established the guidelines for the kingdoms and empires which succeeded her. While Sumer's many cultural and technical achievements are much celebrated, the important question of her ethnic composition is frequently either glossed over or left out of the discussion altogether. The Sumerians did, after all, refer to themselves as "the Blackheaded people." There is also no doubt that the oldest and most exalted deity of the Sumerians was Anu, a name that loudly recalls the thriving and widely-spread Black civilizers found at history's dawn in Africa, Asia and even Europe. Eye-witness accounts, religious similarities, linguistic affinities, skeletal evidence, Biblical references, architectural patterns, oral traditions all point to an early African origin for the Sumerians of Iraq. SOUTH ASIA The ancient civilization of the Indus Valley (named after one of its largest and most studied sites--Harappa) had extensions reaching from the river Oxus in Afghanistan in the north to the Gulf of Gambay in India in the south. The Harappan civilization flourished from about 2200 B.C.E. to approximately 1700 B.C.E. At its height, the Harappans engaged in regular commercial relations with Iraq and Iran. This much we know with certainty. We are equally certain that the founders of the Harappan civilization were Black. This is verifiable through the available physical evidence--skeletal remains, eye-witness accounts preserved in the Rig Veda, artistic and sculptural remains, the regional survival of Dravidian languages (including Brahui, Kurukh, and Malto) and the essential role of these languages which are now being used in the decipherment of the Harappan script.

Exceptionally valuable writings expressing intimate connections between early India, Egypt and Ethiopia have existed for more than two thousand years. In the first century B.C.E., for example, the famous Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, "From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as to India....He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt where he was brought up." Apollonius of Tyana, who is said to have visited India near the end of the first century C.E., was convinced that "The Ethiopians are colonists sent from India, who follow their forefathers in matters of wisdom." The Itinerarium Alexandri, a Latin work written about 345 C.E. for the Roman emperor Constantius, says that, "India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians." The epic story of the African presence in Asia is one of the most exciting and, yet, least known aspects of the Black experience. It spans a period of more than 100,000 years and encompasses the largest single land mass on earth. Although many are startled by the notion, it is absolutely undeniable that as the first modern humans, hunter-gatherers and agriculturists, heroic warriors and culture bringers, sages and priests, poets and prophets, kings and queens, as deities and demons of misty legends and shadowy myths, and yes, even as servants and slaves, African people have known Asia intimately from the very beginning. Even today, after an entire series of holocausts and calamities, the number of Blacks in Asia approaches three-hundred million people. The Black populations of Asia, what they have done and are now doing, are questions that beg and demand serious answers. These answers, which we must diligently seek to supply, cannot be sought merely to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of an elite group, but to further the vision of Pan-Africanism and reunite a family that has been separated far too long. AFRICAN BONDAGE IN ASIA One of the most important consequences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Arab/Indian Ocean Slave Trade is that they made us forget that people of African descent, Black people, had a well-established African Diaspora for thousands of years prior. The story of the African presence in early Asia would be incomplete without an expose of the African role as servant and slave. The subject of African enslavement anywhere is clearly the most sensitive and delicate of historical issues, and all too often it is asserted that the great international movements of blacks occurred only under the guise of slavery. Obviously, as we have seen, this has not been the case. In order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the story of Africans in early Asia, the aspect of servitude must be objectively examined, however painful it might be. What is important to accentuate in this context then is that the period of Black bondage in Asian lands is only one part of a much wider story. The period of bondage is in fact dwarfed by the ages of Black glory and splendor in Asia's past, and even as enslaved people and freedmen the Blacks of Asia distinguished themselves time and again. The issue of African servitude in Asia is intimately connected with the early spread of Islam in the continent's western and southern regions when with the success of the Islamic jihads large numbers of the conquered "non-believers" of many ethnic groups fell into Muslim hands, and were dispersed throughout the lands they dominated. While slavery was not at all confined to the Blacks, increasing numbers of enslaved Africans in Muslim lands became so disproportionate that in time the Arabic word abd, meaning slave, became applicable to the Blacks only. Of all the territories of western Asia it was perhaps in Iraq that the African presence, albeit in the capacity of slave and slave descendant, manifests itself most prominently. An example of this is Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, who was actually born in Upper Egypt around 796 C.E. Dhu'l-Nun was known as the head of the Sufis and is regarded as a founder of the Sufi doctrine of Islamic mysticism. He is said to have been the initial author of the Sufi concepts of ecstatic states and the mystic ways towards a true knowledge of god. Abu 'Uthman 'Amr Ibn Bahr Al-Jahiz, 776-868, the multi-talented scholar of the ninth century Islamic world was, like Dhu'lNun before him, an African resident of early Baghdad. Al-Jahiz was a theologian, anthropologist, naturalist, zoologist,

philosopher, and philologist. He studied under the most brilliant scholars of his time and was a prolific writer who lived during a time when racial ostracism for blacks emerged as an overt reality in Muslim lands. The greatest and most significant literary work of Al-Jahiz then was the controversial Book of the Glory of the Blacks over the Whites (Kitab Fakhr As-Sudan 'Ala Al-Bidan) where in order to help stem the rising tide of racism confronting the Blacks the author lauded what he regarded as the many virtues of the Blacks over the Whites, both biologically and culturally. It was also in Iraq where the largest rebellions of enslaved African occurred. Here were gathered tens of thousands of East Africans called Zanj, who worked in the humid salt marshes in conditions of extreme misery. Conscious of their large numbers and oppressive working conditions the Zanj rebelled on at least three occasions from the seventh through the ninth centuries. The largest of the rebellions lasted from 868 to 883, during which time the Blacks inflicted defeat after defeat upon the Arab armies sent to fight them. It is interesting to note that the Zanj forces were rapidly augmented by large-scale defections of Black soldiers under the employ of the Abbassid Caliphate at Baghdad. The rebels themselves, hardened by years of brutal treatment, repaid their former masters in kind and are credited with great slaughters in the cities and towns that came under their sway. At its height the Zanj rebellion spread to Susiana in Iran and advanced to within seventy miles of Baghdad itself. The Zanj even built their own capital, called Moktara (the Elect City) which covered a large area and flourished for several years. The Zanj rebellion was only suppressed with the intervention of large armies of Arabs withdrawn from points throughout West Asia, and the lucrative offer of amnesty and rewards to any Zanj who might choose to surrender. India also received its share of African bondsmen, of whom the most famous was the celebrated Malik Ambar--who like a number of other former enslaved Africans elevated himself to positions of great authority. In a collective form however, and in respect to long term influence, the African sailors called the Siddis stand out. Indeed, Siddi kingdoms were established in western India in Janjira and Jaffrabad as early as 1100 C.E. After their conversion to Islam the African freedmen of India, originally called Habshi from the Arabic, called themselves Sayyad, descendants of Muhammad, and were consequently known as Siddis. The Siddis were a tightly knit group, highly aggressive, and even ferocious in battle. They were employed largely as security forces for Muslim fleets in West India, a position they maintained for centuries. The Siddi commanders were titled Admirals of the Mughal Empire and received an annual salary of 300,000 rupees. According to Ibn Battuta, 1304-1377, the noted Muslim writer who journeyed through both Africa and Asia, the Siddis "are the guarantors of safety on the Indian Ocean; let there be but one of them on a ship and it will be avoided by the Indian pirates and idolaters." It should be pointed out in closing that the enslaved Blacks of Asia were not exclusively from Africa. During the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, for example, the Muslim Indonesian sultanate of Tidore was a heavy raider of the coasts of New Guinea, transporting Black captives to the slave markets of China, Turkey and Iraq. It was apparently during this period that the Malay term Papuan (literally "kinky-haired") became synonymous with slave. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY EUROPE--THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MOOR It would not be inaccurate to say that the Moors helped reintroduce Europe to civilization. But just who were the Moors of antiquity anyway? Chancellor Williams has written that "The original Moors, like the original Egyptians, were Black Africans." Much of the apparent confusion about Moorish ethnicity may be related to the fact that the same people who were called Moors in Europe, were known in Arab literature as Berbers. Indeed, in Arabic texts the word Moor was fairly nonexistent and the term Berber was applied to practically all the inhabitants of ancient northwest Africa. Early in the eighth century, after a grim and extended resistance to the Arab invasions of North Africa, the Moors, or Berbers, joined the triumphant surge of Islam. Following this, numbers of them crossed over from Africa to the Iberian Peninsula where their swift victories and remarkable feats became the substance of legends.

For hundreds of years Blacks were dominant in the Iberian Peninsula. But after centuries of grandeur, White European pressures on the Moors grew irresistible. Finally, in 1492, Granada, the last important Muslim stronghold in al-Andalus, was taken by the soldiers of Ferdinand and Isabella and the Moors were expelled from Spain. In 1496, to appease Isabella, King Manuel of Portugal announced a royal decree banishing the Moors from that portion of the peninsula. The Spanish king Philip III expelled the remaining Moors by a special decree issued in 1609. It has been estimated that nearly four million Moors, or Moriscos, as their descendants were called, left Spain between 1492 and 1610. Over a million Moors settled in France. Others moved into Holland. A very curious story in the Netherlands is that of Zwarte Piet (Black Peter). By some accounts Zwarte Piet, the companion to Sinterklaas (Santa Claus), was a Moorish orphan boy whom Sinterklaas adopted and trained as his assistant! The fall of the Moors in 1492 marked the end of an era for African people in Europe. After the fall of the Moors we see Africans in Europe largely as enslaved people and the descendants of enslaved people. In spite of that, however, some of them achieved great distinction. In this short paper we will look briefly at four of them--Adolf Badin in Sweden, Angelo Soliman in Austria, and Ibrahim Hannibal and his descendant--the immortal Alexandre Sergeivich Pushkin in Russia. DISTINGUISHED AFRICANS IN EUROPE AFTER THE ADVENT OF THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE In spite of severe limitations, a number of Africans managed to distinguish themselves on the European stage even during the period of the massive enslavement and transport of African people from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. One of the most interesting was Adolf Badin (1747-1822), born into slavery in the Danish colony on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1747. Bought by the captain of a Danish ship, this bright and precocious African child, whose original name seems to have been Couschi, was in 1757 presented as a gift to Swedens Queen Lovisa Ulrika. Under her direction he was converted to Christianity, tutored in French, German, and Latin, and given the name Adolf Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albert Badin. His childhood playmate was the person who would one day be the Swedish King Gustav III. Ultimately, Adolf Badin the African became an important member of the Swedish court. Among other things, he was a roving ambassador and even royal weather forecaster and court chess player. He possessed a library of eight hundred books and twice married aristocratic women, although he produced no offspring. Adolf Badin died in 1822 at about the age of seventy-five. He had lived through the reigns of at least three Swedish kings. Badins widow, Magdalena Eleonora Norell, was known as the moriansankan or morians widow. The story of Angelo Soliman (1721-1796), who became the educator of a hereditary prince, takes place largely in the city of Vienna. Soliman was born in Africa, probably in Northeastern Nigeria, around 1721. As a young boy, around 1728 he was captured by slave hunters and brought on a Spanish ship to North Africa. In 1730 he was taken to Messina, Sicily and raised in a wealthy household. Soon baptized as a Catholic, he was allowed to choose the name "Angelo" in accordance with "Angelina", the name of an African servant in the same house whom he loved very much. His surname "Soliman" was added at the same time. Around 1734 Soliman was made a gift to Prince Johann Georg Christian Lobkowitz--the then Austrian governor of Sicily. Lobkowitz took Soliman to Bohemia where the youth was instructed in German, Italian, French, Latin, Czech, and English. After Lobkowitzs death in 1753, Soliman entered the service of Prince Joseph Wenzel Liechtenstein (1696-1772). In 1761, he accompanied Liechtenstein to Frankurt where Joseph I was selected King of the German Empire. Solimans reputation as a noble Moor and a protector of the poor and downtrodden grew rapidly. In September 1781 Soliman joined an elite Vienna lodge of Freemasons known as the True Concord. Other members of the lodge included Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Solimans Freemasons name was "Massinissa." Massinissa (240-148 B.C.E.) was the long lived king of North Africas Numidian empire (in present day Algeria), and Solimans identification with him indicates a clear awareness of his African ancestry.

On November 21, 1796, Soliman died from a stroke while walking in the streets of Vienna. Shortly after his death, at the express orders of Emperor Francis II, the body was skinned, stuffed, and kept on display for decades in the Natural History Museum of the Imperial House of Austria. Abraham Petrovich Hannibal--the maternal great grandfather of Alexandre Pushkin--was born around 1696, probably in Cameroon, and may have been descended from royalty. He became a favorite of Russian Czar Peter I (1682-1725) and eventually rose to the rank of major-general in the Russian army. By all accounts, young Abraham was an extraordinary figure and it is interesting that he assumed the name Hannibal--the name of the great military commander of ancient Carthage in North Africa. In an official document that Hannibal submitted in 1742 to Empress Elizabeth, while petitioning for the rank of nobility and a coat of arms, he asked for the right to use a family crest emblazoned with an African elephant. Hannibal was baptized in 1705, in St. Paraskeva's Church in Vilnius, with Russian Czar Peter the Great as his godfather. In 1717, he was taken to Paris to continue an education in the arts, sciences, and warfare. By then he was fluent in several languages and knew mathematics and geometry. He fought with the forces of Louis XV of France against those of Louis' uncle Philip V of Spain and rose to the rank of captain. It was during his time in France that he adopted his surname in honor of the Carthaginian general Hannibal. In Paris he met and befriended such Enlightenment figures as Denis Diderot and Voltaire. Voltaire called him the "dark star of the Enlightenment". Pushkin was extremely proud of his maternal great-grandfather, and in an unfinished work, The Moor of Peter the Great, paid great homage to his illustrious ancestor, repeatedly referring to Hannibal as "the Moor", "the Black" and the "African." Alexander Sergeivich Pushkin (1799-1837) has been identified as the father of Russian literature and composed in Russian during an era when most Russian writers composed in French. The most distinguished Russian writers offer Pushkin effusive praise. Feodor Dostoevsky wrote that, "No Russian writer was ever so intimately at one with the Russian people as Pushkin." Maxim Gorky wrote that, "Pushkin is the greatest master in the world. Pushkin, in our country, is the beginning of all beginnings. He most beautifully expressed the spirit of our people." I. Turgeniev wrote that: "Pushkin alone had to perform two tasks which took whole centuries and more to accomplish in other countries, namely to establish a language and to create a literature." According to N.A. Dobrolyubuv: "Pushkin is of immense importance not only in the history of Russian literature, but also in the history of Russian enlightenment. He was the first to teach the Russian public to read. In his verse, the living Russian language was made known to us for the first time, the actual Russian world was opened wide to us. All were charmed and delighted by the mighty harmonies of this new poetry, the like of which had never been known. Stated A.V. Lunacharsky: "Pushkin was the Russian spring. Pushkin was the Russian morning. Pushkin was the Russian Adam. Pushkin did for us what Dante and Petrach did for Italy; what the seventeenth century giants did for France; and what Lessing, Schiller and Goethe did for Germany. According to Nicholas G. Chernishevsky:

Through him literary education was disseminated to tens of thousands of person, whereas before him literary interests had engaged only a few. He was the first to raise literature to the dignity of a national cause to our country.It was Pushkin who paved the way, and to some extent, is still paving the way for further development of Russian literature. Pushkin clearly saw himself as a Black man and closely identified himself with those Africans held in bondage in the Americas. In a letter composed in 1824 he stated that: It is permissible to judge the Greek question like that of my Negro brethren, desiring for both deliverance from an intolerable slavery. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY AMERICA BEFORE SLAVERY The Olmec (2000 B.C.E.--300 C.E.) were an early people of Meso-America who settled the Mexican Gulf Coast. The ancient American culture that they produced has been labeled the first civilization of the western hemisphere. No one knows whence the Olmec came or whether they were direct derivatives of the indigenous population. We do know that much of their sculpture, especially nineteen colossal stone heads, clearly evidences an ancient Africoid presence in the Americas. In fact, some scholars have concluded that the Olmec may have originally have been an African settler-colony which conquered the indigenous population of southern Mexico. Others are convinced that the African presence among the Olmec merely consisted of a small but elite and influential community. The Olmec civilization dominated Meso-America long before the massive enslavement and deportation of Africans from Africa as the result of enslavement. The evidence in support of it is abundant. And yet this critically important data is not taught in the classrooms and universities of either Africa or the Americas. We cite it as another example of the impotence of contemporary Africa as a consequence of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and its aftermath. THE BLACK PRESENCE IN AUSTRALIA AND MELANESIA Aboriginal Australia and Melanesia represent the eastern most extensions of Africa's ancient Eastern Diaspora but have yet to be written of from an African perspective. Like many Black people, Aboriginal Australians were butchered and brutalized by Whites but, unlike Black people on the continent of Africa itself, were not massively enslaved. Considering, however, that the catastrophe that Aboriginal Australians were the victims of occurred roughly during the same time period that Africa was being denuded of so many of its people, and that they are the kith and kin of African people in the land down under, it seems appropriate that we include them here, if only briefly. Australia was settled at least 60,000 years ago by people who call themselves Blackfellas, and who are usually referred to either as Indigenous or Aboriginal Australians. Physically, they are distinguished by straight to wavy hair textures and dark to near black complexions. In January 1788, when Britain began using Australia as a prison colony, an estimated 300,000 indigenous people were spread across the continent in about six-hundred nations. Each of them maintained social, religious, and trade connections with its neighbors. The dumping of British convicts into Australia during the height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade proved catastrophic for the Blacks. Victims of deliberate poisonings, calculated and systematic slaughters, decimated by tuberculosis and syphilis, swept away by infectious epidemics, their community structures and moral fibers shredded, by the 1930s the Blackfellas had been reduced to a remnant of about 90,000 people. After Australia was invaded by Europeans in the eighteenth century, the White historians who wrote about Australia acknowledged that the original inhabitants of the continent had had an historical role. After 1850, however, few writers referred to the Blacks at all. They were thought of as a "dying race." By 1950 general histories of the continent by EuropeanAustralians almost never referenced the indigenous people. During this period--the indigenous people--whether part or full blood, were excluded from all major European-Australian institutions, including schools, hospitals and labor unions. They could not vote. Their movements were restricted. They were outcasts in White Australia. Today, the Blacks of Australia are terribly oppressed and they remain in a desperate struggle for survival. Recent demographic surveys, for example, show that the Black infant mortality rate is the highest in Australia. Aborigines have the shoddiest

housing and the poorest schools. Their life expectancy is twenty years less than Europeans. Their unemployment rate is six times higher than the national average. Aboriginal Australians did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1961, nor the right to consume alcoholic beverages until 1964. They were not officially counted as Australian citizens until after a constitutional amendment in 1967. Today, the indigenous people constitute less than three per cent of the total Australian population. MELANESIA: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES In the 1970s Ben Tanggahma, Foreign Minister of Papua New Guinea, pointed out that "Africa is our motherland. All of the Black populations which settled in Asia over the hundreds of thousands of years, came undoubtedly from the African continent. In fact, the entire world was populated from Africa. Hence, we the Blacks in Asia and the Pacific today descend from proto-African peoples. We were linked to Africa in the past. We are linked to Africa in the present. We will be linked to Africa in the future." C. Madang has described Melanesia (the Black Islands of the South Pacific) as the eastern flank of the Black world, and the expression of ages past when an uninterrupted belt of Black populations stretched across Africa, Eurasia, Australia, the islands of the Pacific, and ancient America. To the contrary, the present Mongoloid inhabitants of Indonesia entered the region during relatively recent times; a period which some scientists have dated to as late as the first millennium C.E. As was the case in Japan, the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, the Mongoloid invaders found the land already occupied by long-settled Black populations. These new peoples, to a very basic extent, eventually absorbed, vanquished or drove the Blacks into the deep forests, high mountains, and remote islands where they remain to this day. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Muslim Indonesian sultanate of Tidore was raiding the coasts of the big island New Guinea in search of chattels for the markets of Turkey, Iraq and the Chinese empire. It is even said that the Malay term "Papuan" (literally "kinky-haired"), which was applied to the Melanesians of New Guinea, was born out of scorn and contempt, and eventual became synonymous with "slave." The European enslavement of Black people in Melanesia--the South Pacific-- was called "black birding" and involved the capture and transporting of South Pacific Islanders to such places as northern Queensland, Australia to labor on sugar cane plantations. Blackbirding was not on nearly the same scale of the Trans-Atlantic trafficking. There is a relationship however, as the wealth that Europeans accrued from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade clearly accelerated and fed European expansionism in Australia and Melanesia. CONCLUSION An African proverb says that if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. In order to know where you are going you must have a clear sense as to where you have been. What you do for yourself depends on what you think of yourself. What you think of yourself depends on what you know of yourself. And what you know of yourself depends on what you have been told. What is the history of African people before slavery? What have we been made to forget? According to the evidence, what we have ignored or forgotten is substantial. It is our position that its recovery is a fundamental requirement for the recovery of Africa itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ben-Jochannan, Yosef A.A., and John Henrik Clarke. New Dimensions in African History: The London Lectures of Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan and Dr. John Henrik Clarke. Edited with an Introduction by John Henrik Clarke. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1991. Clarke, John Henrik. Notes for an African World Revolution: Africans at the Crossroads. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1991.

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Rogers, Joel Augustus. World's Great Men of Color, 2 Vols. Edited with an Introduction, Commentary, and New Bibliographical Notes by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier, 1972. Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House, 1977. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1983. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early Europe. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1985. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Black Women in Antiquity. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1987. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick: Journal of Civilizations, 1988. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Egypt Revisited. Rev. ed. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1989. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presence in Early America. Rev. ed. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Golden Age of the Moor. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1992. Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. Egypt: Child of Africa. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1994. Van Sertima, Ivan, and Larry Williams, eds. Great African Thinkers. Vol. 1, Cheikh Anta Diop. New Brunswick: Journal of African Civilizations, 1986. Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Rev. ed. Chicago: Third World Press, 1974.