markellion's video: Colonial mythology Afro-Arab relations

Changing paternalistic attitudes toward Africans read pages 405 and 406 "The Image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780-1850, Volume 2" By Philip D. Curtin pages http://books.google.com/books?id=d6I665jBV_8C&pg=PA405 =onepage&q=&f=false Ironically, Anti-Islamic attitudes also lead some scholars to take African agency into account. Perry Noble did see paganism as inferior to Islam but it rises little and falls short. Some scholars attributed Sudanese Civilization to a racial superiority of certain ethnic groups rather than religion "The redemption of Africa" By Frederic Perry Noble http://books.google.com/books?id=vdxBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA71 =onepage&q=&f=false "Whatever Islam may have done for the Negro was in being, not the initial impulse for his advance, but the reinforcement of his native faculties. Even in Sudan it has merely aided, not created, his capacity for progress. But "Islam is a reform which has stifled all other reforms. It has chained every people which has accepted it to a certain stage of moral and political growth". The sterility and unprogressiveness of Negro civilizations, Negro states, are as much due to the paralyzing death=grip of Islam as to nature's foreclosure of his intellectual powers when she mortgages the growth of his brain after puberty." http://books.google.com/books?pg=RA1-PA9&id=GIkAAAAAMAAJ =onepage&q=&f=false "Of the group of Negro languages centering upon Lake Chad, the Hausa has become the most popular, and has traveled farthest. Through large districts on both sides of the Binwe and Niger rivers it is invaluable as the circulating medium of thought. In extent of usefulness it surpasses all other single languages in inner Africa. It serves not only as the mother-tongue of fifteen millions of Negroes, but as a lingua franca between Sudanese tribes of difierent tongues, and even as a world-speech between Sudanese and Mediterranean Africa, It is remarkable for simplicity, elegance and wealth of vocabulary. It ranks among man's imperial languages—the Latin of Central Sudan—magnificent, rich and sonorous, beautiful and facile in grammatical structure; exhibiting a harmony in its word-forms, and a symphonal symmetry that few tongnes can equal." On Bantu languages "The Uganda protectorate" By Harry Hamilton Johnston 1904 http://books.google.com/books?id=vyAUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA890 =onepage&q=&f=false ""The Bantu languages, in fact, are rather more closely related one to the other—even in their extremest forms—than are the Aryan languages. This is so much the case that a native of Zanzibar can very soon make himself understood on the Congo, while a man of the Cameroons would not be long before he grasped the vocabulary of the Zulu. This interesting fact must play a certain part in the political development of Africa south of the fifth degree of north latitude. The rapidity with which the Kiswahili tongue of Zanzibar—a very convenient, simple, and expressive form of Bantu speech— has spread far and wide over East Central Africa, and has even gained a footing on the Congo, hints at the possibility of the Bantu Negroes at some future time adopting a universal Bantu language for inter-communication." Axumite civilization did not come from Arabs. Bellow is from an old book The African abroad http://books.google.com/books?id=8yIbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA473 =onepage&q=&f=false The Americana Encyclopaedia also says: "Meroe and Axum (in Abyssinia), which appears to have been a colony of Meroe, remained the center of the southern commerce till the time of the Arabians. . . . If Axum, once the capital of Abyssinia, was a colony of the Isle of Meroe, it clearly shows that the Abyssinians were of the same race stock as the Ethiopians"