markellion's video: The idea of the barbarous negro is a European invention New voice

Did they or didn't they invent it? Iron in Sub-Saharan Africa: http://wysinger.homestead.com/iron_in_subsaharan.pdf AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION http://www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/ All of this came from a friend of mine. Thank you Al Takuri everything is copied from him Leo Frobenius Histoire de la Civilisation Africaine translated by Back and Ermoat Paris: Gallimard, 1936 6th edition page 56 in W. E. Burghardt Du Bois The World and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history New York: Viking Press, 1946 pp. 79, 156 http://markellion.tripod.com/id2.html "When they [the first European navigators of the end of the Middle Ages] arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and landed at Vaida, the captains were astonished to find the streets well cared for, bordered for several leagues in length by two rows of trees; for many days they passed through a country of magnificent fields, a country inhabited by men clad in brilliant costumes, the stuff of which they had woven themselves! More to the South in the Kingdom of Congo, a swarming crowd dressed in silk and velvet; great states well ordered, and even to the smallest details, powerful sovereigns, rich industries, -- civilized to the marrow of their bones. And the condition of the countries on the eastern coasts -- Mozambique, for example -- was quite the same. "What was revealed by the navigators of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries furnishes an absolute proof that Negro Africa, which extended south of the desert zone of the Sahara, was in full efflorescence which the European conquistadors annihilated as far as they progressed. For the new country of America needed slaves, and Africa had them to offer, hundreds, thousands, whole cargoes of slaves. However, the slave trade was never an affair which meant a perfectly easy conscience, and it exacted a justification; hence one made of the Negro a half-animal, an article of merchandise. And in the same way the notion of fetish (Portuguese feticeiro) was invented as a symbol of African religion. As for me, I have seen in no part of Africa the Negroes worshipping a fetish. The idea of the 'barbarous Negro' is a European invention which has consequently prevailed in Europe until the beginning of this century. "What these old captains recounted, these chiefs of expeditions -- Delbes, Marchais, Pigafetta, and all the others, what they recounted is true. It can be verified. In the old Royal Kunstkammer of Dresden, in the Weydemann colection of Ulm, in many another 'cabinet of curiosities' of Europe, we still find West African collections dating from this epoch. Marvellous plush velvets of an extreme softness, made of the tenderest leaves of a certain kind of banana plant; stuffs soft and supple, brilliant and delicate, like silks, woven with the fiber of a raffia, well prepared; powerful javelins with points encrusted with copper in the most elegant fashion; bows so graceful in form and so beautifully ornamented that they would do honor to any museum of arms whatsoever; calabashes decorated with the greatest taste; sculpture in ivory and wood of which the work shows a very great deal of application and style. "And all that came from countries of the African periphery, delivered over after that to slave merchants, . . . "But when the pioneers of the last century pierced this zone of 'European civilization' and the wall of protection which had, for the time being raised behind it -- the wall of protection of the Negro still 'intact' --they found everywhere the same marvels which the captains had found on the coast. "In 1906 when I penetrated into the territory of Kassai-Sankuru, I found still, villages of which the principle streets were bordered on each side, for leagues, with rows of palm trees, and of which the houses, decorated each one in charming fashion, were works of art as well. "No man who did not carry sumptuous arms of iron or copper, with inlaid blades and handles covered with serpent skin. Everywhere velvets and silken stuffs. Each cup, each pipe, each spoon was an object of art perfectly worthy to be compared to the creations of the Roman European style. But all this was only the particularly tender and iridescent bloom which adorns a ripe and marvelous fruit; the gestures, the manners, the moral code of the entire people, from the little child to the old man, although they remained within absolutely natural limits, were imprinted with dignity and grace, in the families of the princes and the rich as in the vassals and slaves. . I know of no northern people who can be compared with these primitives for unity of civilization. And the peaceful beauty was carried away by the floods.