There is a way around this, and there is only one, short of unearthly miracle. We must document our own history. Cheikh Anta Diop started in 1951, and he remains the premiere African historian more than two decades after his death. Western scholars are now reluctantly acquiescing to his version of African history, primarily regarding Egypt. When it comes to Africa, all history is pushed to the northeast. Ethiopia/Eritrea are sort of the demarcation point. After ancient Egyptians extensively documented their voayage to the Land of Punt being a voyage southward via the Eritrean(Red) Sea, modern ‘historians’ are trying to rewrite history that the voyage must have been right across the desert to the Sinai Peninsula. The problem being, Egyptians had extensively documented how they were impressed by the people and their knowledge they ran into at the Land of Punt. So much so, they called the Land of Punt the Land of the Gods, leading many to believe the Egyptians may have picked up their know how from there. The Land of Punt is most likely current day Somalia. How many Africans know about Great Zimbabwe and the ancient ruins there that showed very advanced civilization in Southern Africa? Soon after its discovery by Europeans in the 16th century, they hastily called it an ancient Phoenician work by people who came across the Indian Ocean. Modern archeology has effectively repudiated that assertion, so, as far as the west is concerned, the ruins now don’t exist. How many Africans know of the Dogon’s in West Africa, whose knowledge about celestial bodies sent NASA scrambling to build bigger telescopes in the 1990s? How many Ethiopians/Eritreans know that the Andromeda galaxy and Cepheus constellations, among many others, are named after their ancient fabled princess and king respectively? How many Africans know that their ancestors not only knew the earth is round but also mapped virtually all the star systems that are known to humans to date, long before Galileo was persecuted for suggesting the idea in medieval Europe.

When it comes to our own history, unfortunately, we are the ones who are willing more readily to believe that it is all fairy tales. How can people of such meager stature in the modern world could have achieved so much, is our first thought. Soon after, we put it to rest with, it’s impossible. The neo-liberal academic institutions call us Afrocentric if we linger too long in such thought, and there, most of us bury the possibility of any such thought. Not to mention elder Africans who tell us to mind our own business and earn our daily bread instead of thinking such useless thoughts.

The greatest challenge for the African is to change his/her own thought about himself/herself, and we may need a little bit of miracle there.