Today was not the first day that my alarm clock failed to go off. But today was the first day that I almost missed my own meeting because my alarm clock failed to wake me up. Better late than never I supposed. So I caught a taxi cab – a ten fold increase in fare as compared to the bus – and opened the laptop to prepare. I noticed that the cabbie was a Hornist and avoided eye contact so as to escape the inevitable back and forth on establishing identity, politics and a long discussion on the miseries of the migrant life. I don’t know if this is just me, but saying where you are from has become a task that requires great mental agility these days. And I think this is particularly true for those of us from the Horn. I am always careful not to offend in case my cabbie runs us both off a bridge. Over the past 10 years I have determined that my identity is really dependent on my counterpart’s identity. If he is from Addis then I am from Addis. If he is from Oromia or Ogaden, then I am most certainly Eritrean.

TV was rammed down my throat this past weekend. Our new Internet Service Provider insists that we can not get our beloved surfing without the accompanying cable. The system is free, advanced and flows through fiber optics we are told. The screen was there for movies anyway so, viola, there I was soaking in cable TV all my own for the first time in my life.

The History Channel on HD is incredibly colorful and absorbing. After a whole day of gazing I progressed to listening to the contents of the programming. Before long I realized why I had avoided television for so long. The fact that all the programming is focused on religion can be excused by the timing of my surrender to cable. However, the History Channel’s attempt to do serious investigation of biblical history was horrifying in its lack of realism.

Yes reality is in the eye of the powerful. The biblical programming is probably regurgitating most of the propagandist history papers that are published in US theological and history departments. However, there should be basic, commonly agreed20to objective methods of historical investigation that any programmer of such documentaries must follow – or maybe not.

In these series of essays titled Connecting The Dots, this poster will delve into the tenuous world of modern archeology and history, as it relates to peoples of Africa. For the most part, peoples of African descent are consciously and/or subconsciously aware, that somehow, they are not afforded their right place in history. Often their histories are pursued only as far back as the transatlantic slave trade and/or the era of colonialism. Any history of these people past those relatively recent milestones is considered highly controversial and only relegated to the strong willed, those who are willing to risk most everything they have worked for, if their intentions are to go against the status quo.

Martin Bernal is one of the few such strong willed persons who risked much by writing a series of hard hitting books titled Black Athena. Before Black Athena, Bernal was a well respected British orientalist who was influential in shaping the British diplomatic relationship with China. After the publication of the first volume of Black Athena in 1987, subtitled The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, his stock fell severely.