Customer Reviews

Africa: Mother of Western Civilization (African-American Heritage Series)

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These book is a great reference for the history of Religion and its origins. Eye opening and completely un-opinionated. Just delivered that facts! What more can you ask for.....Truth...it's contagious!

I want to preface my remarks by saying that I am not an African history scholar nor have I read a lot about the subject. My purpose for purchasing this book was to learn about the origins of the great cultures that grew out of the African continent. I was partially satisfied.

Whereas much of the information that was provided was new to me, the total package left me wanting more. The format (a series of lectures) was very redundant with many chapters repeating the same information.

Being an American of African descent, I share the author's anger with the "experts" in the field that have re-written the history of Africa and her people to suit their own desires. However, I don't need to be reminded in every paragraph , in every chapter for 700 pages. I would have preferred more of the history and less of the diatribe.

Dr.Ben is an ethiopian jew by birth with knowledge of Hebrew, Greek,and Hieroglyphics, he is able to literaly read the hieroglyphics off the walls of ancient egypt and tell us how the people saw themselves and the world around them. He was a Professor at Al-Azhar University in Egypt teaching moden egyptians most of whom are descendants of arab invaders that ancient egypt is an african..i.e negro country, culture, religion, race,etc...Do you think they allowed him to do that to help him with his self esteem?...Or was it becuase he knew what he was talking about?

It is true that African culture has been largely sidelined by European and US academics. The African contribution must in that case, by default, have been greater than Europeans make it out to be. However, to argue, as Dr Ben does, that all culture emanated from Africa and that Africa is the source of all Western Civilization is clearly nonsense. He goes as far as to maintain that Freemasonry has African origins. Why anyone would want to claim an aberrant system like Freemasonry as part of their heritage is beyond me!

St Clair Drake put it in a nutshell when he wrote: "Ben-Jochannen's books challenge the reader to exercise alert vigilance to distinguish between fact, statements with a high degree of probability, and assertions based merely on a will to believe" (Black Folk Here & There, p.326)

Most of Dr Ben's major works draw on a bizarre array of sources, including mystical and Masonic texts, and this is no exception. Anything he can find to throw at his ideological opponents he will pick up and throw, however jumbled and incoherent it might be.

He argues for an African monoculture, whereas Africa is necessarily multicultural. He asserts that pre-Arabic Egyptian rulers were (apart from the Hyksos) Black people. He maintained that Egyptian culture has Ethiopian origins, that Greek culture had Egyptian roots, that monotheistic religion had its origins in Egypt, and that all science and art had African origins. Wow!

The book also contains basic factual errors, which prompts me to ask why we should believe that everything written by Black representatives is automatically true. In the interest of labelling Queen Cleopatra as `Black', Dr Ben overlooks the fact that her family (the Ptolemies) did not intermarry with their Egyptian subjects. While the Ptolemies basked in luxury and claimed to be gods (which is why they were allowed to practise incest), their subjects were downpressed and on the breadline. She was probably not `White', the Makedonians being of mixed ancestry, having married into both the Syrian and Persian royal families. But that does not make her Black as understood today. Additionally she was actually Cleopatra VII, not Cleopatra VIII (as repeatedly stated on p.112). Also Dr Ben writes: "Cleopatra VIII committed suicide after being discovered in a plot with Marc Antonio (Mark Anthony) to murder Julius Caesar" (pp.112-113). In reality Julius Caesar had been dead for 14 years when Cleopatra committed suicide.

As with all his works, he includes the charge that "white Jews' of the Western world are global impostors, having falsely hijacked a heritage which, according to Dr Ben, rightfully belongs to Black Africans. They have done this, he argues, by cunningly proclaiming their identity with the Israelites of the Bible. Consequently, he accuses them of propounding a racist creed from their very beginnings (pp.584-627).

It is important to distinguish between Afrocentrism and Afrocentricity.
Maulana Karenga writes: "Afrocentric means essentially viewing social and human reality from an African perspective or standpoint." And that's fine! But, by contrast, "Afrocentrism appears more often in ideological discourse between Afrocentric advocates and critics especially in popular pieces on the subject". [Maulana Karenga. Introduction to Black Studies. (Los Angeles, CA.: The University of Sankore Press, 1993), p.35.]

Afrocentrism is the notion that all civilization and technology had its origins in Africa. This is almost as much of a myth as Eurocentrism, which is a reverse mirror-image of Afrocentrism. A person can view things Afrocentrically without being Afrocentrist.

If you want a serious study on the place of African civilization in human history, you will have to look elsewhere.

His section on Aristotle stealing ideas from black African authors that no longer exist is pure unsubstantiated conjecture that is highly unlikely as well.. Clearly, the author loves his nation and heritage a bit too much..

Same non sence as the other book i read black man of the nile, it's repetative non sence and misinformation.This guy is as scholary as big bird and mr. snuffalufagus from sesame street.