HERITAGE OF THE NEGRO

[Music] n e bows are the most written about and the least understood world's people this term negro demoralizes us and is it detrimental i feel it it doesn't give give us any association past a slave ship i think that the first task of people of african descent whether in the united states or in africa or elsewhere is to get rid of this slave name negro this curious word negro was seldom or never used in africa itself and this word has no meaning or no worthwhile meaning at all in africa i would doubt myself if it has any useful meaning anywhere else what is a negro a simple question but the answer is not so simple [Music] my name is asi davis i'm an actor and a writer and the narrator of our series of programs on the history of the negro people i am also a negro what is a negro in africa the word negro has no meaning in brazil the negro is a man who's very poor and very black and in the united states a man who has any quantity of negro blood or whatever that is is considered a negro our negroes a race a people or a condition our programs will be asking this question in many ways and in many different settings our odyssey will take us throughout the world to africa where we will explore the relationship of american negroes to the land of their origin to brazil where we will ask is brazil a racial paradise and throughout the united states our aim in this series is both a modest and an ambitious one we will be asking many questions and perhaps answer only a few for there is a vast ignorance of negro history among whites and negroes and the job of filling this vacuum is massive do negroes have a heritage and a tradition like the greeks the french the anglo-saxons or are we something less as others have portrayed us everywhere we have looked we have seen negroes as savage and barbaric humble and self-sacrificing scared and childish and inferior and i remember as a kid coming from some of the pictures and we spent the whole time from the from the motion picture house to home uh satirizing the negro performances we saw in the film well it was also an admission that somehow or other this was to some degree what we were now these these important and very very uh impressionistic things that we got from these films did to some degree govern our behavior when a negro child goes into a movie for instance and sees himself or sees another negro in an unfavorable light he he he feels to some degree threatened he feels uncomfortable and a great deal of his laughing at that uh situation will be the kind of laughter that protects him it's a it's a nervous attack against him his self uh the way he looks at himself the esteem with which he holds himself and how he will rate with his fellows in the streets you know uh it's it's seeing something happen to you that you can't control which leaves the scar which leaves you feeling inadequate you know you don't feel loved you're ashamed to look at yourself ashamed to go home ashamed to talk to the boys next door a shame even to ask these questions of your parents although sometimes you do it's a horrible situation and sometimes we never get over that as a negro i have honestly tried to believe that i was somebody and i've always fought during my life to keep that feeling that i did have some value and i say value knowing what that word means and it's been many a night in my life when i went to sleep and known very deep inside me that i really wasn't worth much i still do not really know what being a negro is or what it means it means that my skin is a little bit darker it means that my cultural exposures have been somewhat different to other ethnic groups it may even mean that as a human being i might be more sensitive to need and despair oh yes uh you know that wish i was white kind of thing when you begin to sort of uh get the feeling of uh difference like maybe you're dirty or something's wrong but there was that feeling you know so early you can't even know where it started i'm not over it yet it's part of my american heritage we were told we were a people without a past and without a future and negro boys and girls learned before very long that they were something special you know at an early age as soon as you start school you begin to catch on to the whole racial thing but once you get into school you begin to know it and know there's a difference and that the difference is against you there's no real reference to me as a negro or to my father or any of the other negroes who have contributed so much to the growth of the united states and i i really can't understand it i'll never forget the picture in the geography book a couple of very uh ragged africans you know weeks before we got to the lesson we were stealing ourselves for it uh some negro child would find the picture first in the book before we got to the lesson and alert everyone look on page 22. you see what's there and then we dreaded reaching that lesson because it was always something about the savages not knowing anything and we had to sit there and hear this and instinctively the white children would turn and look at the negro children you know while this lesson was going on and so africa became our shame and our torment we were told that our past was barbarism and the white man our redeemer slavery was not a sin but salvation if few of us had anything to look forward to we were afraid to look back in 1958 lorraine hansberry wrote a play a raisin in the sun that showed the conflicts created for american negroes by their african past [Music] [Applause] well what have we got on the night you are now looking at what a well-dressed nigerian woman would [Music] [Applause] isn't wear beautiful [Music] hey look honey we're going to the theater we're not going to be in it you know george i don't like that do you expect this boy to go out with you looking like that well now that's up to george if he's ashamed of his heritage oh dear here we go again a lecture on the african past on our great west african heritage in one second you know we're going to hear all about the great ashanti empires the song civilizations the the sculpture of being in some poems and the bantu and then the whole monologue is going to end up with the word heritage let's face it baby your heritage ain't nothing but a bunch of raggedy spirituals and some grass huts are you see george you think you would rather stand there in your splendid ignorance and know absolutely nothing about the people who were the first to smell iron on the face of this earth while the ashanti were performing surgical operations when the english was still tattooing themselves with blue dragons [Applause] at the heritage program of how you act a federally sponsored effort to develop better opportunities for harlem's negro youth a new version of african history is being taught robert moore is a visiting lecturer mr moore do you think that the social so-called negro would dignify his identity by associating himself with his ancestral background [Music] after some three or four hundred years of transplantation from africa into america it is obvious that we are not africans anymore we are afro-americans americans of african ancestry and that connects us basically with our original heritage and culture the accomplishments of africa before and after director of the program is john henrik clark is generally glossed over or neglected in human history a lot of this the misconception of africa and the distortion of african history is involved in a word that is relatively new the word negro a kind of nickname that grew out of european laziness the inability of the uh lack of a desire to give africans their proper identity in the period when the europeans had to justify the exploitation of africa and the demeaning of a whole people they systematically started the effort to read the african out of human history a great deal of uh ignorance of african history sits upon the old conservative racial discrimination and prejudice which we have had vazil davidson is a british writer and historian on africa it states it still sits upon the belief perfectly unscientific quite unbased in any scholarly discipline that the africans that is to say if you like the negroes are people of some sort of inferiority to others and therefore have not been able to develop in the same way now you know the great myth of the colonial era the great myth took the shape of saying that the africans the negroes are children and because they are children it said failing to develop we the europeans you the americans must go in there and show them the way they should go civilize them introduce them to the blessings of orderly life one of the misunderstandings you see about africa is the apparently primitive material nature of their civilization you look at these people living in these villages and you wonder what is their past do they have a past what lies behind it all they have nothing but a few straw buildings nothing but a few cattle it seems quite inconsiderable the dinka for example have no stone in their country they have almost no metal half their country is under water half the year they cannot build and could never possibly build an imposing material civilization but their achievement was of course to learn how to master their environment and this they have done with quite outstanding success so that the outside picture of the superficial picture is gives no indication at all of the depth of their culture these are the people who have mastered the problems of taming this difficult vast continent with all its extraordinarily great obstacles to living its swamps its deserts its mountains and its forests the story of africa over the last two thousand years has been one of quite epic dimensions [Music] africa endless deserts scorching and when swept by day bitterly cold at night and the sahara the world's largest desert a harsh bleak expanse of land challenging anyone to cross it [Music] snow-capped mountains near the equator gigantic waterfalls in the jungle mists and rain almost daily [Music] these were some of the barriers to penetration to the outside world it was the dark continent a land of mystery where stories were spread of giants and dwarfs a people whose heads grew under their arms of monstrous animals [Music] [Applause] [Music] it is here in this forbidding other world that what may be the remains of the first man were discovered in 1959 in tanganyika a scientific expedition had been digging for weeks and the sun baked earth looking for traces of the earliest man then in july dr louis lakey and his team found what he called zenjanthropus nicknamed the nutcracker man because of the strength of his jaws he was about six hundred thousand years old and maybe the creature that makes africa the real cradle of mankind the records of ancient africa begin with egypt about 3000 bc its spectacular achievements of the monumental pyramid and brooding sphinx have always been credited to asia and the mediterranean [Music] but there is growing evidence that egypt owes more than originally thought to the land to the south cush the land of the negroes about 700 bc cushite kings conquer egypt and become the 25th dynasty little is known today about the land of cush but in the ancient world it was highly respected in 1791 the french philosopher count de valni wrote of the cushites a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians the elements of arts and the sciences then in about 325 a.d cush is attacked and destroyed and disappears from our view for the rest of africa there is little we can say for certain except for the cushites africans had no writing they kept in their memories the history of their people stories narrated down from generation to generation this oral tradition must tell us much of the history that will fill the gaps in our knowledge in the western sudan negro kingdoms arise in the medieval periods of walled and fortified cities markets and fairs ghana is the earliest of these civilizations going back to 300 a.d in the 8th century an arab writer tells us that the arabs sent an expedition to this pagan land of gold african markets the main source of gold before the discovery of america then about 1067 arabs from the north fired by their new faith storm into the western sudan [Music] after years of fighting the arabs conquer ghana and settle there from this time on trans-saharan caravan trade flourishes and with the trade comes islam islam spreads through west africa when europe was going through a so-called dark ages muslim culture is the main advancement of human knowledge most important of all a written language comes to the western sudan almost all that we know about these kingdoms was preserved for us by arab and negro scholars of that time around the 12th century ghana gives way to the empire of mali in 1324 king manso musa makes a pilgrimage to mecca with a caravan of 60 000 people an arab traveler arriving in mali in 1353 wrote the negroes have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people neither traveler nor inhabitant of this land has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence could the same be said of the 14th century england or france the kingdom of songhai most famous for its university the fabled timbuktu students and scholars from all over the world came here to study a moorish traveler wrote more profit is made from the book trade and from all other branches of commerce if we ask ourselves a little more nearly what have been the cultural contributions of african peoples to the rest of the world then of course we are faced immediately with the remarkably original and outstanding quality of their plastic arts the most important art in africa has of course been dancing and dancing has passed into the folklore of the whole of the rest of the world from its african origins if you go to places like bruh or the west indies or the southern united states you will find african dances still being danced there though of course in different circumstances and therefore in somewhat different ways but the whole concept of rhythm as being expression of the personality and not simply a wiggling of the body and the wiggling of the body is all that most europeans can achieve but an expression of the personality this comes from the african concept of dancing more obvious is the tradition of plastic art a large number of african peoples have developed forms of sculpture in wood or in stone or in ivory or in brass or bronze or iron or gold which are of great effectiveness and great originality and this too of course is passed into the general western tradition of pictorial art and to some extent of plastic art as well the remarkable art of benin the bronzers of benin was said to be worthy of celine europe was amazed at the discovery that africans could perform such an impressive creation of bronze casting africans culture burst upon the european art world it became a major influence in the modern movement picasso brock morgugliani legere found an african sculpture a freedom and a vitality they had been searching for here was no slavish imitation of nature something the camera could do better but a new and fresh way of looking at the world behind the appearance we have only skimmed the surface of the history of african civilizations and there are wide gaps in our knowledge among the riddles of ancient africa are where did the negro come from what happened to the cushites after their defeat where did the sculptors of benin learn their remarkable skills we haven't even begun to penetrate some of these mysteries yet growing knowledge and interest in africa is rediscovering a world we never knew and many negroes are examining for the first time the values that were lost my name is julia mazzy and i'm addressing my question to mr carr i want to know what happened to the so-called negro culture in america the most tragic destruction of african culture was the destruction of the african culture brought to these shores brought to america shores now the first thing they did was to forbid the drama forbid all african ceremonies forbid african ornaments literally to destroy and people in such a manner that they had to be remade in an american image this was not exactly true in the west indies it was slavery make no mistake about it but because it was owned in ireland many of the africans could communicate with each other and maintain some of the african cultures while in the united states it was impossible because as they arrived mother brother sister split up and they went in opposite directions then they were resold they might have been resold within a matter of days after they were sold the last time so it was difficult for relatives to keep track of each other it was difficult for a continuity to be maintained in african culture this was the beginning of the fragmenting of our family in this country it was also the beginning of the demeaning and the uh negation of the masculinity of the black male in america this the meaning of our culture and this reading us out of the commentary of human history has left deep psychological scars what we are trying to do now is a massive job of rebuilding the inside the spirits the hopes the history the culture of a people we're trying to restore those values that have been taken away and we're trying to get across to black youth that they have a part to play in the making of a new world they have the imagination they have the energy you must first restore that part of yourself that has been negated by oppression it is as essential to you as bread and water it is part of the food that must feed your spirit in the world of tomorrow and it is part of what you will have to transfer to your children [Music] uh [Music] this is net the national educational television network