American Democracy and the Promise of Justice

Preliminary Ancestry Study Content

Students are frequently taught about the origins of the United States of America in school, whether or accurately depicted or not.  They are exposed to the information regarding the origins of man much less frequently.  In this three-week opening to my Unit on Ancestry, it is important that I not only teach the origins of a continent but of man entirely.  This will be vital as some of my students are from places in South and Central America.  It is a little known and stunning fact that the earliest accounts and archeological remains of man in any form where found on the continent of Africa.¹⁵ More specifically, in Omo Kibish, Ethiopia 200,000 years ago.¹⁶ Not only is this the continent where the earliest traces of human life were found, but scientists continue to find evidence of this.  There were recently archeological remains found in Morocco that would prove even earlier accounts of humans by about 315,000 years.¹⁷ There are many resources to be pulled for my students from these archeological findings, including three-dimensional images.  Even more interestingly regarding the origins of human life, scientists now believe that the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible as the birth place of life, was in Africa or was the continent of Africa as a whole.¹⁸ It has been researched and predicted, that groups of humans would have eventually migrated out of Africa and into places like Europe, Asia and Australia.¹⁹ Scientists have come to this conclusion, based on the in-text clues given about the whereabouts of the garden of Eden as well as the rivers surrounding it.²⁰ The concrete evidence and argument are found in other facts as well.  Due to the early mega-continent known as Pangea, the Garden of Eden, which many people believe to be in the middle east near Iraq and Sudan, would have at the time of Eden, been included on the continent of Africa.²¹ There are many maps and archeological findings used to support this claim.  Jean Jaques-Hublin works at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as the director of the Human Evolution department;²² he sums up these findings and scientific beliefs about Eden: “If there was a ‘Garden of Eden’, it’s Africa; So, the Garden of Eden is the size of Africa.”²³ All these claims and more lead to the astounding conclusion that we are all in some way of ‘African Descent’ and in fact from the place that many native people call The Motherland²⁴. 

The Seven Kingdoms

After addressing and exploring the origins of man as a class, my students will be introduced to a synopsis on the Seven original Kingdoms of Africa.  The Seven original Kingdoms of Africa were: The Kingdom of Kush, The Land of Punt, Carthage, The Kingdom of Aksum, The Mali Empire, The Songhai Empire and The Great Zimbabwe.²⁵ Some of the extension content that will be explored following the seven empires includes: Egypt and Cleopatra’s Kingdom, The Empire of Ghana: a cosmopolitan and Islamic History, as well as the Twelve Sultans of Kilwa.²⁶  Many have never explored the great Kingdoms that once thrived on this land.  For example the Kingdom of Kush, was a neighbor and military partner with the land of Egypt, ruled by Nubian Kings over what is now Sudan near the Nile River.²⁷ Additionally, The Land of Punt has a mysterious location and was said to be home to Queen Hatshepsut as well as the Gods of the people.²⁸ There were said to be plentiful resources in the Land of Punt such as gold, and leopard furs.²⁹ The last of the original Kingdoms the students will focus on but certainly not the least influential was The Great Zimbabwe.  The Great Zimbabwe was home of the Queen of Sheba and was frequently looted for its bronze and gold resources, including early findings of gold and glass bronze statues that were excavated and taken while its own people were admitted into servitude as laborers while European explorers looted the Land.³⁰

Stolen Resources

The extensive resources of Africa are the common thread that links all the kingdoms together.  Many explorers and pillagers gave shocking opinions and quotes such as an excavator of Great Zimbabwe that claimed that: “the Shona people were too ‘backwards’ ever to have built the ruins.”³¹ Not only were many accounts made of explorer and excavator’s opinions displaying proof that they felt these people inferior, but many accounts were made that clearly tried to understate the level of resource that Africa had to offer at the time.  Whether this was due to the archeological methods at that time being ineffective is unclear; what is clear however is that people took from others, berated the native people and made accounts that portrayed these resources as less then plentiful, when in fact that is not the case.  It appears a more accurate reason is that more gold was found in some regions rather than others, therefore some regions were not as highly regarded by excavators.  For example, the documented archeological accounts of the gold resources in a region called Luanze, a part of The Great Zimbabwe, was regarded as having astonishing levels of gold, so much that gold dust can still be found in the soil today as the result of heavy excavation.³² In contrast, the Kingdoms of West Africa were regarded as having sparse and inconsistent levels of gold.³³ We know however, that Africa is in fact a region that has an abundance of natural food sources, and farming capacity.³⁴ Although many have understated, Africa is one of the most resource rich continents in the world.³⁵ The list of resources in the major regions of Africa includes: Diamonds, Gold, Nickel and Uranium, Pozzolana, Fish, Timber, Titanium, Graphite, Tobacco, Iron Ore, Phosphates, Aluminum and Gas and Copper.³⁶ In an analysis by Nick Dearden from Global Justice now, there is roughly two-hundred and three billion dollars leaving Africa to places like London, as Africa receives only one-hundred sixty-one billion for the resources taken.³⁷ This is attributed to not only blatant evasion of taxes, but also: “twenty-nine billion that is: stolen in illegal logging, fishing and trading in wildlife.”³⁸ The content of the first two weeks of the Unit will be focused on this analysis of Africa’s major regions, kingdoms and resources.