Earth Essences.Com

 THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN - 4

This explains a certain similarity between Egypt and Babylon. The foreign element was not Semitic. They belonged,like the natives, to the hamitic stock; therefore they easily amalgamated with the aborigines, into whom they infused their more progressive and active spirit. The dawn of the Egyptian civilization is certainly a distinct proof of the important part played by Africa in the history of human culture."

The religious ideas of people often furnish us with more or less conclusive evidence as to their racial relations, and many writers today, who go no nearer to Egypt than the armchairs in the libraries, often try to prove that because certain things in the Egyptian system of religion resemble the systems of other nations that, therefore, the Egyptians must have been something another than African.

Yet even here they miss or deliberately overlook the greatest fact of all. The old idea of man having been created in the image of his Maker is made manifest in all systems of religious worship, and the gods are ever representative of their worshipers. Therefore when M. Maspero informs us in his inestimable work upon the Egyptian religion that Osiris, the supreme god of Egypt, was " beautiful of face, but with a dull, black complexion,"it is by no means improbable to conclude that his color is an index to the color of his worshippers.

If, then, the black skin was in any way despicable to the old Egyptians;if men of that color were known to them only as servants and slaves; if they themselves were white-skinned Libyans or yellow-skinned Seminites, it will be difficult to persuade a fair-minded people that the Egyptians would so far depart from the ideas and traditions of their race as to give Negro features and a black skin to the personification of the highest conception of the human-mind-that infinite and unfathomable power that rules omipotent to all men and gods, whose empire encompasses the earth and seas, the eternal stars and everlasting suns, and stretches to the uttermost confines of this mighty universe.

There may be many who, in spite of all that has been written, are not willing to accept what has gone before as conclusive. Men are fallible and religions questionable, and the statements of either or both may not prove absolute. But there are proofs greater than these, proofs wrought in wodden panels of the mythic period of Menes to the stone statues of the last dynasties eternal testimony is borne to the race whose labor brought them forth. Whether upon wood, limestone or granite, in the colossi cut in the flanks of the mighty sandstone hills, or in the minute images of its gods and kings carved in the stones of signet rings, the Negro features are forever apparent. Had this black been but a slave, why should his features be immortalized in enduring monuments by a nation in everlasting testimony to their unbounded pride and immeasurable glory?

And shall men ever tire of wondering at those monoliths that stand so silently beside the Nile? Will patience ever again rear pillars so vast as Karnac's, or love carve out such monstrous tombs in the quite of rocky hills? " Time mocks the world," says an Arab proverb, " but the Pyramids mock time." With that persistency that comes from pride they cut a thousand wonders from the granite of the upper Nile and from their love of repose that lay in a monumental calm they embodied their highest conception in that lonely figure which stands today the greatest and grandest monument ever chiseled by the hand of man.

Those who have gazed upon that silent face will forgive the vanity of the Little Corporal, who said, as he marshelled the armies of France beneath its gaze. " Forty centuries look down upon you!" They will forgive, too, the vanity of the powerful Masonic fraternity that chose it as a symbol of their highest degree. It is the Sphinx, of which Ebers said, "At the present day it has acquired a hideous Negro aspect chiefly from the loss of the nose." He might have gone further to explain that the Sphinx has always worn that Negro aspect and that it is the face of Horus, son off Osiris, the great black god of ancient Egypt.But the Ebers is the first I have ever known who calls the expression of that calm, quite, serene face "hideous." It may be that the sense of vision is misused by those who see in that Negro profile the contradiction of all their ethnic philosophy, but let it pass. Despite its appearance to so eminent a scholar, it nevertheless reigns today the very incarnation of African Genius. 

Our own Mark Twain has paid the Sphinx this beautiful tribute; "After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien and in its face a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It looked toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing-nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of time-over lines of century waves, which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizion of antiquity.

It was thinking of wars of departed ages;of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, and the life and death, the grandeur and the decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was memory, retrospection, wrought into visible and tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of the days that have departed, and the faces that have vanished-albeit only a trifling score of years gone by-will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in those grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew.

Before history was born, before Tradition had being, things that were and forms that moved in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce knew of, passed one by one way, leaving the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange, new age, and uncomprehended scenes. The sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is in the overshadowing majesty mystery that hangs over its story. And there is in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of which he shall fell when he stands at last in the awful presence of God."

As flowers grow on a grave, so myths have sprung up around those solemn tombs. Osiris, the great, good god of Egypt, was slain by Typhon, a red-haired, white-faced, blue-eyed murderer. Typhon attempted to posssess himself on the throne and Isis, widow of the dead king:but Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, opposed him and drove him from Egypt. And because the people were fearful that their enemy might return Horus transformed himself into the Sphinx and kept watch for the coming of Typhon.

And who shall say the vigil has not been kept? For thousands of years Egypt dwelt happily in the Valley of the NIle, till her warrior crossed the emerald mountains with sword in hand, inviting luxury, decay and death, and thought these inevitable human consequences came, as they must always come, Horus, has never ceased his vigil. The stars which garnitured the heavens of Menes still look calmy down; the ghostly moon swims just above the palms; the sun which they worshipped  and glorified shines on in unmindful splendor. And what if unbidden guests tread on holy ground?

What if the lion makes the tomb his midnight haunt? Egypt has lived and played her part in the human wonder drama. But I believe that the memory we have of her may hold one lesson among the many, and that is there have been and are great potentialities in the race which gave Egypt to the sum of human things. Perhaps that Hebrew sage was truly inspired when he told how in the days to come the children of Ethopia and Egypt should again stretch forth their hands and bring back their immortal race the glory which lies sleeping and forgotten.

Reference:The Children of The Sun- George Wells parker

'Tortured' and shackled pupils freed from Nigerian Islamic school

King Leopold's Ghost - Introduction

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

The begginings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverberations still sound today. But for me a central incandescent moment, one that illuminates long decades before and after, is a young man's flash of moral recognition.

The year is 1897 or 1898. Try to imagine him, briskly stepping off a cross-Channel steamer. A forceful, burly man, in his mid-twenties, with a handlebar mustache. he is confident and well spoken , but his British speech is without the polish of Eton or Oxford. He is well dressed, but the clothes are noot from Bond Street. with an ailing mother and a wife and growing family to support, he is not the sort of person likely to get caught up in an idealistic cause. His ideas are thoroughly conventional. He looks-and is- every inch the sober, respectable business man.

Edmund Dene Morel is a trusted employee of a Liverpool shipping line. A subsidiary of the company has the monopoly on all transport of cargo to and from the C ongo Free State, as it is then called, the huge territory in central Africa that is the world's only colony claimed by one man . The man is King Leopold 11 of Belgium, a ruler much admired throughout Europe as a "philanthropic" monarch. He has welcomed Christian missionaries to his new colony; his troops, it is said, have fought and defeated local slave-traders who preyed on the population; and for more than a decade European newspapers have praised him for investing his personal fortune in public works to benefit the Africans.

Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him to belgium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo run. Although the officials he works with have been handling this shipping traffic for years without a second thought. Morel begins to notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off thie Hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. 

Brought face to face with evil, Morel does not turn away. Instead, waht he sees determines the course of his life and the course of an extraordinary movement, the first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century. Seldom has one human being -impassioned,eloquent, blessed  with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman energy-managed almost single-handedly to put one subject on the world's front pages for more than a decade. Only a few years after standing on the docks of Antwerp, Edmund Morel would be at the White House, insisting to President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States had a special responsibility to do something about the Congo. 

He would organize delegations to the British Foreign Office. He woullld mobilize everyone from Booker T. Washington to Anatole France to the Archbishop of Canterbury to join his cause. More than two hundred mass meetings to protest Slave Labor in the Congo would be held across the United States. A larger number of gatherings  in England- nearly three hundred a year at the crusade's peak - wwould draw as many as five thousand people at a time. In London one letter of protest to the Times on the Congo would be signed  by eleven peers, nineteen bishops, seventy-six members of Parliament, the President of the Seven Chambers of Commerce thirteen editors of major newspapers, and every Lord Mayor in the country. 

Speeches about the horrors of King Leopold's Congo would be given as far away as Austrlia. In Italy, two men would fight a duel over the issue. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a man not given to overstatement,  would declare that "no external question for at least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemently".This is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration  and conquest that preceded it, and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of recent history.

Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But if this number turned out to be half as high, I thought, the Congo would have been one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century's horrors? And why had I never before heard of them ? I had been writing about human rights for years, and once, in the course of a half a dozen trips to Africa, I had been to the Congo.

The Serpent and the RainBow-The Jaguar - 2

The first days were among the worst, for we had to traverse the vast swamps east of Rio Atrato, and with the river in flood this meant walking for kilometers at a time in water to our chests . Once across the Atrato, however, conditions improved, and without much difficulty we moved from one Choco or Kuna Indian village to the next, soliciting new guides and obtaining provisions as we went along. Our serious problems began when we reached the small town of Yavisa, a miserable hovel that masqueraded as the capital of Darien Province, but is in fact nothing more than a catch basin for all the misfits exiled from each of the flanking nations.

In those days the Guardia Civil of Pan ama had explict instructions to harass foreigners, and we were the only gringos the Yavisa post was likely to see for some time. We came expected. Already at a border post two days west of the frontier an unctuous guard had stolen our only compass; now at the head quarters we were accused of smuggling marijuana, an accusation which, however absurd, gave them the excuse to confiscate our gear. 

We had been walking for two weeks and had hoped to rest in Yavisa for a few days, but our plan changed with a warning we received that afternoon. After leaving the guardhouse I paddled upriver to an Australian mission post we had heard of, hoping to borrow a compass and perhaps some charts, for the next section of forest was uninhabited. One of the missionaries met me at the dock and acted as if he knew me well. The, soberly, he explained that according to some of the Kuna at the mission, agents of the commandant in tended to intercept our party in the forest and kill us for our money.

The missionary, who had lived in the region for some years, took the rumor seriously and urged us to leave as soon as possible. I returned immediately to the jail, discreetly retrieved a few critical items, and then, abondoning the rest of our gear, told the commandant that we had decided to spend a few days at the mission before continuing upriver. Instead, equipped with two rifles borrowed from the mission, and accompanied by three Kuna guides, we left Yavisa the next day before dawn, downriver.

Our problems began immediately. On the chance that we were being followed, the Kuna led us first up a stone creek bed and then, entering the forest, they deliberately described the most circuitous route possible. Sebastian stumbled, badly twisting an ankle. That first night out we discovered what it meant to sleep on the forest floor at the height of the rainy season. In a vain attempt to keep warm, the three Kuna and I huddled together, taking turns in the middle, Nobody slept. By the end of the second day I had begun to suspect that our riverine Kuna were less familiar with the forest hinterland, and after three days I realized that they were completely disoriented.