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CHAPTER 13
UNSHACKLE YOUR MIND
BLACK POPES: MOORS: BLACK WRITERS: RULERS
by John R. MooreIn this chapter, the examination of Afrika's western Diaspora Europe, will continue, and you will see how Afrikans impacted culturally and even genetically on Europe.
It is a fact that the early Christians in Rome had important Afrikan luminaries in the church, and not all were just Roman individuals. For example, there were at least three Black Afrikan Popes, of which one, Pope St. Miltiades or St. Melchiades, became a saint. He was born in Afrika and died in Rome in January, 314.
Pope Victor, an Afrikan by birth, was the Church's 14th Pope who "had condemned and excommunicated Theodore of Byzantium who had denied the divinity of Jesus Christ." He suffered martyrdom under Septimus Servus.
Pope St. Gelasius was born in Afrika and reigned as Pope from 492 to 496. "He was active in rooting out the last vestiges of paganism in Rome".
So in the early days of the Christian church, it was not unusual to have people from Afrika who would be high officials in the church, including Popes.
Notice that you are not being shown slaves, which is not to say that there were no slaves in Europe, but what has been left out when the story of Afrikan people was told about their participation in Europe, is the fact that they occupied central positions in government, in religion, in art and other areas that took place in Europe.
This is Septimius Severus, one of the emperors of Rome who came from Carthage, Afrika. There were at least 3 Black emperors of Rome and he was one of them. This emperor persecuted the Christians.
Also from Carthage is this person whose name is Terence, (right) and he was studied widely in Europe. This is not his picture but one that the publishers placed on the book which was created by some artist. We do not have an actual picture of him from the time he lived. Terence would be one of the writers that Shakespeare must have studied for example, because everyone else during Shakespeare's time would have studied him. He was considered a classical writer but what is not known about him is that he came from Afrika. It is interesting that they only called him Terence, but with Shakespeare they called him William Shakespeare, using the first and last name, but with Terence you get only his first name. Terence's full name is Terence Publius Afra, or specifically, Terence the Afrikan. This again shows that the distortion of the Afrikan past continues. So persons who now pick up and read Terence's literary works would not be aware from that book that this classical writer was Afrikan, neither would they be aware of the Afrikan influence in a profound way on the literature of Europe. But it was not only Terence as there were many other significant individuals.
This is Alessandro (Alexander) de Medici sometimes called il Moro. An Afrikan woman and Pope Clement VII got together and produced Alessandro de Medici, who became the head of the famous De Medici family in Italy. He produced a number of daughters that were married off to the kings of Europe.
In fact, almost every major king of Europe got married to one of his daughters, so there are many of the royal families in Europe right now who can trace their lineage all the way back to this Afro-European - Alessandro de Medici. He not only became head of the De Medici family, but also the Duke of Florence. Now in reading the history of Italy or the history of Europe, very few people come across this name, or if they do, hardly recognize that this is an Afrikan or Afro-European.
"Despite the many portraits of this 16th century Italian Renaissance figure, his Afrikan heritage is rarely, if ever mentioned. Alessandro wielded great power as the first duke of Florence. He was the patron of some of the leading artists of the era and is one of the two Medici princes whose remains are buried in the famous tomb by Michelangelo.
The ethnic make up of this Medici Prince makes him the first Black head of state in the modern western world." This is the mother of Alessandro de Medici with the Pope, identified in documents as Simonetta da Collavechio.
From what you have been seeing so far, one thing should be abundantly clear. You cannot write European history and leave out Afrikan history, because if the Afrikans are left out of Europe's story, then it becomes incoherent and you will have something like a tree without a trunk, leaves or anything else for that matter. So there is an integral connection between Afrika and the rest of the world, and in reality, to write history, you have to write world history of which Afrikan history must be a major part. It would be intellectually dishonest and intellectually incompetent to write world or European history without attention to co-events in Afrika, and also its antecedents.
Joel Rogers was an Afrikan-American historian who came from Jamaica in the Caribbean. He was one of those free minds with no degree, but this was probably the best thing that could ever have happened to him, since no one could train out of him his critical faculties. He was the one who discovered this tremendous amount of material that allowed him to become one of great historians of America, being recognized as such in Europe, but not in the United States.
Many of his books were self-published, but one of them, "The World's Great men of Color," got printed by a major publisher. One of the activities that he enjoyed most was travelling. He was a Pullman porter who took all his money with no grants from The National Endowment for Humanities and National Science Foundation, and went to the libraries of America, the library of Congress, to Europe, Paris, London, all over the world in fact, searching for the history of Black people. Joel Rogers found 500 of these images before he stopped. He simply got tired of counting as there were so many.
These are some of the images Joel Rogers got from the books in Europe. If you are in the royal family in Europe, you register your family crest, and there are certain books that keep records of those family crests. He kept going through these family registries and finding these Black images commenting that, "every time I find Black images, it looks as if they are almost always associated with the name Moor or the name Black in some way."
This image shows the Negroes in Coats of Arms. Look at the one at the top in the centre and note that by the way he is drawn; he is Black with full lips emphasized. Note also that his name is Schwartz, which comes from Germany where it is registered.
Now the name Schwartz in German means Black, so he is Black and his name is Black.
Look at the man in the lower left corner, his name in German is Moorcroft (also Marcroft or Morecrofte). In German the word Moor means just that, and the word Croft means head, so this means the head of the Moor. Note the one in the centre, Mohr, which is nothing more than another variation of the word Moor. So here is a good example of the fact that the Moors left their impression in Germany, but it was not just in Germany alone.
Take a look at the centre line and note the entire group of family crests with Black faces on them, and underneath is Negri / Negre, and on the line near the bottom you will see Le noir which in French means (the) Black, and in Italian there would be heads like these with names like Mora.
Returning to the word Moor, in English there would be family crests that are registered as Morrison, which means son of the Moor, and Moorhead, as in Agnes Moorhead, which means Agnes, head of the Moor.
In other words, The Moors were a phenomenal, major presence in southern European societies spilling over into northern Europe, up into Ireland and up the coast to England, leaving evidence behind of the fact that they were there, but clearly not as slave populations. They were there in noble families, and the records are located in one place. One of the things that allow you to see these records is the material that Joel Rogers selects, which comes from his book "Nature Knows no Color Lines".
This is the patron saint of Germany whose name is St. Maurice or Mautritus. The name Maurice or Mautritus comes from the word Moor or Mauritania. So clearly no one had any problem with an Afrikan saint.
By the way, if those isolated heads had not been picked out and pulled together but you saw only one, you might not have recognized what it meant, but by pooling them all together you begin to see the pattern of Black faces and the name Moor especially, which allowed Joel Rogers to draw the further connection regarding the role that the Moors played in European civilization.
When you explore this information, the question of how white is white and how European is European should come up. People will look at an Afrikan-American population and both the Afrikan-American and the European will talk about how mixed the Afrikan-American population is, referring to the period when Afrikans came over and got mixed up during slavery times with the owners and so forth, or that there was miscegenation since that time.
This line of reasoning merely suggests that many of the people that you see have lost melanin or skin colour over a period of time and have become a mixed population, without recognizing at the same time that both the white and the Black population that went into America went there already mixed. In other words, there was mixing a long time before slavery and during slavery, but there was also mixing in Europe. The Afrikans began to mix with Europeans even after Grimaldi, not to mention the Moors.
You will find in the historical records, references to Afrikans who left Afrika on ships and went up to Ireland and Scotland. They were called Fomorians and had settled in Ireland and Scotland. "The Fomorians were seafarers from Afrika who were descendents from Noah's son Ham. In Irish mythology, the Fomorians (Irish Fomóiri, Fomóraig) or Fomors were a semi-divine race that inhabited Ireland in ancient times and may have once been the beings that preceded the gods, similar to the Greek Titans."
Of particular interest is a dance in Ireland, Scotland and England which is performed even now called The Moorish Dance (The Maurice Dance). It has become the National Dance of England, where people paint their faces Black to perform these dances that originated during Moorish times. Most people are fascinated by the way Black people dance, and this goes all the way back to Egyptian times. They used to send all the way to the south to get pigmies to come to Egypt and dance, because pigmies were thought to be able to dance in a holy fashion that was more pleasing to God than anybody else's dance. Therefore, that long legacy in the dance tradition is carried by the Blacks.
What is being pointed out is that there was an untold story of this movement into Europe by Afrikan populations especially across the straits of Gibraltar into Spain and Portugal, and then further up into Europe as well. There was an infusion of the culture as well as a biological infusion, since Afrikans were mixing with these people.
Here is an example of this type of mixture in Europe. Robert Browning, the Greek poet of England, is pictured in the lower left. He is an Afrikan-European since he comes from Afrikan-European parentage.
Alexandre Dumas who is in the upper right and the writer of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" is also Afrikan-European. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the great French author is another Afrikan-European, though she looks completely white.
Beethoven on the left is an Afrikan-European. This fact stuns all the musicians, especially the classical type, to hear that their idol Beethoven had Black blood.
This comes from Joel Rogers's book "Sex and Race Vol. III". You see Beethoven on the left and Walter White from the NAACP on the right who is even lighter than Beethoven because of the way he is painted. The manner in which Rogers came to his conclusion was that he got all the biographies of Beethoven that were written by people who knew him, and the physical descriptions from eyewitnesses of what Beethoven was like. Beethoven was called frizzy haired and in some cases he was even called Nigger and The Black Spaniard. Beethoven was clearly a Black-European. This is thoroughly researched and reported in the appendix of "Sex and Race Vol. III". By the way, Mozart and Handel his teacher were Afrikan-Europeans.
This is Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) who is recognized today as the greatest poet of Poland and Russia. What most people do not know about Pushkin is that his grandfather was an Afrikan the Czar of Russia liked so much that he had him brought in from Afrika to Russia. His grandfather then became an important part of the whole Russian hierarchy; even becoming a general in the Russian army.
Pushkin as a child Alexander Pushkin Alexander Pushkin 
Pushkin therefore grew up with the support of a middle-upper class family and became a writer. Pushkin was also the one who taught the Russians to write in Russian because until that time, anyone who was a literary person in Russia felt that they had to write in French or German, because the Russian language was not thought to be suitable for advanced literary work. So Pushkin showed the beauty of the Russian language to the Russians themselves, even though he was also Russian. There are also great stories about him in duels. Now, Pushkin was so proud of being Afrikan, that he wrote a book to his grandfather which was called "The Negro of Peter the Great of Russia". Peter the Great of Russia was therefore the Czar who brought Pushkin's grandfather to Russia. Pushkin remembered this and loved his grandfather, who was a special figure in Russia, so much that he dedicated this book to him. His grandfather was known as The Negro of Peter the Great.
Pushkin's grandfather Pushkin's mother Pushkin's daughter/grand Pushkin's grandson
Take note of Pushkin's daughter (or granddaughter). Putting it in line with the mixing question, here you can see the effects of such mixing, in other words, Pushkin had been mixed, now his daughter has been mixed. Now take a look at Pushkin's grandson and notice that the genes have practically disappeared into the European population.
Now how many Europeans walking around today are aware of the fact that they are mixed with Black Afrikan genes? Therefore, when we talk about the mixture that took place in the United States of America, it is really a mixture of mixtures.
But to talk about mixture really may be somewhat ridiculous in view of the fact that it all came from the Afrikan root. It comes from the Afrikan in the first place, so Afrikans are actually mixing with Afrikans who changed through other environments over time.
Later, Europeans began to get interested in Afrikan creativity. Here is just a sample of how artists were influenced, and you could also imagine how musicians would have been influenced.
Look at the Ashanti Doll on the left and then look at this painting by Picasso which is a copy of the Ashanti Doll.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC has a whole set of slides on the comparison of Afrikan art which Europeans copied. There are several slides that show time and time again how the major European artists would go for their inspiration to Afrika, and would then re-present this material in their own modified form to European audiences.
AFRIKA'S WESTERN DIASPORA-AFRIKA. The western Diaspora in Europe was touched on, now we will focus on moving out of the Nile Valley across the continent of Afrika, a feat they did many times, but what is important about that are these points which will help to explain how Afrika lost its pre-eminent position.
Afrikans give up the coast. That is one of the critical points. Any group of people who gives up their coast land and moves to the interior even though it is for protection will eventually lose the benefits of trade and access to the rest of the world.
Afrikan nations and empires develop in the interior. Those nations that developed in the interior are Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Zimbabwe after that period of time when Afrikans deserted Egypt and had been migrating out to the west. Many of these migrants were people who had come from Nile Valley locations somewhere along the Nile River according to the oral history, and in some cases the written history of the Afrikans themselves.
Europe goes to war at the source. Here are the three things that the Europeans have done that helped to destabilize and destroy businesses that were going on in Afrika.
1. First Colonization, that is to say, the splitting up and control of the Afrikan continent among European powers that settled in Afrika.
2. Slavery, meaning the depopulation of the Afrikan continent which, according to some scholars, was to the tune of about 200,000,000 (two million) people. In other words, what we see in Afrika now is nothing but the remnants of vast populations and national states that existed before the colonial period. So there was genocide on the Afrikan population and the destruction of the Afrikan infrastructure from which they have been trying to recover since the time of slavery and colonization.
3. Finally, Neo-colonization, something that was in existence in 1986. This means controlling Afrika not by the physical presence of the outside powers, but by the manipulation through funds and force of arms, which amounts to dictating the structure from the outside. These would be the kinds of things that must be noted about Afrika's Western Diaspora.
© John Moore - Barbados, W.I. (November 2005) ©. All rights reserved.
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