Musa Jallow, AfricaNews contributor in Bamako, Mali
I wish to kindly refute the sentiments expressed in Poor Diet: Cause of Africa’s Underdevelopment. The article is an insult to our [African] intelligence and history. Most respectfully, this is an uneducated and stereotypical and unscientific report that has no basis in fact or science.
First, it sustains the myth of the inferiority of the African as a human- which is false. There is no continent on earth that has not experienced invasion, partial or full occupation by other peoples or races. In fact, modern science holds that the common ancestor of mankind as we know him or her now is African. This means that of all the possible races of humans, the African was the one that succeeded against nature’s odds, thrived and gave us modern humanity.Second, how does one then explain history in which Ancient Egypt, Cush and Ethiopia not only led civilization but even colonized the Arabian Peninsula? How does one explain the fact that Black moors led the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula? Kindly note that according to Arabic and Judaic tradition, the ancestor of modern Arabs, the descendants of Abraham through Ishmael were the Egyptian handmaidens of the Egyptian Pharoah, now more and more accepted as African as recent genetic studies are proving that Queen Tiye, Nefertiti were all not only African as indeed Egypt is on the African continent but also Black.
It is recorded in history that until the advent of Islam, Black Abyssinia was not only a leading power that competed with the Roman and Persian Empires but one that could offer asylum to the early Muslims and were viewed as more attuned to the precepts of fair play and justice and Christian compassion than the Jewish and Christian Semitic peoples that shared the Arabian Peninsula with the early Makkan Muslims. This is authentic Islamic history and the asylum and protection afforded the early exiles upheld Prophet Muhammad’s faith in Black Abyssinia. Read the rest of this entry »
