Moving Against the System by Austin David

Author:Austin, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Chapter 5

THE

CIVILIZATIONS

OF ANCIENT

AFRICA

RICHARD B. MOORE

ROCKY JONES: I hope that, when the time comes for the roll to be called down yonder, I can present as impressive a battle record as the next speaker. He is the author of The Name “Negro”: Its Origin and Evil Use, published in 1960. He is the author of Basic Views on Image and Independence.1 He has presented articles to Freedomways magazine. He has written articles, “Caribbean Unity” and “Pan Africa and Du Bois”2 and many more that have appeared in Freedomways magazine. He has been a lecturer and consultant on African and Afro-American history to Uniondale public school system in Long Island, New York. He is involved in the Afro-American project of history and culture of the board of education of New York; founder and proprietor of the Douglass Book Center in Harlem, New York. He has transferred a collection of books, etcetera, on African and Afro-American history to the government of Barbados. These books are now being used for the Centre for Multiracial Studies in Barbados under the joint auspices of the University of the West Indies and Sussex University. Brother Richard Moore. [Applause]

RICHARD MOORE: Brother chairman, fellow sufferers from colonialism, and fellow seekers after truth, justice, and a better society.

I’m to speak to you on African civilization according to the assignment given to me. But I am, like my younger brother,3 in disagreement with the term “civilization.” He’s never been able to find it, and I recognize that this concept of civilization connotes, as it has been used by European colonialists, a vague but superior manner of acting or way of life, especially if it is recognized in contradistinction to that which is regarded by them as barbarism or savagery. The western European is thus supposed to have achieved civilization, whereas other “off-coloured” people, be they considered yellow or black—particularly the black—have never achieved civilization, according to that view.

Now, is it possible for these benighted blacks ever to attain civilization if left to themselves, such is the set and deep-seated opinion and feeling of European colonialists and European-American racist overlords? Quite evidently, this usage of the term civilization is misleading and false. The term civilization has no definite and scientific content. Of course, there have been some students, like [Lewis] Morgan in his Ancient Society,4 who have attempted to put some scientific connotation into this term. But their proposals have been inadequate and, what is more to the point, they have never gotten through to the people, even to the generality of scholars in their own or cognate field. So, to this day, among European wielders of power, various spokesmen, and even among some unwilling imitators or unconscious followers, civilization is the unique accomplishment of the superior European, as distinct from the barbarism and savagery of Asian and African peoples. Let me point to one example so you will understand that I am not Don Quixote chasing at windmills.

No less a person than the world-renowned British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his

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