Africa’s Priceless Heritage

THE AFRICAN CONNECTION A study of races rooted in the Bible links the understanding of such a people with an eternal purpose. Blacks, according to scripture , are a result of God’s love and grace. The fact that the very lineage of Jesus Christ includes Blacks and that the leadership of the first century church included Africans indicates that Africans are an integral part of God’s redemptive master plan. Indigenous humanity and the originators of the civilizations in both Mesopotamia and Africa were Blacks. They truly were Black in Asia’s Lower Mesopotamia and they were Black in Africa. Either way one may cut it the originators of the world civilizations were Blacks or Black people. The Historian Lerone Bennett concludes this by saying; Civilizations started in the great river valleys of Africa and Asia, in the Fertile Crescent in the Near East and along the narrow ribbon of the Nile. In the Nile Valley that beginning was an African as well as an Asian achievement. Blacks, or people who would be considered Black today, were among the first people to use tools, paint pictures, plant seeds and worship gods (Before the Mayflower. 1982, p.5). It is true that civilization dawned in the region between the two major rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. There is a fertile and broad valley between Tigris and Euphrates rivers known to the Greeks as the Mesopotamia, which means ‘the land between the two rivers’. In the Southern parts of this long valley an energetic and inventive people began to construct the world’s first cities. They invented a system of writing (other than hieroglyphics which the Egyptians invented) and were the first also to use wheeled vehicles. Mesopotamian people survived for more than three thousand years until the conquest of Babylon by the Persians in 539 B.C.. This made it even part of a wider empire.