Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
Interpretation
The quote highlights Egypt's foundational influence on the development of Western Civilization before the rise of Greece and Rome.
John Henrik Clarke emphasizes the often-overlooked historical significance of ancient Egypt as a cradle of civilization, suggesting that its contributions laid the groundwork for what would later be recognized as Western Civilization. By pointing out that Egypt's influence predates that of Greece and Rome, Clarke urges us to reconsider our understanding of history and the origins of cultural and intellectual achievements.
In practice
In a lecture about the roots of Western culture, one could use this quote to highlight Egypt's contributions.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
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