Hello,

About 3 years ago(+/-) I was watching fox news and the analyst made a ridiculous comment about arabs being upset for getting kicked out of spain. While my first thought was thats the dummest thing I've heard in a bit, my second thought was thats the longest rout on GODS' green earth. To go into africa cross the sahara then cross the water into spain before stopping.

That caused me to first look at east Africa(princably Ethiopia/Sudan) then west Africa, which showed that rout was simply the "path of least resistence" (basic physics). The side effect was that I ended up diving into the history of African peoples & cultures on the continent and in the diaspora. After A year or two of study I found I had developed a deep resentment(?). Not about anything that happened in history but about the fact that I had to learn this stuff on my own. The fact that I was deep into University didn't help the issue much either. It also caused me to question the goal of education, the criteria behind what is deemed worthy of beieng taught, and who deems it so.

Fast forward and a friend of mine from kenya had recently recieved his U.S citezenship and joked "looks like I'm an African American now". I thought about his new born child and asked what did they teach you about kenya specificly and africa in general. From what he told me it seems like they basicaly start history at independence and skim over everything before that short of a sampling of the "highlights" (timbuktu, great zimbabwe, etc). Which has a distinct feel of whats propogatetd in the Diaspora (Europeans oppressed you then you got "free", now make something of yourself)

Whats missed is those Histories and cultures are building material for a person to "...now make something of yourself". As a matter of fact before really diving into history I fell in love with traditional Archetecture systems such as...

Mali


[img]http://dilemmaxdotnet.files./2012/07/timbuktu-architecture.jpg[/img]

Lybia




Camaroon



Togo(I love these little castles!)



burkina faso



Morrocco




Now with an engineering background I have the point of view there is no such thing as useless or antiquated. Something may be inefficiant or broken but thats when you engineer out the problem or take whats useful from it and store it in your mental tool box to possibly apply to something else. You could easily put a polymer coat on the clay to make it resistent to weathering, add a plumming system & electrical wireing, or change the roofing material to make it fire resistent. The idea thats pushed is that your cultural/historical inheritence is antiquated therefore you should completly supplant it with ours. Which is far different from what went through my mind when I started exposing myself to it. The point isn't to convert into acting like my forbeares. The point is to identify & make use of the great foundation laid down, build on it, and engineer the kinks out with new knowledge.

But what do you do when the educational system doesn't properly expose you to it? I've been very sad by people I've seen on here say nonsense like "our parents didn't have cloathing untill europeans came", "African didn't have architecture untill europeans brought it", "I was surprised when I saw Africans had beds and two story houses" etc.

The sad thing is I see Africans from the contenent complain about the backward ideas that some Diaspoians(who aren't taught anything in school mind you) have about present day Africa reflected in various contnental Africans, except they think it was like that in the past instead of the present. Some from both sides thinking the same things the only difference being temporal.

I know why people in the Diaspora think such things(The information is omitted from the educational system). So I'd like to know what is the state of African history and cultures at you schools?

Thank you