The Zanj Slaves Rebellion

Zapping the Zanj: Towards a History of the Zanj Slaves' Rebellion Revised on: 16 October 2002. This is an ongoing investigation. Credible sources regarding the Zanj are hard to come by. Melancholic Troglodytes would appreciate any assistance from readers. "Once war is declared, [the skillful soldier] will not waste precious time in waiting for reinforcement ... but crosses the enemy's frontier without delay. This may seem an audacious policy to recommend, but with all great strategists the value of time has counted for more than either numerical superiority or the nicest calculations..."- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Sisters fight to save ancient African language from extinction

A 95-year-old woman is helping a last ditch effort to preserve an ancient African language before it goes extinct.

Hanna Koper and her two sisters are thought to be the last remaining speakers of the San language N|uu, rated as critically endangered by Unesco . The San, also known as “bushmen”, were the first hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

N|uu, which has 112 distinct sounds, was passed on orally down the generations but never written down. Now Koper and her siblings have worked with linguists to design alphabet charts with consonants, vowels and 45 different “clicks” that are typical of San languages, as well as rules of spelling and grammar.

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Ancient Man and His First Civilizations

The Iberian Peninsula because of its close proximity to Africa, has been inhabited for at least 1,000,000 years. At about 45,000 B.C. the Khoisan type African “Grimaldi,” became the first “Modern Man” to enter Europe; as he crossed the Gibraltar straits and started his journey across Europe. (Europe and Africa are NOW separated by 7.7 nautical miles - during glacial periods it was much less).

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The Black Seminole Slave Rebellion

Imagine that the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history had gone unrecognized for more than a century and a half, even by the country's leading scholars. Imagine further that the rebellion was not some obscure event in a rural backwater, but a series of mass escapes that took place in conjunction with the largest Indian war in U.S. history and that resulted in a massive, well-documented destruction of personal property. How could scholars forget such an event? And what would such an oversight say about the country? A country that had robbed generations of the story of its most successful black freedom fighters. A country that had taught its children a lie, that over the first American century, only white men fought for freedom and won.

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Meet Sada Mire: the First Somali Archeologist known to the World

Somalia sits on the horn of Africa with the longest coastline on the continent’s mainland, while its capital city Mogadishu is known as the ‘white pearl’ of the Indian Ocean. In antiquity, Somalia is said to be “among the most probable locations of the fabled ancient Land of Punt;” in addition, it was an important commercial centre with ancient relations. Its long-distance trade by sea and camel caravan gave birth to a multi-cultural society with communities on the coast.

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Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women. Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.

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What, to the American Slave, Is Your 4th of July?’

Frederick Douglass “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass of the crowd gathered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852. “I answer,” he continued, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”

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