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Book by
Peggy
Brooks-Bertram
Uncrowned Queens: African
American Community Builders
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Drusilla Dunjee-Houston, Wonderful Ethiopians of
the Cushite Empire, Book II
Origin of Civilization from the Cushites
Unearthed!!!
Review by Larry Obadele Williams
For those who are
seeking to find an answer to the question, from whence
did humankind spring? They should not fail to avail
themselves of a copy of Wonderful Ethiopians of the
Cushite Empire, Book II: Origin of Civilization from the
Cushites by the indomitable Drusilla Dunjee-Houston.
Long thought to be lost in the mists of history and
memory, it has been rescued by the painstaking research
and detective work of Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram. Using
research skills acquired through her study in the
medical-health field, she surgically re-assembled the
journalistic historic writings of Drusilla Dunjee-Houston.
Her task was to find the keys to the 500 year room Ivan
Van Sertima has said was locked containing many of the
contributions African people gave to human culture and
civilization. In analyzing and assessing Dunjee-Houston’s
life story, critical points were discovered. Why is
Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire, Book II: The
Origin of Civilization from the Cushites so
important?
Peggy
Brooks-Bertram is the ablest scholar/specialist on
Drusilla Dunjee-Houston’s life and writings, placing
them within the proper context of the times in which she
lived. Bertram recovered materials interested historians
had given up ever to gain accessibility. Wonderful
Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire, Book II: Origin of
Civilization from the Cushites examines the early
centers of global Cushite (African) impact. Asa G.
Hilliard III, Fuller E. Calloway Professor of Urban
Education at Georgia State University observed regarding
Dunjee-Houston’s newly released work, “Dr.
Brooks-Bertram has now placed Houston’s work in the
bright light that it deserves. It is a tragedy that the
better part of a century has passed with the world
deprived of her great gifts of writing and her model of
a visionary and fearless life of a warrior on behalf of
African people and indeed humanity itself.”
Making her own
assessment why she was charged to seek Dunjee-Houston’s
lost historical works, Brooks-Bertram says,“The
writings of Dunjee-Houston entered my soul from where
they echoed the voices of our ancestors.” She splendidly
brings to life Dunjee-Houston’s voice speaking truth to
power when Houston cites the origin of her zeal in
writing Wonderful Ethiopians, “My father was
eaten up with the zeal for race service. It is the
abiding passion of my life and of my brothers and
sisters.” Captivated by the post emancipation leadership
traditions developed by elite Black Women of the 1880s
and1890s, Brooks asserts, “Dunjee-Houston used every
means at her disposal to engage in state and national
racial uplift activities.” African-American literary
societies were crucial in spreading information found in
Wonderful Ethiopians, Book II. While it was not
placed or accepted in mainstream primary schools and
universities, it was a topic of serious discussion among
African-Americans seeking to know themselves. These
literary societies not only read literature, but history
was also a topic examined by inquiring minds. Through
the pages of the Oklahoma Black Dispatch Newspaper,
Dunjee-Houston had a journalistic platform for teaching
racial uplift and race advocacy.
In 1897 Martin R.
Delaney challenged racist propagandists advocating the
inferiority of the Black race by publishing Principia
of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color.
Delaney’s work was among the works that gave inspiration
to Dunjee-Houston to further delve into published
literature supporting the African Origin of
Civilization. It brings to prominence African-Americans
who were writing and publishing literature to counteract
the negative portrayal of African peoples. Restoring a
record of that publishing history is under-valued and
must be encouraged. Having grown up witnessing Black
independent towns, Reconstruction Common Schools founded
by Blacks, the oncoming of the Garvey movement, the
Harlem Literary Renaissance, the New Negro Movement and
the birth-winds of Pan-Africanism, Dunjee-Houston
critically assessed their place among the affairs of
African-Americans. She knew that until
African-Americans truly knew their role as progenitors
of civilization and culture they would never fulfill
their destiny.
While W.E. B
Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke fostered
political and literary arts during the Harlem
Renaissance, Dunjee-Houston was delving into the
foundations of civilization by the Cushites.
Wonderful Ethiopians, Book II: Origin of Civilization
from the Cushites was to create a sensibility and
receptivity to Africa with a historical underpinning
having utilized the latest findings of her day. It was a
lesson she sought to teach generations of Blacks
starting as early as the primary grades through
pioneering curricula on the global contributions of the
Cushites. While active in the Black women’s Racial
Uplift Movement Bertram concludes that Dunjee-Houston
researched and documented the vital cultural
significance of the ancient African Matriarchy as a
direct link to the historical importance of Black female
leaders predating the women’s movement.
Her sojourn in
writing and seeking to make known the facts of her
historical work Dunjee-Houston was angered by the
absence of accurate Africana history in school and
university curricula. Her views regarding educating the
Black community about its own history and culture was
deeply rooted in her ideas concerning Black
self-reliance. In 1917 while teaching at the new Baptist
Training School, Dunjee-Houston began formulating a
curriculum. By1921, she finalized and produced a
Curriculum Bulletin drawn heavily from her research on
the ancient African history of the Cushites.
Writing in 1934
Dunjee-Houston cites scientific investigations and the
anthropological record as the means to unravel the
pedagogy of lies and falsehoods designed to create a
literature of conspiracy to erase the record of African
achievements. Science and archaeology continues to
verify her conclusions. Dunjee-Houston even theorizes
that the world would be a better place if whites learned
the facts she uncovered. Dunjee-Houston seems to be
asking in Book II: Origin of Civilization from the
Cushites, “Would you denigrate or enslave or oppress
your brother?” Her conclusion was that it would
enlighten a closed un-informed mind.
As well as studying
the work of historians, archaeologists and scholars of
her day, Dunjee-Houston was able to partake of the
research of William Leo Hansberry of Howard University.
E.A. Hooten, the noted anthropologist, said of Hansberry,
he knew of no one possessing the knowledge of African
History as Hansberry. He was considered by his peers as
the leading authority in the field of Africana studies.
Hansberry answered her call when she criticized W.E.B Du
Bois’ The Negro [1915]. Dunjee Houston writes, “I
read Du Bois. His little book, The Negro, gives
hints in an almost apologetic form of what the race must
have been. As I read something seemed to reveal: There
is more, MORE, MORE! I decided to dedicate my reading to
this end for the rest of my life.”
It was through her
further extended research of sources in the field of
historical inquiry that she apprised herself of the
researches of Hansberry as he taught a course at Howard
titled, “The Ancient Civilizations and Cultures of
Africa.” Years later, Ebony magazine would
publish a series of articles captioned “Africa’s Golden
Past”, its subtitle was appropriately titled, “Life
could have begun in Kush.” This event seems to have
foretold of Dunjee-Houston’s second volume of
Wonderful Ethiopians, finally seeing the time of day
through the efforts of Peggy Brooks-Bertram. They were
times of immense excitement with discoveries in Egypt of
King Tutankhamen’s intact tomb in 1922. Even scholars of
the Western canon sought to call the founders of
civilization “Caucasoid blacks” or Hamites. Dunjee-Houston’s
view was that it was these ancient Blacks, progenitors
of present day Blacks, who founded civilization.
Basil Davidson,
Africanist English historian, has said of this
controversy,
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This
theme portrayed Egypt of the pharaohs,
ancient Egypt before conquest by the Arabs
in the seventh century A.D., as a country of
black origins and population whose original
ancestors had come from the lands of the
great interior, and whose links with inner
Africa remained potent and continuous. To
affirm this, of course, is to offend nearly
all established historiographical orthodoxy.
The ancient Egyptians, by that orthodoxy,
were not only not black—in whatever
pigmentational variant of nonwhite that
nature may have provided—but they were also
not Africans. To say otherwise must be so
mistaken, one has gathered, as to be
patently absurd.
But
isn't Egypt, other issues apart, quite
simply a part of Africa? That, it seems, is
a merely geographical irrelevance. The
civilization of pharaonic Egypt, arising
sometime around 3500 B.C. and continuing at
least until the Roman dispossessions, has
been explained to us as evolving either in
more or less total isolation from Africa or
as a product of West Asian stimulus. On this
deeply held view, the land of ancient Egypt
appears to have detached itself from the
delta of the Nile, some fifty-five hundred
years ago, and sailed off into the
Mediterranean on a course veering broadly
toward the coasts of Syria. And there it
apparently remained, floating somewhere in
the seas of the Levant, until Arab
conquerors hauled it back to where it had
once belonged.
Now
what is one to make of this unlikely view of
the case, coming as it has from venerable
seats of learning? Does its strength derive
from a long tradition of research and
explanation? Is it what Europeans have
always thought to be true? Have the records
of ancient times been found to support it?
As Martin Bernal has now most ably shown in
his Black Athena, the remarkable book
about which I am chiefly writing here, the
answer to such questions is plainly and
unequivocally in the negative. That the
ancient Egyptians were black (again, in any
variant you may prefer)—or, as I myself
think it more useful to say, were African—is
a belief which has been denied in Europe
since about 1830, not before. It is a
denial, in short, that belongs to the rise
of modern European imperialism and has to
be explained in terms of the "new racism,"
specifically and even frantically an
anti-black racism, which went together with
and was consistently nourished" by that
imperialism.
I say
”new racism” because it followed and further
expanded the older racism which spread
around Europe after the Atlantic slave trade
had reached its high point of "take-off" in
about 1630. Was there no racism, then,
before that? The point is complex and can be
argued elsewhere; essentially, however, the
answer to this is also in the negative.
Before the Atlantic slave trade, and before
its capitalism, there was plenty of ancient
xenophobia, fear of "blackness," association
of blackness with the Devil, and so on and
so forth; but none of this was the racism
that we know. The racism that we know was
born in Europe and America from the cultural
need to justify doing to black people, doing
to Africans, what could not morally or
legally be done to white people, and least
of all to Europeans.1 |
Davidson
foreshadows the need to look back to settle the
controversy.
When Dunjee-Houston’s
first volume was published (1926), many asked, “Where
are her footnotes, references?” Maurice Dieulafoy
writing in The Acropolis of Susa may have been
one of her sources states, “Toward 2300 BC. The plains
of the Tigris and Anzian Susinka were ruled by a dynasty
of Negro Kings.”2 Earnest A. Hooten in Up
From the Ape concludes, “A large share of
responsibility for the great civilization of India must
be assigned to Negroes since there is unquestionably a
very strange Negroid strain in the Indian population.”3
Both Maurice and Hooten brings weight to Dunjee-Houston’s
thesis of the exploits of the Cushites. Mathew Flinders
Petrie, famed English archaeologist, affirmed Houston’s
view of the Nubian origin of pre-dynastic Egypt when it
was stated in 1939, “The pioneer among British
Egyptologists, Sir Flinders Petrie, who excavated in the
Thebaid, was convinced that the basic elements of
Egyptian pre-dynastic cultural development came into
Egypt from the southeast, near the Red Sea, but that the
rulers of the highly creative old Kingdom dynasties were
of Nubian origin."4 Brooks-Bertram has
tracked down those references along with those of Book
II in a truly superb job. One seeks to ponder what is
their destiny or task in life. Brooks-Bertram’s task has
been to unearth and give rebirth to the legacy of a
pioneer Africana scholar, Drusilla Dunjee-Houston. May
her example be the paradigm for teaching Black children
to see beauty in themselves and that the future is
limitless when you know who you are.
Dunjee-Houston’s
pedagogy can be summed up thusly:
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Cushites were the founders of world culture
and civilization.
Cushites were a global people.
The
Matriarchy was a central component of
African civilization.
Teaching African history is necessary for
balanced human progress. |
Contemporary
scientific finds continue to validate Dunjee-Houston’s
thesis. Mitocondrial DNA traces man’s origin to an
African woman. Recently a team of anthropologists led by
an Ethiopian found a 3.3 million year old fossil
child linking her to Dinkinesh of 3.0 million years
earlier. Dunjee-Houston’s Book II is not the ranting of
an un-informed armchair scholar. It is the work of an
informed, nurtured, tested student of history, having
access to the latest documents of history, regardless of
academic denials. Knowing the prejudices of her day
Dunjee-Houston bought many of her books she needed in
her quest for accuracy, as well as, utilizing her
father’s library of 2000 to 3000 volumes. Dunjee-Houston
went on to tackle the malady of gender bias.
Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham in her article, “African-American Women’s
History and the Metalanguage of Race (1995, p. 17)
records the type of issues Dunjee-Houston confronted,
“On the other hand, we should challenge both the
overdeterminancy of race vis-a-vis social relations
among blacks themselves and conceptions of the black
community as harmonious and monolithic. The historic
reality of racial conflict in America has tended to
devalue and discourage attention to gender conflict
within black communities and to tensions of class or
sexuality among black women. The totalizing tendency of
race precludes recognition and acknowledgment of
intragroup social relations as relations of power. With
its implicit understandings, shared cultural codes, and
inchoate sense of a common heritage and destiny, the
metalanguage of race resounds over and above a plethora
of conflicting voices. But it cannot silence them.”
While retrieving
the lost archives of Dunjee-Houston where Origin of
Civilization from the Cushites was carefully placed in a
pink box for a scholar with the probing eye of a
doctoral mind to restore to modern investigation, we
should note the following. The Cushitic background and
origin of the ancient Egyptians recorded by Dunjee-Houston
has been confirmed by Cheikh Anta Diop’s 12 categories
of evidence of their African origins. Fifty years before
Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1984) and a
generation before George G.M. James Stolen Legacy
(1954) while predating Diop’s African Origin of
Civilization: Myth or Reality? (1974) by 40 years;
Dunjee-Houston pioneered African-centered
historiography.
While operating
“Outside Academia” as Dr. Jacob H. Carruthers noted,
Dunjee-Houston was not limited by the fetters of racism
that lanquished in university halls seeking to suppress
the historical greatness of a people. Multi-dimensional,
Multi-disciplinary scholars, seminary students,
curriculum specialists and biographical researchers all
have the daunting task of further studying Drusilla
Dunjee-Houston’s historical endeavors. Dunjee-Houston is
indeed the foremother of Africana historical writing and
research. She sought to burst asunder vestiges of
notions of the “Dark Continent” in both academia and
among the lay populace. Wonderful Ethiopians Book II:
Origin of Civilization from the Cushites created a
wedding between the adherents of the Garvey movement and
the Harlem Literary Renaissance. It shared its birth
with the Negro Society for Historical Research, the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the
global researches of Arthur A. Schomburg, Joel A. Rogers
and Willis N. Huggins.
Book II was a
precursor to the findings of Bruce Williams at Chicago’s
Oriental Institute. Williams’ findings make the claim
that Nubia was the birthplace of pharaonic civilization
several generations before the rise of the first
historic Egyptian dynasty. Even more startling is the
fact that advanced political organization, i.e.,
kingship, the monarchy, and religion was not believed to
have come to Nubia, or anywhere south of Egypt, for
another 2,500 years. Nubia preceded Egypt by 300 years.
Ivan Van Sertima, founder of the Journal of African
Civilizations, has said of Nubia, “The discovery of
a black kingdom in the Nile Valley, which precedes by
several generations the first dynasty in Egypt and in
which were found the main religious and royal symbols
that were to dominate Egypt throughout its history,
crowns all the efforts of all Afrocentric historians of
the past century. This Black kingdom, the first in the
Nile Valley, dated 3,300 B.C. is also the first to
develop the hieroglyphic system. There is no doubt about
whether civilization came from the north or up from the
south.”5
Drusilla Dunjee-Houston
was keenly aware of bias against women as she sought a
career as a historian. Brooks-Bertram outlines some of
those struggles in her editorial comments. Dunjee-Houston’s
book should not be categorized as “Vindicationist.”
Dunjee-Houston was re-establishing the “missing pages of
world history,” as Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dean of
Africana Studies, often remarked. In the introduction
Asa G. Hilliard III again best encapsulated Dunjee-Houston
in saying, “One can only imagine this great scholar with
the benefit of the internet, computers, graduate
assistants, and networks of colleagues with similar
interests and priorities at her disposal.”6
Finally, Dunjee-Houston
was among intellects across the African Diaspora who
made it their primary mission to defend the integrity
and historical legacy of Africa from anti-African
propaganda and false scholarship. So inspiring was the
Cushites of old, Paul Elizabeth Hopkins in her novel
One Blood serialized in the Colored American
Magazine, from March 1901 and November 1903, gave a
fictionalized account of them. It was Dunjee-Houston who
delved into the writings of George Rawlinson, Arnold
Heeren and John D. Baldwin to document their historical
record. It is also possible that Dunjee-Houston may have
examined Edward Wilmot Blyden’s seminal article, “The
Negro in Ancient History,” published in the Methodist
Quarterly Review in January 1869. One wonders what
other Black female historians of the past will we be
able to unlock from the recesses of lost memory and
time. Dunjee-Houston’s Wonderful Ethiopians of the
Cushite Empire, Book II: Origin Civilization from the
Cushites is long overdue. It seeks to document the
record of African people in World history.
Endnotes
[1] Davidson,
Basil. (1994). “The Ancient World and Africa: Whose
Roots?” in The Search for Africa History, Culture,
Politics, New York: Random House, pp. 319-320.
2 Dieulafoy,
Maurice. (N.D.). L’Acropolede Suse, pp. 27, 46, pp.
102-115.
3 Hooten, E.A.
(1931). Up From The Ape, New York, p. 592.
4.Flinders Petrie,
Mathew. (1939). The Making of Egypt, London: Sheldon
Press, Chapter 8, The Dynastic Conquest, pp. 65-68;
Chapter 12, “The Pyramid Age,” pp. 105-112.
5 Van Sertima,
Ivan. (1982). “Editorial,” Egypt Revisited: Journal
of African Civilization, Vol.4, No. 2, p. 6.
6 Bertram, Peggy
Brooks. Editor. (2007). Wonderful Ethiopians of the
Cushite Empire, Book II: Origin of Civilization from the
Cushites, Introduction, p. xiii.
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Bio- Sketch
Drusilla Dunjee Houston
(1876 – 1941) was a multi-talented African American
woman whose major efforts were directed toward the
redemption of the role of Africans in the development of
world civilization. The daughter of Lydia Taylor and
John William Dunjee, Drusillas was born in Winchester,
Virginia in 1876. her father counted among his friends
Frederick Douglass and Blanche K. Bruce. Houston lived
in Minneapolis, Minnesota and finally settled down in
Oklahoma. In McAlester, Oklahoma she opened the
McAlester Seminary—an educational institution which she
maintained for a dozen years. Although history was her
first love, Houston worked with her brother Roscoe
Dunjee (1883-1965), the editor of The Black Dispatch—an
Oklahoma City weekly newspaper.
While her only
known published work is Wonderful Ethiopians of the
Ancient Cushite Empire (1926), Houston was a
prolific writer. In addition to Wonderful Ethiopians, she wrote
many others, several of which may be lost. Nonetheless,
she was probably the only woman or man who wrote a
multi-volume history of the ancient Cushites of
Ethiopia. Some of her other works that were never
published include Origin of Civilization,
Origin of Aryans, Astounding Last African Empires,
and a number of other volumes which she called the
"Wonderful Ethiopians Series.” Book I of Wonderful
Ethiopians was republished in its entirety in 1985
by Black Classic Press, supplemented with an
introduction, afterword, and commentary by
Coates, Asa G. Hilliard III and James G. Spady,
respectively.
The "Final Word" of
Book I of
Wonderful Ethiopians concludes as follows:
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So
fascinating and vital has the world
considered these classic stories that they
are still the commanding literature of Aryan
college life everywhere; for strange as it
may seem the most powerful branches of the
so-called Aryan race, as can be indisputably
proven, are as well as the African
Ethiopians, descendants of Cushite Ethiopian
blood. Another volume of this work (Book II)
gives more authentic information upon this
subject than any other book extant, in it
has been interwoven the undeniable proofs of
the Cushite origin of western Europe, linked
with the intense drama that was the
foundation of the Greek legends |
Dr. Peggy
Brooks-Bertram, 81 years later, has made Book II of
Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire, a
reality.
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To
order a copy of Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient
Cushite Empire,
call: (716) 829-6047 (daytime) / (716)
832-7928 (evenings) * * * *
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posted 15 June 2007 |
