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TRUE MYTH
BLACK VIKINGS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
By Nashid Al-Amin Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Nashid Al-Amin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-6003-9
CHAPTER 1
THE ANCIENT WORLD RECONSIDERED
When we hear the term "Viking," the image that comes to mind most readily is that of a tall, blond, broad-shouldered, bearded white man dressed in animal skins, wearing a rounded helmet with horns protruding from either side of it. Many books written by Western scholars present illustrations of Norsemen thusly attired, and the few Viking films that have been made reinforce this image, although Vikings rarely, if ever, wore such helmets, or never actually wore them. Numerous books have chronicled the exploits of these vigorous peoples, also called Norsemen and Northmen, who swooped down from Scandinavia to wreak havoc on civilizations from the British Isles to Spain, Italy, France and Russia. That these Vikings or Norsemen left an indelible impact on the territories they scourged is undeniable; that they were all members of the white or "Nordic" race, however, is questionable, for ample evidence—evidence heretofore not unknown, strongly confirms that a substantial number of these peoples were black or dark-skinned.
Black-skinned will not always denote "African" in this work, although most people, especially Caucasians, seem to associate blackness of skin exclusively with Africa. However, there are numerous black-skinned Indians (from India), Indonesians, Burmese, Pacific islanders and Southeast Asians and, as will be shown, several millennia ago the earth's population was comprised of many more black-skinned peoples in these areas, as well as in Asia and Europe, generally. White historians and anthropologists have classified the populations of some of the aforementioned areas—including the black-skinned, so-called Aborigines of Australia—Caucasian by methods only they seem to understand, which has only added to confusion in those of us unacquainted with their intricate methods of categorization. Even new DNA technology has not clarified the issue, somehow arriving at the same conclusions that pre-DNA historians and scientists have asserted for two centuries or so in regard to race. The new DNA science has forced Eurocentric scholars and historians to grudgingly admit that the origin of Homo sapiens, or modern man, was Africa, but a number of them (although this theory is at least two centuries old) are still uncomfortable with this notion and continue to seek ways to revise it, rework it, disprove it to fit the Eurocentric racial models they have so long cherished.
I reject the classifying of obviously black-, brown-, and dark-pigmented people as Caucasian or white, as Eurocentric historians and scientists do the Aborigines, Indians, and historic peoples like the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians. And the reader who wishes to understand this humble work needs to understand that an element of the white race—or people who considered themselves "white," different, and perhaps superior to the dark races of mankind—introduced the theory of race, nurtured it after invading the territories of the darker races all over the earth, destroying civilizations and countless human beings in the process. They then wrote the books that most of us read depicting these deeds and assigning this or that people to one race or another. A plague arose, and continues to afflict most of the world: racism. Racism is the dominant malady infecting today's world—more than crime, drugs, pollution, weapons of mass destruction, poverty, cancer and war. Race and racism, in fact, seem to be at the root of most wars fought over the last thousand years or so, perhaps longer, obviously (at least to this writer) a factor in the first Crusade in 1096 when Christian Europe, with the blessing of Pope Urban II, invaded the Holy Land to wrest Jerusalem from the Infidels—dark-skinned, Muslim Turks and Saracens. European and American historians of course cite other causes for the wars Europeans have waged since the decline of Greece and the fall of Rome at the end of the 5th century, but even a cursory look at wars fought by Europeans outside the European continent would show them to have been expansionist and waged (when European countries were not fighting each other) against dark-skinned peoples.
Except, perhaps, for World War I and the Revolutionary War, race has been a factor in all of America's wars, beginning with the subjugation and near-genocide of Native American peoples in establishing what would become the United States.
Eurocentric historians and scholars almost never mention racism—that is, a collective white racial hatred toward non-white peoples—in their assessments of European colonization and warfare. They have excused European trespasses and the destruction of numerous non-Caucasian cultures and peoples as mere acts of economic necessity (for Europeans) or strategic utilitarianism or necessary evil, exhibiting not the slightest regard for the lives of the affected populations in the areas overrun: Europe needed trade; Europe needed spices; Europe (or a particular European country) needed a trade route to the East; Europe needed raw materials; Europe (or particular European countries) needed slaves; Europe needed oil to maintain its industrial growth. The people who suffered the loss of their lands, way of life, resources, lives or particular civilization are less important than the needs of European nations. Their resultant fates go unnoted, or are mentioned in a brief afterthought at the end of a historian's chapter.
The most profitable pursuits by Europeans for trade, resources, slaves and other riches were into areas of the world populated by dark-skinned people—Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia, South America, the Caribbean, China, the isles of the Pacific. Yet, racism—the dehumanization of dark-skinned people in the minds of Europeans; their bold, and often undesired, intrusions into areas inhabited by dark-skinned populaces; their use of more modern weaponry to subdue these populaces; the guiltless slaughter of untold numbers of people—is never mentioned by historians who write of the events that we ingest in schools, universities and our own private readings which invariably present a one-sided picture: the European side.
We have become used to this presentation of history without realizing that another whole side is missing, practically unrecorded, unknown. Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of inhabitants in Europe, Canada, India, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and the United States—whatever our individual race or racial background—are westernized and attuned to Eurocentric thought and values. Most of the dark races of the world have not totally kicked free of the shackles of colonization, slavery, imperialism, fear and subjugation that they have lived under for the last five centuries. And the Whites of Europe and North America—having shaped our modern world and mores, having benefited from the injustices their ancestors wrought and continue to effect against the darker races of the world—have not let go of the racial animus that consumed their forefathers, no matter how enlightened, liberal or tolerant some may feel they are.
The scholars who write the histories we read are predominantly white and Eurocentric, and their writings present a Eurocentric view of history offering very little information on the contributions of black- or dark-skinned people to civilization. One method employed by Eurocentric historians to erase dark-skinned people from history is to declare them white, assert that this or that people were Caucasian—as they have done with the ancient Egyptians, Indians, Ethiopians, Australian Aborigines and others, which will be discussed further on in this work. It will also become apparent that Western scholars have ignored the presence of black- and dark-skinned, non-Caucasian people in Europe so that we think of Europe as always having been a continent inhabited exclusively by white-skinned people.
* * *
To assert that the Vikings or Norsemen were primarily black-skinned must cause the average reader to smile at this writer's naivete, a naivete certainly attributable to the publication of fairly recent books and scholarly articles by African-American and other non-white scholars who have emerged over the last three or four decades to challenge the oft-repeated assertions of white historians whose numerous works have shaped the consciousness of most of the world for the last several centuries. Our nurturing by historians and scientists has been masterfully accomplished and we believe, for instance, that Asia has always been inhabited by Mongoloid or "yellow" people; Europe has always been inhabited by Caucasoid or white people; and that Africa has, for the most part, always been inhabited by Negroid or black people who, the analyses contend, have never contributed much of anything to civilization. We look at the present distributions of races over the continents they dominate today and assume that these distributions have always been constant—especially the Caucasian presence in Europe. Blacks, scholars and scientists have drilled into us, could not have survived the colder climates of Europe and northern Asia.
While the writers of scientific and historical treatises seem to be caught up in the trend of moving away from racial considerations in their writing, enlightened by the new science of DNA and what the science reveals about racial intermixing, so much damage has been done by the centuries-old focus on race by Eurocentric scholars that suddenly replacing this focus with a supposed race-free veneer would merely increase the damage and confusion wrought by three centuries of Eurocentric, race-based scholarship. Blacks and other dark-skinned people who have been written out of history would still not find themselves in it. Whites or white nations who perpetrated crimes against them could not be singled out and condemned in absentia for racial crimes against humanity. Eurocentric writers whose racial theories we have inculcated, whose often deliberate fabrications have obscured the blackness of some civilizations, would go unexposed and unvilified. An expression that has become popular in the United States over the last two or three decades is "Let's move on"—an aphorism implying that the past is done and the present should be concerned with forging a new future. But to simply move on would not rectify the damage that has been done over the past several centuries or reveal the falsehoods and omissions by the majority of Eurocentric scholars.
So this work will discuss race in terms we have come to understand, referring to the black, brown, red, yellow and white races that Eurocentric scholars originated and have drummed into us for three centuries that we have become accustomed to and which most of us still abide by. Only then, after considering what is presented in this work, might we be able "move on."
History should show us that the races of man have been constantly in flux and that over many millennia various peoples have migrated from one territory to another vanquishing, settling among and intermingling with the races they encountered, often spawning new races and acquiring or imposing new languages, customs and lore. Over the last two decades (although such a theory has existed for two centuries) it has been universally acknowledged by most scholars that true man first evolved in Africa and then migrated over untold millennia to nearly every part of the earth—including northern climes. His movement out of the Mother Continent was made easier during the last great ice age (Wurm glacial), beginning roughly 2,500,000 years ago (the Pleistocene Epoch) and lasting until about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Ocean and sea levels fell significantly and land-bridges were formed, connecting the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa; Italy with Sicily, and Sicily with North Africa, or close enough to North Africa that the two continents were separated by a narrow channel of water between them; northeastern Asia formed a wide land-bridge connecting with Alaska; and southeast Asia and Indonesia were joined in a more solid landmass which may have stretched to Australia. As well, many Greek isles were larger and there was a land-bridge connected to Asia Minor (i.e., Turkey); the Greater and Lesser Antilles (i.e., the Caribbean islands stretching from Cuba to Trinidad) may have been a solid landmass stretching from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico to northern South America; Japan and the Philippines may have merged with China; northern Japan may have been joined to Sakhalin Peninsula and northeastern Russia; the Red Sea and Persian Gulf may not have existed, joining Africa and southwestern Asia in one solid landmass, with Arabia sandwiched between them. The whole of northern Europe was covered by glacial ice as was much of northern Asia, and this was the prevailing condition on earth for more than two million years, until the glacial ice finally melted—raising sea levels and producing the present formations of continents and island land masses—only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
In 1989, a theory was developed by the late Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, strongly suggesting that the first "anatomically modern human beings" evolved in Africa 166,000 to 249,000 years ago (Washington Post, 27 Sep. 1991, "New Evidence of 'Eve'"). This was the controversial study which asserted that all human beings are ancestors of a single, African woman. Dr. Wilson's theory is hardly new. He and his colleagues compared a special DNA type passed down through the maternal line. Changes or mutations that DNA undergoes can be counted, and analysis showed that "the trunk of the tree was African" (op. cit.).
A rival theory insists that man did not evolve into Homo sapiens in Africa but left Africa as Homo erectus and evolved into true humans simultaneously in different parts of the earth (op. cit.). But whether Homo erectus or Homo sapiens walked out of Africa is not essential at this point. What is is that for as long as we have studied it, we've seen that the masses of humanity that flowed out of Africa have been black-skinned, and common sense should tell us that earliest man must have remained so for many millennia after he reached various territories in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas before climate or other still to be determined factors caused him to differentiate into other races which, over time, predominated in the regions he found himself in.
These earliest Homo sapiens, short and pygmy-like, are often referred to as "Negritos." These first humans spread from Africa (probably East Africa) to nearly all parts of the earth, and we must assume that they resembled, in complexion and physiognomy, the present-day pygmies of central Africa. They would have emerged during the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age if man were in existence 249,000 years ago, accepting Dr. Wilson's conclusion (although some believe that man has existed much longer). It must also be considered that the physiognomy of man began to differentiate—in musculature, dexterity, limb length, waviness of hair and skin tone (i.e., jet-black, dark-brown, blue-black, reddish-black, copper-colored, reddish-brown, and so on)—brought about by the inexorable forces of African nature which first brought true man into existence, and not by naturalistic forces outside of the African continent—although these must also be considered. However long these genetic alterations took to produce each physically altered human type (there is evidence of a Mongoloid characteristic in one or more present-day southern African tribes) and for each type to migrate out of Africa to some other part of the earth, those humans were essentially black-skinned and remained so for many millennia afterward in the areas they eventually settled.
We can fathom the extent of black-skinned humanity around the earth in the statements of historians and scholars who have long written of this reality, although their works and comments are largely overlooked today. In Why We Behave Like Human Beings, George A. Dorsey states:
Open your atlas to a map of the world. Look at the Indian Ocean: on the west, Africa; on the north, the three great southern peninsulas of Asia; on the east, a chain of great islands terminating in Australia. Wherever that Indian Ocean touches land, it finds dark-skinned people.... (44-45)
In a work entitled India, H.G. Rawlinson notes that German anthropologist Baron E. von Eickstedt—
... considers the oldest stratum, going back to an early post-glacial period [in India] to have been a dark-skinned group akin to the early Negroid stocks of Africa and Melanesia. These Indo-Negrids once covered the whole peninsula ... (my emphasis 9)
In The Arabs, Bertram Thomas states:
The original inhabitants of Arabia ... were not the familiar Arabs of our own time, but a very much darker people. A protonegroid belt of mankind stretched across the ancient world from Africa to Malaya. (my emphasis, 339)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TRUE MYTH by Nashid Al-Amin. Copyright © 2013 Nashid Al-Amin. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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