Simply Sue: Proud To Be English?
So you are proud to be English? Fine - but do remember that the English invaded Britain. They came from Germany.
After watching a television programme about the British National Party Sue Papworth was moved to write this brisk reminder of the facts of world history.
The bit of that BNP programme no-one seems to have commented on was their old leader saying the people of Africa and Asia have only ever “squatted in mud”.
Some mud! A lot of the stuff they built with it two or three thousand years ago is still standing.
Pears Cyclopaedia’s potted history of the earth in ten pages shows civilisation starting off to the East of the Mediterranean around 3,000 years ago. Europe doesn’t even get a mention until about 400 BC!
Egypt had a vast civilisation over 2,000 years BC, and he should look at the faces on some of their sculptures – Tutankhamun’s comes as giftwrap if the library’s too complicated to wade through. They certainly weren’t Europeans. Queen Tiye, Tut’s Mum, was sculpted in ebony for a very good reason. Take a look next time you're in Cairo.
And check the face of Rameses (that ruddy great figure on the front end of the Abu Simbel temple) next time you’re on a Nile Cruise. If that’s not a black African, I’m an aardvark.
And they could write in Egypt 2000 years before Homer, the first European poet. And he couldn’t. Write, that is –his stuff was passed down aurally for generations before it was. Rather like the music and stories of West African griots.
The first city with piped water and water-flushed loos was built around the same time. It was Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley – in present day Pakistan.
When the Romans arrived in Britain –around 2,000 years after the Egyptians were building better stuff than Huddersfield market hall - they found the Brits living in mud huts.
(The English didn’t poll up until after the Romans left. They invaded Britain. The English, that is. They came from Germany.)
Oh, and about the same time the Romans showed up here, China had a civil service that you had to get into by written examination. A bit like ours, here and now. They even had tea.
Christianity hit Africa before it got here. The Egyptian and Ethiopian churches were founded before 100AD. St. Augustine was an Algerian.
The Empire of Ghana (capital Timbuktu, I kid you not, big city, made of mud bricks) was at the height of its powers at the same time that Alfred was burning the cakes. In, as history tells us, a hut.
In the middle ages, we studied Arab philosophers, scientists and theologians like Avicenna and Averroes at Oxford -our very first university - because Europe hadn’t produced much in the way of scholars for about a thousand years. All that time was called The Dark Ages as Europe was shut for business and pretty well everything else but running about in warpaint, and if the Middle East hadn’t rescued the ideas of classical Greece, we wouldn’t have them now.
Civilisations come and go, as do Empires. They feed on each other, and grow out of each other. After a while, people just seem to forget how to do it in one place, as if they’ve got tired. It all dies down and pops up somewhere else.
But I’ll bet every single time, when it all fell apart they thought it was the fault of the buggers next door.
