AFRICA A Voyage of Discovery in HD: Different but Equal - Episode 1/8 - Basil Davidson

Africa A Voyage of Discovery - Different But Equal - Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson's seminal documentary series 'Africa A Voyage of Discovery' challenges the long held beliefs that Africa had 'no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences'. The series presents a pan-African conception of history from the origins of Egypt and Nubia to the liberation movements that Basil Davidson was familiar with, in newly independent nations Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

When Greek Historian Herodotus visited Ancient Egypt he described the civilization he saw there as 'different but equal'. Episode one shows that some of the world's greatest early civilizations have their origins in black Africa, including those along the Nile Valley. The episode includes interviews with Senegalese mathematician, philosopher and Egyptology Cheikh Anta Diop and explores the growth of African civilizations in West and Northeast Africa.

Basil Davidson was an acclaimed writer on the subject of African history having written more than 30 books on the subject before he died in 2010. His works are required reading in many African, British and US universities & is often used as the framework for many Black history courses worldwide.

Basil Davidson's Africa A Voyage of Discovery series premiered at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 20th October 1983, with a wonderful reception hosted by the Nigerian Permanent Mission to the UN.

The Africa A Voyage of Discovery series was shot and edited over a 2 year period beginning in 1981. During this period the accompanying book The Story of Africa was also written by Basil Davidson.

["Africa" Theme Music and water splashing]

["Africa" Theme Music]

Just over 100 years ago, a wandering prospector,

a German by origin called Karl Mauch, searching for gold,

came through these remote hills of a long trail,

and stumbled on this.

He was the first white man ever to see it.

And what he'd found, though he didn't know,

were the largest man-made structures in any part of old Africa,

south of the valley of the Nile.

Narrator: What were these mysterious ruins found so unexpectedly in the far interior of Africa?

About the ancient history of the black peoples,

nothing was remembered in the outside world, or even known.

Today, at last, we're beginning to learn.

We know now that these great buildings stood at the heart of a powerful black kingdom.

Within these almost overwhelming walls,

the kings lived in royal seclusion.

Adding to their mystery, according to the nature of kings.

Invested with a religious, as well as a temporal power,

they were believed to embody the whole welfare of their people.

Narrator: A stone-built city in the heart of Africa.

And yet, the white people who first saw it were so blinded by their prejudices

that they could not believe the evidence of their own eyes.

Rather than face the possibility that Africans might have a history of their own,

they fabricated exotic explanations,

and imagined fantastic rites in honor of far away monarchs

like King Solomon, and the Queen of Sheba.

The famous German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, set the tone.

Though he'd never been to Africa, and knew nothing of its people,

this was his publicly expressed opinion in 1831:

Voiceover: "This is the land where men are children.

A land lying beyond the daylight of self-conscious history,

and enveloped in the black cover of night.

At this point, let us forget Africa.

Not to mention it again.

For Africa is no historical part of the world."

Narrator: Hegel was not alone.

His views were echoed widely.

An English explorer who did know Africa, and had studied some of its customs and languages,

Richard Burton, had this to say:

Voiceover: "The study of the negro is the study of man's rudimental mind.

He would appear rather a degeneracy from the civilized man

than a savage rising to the first step,

were it not for his total incapacity for improvement.

He has not the ring of the true mettle.

There is no rich nature for education to cultivate.

He seems to belong to one of those childish races, never rising to man's estate,

who fall like worn-out links from the great chain of animated nature."

Narrator: Another famous explorer, Samuel Baker,

who passed through this very district in his search for the source of the Nile,

wrote in his memoirs:

Voiceover: "Human nature viewed in its crudest state as seen amongst African savages

is quite on the level of that of the brute,

and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog.

There is neither gratitude, pity, love, or self-denial.

No idea of duty, no religion, nothing but covetousness,

ingratitude, selfishness, and cruelty."

Narrator: In a manner which seems quite unforgivable today,

Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries preferred to forget what their forebears

had known very well: that kingdoms flourished in West Africa,

which were as sumptuous and well governed as any in medieval Europe itself.

What is more, the reports of traders and diplomats who visited these kingdoms

assumed no attitudes of racial superiority.

Racism, in fact, is a rather modern sickness.

Nothing more clearly illustrates the change that was to come

than the European art of the renaissance, and earlier still.

[Music]

White and black take their place in these paintings with equal dignity.

There's no hint here of what a later world was to call "human nature in its crudest state".

And this acceptance of equality between black and white had also been a keynote of the middle-ages.

Among the revered saints of central Europe was the black martyr, St. Maurice.

As we shall see, he's one of the heroes of this story.

What then was the cause of this enormous change in white attitudes

from equality to racist prejudice?

History gives one dominating reply: the Atlantic trade in slaves.

Based in strong castles on the West African coast, the nations of Europe vied with each other

in the massive removal of millions of captured men and women.

Their guns were not pointed at Africa,

which was seldom regarded as a source of danger, but out to sea.

Ready to face rival ships, suddenly appearing over the horizon.

Africans, of course, have not been the only victims of racism and color prejudice.

But if, as I believe, they suffered more acutely than the other peoples of the world,

the reason lies here.

For over 300 years, this magnificent coast was the scene of organized and systematic cruelty.

Year after year, black people were dragged from their homes

into the white man's world of misery and degradation.

[Music]

They were presented as less than human.

Objects for buying and selling, like cattle.

Against whom any act of violence and debasement was justified.

Wherever the slave trade spread its ruin, the stability and fabric of African life were destroyed.

But something else was also destroyed.

And that was the mutual respect, which had previously existed between white and black.

But after all, the slave trade ended a long time ago.

Surely it's time to think again.

Those old ideas about black inferiority were completely wrong, without foundation.

As it happens, modern science has given us a vast fund of new and reliable knowledge,

which shows that the black peoples do indeed have a history of their own

as rich and strange, as long and sometimes surprising as any major branch of the human family.

Narrator: On the high plateau of Central Africa, in what is now modern Zimbabwe,

stand the Matopo hills.

Large numbers of leopards inhabit these rock formations,

which in their strange mystery and shape seem to take us back to the carvings

of ancient African history.

To the people of this region, this unearthly landscape has always been a sacred place,

and still is to this day.

Tucked away in this Matopo hills, there are messages from the very dawn of history.

This is the Inswatugi cave.

One of the many rock shelters in the Matopos that were decorated by the people who lived here

in ancient times.

These truly marvelous rock paintings were inspired by motives that we don't know.

Probably it was a variety of motives, as with all great art.

Those distant peoples who faced the wild wilderness of primeval Africa,

must surely have felt the need for psychological and spiritual reassurance,

as well as for magic to safeguard their cattle.

And their artists, so long ago, clearly loved to portray the animals they knew.

Narrator: The land was ideally suited by its climate for man and beast to prosper.

And even today, perhaps 3 or 4,000 years later,

it's easy to recognize diker, kudu, antelope, and giraffe.

The arid wilderness of the great Sahara, 3,000 miles to the north,

could hardly be in greater contrast.

Yet here in the 1950s, even more surprising evidence was found of early African history.

Today, the place belongs to the creatures of the desert.

Lizards, scorpions, and snakes that can survive the searing temperatures of this thirsty land.

One of the driest and most desolate regions on Earth.

Water is the rarest and most precious commodity,

yet even here it must once have flowed in abundance.

[Music]

The revelation of these rock paintings in the Tassali mountaints of the Algerian Sahara

just 30 years ago astonished the world.

[Music]

Whole communities of people, who are obviously African in origin,

had created marvelous galleries of ancient art depicting most vividly

the life of the Green Sahara, as it was once have been.

First we see hunting folk, and the animals they lived among.

The clearest proof that this region of the Sahara long ago teemed with wild game.

The earliest paintings may be 7 or 8,000 years old.

But not all the people who inhabited this huge region were nomadic hunters.

This horse, complete with saddle and bridal,

points to the development of transport systems and traders.

And this ox-drawn plow, to the planting and growing of crops.

Whether for war or sport, elaborate chariots came into use.

While the clothing of these people bears a striking resemblance to the tunics of ancient Egypt.

The evidence of these paintings suggests a continuous community of peoples living right across the Sahara

from the Atlantic to the valley of the Nile.

Then, some four and a half thousand years ago,

the climate began to undergo a disastrous change.

Gradually, the Sahara lost its rainfall, its animal life,

and finally its people.

[Singing in a foreign language]

Abandoning their increasingly arid pastures,

more and more people from the Sahara had to join their foreigners,

and follow the trails in search of a secure supply of water.

Some headed for the tropical rainforests which lay to the south and west.

Others moved east towards the valley of the river Nile.

Fed by Africa's greatest lake,

the Nile runs north for over 4,000 miles before reaching its outflow in the Mediterranean sea.

It's the longest river on Earth, and no river anywhere pushes on so relentlessly through

mile after mile of vast and rainless desert regions, after it's been joined by the blue Nile

tumbling down from the mountain plateau of Ethiopia.

[People talking]

But the Nile is more than a great river.

It's a whole library of the history we're looking for.

From the earliest times of human settlement along the river some 10,000 years ago,

the Nile was the giver of life to ancient communities who came to its banks,

and found on fertile soil that was enriched unfailingly year by year by the flood of silt.

Those early people were among the ancestors of the Egyptians and the Sudanese of today.

Others may have come from the Middle East.

But the archaeological evidence combines to show that the main lines of incoming migration

were from the southwest and the west.

In other words, from the African communities of the Sahara.

[Music]

5,000 years ago, this homeland had already become the scene of a civilization

in many ways unmatched anywhere else in the ancient world.

[Music]

This is where we have to begin.

In the Egypt of the pharaohs.

In the African land that was the gift of the God of the Nile.

It's easy enough to believe within these corridors, built to a gigantic scale,

and yet wonderfully proportioned, that you've entered a world sprung complete from the

lap of the gods.

Egypt of the pharaohs was the greatest, and the oldest, and the most inventive of all

the high civilizations of antiquity.

And it flourished for 3,000 years.

It set a pattern and example for people near and far.

But where were its roots? Its origins? Its starting point?

Most of us have believed, or have been taught that the glories of the pharaohs

could never have been created by African people or African ideas,

because it's been said Africans could never have built a high civilization.

Narrator: Here reigned, for dynasty after dynasty,

the kings who wore the double crown.

The combined crown of Upper-Egypt, and of the Delta.

But what had they to do with Africa?

How could this grand hierarchy of gods and spirits have anything in common with

the superstitious mumblings of the black peoples of Inner-Africa?

Wandering among the treasures of the Cairo museum,

it's easy to think of the Egypt of the pharaohs as a civilization complete within itself,

owing little or nothing to outside influences from whatever source,

entirely its own creation.

And I imagine that most visitors conclude as they listen to their guides,

that a statue such as this of the young king Tutankhamen,

may have turned very black in the course of centuries,

but could not have been a black man in the first place.

It's a view which is now increasingly under-challenged,

not least from African historians and archaeologists.

One of the more outspoken of these is professor Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal,

who has made a special study of the origins of the people of ancient Egypt.

Narrator: That particular painting, however, is a rare exception.

The only one, as far as I know, that so clearly makes the professor's point.

For the most part, the ancient Egyptians had themselves portrayed as reddish-pink.

But, of course, they intermarried with Asians,

and even more with other Africans.

Many of their noble-ladies were Nubians, and lovingly portrayed as such.

This painting comes from the tomb of Hemaka,

clearly a black lady, with a handmaiden behind her, just as surely white.

It followed that the royal children were often black as well,

as was King Senusret, seen here wearing the white crown of Upper-Egypt.

Or this pharaoh of unknown name, but obviously of high prestige in his time,

and just as clearly African.

Elephantine island, in the Nile, marked the border between Egypt and Nubia,

and was a place of great sanctity in ancient times.

Among the travelers who came here were the earliest European historians, the Greeks.

Men like Herodotus, brought up as he was in the classical tradition,

which regarded the various races of the known world as different, but equal.

The Greeks knew Egypt well, and firmly believed that the original Egyptians were black people,

who had come from the South to settle the land of the Nile.

But Herodotus himself got no further than this.

He was prevented by the first cataract from traveling further South.

And so he never saw the huge temple, which Ramses II chose to build here at Abu Simbel,

further south into Inner-Africa than any other great monument built by

the pharaohs to celebrate their power.

A few years ago, with immense ingenuity, the entire structure was lifted to a new site,

above the artificial lake, which has drowned all the sites of the most ancient kingdoms that

flourished here in Nubia, even before the first of the pharaohs.

But why should he have built this great temple so far to the South?

Perhaps because his queen, Nefertari, was herself a Nubian.

And also because these were the people, the people of the south,

whom he wanted to impress with evidence of the prisoners he had taken in far-away Seria

and Asia Minor.

Even mighty temples, like this one, have to be seen against the background origins of

ancient Egyptian civilization.

And those origins, in the light of modern science,

were above all African.

No matter what ideas or customs the pharaohs may have found in the Asian lands they conquered,

Egypt's beginnings were in the South.

In this Inner-Africa, which the ancient Egyptians called the land of the Gods,

of the African Gods whom they revered as their guardian spirits.

Narrator: The time came when Egyptian conquests ended.

400 years later, it was the turn of the kings of the South, of Nubia,

who now marched North to subdue the power of Egypt itself.

And here is the most famous of those mighty kings of the South,

recognized by the peoples of that time, the 7th century BC, as among the masters of the world.

This one, as it happens, received a favorable mention in the bible,

in the book of kings, as the emperor of Kush,

and of all Egypt, whose name was Taharqa.

["Africa" Theme Music]

Narrator: By 650 BC, the Nubian kings who had subdued Egypt,

were ready to withdraw to the South, to Napata,

and then to a new capital in their kingdom of Kush at Meroe.

And there we must follow them if we are to understand the history of this Inner-Africa,

which exercised so strong an early influence on ancient Egyptian civilization,

and which later was to reflect that influence.

The city of Meroe was situated 1,000 miles south of the old Egyptian frontier, far into Inner-Africa.

I never come here without a sense of wonder,

for right ahead and in the midst of this pitiless desert,

there stands one of Africa's great historical surprises.

[Music]

The remnants of a lost civilization, standing across the skyline

as though shipwrecked on the sands of time.

[Music]

These are the pyramid tombs of the kings and queens of Meroe,

who reigned and were buried here through more than 6 centuries.

[Music]

Long ruined by tomb robbers and by time,

the pyramids are being restored, and even reconstructed.

[Talking in a foreign language]

Meroitic civilization still presents many puzzles.

One is that the monarchs of Kush built their pyramid tombs

long after such monuments had ceased to be raised in Egypt.

Partly because the pyramids of Meroe are neither as old, nor as massive as those of Egypt,

it's been assumed that all this was a mere provincial copy of that greater civilization.

In fact, it was far more than a copy.

The similarities are there, but other aspects of Meroitic culture are found nowhere else.

Another intriguing question is the relationship between the ancient people of Meroe,

kings, queens and citizens, and the modern Nubians who live in this region today.

We can still see their stylized portraits in stone,

but what did they really look like?

I asked Dr. Ali Osmon of the University of Khartoum.

Obviously they look like me, of course.

I'm a Nubian.

Um, very much the Nubians of today are the Nubians of yesterday.

We've got to understand that rather carefully,

because the Nubian culture actually have not yet been very much explored, the Nubians from within.

I, the Nubian, what I do and how I behave, won't have changed that much from what

the individual Nubians would have done.

But the influence that were common on us as Nubiens started as early as we could

the Egyptian coming down to the Muslim had an influence.

Have been changing.

That does not mean that the Nubien have changed.

Narrator: But this identity has had to survive many foreign incursions,

and even conquests.

At one time, Meroe fell before the invading armies of Axum,

another ancient kingdom, high in the mountains of what is now Ethiopia.

In more recent times, the Turks and the British have sent in their armies of occupation.

Most lasting of all has been the influence of Islam.

But through all these changes, the Nubians have done more than retain their identity.

Just as they absolved influences from elsewhere,

so they too have had a deep cultural impact on their neighbors.

They build now as they've always built.

In all probability, just as the people of Meroe built,

with an old, effort saving rhythm.

Constructing mud walls to defy the scorching heat of the Nubian summer.

Their beds are no different from those of their ancient ancestors,

like this one in Khartoum museum, with a pattern of headrest,

which is much the same here, and right across Africa, as those of 5,000 years ago.

[Speaking in a foreign language]

And the traditional clan marks, cut into this Nubian's face,

can be seen exactly reproduced on a stone relief, which decorates one of the pyramids,

just a couple of miles away.

It's been said that Meroe was the Birmingham of ancient Africa.

And that wasn't altogether a flight of fancy.

For the people of Meroe had a very extensive iron making industry.

Just consider this enormous pile of industrial waste--of slag.

It proves that among the major activities of the people of this flourishing city was to smelt iron.

And here is a bit of the residue.

Narrator: A few yards away stood the great temple of Amon, Meroitic,

although dedicated to a very Egyptian God.

And somewhere in the sand, if I can find it,

there's another remarkable fragment of Inner-African originality.

Here it is. A stone inscribed with a fully-operative script

that was invented for the African language of Meroe in the 3rd or 2nd century BC.

23 signs for letters, and a word divider.

One of the earliest alphabetical ways of writing invented anywhere in the world.

And still a puzzle for modern scholarship.

[Music]

In wealthy houses surrounding the temple were found

some of the comforts and enjoyments of Meroitic life.

The style of these pots is uniquely Nubian, and repeated nowhere else in the Nile valley.

Half a day's journey from Meroe by modern transport,

a little further into the sand and rock of the Butana desert,

there stands another complex of stone buildings.

This time dedicated to the Gods of Kush, and not to the Gods of Egypt.

Nowadays, this place is called Musawarat.

[Music]

Strange hints remain among the ruins, like this old lion in the sand.

But what were these buildings for?

Perhaps the kings of ancient Kush strolled beneath these colonnades.

Historians have offered this or that explanation.

My own is that the principle function of this unexampled and powerful building,

made it unique in the ancient world.

This function, I think, was for the taming and training of the great African elephant.

That seems to be the best explanation of the remarkable stone ramps, which occur here, like this one,

and that one over there, and another long one going over there.

Narrator: We can accept that the taming of the African elephant,

bigger and more difficult to handle than its Indian cousin,

had become a speciality of the Kushites of Meroe.

With their skills, they converted this, the greatest of Africa's wild animals,

into the military tank of the ancient world.

When Hannibal of Carthage invaded Roman Italy across the Alps,

he had 38 war elephants in his army.

The skills of the elephant trainers of Musawarat may well have contributed to that legendary feat.

These temple walls provide a surprising reminder of much greener times,

with abundant pastures for domestic grazing.

All that has vanished, as the desert advanced from the Sahara,

the civilization of Meroe disappeared.

Today, away from the banks of the Nile, only nomads can survive.

This well has never been known to run dry.

The scene is exactly as it was when I first came here some 30 years ago,

and I doubt if it's changed very much in a thousand years.

Proud and self-sufficient, these people seem untouched by the modern world.

It's rare to see a single mass-produced item among their belongings,

or anything made of plastic.

It's as if they share a determination to rely on nothing but themselves and their animals.

Visiting Europeans have usually made the mistake of judging the degree of civilization

among different peoples by the number of their possessions.

[Talking in a foreign language]

The ancient traditions of these nomads reach back to the very beginnings of history.

[Talking in a foreign language]

And should they still remember their ancient Gods,

those too are still here, not yet swallowed up by the encroaching sand.

Here at Naga, there's an even more remarkable mixture of local and imported influences.

King Natakamani triumphs over his prisoners in a very Egyptian style.

The python, on the other hand, was an Inner-African religious symbol,

regarded in many lands down to this day as a figure of spiritual power.

And this representation of the lion God looks quite Indian,

with his 3 heads and 4 arms, but he too is uniquely Meroitic.

The kingdom of Kush collapsed in the 4th century AD.

But evidence has recently come to light that some of its people migrated across the planes of Kordofan

towards the Nuba Hills.

[Music]

Less influenced by Islam than the Nubians along the Nile,

the people of this region have become of considerable interest to historians,

because they may be closer in their way of life to the Nubians of old.

[Whistle blowing and chattering]

As it happened, we chanced on a special day among these Nuba people, a bit like a cup final.

This is Africa as it can still be found away from tourists, motor cars, and big cities,

celebrating in its own fashion.

A number of cultural links have been found to suggest that these people

may well share a common heritage with distant ancestors who lived in the time of the

kings and queens of Kush.

Village teams, each wearing its own distinctive color, have gathered from a wide area

to take part in one of the oldest of all sporting events,

but also a passion among the Nuba, wrestling.

So intricate are the rules governing not only the contest itself,

but also exactly who may wrestle with whom on the basis of family relationships,

that it's almost impossible for a visitor to follow all the moves.

But for the historian, there's another close relationship between the Nuba wrestling of today,

and that of ancient times.

Dating from around 2,500 BC, these vivid paintings have been copied from an Egyptian tomb

at Beni Hasan.

[Clapping and whistles blowing]

[Chanting]

Narrator: Increasingly, it seems that these people can indeed trace their past

back to civilizations in antiquity.

And their ancient sport provides one more small piece of evidence of a continuous

social tradition that's lasted for centuries.

Yet these are the very people whom the 19th century explorer, Samuel Baker,

described as human nature in its crudest state, not to be compared with the noble character of the dog.

[Cheering and clapping]

After the contest comes the celebration.

[Clapping and singing]

Some of these Nuba girls may well be Muslim,

but it's no part of their tradition to hide their faces behind veils.

They have a pride and place within society,

in line with the customs of old Nubia,

and even of Meroe itself, whose rulers were often women.

In another part of the Nuba hills, just a few miles to the southeast,

the teachings of Islam have made no headway at all.

The people of these villages have quite consciously chosen to reject either Western or Islamic dress.

Free spirits under an African sky, young girls dance as much for their own pleasure

as for the spectators, breathing life into these astonishingly similar images of Nubian dancing girls,

performing for the pharaohs 5,000 years ago.

Famed for their grace and beauty, they had an honored place in the life of ancient Egypt.

[Music and chanting]

That the one should still be regarded as primitive,

and the other as part of the world's cultural heritage,

reflects on the ignorance and prejudice of the modern world.

And not at all on them.

[Shouting in unison]

On the day that i visited Meroe, a pyramid was being rebuilt.

Not to the aid of bulldozers and cranes,

but by the traditional techniques used in their original construction.

As each great shaft of masonry was hauled up the ramp and pushed into place,

for me, the continuity of African history was brought directly alive.

The Egypt of the pharaohs did not spring whole and complete from its own local genius.

It owed much to Inner-Africa.

In the years ahead, more evidence will surely come to light,

which would emphasize that it's to the whole of the Nile that we must look,

and to lands lying far in the interior, for the source and origin of these great civilizations

that have flourished along its banks.

The last of these pyramid tombs was completed around AD 340.

Then came a time of change.

Meroe disappeared, and after the middle of the 6th century,

this old civilization underwent another transformation,

and one that brings us closer to our own world.

From the north, Christianity spread south into the lands of Nubia.

This was once the far famed monastery of St. Simeon, near Aswan.

The faded frescos on the chapel roof can only hint at its past magnificence.

But in the 1960s, by a stroke of great good fortune,

the full glory of medieval Nubian painting was suddenly revealed.

The story behind the finding, and the saving, of these wonderful mural paintings is almost a miracle.

As the waters of Lake Nasser rose to engulf the old Christian Nubian city of Faras,

archaeologists managed to dig down to the level of the long-buried walls of its cathedral,

founded in AD 707.

And pulling away the dry sand, they saw what nobody had seen for centuries,

these paintings, and removed them in the nick of time.

Now safely in Khartoum museum, they glow once again with their distant message of art and piety.

[Chanting]

Narrator: The Christian civilization of Nubia was one of wealth and comfort.

A visitor in the 10th century, Ibn Selim Al-Aswani,

described the city of Soba, one of Christian Nubia's three capitals,

as having fine buildings, spacious houses, churches with much gold,

and cool, delightful gardens.

He might well have added priceless works of ecclesiastical art.

Splendidly preserved by the dry sand,

these figures take us directly to the heart of Nubian Christianity.

Here is the nativity scene, with the virgin and the archangel Gabriel,

portrayed in the conventional style, and unnatural skin color,

of the Byzantine church, from which, of course, the Nubians took their beliefs.

Over here are the three kings of orient, riding to Bethlehem, one of them clearly an African,

and down here is a Nubian princess looking, I must say, very much like the Nubians look today.

Narrator: These are portraits of Nubian bishops.

25 of them were listed in Fara's cathedral as having succeeded one another

from the 8th to the 11th centuries.

The line might have stretched right up to the present day,

so settled and secure did Christian Nubia appear.

But it was not to be.

This monastery did not simply fall into decay,

it was sacked by the Saracens in the year 1172.

The origins of that disaster lay not with the Christian Nubians, who'd been at peace for centuries

with their Muslim neighbors to the north.

The origins lay in Europe.

The first of the great crusades whose purpose was to recapture the holy places from the Muslims

set out in the year 1096.

Many knights fought for God's purposes.

Many others fought for those of Mormon.

As one crusade followed another, those first high purposes became corrupt.

The holy cause turned into a reckless rush for loot.

Very soon they provoked a massive reaction.

The holy war of Islam was launched under a brilliant Saracen general, Saladin.

From his great citadel in Cairo, Saladin set out to crush not only the European invaders,

but also, and this is something that a later world forgot, their African allies in the south.

Historians have moments of bubbling excitement when they find proofs of something

they'd only guessed to be true.

I almost jumped for joy when I first saw this small wooden plaque from Nubia.

For it's a unique proof of something that I'd guessed

that the Christian Nubians of 7 or 8 centuries ago also took part in the old wars of religion,

the crusades against conquering Islam.

And here you see a crusader from Nubia with his cross wearing chainmail and his sturdy steed,

just as we in Europe can still see portrayals of our own crusaders.

Narrator: In this old film taken half a century ago,

Nubian horsemen can still be seen in their chainmail.

The black crusaders of 800 years ago must have looked very similar

as they gathered at fortified monasteries before setting out on that disastrous venture.

Safe within his mighty Cairo citadel, Saladin was waiting to annihilate them.

And there came an end to Christianity in these lands.

An eclipse, so final and complete, that the world forgot, almost 'til now,

that Christian Nubia had ever existed.

Yet, distant echoes of that long lost epic can still be caught on the winds of history,

and in unexpected places.

[Bells tolling]

Narrator: The cathedral of Magdeburg, a famous capital of medieval Germany.

From here, in the year 1228, the German emperor Frederich led out his knights on the 6th crusade.

And a few years later, a new statue was raised to the patron saint of Magdeburg, St. Maurice.

Astonishingly, but beyond question, an entirely black St. Maurice.

Until then, the many statues of St. Maurice around western Europe

had invariably shown this military saint as white.

But here at Magdeburg, St. Maurice suddenly became black.

Unmistakably to my mind, the black knight of Christian Nubia,

Christ's warrior from the distant south.

So here his noble figure stands to this day.

Certainly the most important, perhaps the most moving sculpture

of an African in all the history of European art.

It was created and set up in this great German cathedral

to honor the fame and virtue of an African friend and ally,

different in face and form, but just as surely equal in dignity and human worth.

["Africa" Theme Music]