The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire
It was once an historic and celebrated fact that the Sun Never set on the British Empire, and that this Empire once consisted of people from many nations. The forerunners of Britain who built the Empire were mainly men.
As Britain spread her tentacles like an Octopus strangles its prey, the explorers who first went into these various countries did not only uphold and spread the power and system of rule of Britain, but most importantly infused the English blood, whether through legal marriage or common law breeding, or on some occasions by the outright rape of the women folk of these countries and people. Britain left a legacy, which lay deep within the roots and in the blood of generations to come.
The surnames of West Indians both in the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles are synonymous with the people of the British Isles. Over the years, both in England and the United States of America, different theories have been given for the reasons why the West Indians, black Americans, Sierra Leoneans in West Africa, possess the same surnames as the people of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
It is said we derive our surnames from our slave masters. We are told at the time of slavery all slaves were named after the masters who owned them. This is why many religious sects, such as the black Muslim and latterly the Rastafarians decided to change their names back to their African roots.
In our search for our identity we are now conditioned not to look within ourselves, our present history, or our intermediate history of the past 400 years.
One has to examine the basic belief, that all men of colour originated from the continent of Africa, and were taken to the ‘New World’ as slaves by the Europeans. This is a myth; we cannot ignore the fact that black people were in Britain and other parts of Europe before the Romans.
In Athens, the cradle of western civilisation, the black people were dominant.
We try to deny the historical fact, that the Roman soldiers, who occupied Britain, were almost entirely black people. We try to ignore the fact we had a black Roman Governor, whose name was ‘Septimus Saverus’, who once was Governor of Britain. We say little of the Moors who conquered Spain and governed the north of Britain long before the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
We have ignored the fact, that our present civilisation and culture came from the East and from Africa, and the men whose philosophy formed most of our present thinking were originally black people.
Can we name the three greatest philosophers of all time? Yes, the name of ‘Esop the African’, ‘Confucius the Chinese’ and ‘Aristotle the Greek’ have been embedded as a deep imprint on our conscious, and subconscious, depending on the degree of our knowledge and understanding. We read of ‘St Augustine’, ‘Hannibal of Carthage’, ‘St Morice the Essential Saint of Germany’, only to name a few of the men who have formed the cornerstone of European civilisation.
Today’s history has decreed only the black people were slaves.
The fact that slavery had engulfed Europe at the time of the Greco-Roman Empire until the Anglo Saxon conquest of Britain has been ignored.
The first slaves to enter the West Indian islands were from Europe, that Australia was first populated by English and Irish slaves in the shape of convicts has been forgotten.
Yet we instil in the minds of black people the fallacy that they were mere slaves who had no past and contributed nothing to history, and should be glad to be rescued by the European Christians and must accept with gratitude a history of serfdom promoted by whites.
Do we wonder why black people of the Western world find themselves trapped in a history, which only occupies a brief spell in the distant time of their existence?
I was born on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica, on October 9th 1926, in the Parish of St James, in the county of Cornwall, this county is the oldest place of white settlement in the Caribbean, because the Parish of St James was where Christopher Columbus first massacred thousands of Arawak Indians in the quest for Spanish expansion into the Americas.
by Enrico A Stennett