#BTColmn – Africa: The ‘cradle of civilisation’

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Vincent Smith, Reason and Faith Apologetics.com

Reverend Rogers implied that Africa is the cradle of civilisation because evolutionists found bones in Africa.

Evolutionists believe the first creatures to evolve into apes occurred in Africa and then the first apes to evolve into humans occurred in Africa.

Rogers links the cradle of civilisation to ape to man evolution. Black people hearing that Africa is the cradle of civilization may take this as a complement because the term is usually understood by Afrocentric historians to mean black people were the first highly developed human civilisation while other humans co-existing in other parts of the world were behind.

But the evolutionary view of Africa differs which speaks to the cradle of mankind, a view held by Charles Darwin (evolutionist) who said that Africa is where we find the apes who are our closest ancestors and therefore was the cradle of mankind.

So, Darwin was not saying that the intelligence and ingenuity (engineering, mathematics, civility and technological advancement etc) of black people on the continent of Africa were superior to all other people groups, he was saying it is the cradle of mankind because it had apes first.

He also said this was disputable because there was an old skull found during his time in Europe, which means mankind first came out of Europe. So, Archaeology was in dispute with Darwin at the time. Darwin spent some time with the natives of Tierra del Fuego and thought they were nothing more than “beasts” (animals).

Now according to evolutionary diagrams that depict the evolution of ape to man in textbooks you will clearly see as the chimp evolves to human the stages start with black in colour and gradually evolve into the highest human form a blonde, blue eyed, white man, the homo sapiens stage.

Why? Darwinism spawned the belief that some races were physically closer to the lower primates and were also inferior.

The polyphyletic view was that blacks evolved from the strong but less intelligent gorillas, the orientals from the Orangutans, and whites from the most intelligent of all primates, the chimpanzees.

So, the primates, Apes, Chimpanzees, Australopithecus, and the homo erectus (earliest Africans) were not intelligent enough to build great civilisations. It’s only the homo sapiens who could but by this time these were white people according to evolutionary interpretation.

Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton wrote several letters to Darwin about population control of the black man in England.

He used the teachings of Darwin’s evolution assuming that blacks were more closely related to the apes than whites and were nothing more than animals in an underdeveloped evolved state. He used the theory of natural selection as his basis for “scientific” racism. Claiming science justified his actions. He was the pioneer of

Eugenics in England which led to eugenics in the US then the US taught eugenics to the Germans who used it on the Jews.

In 1904, Ota Benga was an African who was placed in an American Bronx Zoo in the science of Anthropology section to show the stages of ape to human evolution from the black African to the white man.

Rogers conflated “cradle of civilisation” and the evolutionary view of “cradle of humankind”. The evolutionary view is not the celebration of African people but the stripping of their dignity and humanity. So, when you hear people bandying about the words Africa is the cradle of civilisation, they may be speaking of something other than what you think.