A South Africa-born physics Professor Xavier Carelse has launched a book titled The Children of Ham through which he seeks to correct biased historical narratives that have cast Africans as inferior to Europeans.
BY KENNEDY NYAVAYA
The book focuses on history emanating from the Roman Empire when slavery was not rooted on racial differences. The author details the life of Simon of Cyrene in the Cyrenian Chronicles.
Speaking at the book launch at Book Café last week, Carelse said the history of Africa needed to be revised to rid the partiality that paints Africans as inferior to Europeans.
“One problem I have always had with the history of Africa is that history always starts with the arrival of the Europeans and this is not true because all the research I have done shows that this is the oldest continent to be occupied by humans,” he said.
“This book is about African history, technology and achievements in different respects, including religion and culture.”
Carelse said the book was aimed at redressing the bias in history sources on the continent. He argued that introducing it in schools would help correct the inaccurate African background.
“These books should be used as textbooks in all African countries so that people may know the continent’s hidden history and that most major developments that the world now enjoys started here (Africa),” he said.
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The book is an accidental reflection of the late South Africa President Nelson Mandela’s statements in 1996 in Tripoli where he said if the Romans had not destroyed Carthage, Africans would have led the world into modern era.
The book is a first of the quadrilogy of books about Simon of Cyrene with the other three books which will be titled The Voyages of the Iyanda and Redemption to cover the period from 6 BC to 43 AD.
The last one will be The Tax Collector which covers 46 AD to 72 AD telling the story of the conversion of Alexandria to Christianity by Mark, the evangelist who was also a close friend of Simon.
Carelse is South African by birth, but has worked in eight different African countries and has been a professor of physics at the University of Zimbabwe for more than 20 years where he founded the Master’s of Applied Physics programme in 1994.
