Education.

It is our desire to enlighten our people to understand that they are a people with innate greatness. We want our people to know that even though we fail to recognise this great power within us that others do recognise, and that this is one of the reasons that Black people all over the world are despised and subjugated.

We must recognise that we have been living in a constructed reality ‘the matrix’, that our lives are far from ideal. Our minds have been closed and we have for far too long been conditioned to believe that we are not worthy to accept the best for ourselves and our children, we have settled to being second, or third-class citizens of the world. All over the world, Black people are discriminated against and marginalised, and both ourselves and the world at large have normalised and accepted this poor treatment of ourselves.

We need to change our narrative if we want to make positive change to our position in the world. We can only do this by coming together as a people to work together for our common good.

We want to bring awareness to the African diaspora that regardless of where they are in this world, be it in the USA, the UK, Canada, the Caribbean, etc. that, Africa is their Motherland.

African diaspora must understand that Africa will only be as good as we make it. Therefore, we must begin to direct our mind to the development of our Motherland in order to make it great once again.

We want to educate both Africans within the African continent and the diaspora to understand how great Africa was and is.

For instance, Africa is recorded as having the world’s oldest stone tools production, providing evidence of the claim that Africa is the cradle of civilisation. According to Olson, David R. and Torrance, Nancy in their book ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy’ writing developed in Egypt in or around 3100. The above clearly shows that we were not a people without knowledge or history as claimed by our colonial masters. Far from it, in fact, the kingdom of Kush, an empire along the Nile river led by King Piye in 700 BCE conquered Egypt. It is noteworthy that ‘non-civilisation’ located in central modern-day Nigeria, was one of the many innovative communities in ancient Africa, and that they were sophisticated Iron Age civilisation, and some of their sculptures, date back to c. 1000 BCE. Similarly, a Yoruba 12^th century bronze sculpture head which possibly depicts a member of the monarchy all go to refute the notion that Africa was a dark continent with no civilisation as does the existence of the Great Zimbabwe (1200 to 1450 CE) the golden Stool of Asante Ghana.

A publication by Colette Hemingway states that “Paintings in the tomb of Rekhmire, dating back to the 14^th century BC, depicts an image of an African and Aegean people”  the Greek were engaged in commercial ventures with Egypt and Nubia from the Bronze Age until Greece entered a period of impoverishment and the contact was limited. According to ancient Greek; a 5^th century BC historian Herodotus, all Africans were known as Ethiopians. And it was recorded that Ethiopians were amongst the troops of King Xerxes’ when Persia invaded Greece in 480 BC. These certainly debunk the notion that African history begun with colonisation of the continent.

It is said that history belongs to the victor. The Europeans not satisfied with carrying away approximately 12.5 million Africans through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade between 1525 and 1866, they sought to and continued to enslave Africans in Africa via colonisation. In 1884-1885, the Berlin Conference also known as the West African Conference regulated European colonisation and trade in Africa. It was at this conference that Africa was caved up into its current state with total disregard of its natural boundaries or people. Countries were created based on the needs and machination of the colonial masters to ensure that Africa and her children were forever defeated. This plot to defeat us continues to this day includes but not limited to France’s colonial tax on the Fancophone countries since their ‘independence’ to the tune of 4040 billion euros a year. We are brainwashed to believe that anything white is good and anything black is bad, we are taught to hate ourselves and to kill one another in the name of tribal and gang warfare. They hide from us our history and our contribution to the world such as the fact that we were the first to circumnavigate the world by boats and that Africans arrived in the Americas long before the 15^th century. For example, Afro-Olmecs came from the Mende Regions of West Africa, these people were the Black builders of ancient Mexico’s civilization. Our ingenuity does not rest there, we are responsible for inventing the following:

• Caller ID
• Home security systems
• Ironing board
• Internet protocol
• The internet
• GIF animation
• GPS
• Air conditioning
• 3D movies
• Light bulb
• Traffic light
• Mathematical calculations that placed Neil Armstrong on the moon

The above are but a tip of the iceberg. The question is why is it that our history is only reserved to one month of the year, with “Black History Month” limiting the subject of history?

It is therefore our aim at AAI to educate our people of their greatness, past, and present. By working together, we can reach a position where all Africans work collectively for the betterment of Africa and her people regardless of where they are, with the knowledge that if one of us is hurt, all of us are hurting too, therefore were must all adopt the Ubuntu principle (I am because you are).