Eyo Ekpo, Cross River State gubernatorial aspirant of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, who on Friday, August 26, 2018, was keynote speaker at the 2018 Black History Month held at the Palace of Westminster, United Kingdom, has revealed that, the history of the existence of blacks as humans cannot be complete without people “acknowledging the fact that this species originated from Africa, the distinct geographic and geological enclave native to “black men”.
“It is also a well known, time worn truism corroborated with archeological evidence that the Fertile Crescent, that is, the regions between Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and Ancient Egypt (in Africa) is one of the earliest cradles of civilization”, he maintained.
Ekpo added that, that blacks and indeed the continent at some point led advancement in science and the arts, it was this success on the continent at that time that led people like “. King Antera Duke, to name one of our ancient monarchs who is famous for his desire of uniting the Efik and English thrones that he even sent a love letter in 1895 to Queen Victoria [of the House of Hanover] asking for her hand in marriage and for the commencement of trade and information exchange between both kingdom”
To return to those glory days, Ekpo added that Blacks should put “a conscious effort at self-reawakening, impacting the individual self and then our group consciousness as a race. We have a local proverb back home in Nigeria, which says, you are not what you are called, you are what you answer to and so it is high time, we as “blacks” decide on what we choose to answer to.”
“Individually we are achieving excellence in various fields of endeavor; but as a people, we are yet to deliberately make a mark save for that which we have already made in ages past, and this affects how we are seen and how we are called. Sadly, a lot of our people demonstrate these false perceptions, i.e., “what we are called”, as we can observe in the typical social tendencies that too many of my people back home in Africa demonstrate (gangster mentality, prison culture, poor state of infrastructure in almost all of our African States, leadership crises across these countries, to mention a few”, he particularly said.
This annual event organized by Tony Tokunbo Fernandez is in its sixth year.
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