1. The “Ten Commandments” of Africa

2. ► Myth One. Africa has no ancient cultures, histories or civilizations and has therefore made no meaningful contributions to world history. ► Myth One. Africa has no ancient cultures, histories or civilizations and has therefore made no meaningful contributions to world history. ► Subsidiary to this, the values that Westerners hold dear today like political freedom and democracy had and have no tradition or history in Africa

3. ► Myth Two. Africans are primarily tribes people; Africans are organized first and foremost into tribes while Europeans are primarily organized into nations.

4. ► Myth Three. Africans are essentially primitive in lifestyle, art and technology because few or no innovations took or take place in Africa.

5. ► Myth Four. Africans have no literary, philosophical and historical traditions in either the recent or the far past.

6. ► Myth Five. All Africans are black. To be African is to be black. Africans are not culturally diverse. Africans share an essentially unified culture

7. ► Myth Six. Africa is one country and the people there speak a language called “African.”

8. ► Myth Seven. Africa is mostly jungle, with some desert, and is highly overpopulated.

9. ► Myth Eight. North Africa is not a part of Africa

10. ► Myth Nine. Africans are not normal people. There are two very different versions of this fundamental myth. Form A: Everything Africans do is worthless, a failure, and Africans can essentially only do bad things; Africans have no part in the history of civilization. Form B: Everything Africans do is perfect, worthy, harmonious, better than anything anybody else can or did do ► Myth Nine. Africans are not normal people. There are two very different versions of this fundamental myth. Form A: Everything Africans do is worthless, a failure, and Africans can essentially only do bad things; Africans have no part in the history of civilization. Form B: Everything Africans do is perfect, worthy, harmonious, better than anything anybody else can or did do ► Africans are the only or the primary origin of all civilization, especially Western Civilization and even the ancient Native American civilizations.

11. ► Myth Ten. African history is basically a history of poverty, ignorance, slavery, violence, failure—of negative things. It is therefore both boring and depressing to study