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Bend down low, let me tell you what I know...
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Re: Bend down low, let me tell you what I know...
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Yardy1
Re: Ghanian royal entourage
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Nov 7 05 10:57 AM
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Speaking of royalty, here is an interesting take on how royalty are received, or not received as the case may be, depending on where they are coming from:
Royalty Comes In Many Hues
By Courtland Milloy
Monday, November 7, 2005
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall received an exceedingly warm welcome in Southeast Washington last week, demonstrating yet again that a royal dip in and out of the black side of town can restore luster to even the dullest crown. During a tour of the School for Educational Evolution and Development, District officials got to show off some model black students, and Prince Charles and his new wife, Camilla, got to show that even white people with fairy-tale titles could be real.
"It's very rare for royal people to come to our school," one appreciative student declared.
This brand of international diplomacy writ small was honed to great effect by Princess Di, who got rave reviews in 1990 for a solo visit to Grandma's House, a hospice for AIDS babies in Shaw. Not to be outdone, Queen Elizabeth showed up in Southeast the next year for a visit with Alice Frazier, a black grandmother who offered the queen potato salad and fried chicken and broke centuries of British protocol by giving her a hug.
The world went wild with delight.
But here's the rub: The same formula does not appear to work so well when the visiting royalty is black. Take the case of Francois A. Alyi, crown prince of the Kingdom of Guin in the Republic of Togo, who visited Southeast Washington in 1994. Black children couldn't believe their eyes. Alyi wore a royal purple robe and tried getting to know them by joining in a game of basketball, which only made matters worse.
"He's a real prince? He doesn't act like a prince," one girl said. Her friend declared: "He looks like a preacher. Preachers wear stuff like that."
There hasn't been a black prince in the neighborhood since.
The Queen Mother of Swaziland met with Mayor Anthony A. Williams in his office earlier this year. But who knew? No media hullabaloo at all. "It was just a courtesy call, not part of an official state visit," Sharon Gang, deputy press secretary to the mayor, told me. Still, to dote on a duchess from England while virtually ignoring a queen from South Africa is not what you'd expect from a city where so many residents and their elected officials proudly proclaim themselves to be African Americans.
The District and Prince George's County have "sister cities" in Senegal, and the relationships are supposedly rooted in a common history. Senegal is home to Goree Island, where millions of Africans were held during the 18th and 19th centuries before being shipped across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the Americas.
Whenever African American dignitaries -- from Marion Barry to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice -- make a pilgrimage to Goree Island, they are treated like royalty. But when the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, came to Washington in December, hardly anyone noticed. There were no tours of the city or offerings of home-cooked meals for him. It's enough to make a sister city go looking for another sibling.
The District has long been a backdrop for international propaganda efforts. During the Cold War, for instance, the Soviet house organ, Pravda, published photographs of a Capitol dome rising majestically above a veritable black shantytown in Southwest -- indisputable evidence, as the communists saw it, of America's racism and the economic failings of capitalism.
District leaders have little control over how images of the city and its people are used by visiting dignitaries. But at least they can start rolling out the same red carpet for the black ones as they do for the white ones. All Prince Charles did for the kids at the SEED school was plant a tree -- a Prince Valiant variety of an English oak -- that represented his heritage. President Wade could have given out pieces of Senegalese art that represented theirs.
Crown Prince Alyi tried to tell the children he met about the great kingdoms of ancient Africa. "Maybe many of you come from a kingdom," he told them. "Maybe you are descendants from a prince or a princess."
Maybe if they heard that more often, they'd come to realize that royalty runs in their veins and not just in those of the blue bloods of England.
E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com
2005 The Washington Post Company
Brother Errol, what do you think of this ? :
Site May Be 3rd-Century Place of Christian Worship -
Discovery Made At Israeli Prison
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 7, 2005
MEGIDDO, Israel, Nov. 6 -- Israeli state archaeologists have discovered mosaics, pottery and other remains of a Roman-era Christian building on the grounds of a high-security prison here. They say the site could be the oldest public place of Christian worship ever uncovered in Israel and perhaps one of the earliest such sites in the world.
The mosaic floor of the structure, buried beneath rock, soil and asphalt, was discovered Oct. 30 by an Israeli prisoner working on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The agency has been excavating the compound for more than a year to ensure that nothing of historic value is lost during an ongoing renovation project. At a news conference Sunday, Yardena Alexandre, a spokeswoman for the authority, called the discovery "one of the most important finds for the history of early Christianity."
Judging by the age of broken pottery discovered on the floor, the distinctive mosaic style, inscriptions citing Jesus and the apparent pre-Byzantine design of the building, state archaeologists said the structure was most likely a public place of Christian worship that dates to the mid-3rd or early 4th century. If true, the find would join the early 3rd-century Christian gathering place at Dura Europus in Syria as one of the oldest of its kind.
At that time, near the end of the Roman Empire, Christianity was an outlawed religion practiced in the Holy Land in the clandestine chapels of private homes. Archaeologists involved in the excavation were reluctant to describe the remains as a church because the term was not used during that period.
But they said its inscribed dedications to community figures, mosaics of fish and specific mention of "the God Jesus Christ" were proof it was a public building used in Christian worship -- the sort of structure archaeologists here had read about in historical texts but had never uncovered.
"The most important thing about this is that it is the oldest Christian building we have found in archaeological form," said Yotam Tepper, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation. "The problem is that we didn't have churches at that time."
Before the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the year 313, Christians were persecuted here in sporadic waves of violence. But archaeologists say the second half of the 3rd century, when the building might have been erected, was probably a relatively open time to be Christian. The Byzantine period that followed Christianity's legalization featured a boom in church construction.
Covered by scaffolding and a black tarp to protect against rain during the approaching winter months, the site is roughly the size of a tennis court, with the fragile mosaics covering approximately half of it. Tepper said the building does not follow the basilica plan, characterized by colonnades along a central nave leading to a rounded apse. He said the simple design suggests it predates Christianity's legalization.
The oldest definitively dated church in Israel is in Ramle, where inscriptions say the structure was built in 376. But some archaeologists believe the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which tradition says marks the spot where Jesus was crucified and entombed, was built in 330 by Constantine's mother. This site would predate those by decades.
Tepper said the most important evidence comes from three inscriptions found in the mosaics. Along the edge of the largest mosaic, featuring at its center the early Christian symbol of two fish, an ancient Greek inscription, roughly translated, reads: "Gaianos, also called Porphyrio, centurion, our brother, having sought honor with his own money, has made this mosaic. Brouti has carried out the work." Tepper said the inscription refers to a Roman officer -- many officers were early converts to Christianity -- who financed the structure's construction.
An inscription on a second mosaic, closer to the base of a pedestal whose use archaeologists have not determined, recalls by name four women from the community.
Tepper said the third inscription is the most archaeologically valuable. It reads: "The God-loving Aketous has offered this table to the God Jesus Christ, as a memorial."
The table might have been an altar or a place where local Christians gathered for meals on holy days, recalling the Last Supper. Tepper said the pottery found on the floor included a wine jug and cooking pot. But Weiss and other archaeologists said it was possible for older pottery to be found on a floor built more recently. He said excavation should take place under the mosaics to determine what is there and to better determine the timeline.
"It's a very important place," said Ofer Lefler, spokesman for the Israel Prison Service. "Important to Israel and the rest of the world."
2005 The Washington Post Company
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