There is an old African saying that goes: "The wise eagle that wants to see tomorrow's brightest day must be brave enough to shake the great reptile of the Past awake", and the saying means that if people wish to create a bright future they must look closely and clearly at their past.
Today the entire world is in trouble in many ways simply because people are refusing to study their past closely and coldly and to learn important lessons from it. One of the greatest fallacies that many are shackled by is that the Past is dead, and that we can safely consign it to the darkest cupboards and cellars of our existence. That is not so, the Past is alive and dangerously so, and those who care to ignore it do so at their direst peril.

The Past is alive; it is a powerful and dark consciousness which cries out for attention, and even if, like the mad Chinese Emperor Huang-pi and the bloody-handed Poll Pot, we were to burn all books on history and palaeontology on Earth, we would not be able to kill the Past and consign it to dark oblivion. Never, no matter what we did, the Past would fiercely attract out attention and that of our descendants; it would ooze out of the mud of great rivers at our feet in the form of ancient crockery shards and rusted metal artefacts, it would grin at us from the limestone walls of ancient caves with fossilized teeth; and it would beckon to us out of the shifting sands of man-created deserts as the golden-haired Sirens of old beckoned to Odysseus, hoping to lure him and his fellow-sailors to their doom.

The Past is immortal; it draws our attention . . . it demands justice and appeals to our noblest feelings, thoughts and instincts. The Past asks questions and demands fiercely that we truthfully answer them for our descendant's sakes. There are questions about South Africa's Past that have never been answered; there are mysteries in our country that have never been investigated or solved; and in this book Mrs Brenda Sullivan-Wintgen, a lady of courage if ever there was, takes the lion by the tail and answers some of these questions and makes great efforts to solve some of these mysteries for the benefit of us all.

Our leaders in South Africa repeatedly call out for an African Renaissance, a great spiritual and physical rebirth of the peoples of the Dark Continent. But this Re-Birth in Africa will forever remain a mirage haunting a dead desert, so long as knowledge is chained, and thought wears blinkers. There will never be a Renaissance in Africa so long as people cling to palpable lies about our Past and call them the Truth.

It is a lie to say that the southern tip of Africa was only rounded by Portuguese sailors during the time of Prince Henry the Navigator. No, my friends, the sea route to India was known to the bold mariners of the remotest past, and was not discovered by the Johnny-come-lately Vasco da Gama and his kind. Also, the vast American continent and the many islands that float around it was not first discovered by any Christopher Columbus, but was known to ancient Celts, Libyans, Egyptians and Africans - Africans who established kingdoms and empires in meny parts of Mesoamerica and South America - Africans who left African words in the languages of many Native American tribes and who knew the Black gods such as Tezcatlipoca in the pantheons of Central and South American native American gods.

I say again my friends, the Past is alive and watching you.

Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa
South Africa, 2001

First published as a Foreword to my book "Africa through the Mists of Time"(Covos Day 2001)