Black parents in Bermuda must take responsibility for teaching their children African values and black history, a workshop at the African Diaspora Heritage Trail conference heard yesterday.

Melodye-Micere Stewart, an Africalogist and consultant to the Education Department, made the call but also noted that the school system also needs to be changed to include black history for children.

"The goal is to see black history workshops for children becoming a national institution," said Ms Micere-Smith, who has developed a Black History Workshops for Children programme, which includes messages such as Africa = Excellence.

"The message I want to leave you with is that we must be responsible for educating young people within our community and have self-agency, and we must teach them," she said at the conference at the Fairmont Southampton Princess.

"Why should we expect the people who taught us wrong to teach our babies right? My programme can be replicated anywhere but you can't teach if you don't know."

She said children should do chores around the house without pay to teach them about the African values of collective work.

And she said part of her programme asked children to name two black-owned stores, so that black people would keep their money within their own community.

"In the US, money doesn't leave our hands five minutes before it reaches hands that aren't ours. We must teach co-operative economics."

They should be taught about self-awareness, to have faith, to be in harmony with themselves and those around them, and to know they will get back what put into life.

She said history has to be taught within a context that has values rather than just dates, and it must be central to the way children are educated in Bermuda, she said.

She said she teaches that Africans, the first people on the earth, made a whole series of inventions such as agriculture, architecture, philosophy, medicine, astrology, surgery and steel. And, she said, Africans travelled to America "long before Columbus.

"You have to read to teach your children. Our history must be central to who we are. Young people are alienated because they do not see themselves in education," she said.

"That is the challenge in Bermuda. How do we centre ourselves? What are the educational needs of Bermuda and how do we massage the curriculum to meet those needs, and when do we do it?"

Panel member Ted Erwin of the Graduate Education Centre of Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, said 12 years ago he and a group of teachers went through school text books to find out what books there were on Africa and African Americans.

"We came to the conclusion that it would be better if our kids had no history books," rather than read the ones available because, he said, they would make black kids hate themselves and make white children feel superior.

He helped set up criteria for ordering books, but when staff were asked what they knew about black American history, the "answer that permeated from the teachers was that they didn't know anything and didn't want to know.

"These are teachers and that is serious and it tells us what's wrong and what the major problem is. We can't leave education up to the schools."

He said "negatives and stereotypes and distortions" should be taken out of school textbooks. "What has been omitted, we can put that in. We can tell the truth. We have to tell our own story," he added.