Every schoolboy and every schoolgirl knows that there was a rekindling of the love of knowledge during the fifteenth and sixteenth century in Europe. A German scholar named it the "Renaissance''.

The names of Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo are forever associated with this movement which is thought to have begun in Italy.

Every country in Europe had their renaissance. What was seldom taught to every boy and girl was the part Muslim scholarship played in this revival. It is a story too rich and complex to relate in detail here.

Let one reference suffice: Caliph al Mamum of Bagdad. He and other Muslim patrons of the Arts and Learning commissioned the translation of Greek classics into Syriac and Arabic thereby guaranteeing their survival.

Many of these works were in libraries in Toledo when the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand reclaimed Spain from seven hundred years of rule by their Arab neighbours to the south of them.

From these centres spread the scholarship that became the models in arts and letters for the Renaissance. Even then, the debt Greece owed to Egyptian civilisation and others was never acknowledged.

But there was yet a darker side to the Renaissance that is never mentioned, or hardly so. That is the decimation of peoples newly come into contact with Europe, and the commencement of the three centuries long African Salve Trade.

Cartographers led the way for adventurers, explorers, and colonisers to set about harassing then enslaving the indigenous peoples in a mindless search for gold.

When the hapless `Indians' numbers dwindled, one of their champions, a man who fought tirelessly for their cause before the Spanish crown, recommended the introduction of African slavery as a way of halting the Indians' genocide.

And so another atrocity was visited upon the "New World''.

It was not so long ago; just half a millennium. In addition, the effects of that enterprise can be observed and experienced up to this very day.

But it is a new day. The recently ended century witnessed the culmination of resistance struggles against colonialism and racism.

A long list of heroes from long before Marcus Garvey up to Mandela, authors, actors, athletes, revolutionaries, scientists, businessmen, politicians, run aways, educators, soldiers, repeatedly gave the lie to the racist assessment of African peoples as inferior, and therefore not as deserving of human and civil rights as others.

That story of capture, enslavement, dispersal, resistance, freedom, and empowerment is the epic forged in the last half of this millennium.

It is heroic on the grandest imaginable scale. It has triumphed in its own flowering of Music and the Arts.

This is the new Renaissance, the rebirth of human dignity, and a story for all mankind about the unquenchable thirst for freedom and dignity in every human heart.

That is the context of Black History. It is universal, and must be perceived, studied and appreciated as such, by the citizens of the world. It is their story too.