Potoooooooo
Contributor
http://www.vice.com/read/the-alien-race-all-eyes-on-egipt-and-the-nuwaubian-cult
There's a bookstore in Brooklyn called All Eyes on Egipt. From a distance, the place looks like a Fisher-Price version of Cleopatra's palace. Housed in a narrow brownstone on Bushwick Avenue, charcoal paint and gold accents coat the exterior.
Inside, there are just a few shelves of merchandise. The first, a modestly-appointed book collection of conspiracy theory superstars (David Icke, Alex Jones, Milton William Cooper) is propped against a wall. The rest, in the center of the room, carry an array of self-printed booklets.
I wander in one afternoon, curious after passing a group of people dressed in lavish, Egyptian-style tunics filtering out the front door. I pick up one of the booklets, and leaf through a long, science fiction-inspired stream of consciousness. On page 15, I read a paragraph that traces Caucasian genealogy to "Flugelrods," beings that now live in a cavern beneath the Arctic. On page 84, I learn that Caucasian women once mated with jackals, "ancestor of today's dogs," and on Page 87, that the "pale man" still has a vestige proving this union: a tail.
Keeping a watchful eye over the store are two paintings of a man with dark skin and shallow eyes. Sensing, perhaps, how deeply weirded-out I am, a heavyset cashier emerges from behind a card table. She tells me she is "Nuwaubian," a member of the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and the row of booklets I'm thumbing through hold the scriptures of her people. I point to one of the paintings.
"That's Dr. Malachi York," she says. "He wrote every last one of these."
If you've lived in Brooklyn for more than a few decades, you may remember the Nuwaubians. Originally called the Ansaaru Allah Community, and operating under the guise of a fringe, all-black Muslim separatist group in the 70s and 80s, the group changed its name to the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors in the early 90s, and shifted focus to extraterrestrial origin stories that place African Americans at the top of the universal totem pole.
The Nuwaubian system of beliefs is too convoluted to sum up in a sentence, but the basic premise is that while some races share a common ancestor with modern apes, dark-skinned humans were born of an ancient, superior alien species. Also central to Nuwaubianism is an obsession with Ancient Egypt, which the group believes was an all-black race.
There's a bookstore in Brooklyn called All Eyes on Egipt. From a distance, the place looks like a Fisher-Price version of Cleopatra's palace. Housed in a narrow brownstone on Bushwick Avenue, charcoal paint and gold accents coat the exterior.
Inside, there are just a few shelves of merchandise. The first, a modestly-appointed book collection of conspiracy theory superstars (David Icke, Alex Jones, Milton William Cooper) is propped against a wall. The rest, in the center of the room, carry an array of self-printed booklets.
I wander in one afternoon, curious after passing a group of people dressed in lavish, Egyptian-style tunics filtering out the front door. I pick up one of the booklets, and leaf through a long, science fiction-inspired stream of consciousness. On page 15, I read a paragraph that traces Caucasian genealogy to "Flugelrods," beings that now live in a cavern beneath the Arctic. On page 84, I learn that Caucasian women once mated with jackals, "ancestor of today's dogs," and on Page 87, that the "pale man" still has a vestige proving this union: a tail.
Keeping a watchful eye over the store are two paintings of a man with dark skin and shallow eyes. Sensing, perhaps, how deeply weirded-out I am, a heavyset cashier emerges from behind a card table. She tells me she is "Nuwaubian," a member of the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and the row of booklets I'm thumbing through hold the scriptures of her people. I point to one of the paintings.
"That's Dr. Malachi York," she says. "He wrote every last one of these."
If you've lived in Brooklyn for more than a few decades, you may remember the Nuwaubians. Originally called the Ansaaru Allah Community, and operating under the guise of a fringe, all-black Muslim separatist group in the 70s and 80s, the group changed its name to the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors in the early 90s, and shifted focus to extraterrestrial origin stories that place African Americans at the top of the universal totem pole.
The Nuwaubian system of beliefs is too convoluted to sum up in a sentence, but the basic premise is that while some races share a common ancestor with modern apes, dark-skinned humans were born of an ancient, superior alien species. Also central to Nuwaubianism is an obsession with Ancient Egypt, which the group believes was an all-black race.