Matthew Theodore Momon

I was born in 1968 A.D. I shared the womb with my twin brother, Christopher Floyd Momon. My brother was a healthy baby; I wasn’t, I was born two pounds, three ounces. My mother told me that the doctors were ready to conclude the operation when they noticed me. After entering the world, the doctor performed their normal routine on me but I did not respond to their attempts to wake me. They put me in an incubator to simulate the womb then told my parents that I had a 50% chance of survival and if by some miracle I survived, I would be unable to see. This was all because of the cigarettes my parents smoked in the sixties. Back then it was considered cool, acceptable and healthy, even the doctors endorsed it. Today, we know better. The effects of smoking did not affect my brother and sister because they were of normal weight. I wasn’t; so, it affected me most of all.

In my case, the doctors were incorrect. I survived but I spent the first 13 years of my life in and out of hospitals for eye surgeries. I spent the first years of my schooling in special education for the visually impaired. I also had asthma that I finally out grew with exercise. Psychologists will tell you that the first 12 years of an individual’s life is known as “The Formative Years” and new parents will agree. This means that the essence of you is developed in those years. They are correct in many ways. For instance, I was not that sociable when I was young because I was in special education or involved in some way with eye surgery, so I find it difficult to be sociable today.

When my brother was outside playing, I was reading science and encyclopedia books when I could see well enough to read. I studied math because I was impressed with how far the planets are from each other, how far the stars were from each other and so on. After I received my Master’s degree in Operation Research/Statistics from Michigan State University I wanted to follow up on what I asked my father when I was 10 years old. Back then my father and I were watching “The Ten Commandments” for the 5th time or so in my life while my father was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. As I recall, we were the only ones watching that show that day when I asked my father, “Dad, what did black people do?” and my father chuckled a little as if he knew something but could not tell me because he knew I would not have understood anything at that time.

After I graduated college I attended church for at least a year to see if that institution would teach me about the past but they would not because they have a closed view of the world. I was very disappointed in this institution so I bought some books from African bookstores like the Shrine of the Black Madonna. These books told me that the knowledge and the three major religious systems come from Africa plus they explained the history of the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean World. It was very moving; however, they did not track the path of the knowledge from Africa to the modern world. I had to wait 10 years (and I wasn’t really waiting) until the movie Alexander the Great came out in 2006 A.D.

It was the catalyst for a broadcasting revolution. The movie Alexander the Great was so poorly done, so none historic that the History Channel put on a 2-hour documentary that was very well done and very informative. So much so that the other educational channels decided to follow suit. Channels like the Discovery Channel, A&E, TLC and PBS battled each other to put this history on T.V. From this battle I have acquired 36 hours of video documented evidence, but it was not enough. These channels were still following conservative views. To counter this view, I ordered 14 hours of video documented evidence from African scholars to fill the gaps.