Some time ago I wrote, and self-published a book about my father Njoki Mangabell and the stories he would tell me about his native country the Cameroon and his royal father King Douala Mangabell. I called it The Royalty. When I was very young I heard the stories as if they were coming from a brilliant storyteller but as I grew and became older, to me the stories of my father visiting Buckingham palace seemed to be a complete fantasy, I dismissed the stories as his need to boast about something that wasn’t real about his beloved Cameroon, however I only half listened and pretended to be interested only because it all seemed so important to him. I remember when he told me about an article that appeared in the Journal American Weekly section of the New York Sunday American on October 8, 1922, the paper ran an article titled "Mystery of the Petrified ’Shoe Sole," by Dr. W. H. Ballou.
He, Balillou wrote: "Some time ago, while he was prospecting for fossils in Nevada, John T. Reid, a distinguished mining engineer and geologist, stopped suddenly and looked down in utter bewilderment and amazement at a rock near his feet. For there, a part of the rock itself was what seemed to be a human footprint!
Closer inspection showed that it was not a mark of a naked foot, but was, apparently, a shoe sole, which had been turned into stone.
The forepart was missing.
However, there was the outline of at least two-thirds of it, and around this outline ran a well-defined sewn thread which had, it appeared, attached the welt to the sole. Further on was another line of sewing, and in the center, where the foot would have rested had the object really been a shoe sole, there was an indentation, exactly such as would have been made by the bone of the heel rubbing upon and wearing down the material of which the sole had been made.
Reid got hold of a micro photographer and an analytical chemist of the Rockefeller Institute, who made photos and analyses of the specimen. The analyses removed any doubt of the shoe sole having been subjected to Triassic fossilization....
The micro photo magnifications are twenty times larger than the specimen itself, showing the minutest detail of thread twist and warp, proving conclusively that the shoe sole is not a resemblance, but is strictly the handiwork of man. Even to the naked eye, the threads can be seen distinctly, along with the definitely symmetrical outlines of the shoe sole. Inside this rim and running parallel to it is a line, which appears to be regularly perforated as if for stitches.
The Triassic rock bearing the fossil shoe sole is now recognized as being dated at 213 - 248 million years old. An obviously modern shoe, complete with stitching, and etched in time in ancient Triassic rock. All of which my father told me, the nuclear reactor in Africa, the shoe sole means we are not being told the truth about our Alien visitors; This isn't the first time that people have found fossils with shoe and then one day I received an overseas phone call from a reporter who worked for the BBC in London, her name was Veronique Edwards, she introduced herself and started telling me things about my father and when she said the words “Do you realize your father is a king and that you come from a royal family of kings that come from the Cameroons!” It was at that moment I almost dropped the phone.
Everything my Father told me was being confirmed by a reporter who worked for the BBC who was herself born in the Cameroons, thank you Mrs. Edwards wherever you are and by the time she had left me reeling my father dropped another mysterious giant foot print before me it was the foot print of Queen Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the first black queen of England, who it seemed was related to Emily Engome Dayas, daughter of and English tradesman, half British, half Cameroonian wife of my grandfather Rudolph Douala Mangabell. In February 2021 I will lift the curtain that hangs between here and Africa and remind you once again, how a black man’s foot fits into a royal shoe of history..
