1. The human race is of African origin. The oldest known skeletal
remains of anatomically modern humans (or homo sapiens sapiens) were
excavated at sites in East Africa. Human remains were discovered at
Omo in Ethiopia that were dated at 195,000 years old, the oldest known
in the world.
2. Skeletons of pre-humans have been found in Africa that date back
between 4 and 5 million years. The oldest known ancestral type of
humanity is thought to have been the australopithecus ramidus, who
lived at least 4.4 million years ago.
3. Africans were the first to organise fishing expeditions 90,000
years ago. At Katanda, a region in northeastern Zaïre (now Congo), was
recovered a finely wrought series of harpoon points, all elaborately
polished and barbed. Also uncovered was a tool, equally well crafted,
believed to be a dagger. The discoveries suggested the existence of an
early aquatic or fishing based culture.
4. Africans were the first to engage in mining 43,000 years ago. In
1964 a hematite mine was found in Swaziland at Bomvu Ridge in the
Ngwenya mountain range. Ultimately 300,000 artefacts were recovered
including thousands of stone-made mining tools. Adrian Boshier, one of
the archaeologists on the site, dated the mine to a staggering 43,200
years old.
5. Africans pioneered basic arithmetic 25,000 years ago. The Ishango
bone is a tool handle with notches carved into it found in the Ishango
region of Zaïre (now called Congo) near Lake Edward. The bone tool was
originally thought to have been over 8,000 years old, but a more
sensitive recent dating has given dates of 25,000 years old. On the
tool are 3 rows of notches. Row 1 shows three notches carved next to
six, four carved next to eight, ten carved next to two fives and
finally a seven. The 3 and 6, 4 and 8, and 10 and 5, represent the
process of doubling. Row 2 shows eleven notches carved next to
twenty-one notches, and nineteen notches carved next to nine notches.
This represents 10 + 1, 20 + 1, 20 - 1 and 10 - 1. Finally, Row 3
shows eleven notches, thirteen notches, seventeen notches and nineteen
notches. 11, 13, 17 and 19 are the prime numbers between 10 and 20.
6. Africans cultivated crops 12,000 years ago, the first known
advances in agriculture. Professor Fred Wendorf discovered that people
in Egypt’s Western Desert cultivated crops of barley, capers,
chick-peas, dates, legumes, lentils and wheat. Their ancient tools
were also recovered. There were grindstones, milling stones, cutting
blades, hide scrapers, engraving burins, and mortars and pestles.
7. Africans mummified their dead 9,000 years ago. A mummified infant
was found under the Uan Muhuggiag rock shelter in south western Libya.
The infant was buried in the foetal position and was mummified using a
very sophisticated technique that must have taken hundreds of years to
evolve. The technique predates the earliest mummies known in Ancient
Egypt by at least 1,000 years. Carbon dating is controversial but the
mummy may date from 7438 (±220) BC.
8. Africans carved the world’s first colossal sculpture 7,000 or more
years ago. The Great Sphinx of Giza was fashioned with the head of a
man combined with the body of a lion. A key and important question
raised by this monument was: How old is it? In October 1991 Professor
Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, demonstrated that
the Sphinx was sculpted between 5000 BC and 7000 BC, dates that he
considered conservative.
9. On the 1 March 1979, the New York Times carried an article on its
front page also page sixteen that was entitled Nubian Monarchy called
Oldest. In this article we were assured that: “Evidence of the oldest
recognizable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the
earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in
artifacts from ancient Nubia” (i.e. the territory of the northern
Sudan and the southern portion of modern Egypt.)
10. The ancient Egyptians had the same type of tropically adapted
skeletal proportions as modern Black Africans. A 2003 paper appeared
in American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Dr Sonia Zakrzewski
entitled Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions
where she states that: “The raw values in Table 6 suggest that
Egyptians had the ‘super-Negroid’ body plan described by Robins
(1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the
distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal
segments than in many ‘African’ populations.”
11. The ancient Egyptians had Afro combs. One writer tells us that the
Egyptians “manufactured a very striking range of combs in ivory: the
shape of these is distinctly African and is like the combs used even
today by Africans and those of African descent.”
12. The Funerary Complex in the ancient Egyptian city of Saqqara is
the oldest building that tourists regularly visit today. An outer
wall, now mostly in ruins, surrounded the whole structure. Through the
entrance are a series of columns, the first stone-built columns known
to historians. The North House also has ornamental columns built into
the walls that have papyrus-like capitals. Also inside the complex is
the Ceremonial Court, made of limestone blocks that have been quarried
and then shaped. In the centre of the complex is the Step Pyramid, the
first of 90 Egyptian pyramids.
13. The first Great Pyramid of Giza, the most extraordinary building
in history, was a staggering 481 feet tall - the equivalent of a
40-storey building. It was made of 2.3 million blocks of limestone and
granite, some weighing 100 tons.
14. The ancient Egyptian city of Kahun was the world’s first planned
city. Rectangular and walled, the city was divided into two parts. One
part housed the wealthier inhabitants – the scribes, officials and
foremen. The other part housed the ordinary people. The streets of the
western section in particular, were straight, laid out on a grid, and
crossed each other at right angles. A stone gutter, over half a metre
wide, ran down the centre of every street.
15. Egyptian mansions were discovered in Kahun - each boasting 70
rooms, divided into four sections or quarters. There was a master’s
quarter, quarters for women and servants, quarters for offices and
finally, quarters for granaries, each facing a central courtyard. The
master’s quarters had an open court with a stone water tank for
bathing. Surrounding this was a colonnade.
16 The Labyrinth in the Egyptian city of Hawara with its massive
layout, multiple courtyards, chambers and halls, was the very largest
building in antiquity. Boasting three thousand rooms, 1,500 of them
were above ground and the other 1,500 were underground.
17. Toilets and sewerage systems existed in ancient Egypt. One of the
pharaohs built a city now known as Amarna. An American urban planner
noted that: “Great importance was attached to cleanliness in Amarna as
in other Egyptian cities. Toilets and sewers were in use to dispose
waste. Soap was made for washing the body. Perfumes and essences were
popular against body odour. A solution of natron was used to keep
insects from houses . . . Amarna may have been the first planned
‘garden city’.”
18. Sudan has more pyramids than any other country on earth - even
more than Egypt. There are at least 223 pyramids in the Sudanese
cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroë. They are generally
20 to 30 metres high and steep sided.
19. The Sudanese city of Meroë is rich in surviving monuments.
Becoming the capital of the Kushite Empire between 590 BC until AD
350, there are 84 pyramids in this city alone, many built with their
own miniature temple. In addition, there are ruins of a bath house
sharing affinities with those of the Romans. Its central feature is a
large pool approached by a flight of steps with waterspouts decorated
with lion heads.
20. Bling culture has a long and interesting history. Gold was used to
decorate ancient Sudanese temples. One writer reported that: “Recent
excavations at Meroe and Mussawwarat es-Sufra revealed temples with
walls and statues covered with gold leaf”.
21. In around 300 BC, the Sudanese invented a writing script that had
twenty-three letters of which four were vowels and there was also a
word divider. Hundreds of ancient texts have survived that were in
this script. Some are on display in the British Museum.
22. In central Nigeria, West Africa’s oldest civilisation flourished
between 1000 BC and 300 BC. Discovered in 1928, the ancient culture
was called the Nok Civilisation, named after the village in which the
early artefacts were discovered. Two modern scholars, declare that
“[a]fter calibration, the period of Nok art spans from 1000 BC until
300 BC”. The site itself is much older going back as early as 4580 or
4290 BC.
23. West Africans built in stone by 1100 BC. In the Tichitt-Walata
region of Mauritania, archaeologists have found “large stone masonry
villages” that date back to 1100 BC. The villages consisted of roughly
circular compounds connected by “well-defined streets”.
24. By 250 BC, the foundations of West Africa’s oldest cities were
established such as Old Djenné in Mali.
25. Kumbi Saleh, the capital of Ancient Ghana, flourished from 300 to
1240 AD. Located in modern day Mauritania, archaeological excavations
have revealed houses, almost habitable today, for want of renovation
and several storeys high. They had underground rooms, staircases and
connecting halls. Some had nine rooms. One part of the city alone is
estimated to have housed 30,000 people.
26. West Africa had walled towns and cities in the pre-colonial
period. Winwood Reade, an English historian visited West Africa in the
nineteenth century and commented that: “There are . . . thousands of
large walled cities resembling those of Europe in the Middle Ages, or
of ancient Greece.”
27. Lord Lugard, an English official, estimated in 1904 that there
were 170 walled towns still in existence in the whole of just the Kano
province of northern Nigeria.
28. Cheques are not quite as new an invention as we were led to
believe. In the tenth century, an Arab geographer, Ibn Haukal, visited
a fringe region of Ancient Ghana. Writing in 951 AD, he told of a
cheque for 42,000 golden dinars written to a merchant in the city of
Audoghast by his partner in Sidjilmessa.
29. Ibn Haukal, writing in 951 AD, informs us that the King of Ghana
was “the richest king on the face of the earth” whose pre-eminence was
due to the quantity of gold nuggets that had been amassed by the
himself and by his predecessors.
30. The Nigerian city of Ile-Ife was paved in 1000 AD on the orders of
a female ruler with decorations that originated in Ancient America.
Naturally, no-one wants to explain how this took place approximately
500 years before the time of Christopher Columbus!
31. West Africa had bling culture in 1067 AD. One source mentions that
when the Emperor of Ghana gives audience to his people: “he sits in a
pavilion around which stand his horses caparisoned in cloth of gold:
behind him stand ten pages holding shields and gold-mounted swords:
and on his right hand are the sons of the princes of his empire,
splendidly clad and with gold plaited into their hair . . . The gate
of the chamber is guarded by dogs of an excellent breed . . . they
wear collars of gold and silver.”
32. Glass windows existed at that time. The residence of the Ghanaian
Emperor in 1116 AD was: “A well-built castle, thoroughly fortified,
decorated inside with sculptures and pictures, and having glass
windows.”
33. The Grand Mosque in the Malian city of Djenné, described as “the
largest adobe [clay] building in the world”, was first raised in 1204
AD. It was built on a square plan where each side is 56 metres in
length. It has three large towers on one side, each with projecting
wooden buttresses.
34. One of the great achievements of the Yoruba was their urban
culture. “By the year A.D. 1300,” says a modern scholar, “the Yoruba
people built numerous walled cities surrounded by farms”. The cities
were Owu, Oyo, Ijebu, Ijesa, Ketu, Popo, Egba, Sabe, Dassa, Egbado,
Igbomina, the sixteen Ekiti principalities, Owo and Ondo.
35. Yoruba metal art of the mediaeval period was of world class. One
scholar wrote that Yoruba art “would stand comparison with anything
which Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Rome, or Renaissance Europe
had to offer.”
36. In the Malian city of Gao stands the Mausoleum of Askia the Great,
a weird sixteenth century edifice that resembles a step pyramid.
37. Thousands of mediaeval tumuli have been found across West Africa.
Nearly 7,000 were discovered in north-west Senegal alone spread over
nearly 1,500 sites. They were probably built between 1000 and 1300 AD.
38. Excavations at the Malian city of Gao carried out by Cambridge
University revealed glass windows. One of the finds was entitled:
“Fragments of alabaster window surrounds and a piece of pink window
glass, Gao 10th – 14th century.”
39. In 1999 the BBC produced a television series entitled Millennium.
The programme devoted to the fourteenth century opens with the
following disclosure: “In the fourteenth century, the century of the
scythe, natural disasters threatened civilisations with extinction.
The Black Death kills more people in Europe, Asia and North Africa
than any catastrophe has before. Civilisations which avoid the plague
thrive. In West Africa the Empire of Mali becomes the richest in the
world.”
40. Malian sailors got to America in 1311 AD, 181 years before
Columbus. An Egyptian scholar, Ibn Fadl Al-Umari, published on this
sometime around 1342. In the tenth chapter of his book, there is an
account of two large maritime voyages ordered by the predecessor of
Mansa Musa, a king who inherited the Malian throne in 1312. This
mariner king is not named by Al-Umari, but modern writers identify him
as Mansa Abubakari II.
41. On a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 AD, a Malian ruler, Mansa Musa,
brought so much money with him that his visit resulted in the collapse
of gold prices in Egypt and Arabia. It took twelve years for the
economies of the region to normalise.
42. West African gold mining took place on a vast scale. One modern
writer said that: “It is estimated that the total amount of gold mined
in West Africa up to 1500 was 3,500 tons, worth more than $30 billion
in today’s market.”
43. The old Malian capital of Niani had a 14th century building called
the Hall of Audience. It was an surmounted by a dome, adorned with
arabesques of striking colours. The windows of an upper floor were
plated with wood and framed in silver; those of a lower floor were
plated with wood, framed in gold.
44. Mali in the 14th century was highly urbanised. Sergio Domian, an
Italian art and architecture scholar, wrote the following about this
period: “Thus was laid the foundation of an urban civilisation. At the
height of its power, Mali had at least 400 cities, and the interior of
the Niger Delta was very densely populated”.
45. The Malian city of Timbuktu had a 14th century population of
115,000 - 5 times larger than mediaeval London. Mansa Musa, built the
Djinguerebere Mosque in the fourteenth century. There was the
University Mosque in which 25,000 students studied and the Oratory of
Sidi Yayia. There were over 150 Koran schools in which 20,000 children
were instructed. London, by contrast, had a total 14th century
population of 20,000 people.
46. National Geographic recently described Timbuktu as the Paris of
the mediaeval world, on account of its intellectual culture. According
to Professor Henry Louis Gates, 25,000 university students studied
there.
47. Many old West African families have private library collections
that go back hundreds of years. The Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti
and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written mediaeval books. There
may be another 6,000 books still surviving in the other city of
Walata. Some date back to the 8th century AD. There are 11,000 books
in private collections in Niger. Finally, in Timbuktu, Mali, there are
about 700,000 surviving books.
48. A collection of one thousand six hundred books was considered a
small library for a West African scholar of the 16th century.
Professor Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu is recorded as saying that he had the
smallest library of any of his friends - he had only 1600 volumes.
49. Concerning these old manuscripts, Michael Palin, in his TV series
Sahara, said the imam of Timbuktu “has a collection of scientific
texts that clearly show the planets circling the sun. They date back
hundreds of years . . . Its convincing evidence that the scholars of
Timbuktu knew a lot more than their counterparts in Europe. In the
fifteenth century in Timbuktu the mathematicians knew about the
rotation of the planets, knew about the details of the eclipse, they
knew things which we had to wait for 150 almost 200 years to know in
Europe when Galileo and Copernicus came up with these same
calculations and were given a very hard time for it.”
50. The Songhai Empire of 16th century West Africa had a government
position called Minister for Etiquette and Protocol.
51. The mediaeval Nigerian city of Benin was built to “a scale
comparable with the Great Wall of China”. There was a vast system of
defensive walling totalling 10,000 miles in all. Even before the full
extent of the city walling had become apparent the Guinness Book of
Records carried an entry in the 1974 edition that described the city
as: “The largest earthworks in the world carried out prior to the
mechanical era.”
52. Benin art of the Middle Ages was of the highest quality. An
official of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde once stated that: “These
works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European
casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast them better,
nor could anyone else before or after him . . . Technically, these
bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”
53. Winwood Reade described his visit to the Ashanti Royal Palace of
Kumasi in 1874: “We went to the king’s palace, which consists of many
courtyards, each surrounded with alcoves and verandahs, and having two
gates or doors, so that each yard was a thoroughfare . . . But the
part of the palace fronting the street was a stone house, Moorish in
its style . . . with a flat roof and a parapet, and suites of
apartments on the first floor. It was built by Fanti masons many years
ago. The rooms upstairs remind me of Wardour Street. Each was a
perfect Old Curiosity Shop. Books in many languages, Bohemian glass,
clocks, silver plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster
carpets, pictures and engravings, numberless chests and coffers. A
sword bearing the inscription From Queen Victoria to the King of
Ashantee. A copy of the Times, 17 October 1843. With these were many
specimens of Moorish and Ashanti handicraft.”
54. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Clarke, an English visitor
to Nigeria, remarked that: “As good an article of cloth can be woven
by the Yoruba weavers as by any people . . . in durability, their
cloths far excel the prints and home-spuns of Manchester.”
55. The recently discovered 9th century Nigerian city of Eredo was
found to be surrounded by a wall that was 100 miles long and seventy
feet high in places. The internal area was a staggering 400 square
miles.
56. On the subject of cloth, Kongolese textiles were also
distinguished. Various European writers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries wrote of the delicate crafts of the peoples
living in eastern Kongo and adjacent regions who manufactured damasks,
sarcenets, satins, taffeta, cloth of tissue and velvet. Professor
DeGraft-Johnson made the curious observation that: “Their brocades,
both high and low, were far more valuable than the Italian.”
57. On Kongolese metallurgy of the Middle Ages, one modern scholar
wrote that: “There is no doubting . . . the existence of an expert
metallurgical art in the ancient Kongo . . . The Bakongo were aware of
the toxicity of lead vapours. They devised preventative and curative
methods, both pharmacological (massive doses of pawpaw and palm oil)
and mechanical (exerting of pressure to free the digestive tract), for
combating lead poisoning.”
58. In Nigeria, the royal palace in the city of Kano dates back to the
fifteenth century. Begun by Muhammad Rumfa (ruled 1463-99) it has
gradually evolved over generations into a very imposing complex. A
colonial report of the city from 1902, described it as “a network of
buildings covering an area of 33 acres and surrounded by a wall 20 to
30 feet high outside and 15 feet inside . . . in itself no mean
citadel”.
59. A sixteenth century traveller visited the central African
civilisation of Kanem-Borno and commented that the emperor’s cavalry
had golden “stirrups, spurs, bits and buckles.” Even the ruler’s dogs
had “chains of the finest gold”.
60. One of the government positions in mediaeval Kanem-Borno was
Astronomer Royal.
61. Ngazargamu, the capital city of Kanem-Borno, became one of the
largest cities in the seventeenth century world. By 1658 AD, the
metropolis, according to an architectural scholar housed “about
quarter of a million people”. It had 660 streets. Many were wide and
unbending, reflective of town planning.
62. The Nigerian city of Surame flourished in the sixteenth century.
Even in ruin it was an impressive sight, built on a horizontal
vertical grid. A modern scholar describes it thus: “The walls of
Surame are about 10 miles in circumference and include many large
bastions or walled suburbs running out at right angles to the main
wall. The large compound at Kanta is still visible in the centre, with
ruins of many buildings, one of which is said to have been
two-storied. The striking feature of the walls and whole ruins is the
extensive use of stone and tsokuwa (laterite gravel) or very hard red
building mud, evidently brought from a distance. There is a big mound
of this near the north gate about 8 feet in height. The walls show
regular courses of masonry to a height of 20 feet and more in several
places. The best preserved portion is that known as sirati (the
bridge) a little north of the eastern gate . . . The main city walls
here appear to have provided a very strongly guarded entrance about 30
feet wide.”
63. The Nigerian city of Kano in 1851 produced an estimated 10 million
pairs of sandals and 5 million hides each year for export.
64. In 1246 AD Dunama II of Kanem-Borno exchanged embassies with
Al-Mustansir, the king of Tunis. He sent the North African court a
costly present, which apparently included a giraffe. An old chronicle
noted that the rare animal “created a sensation in Tunis”.
65. By the third century BC the city of Carthage on the coast of
Tunisia was opulent and impressive. It had a population of 700,000 and
may even have approached a million. Lining both sides of three streets
were rows of tall houses six storeys high.
66. The Ethiopian city of Axum has a series of 7 giant obelisks that
date from perhaps 300 BC to 300 AD. They have details carved into them
that represent windows and doorways of several storeys. The largest
obelisk, now fallen, is in fact “the largest monolith ever made
anywhere in the world”. It is 108 feet long, weighs a staggering 500
tons, and represents a thirteen-storey building.
67. Ethiopia minted its own coins over 1,500 years ago. One scholar
wrote that: “Almost no other contemporary state anywhere in the world
could issue in gold, a statement of sovereignty achieved only by Rome,
Persia, and the Kushan kingdom in northern India at the time.”
68. The Ethiopian script of the 4th century AD influenced the writing
script of Armenia. A Russian historian noted that: “Soon after its
creation, the Ethiopic vocalised script began to influence the scripts
of Armenia and Georgia. D. A. Olderogge suggested that Mesrop Mashtotz
used the vocalised Ethiopic script when he invented the Armenian
alphabet.”
69. “In the first half of the first millennium CE,” says a modern
scholar, Ethiopia “was ranked as one of the world’s greatest empires”.
A Persian cleric of the third century AD identified it as the third
most important state in the world after Persia and Rome.
70. Ethiopia has 11 underground mediaeval churches built by being
carved out of the ground. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD,
Roha became the new capital of the Ethiopians. Conceived as a New
Jerusalem by its founder, Emperor Lalibela (c.1150-1230), it contains
11 churches, all carved out of the rock of the mountains by hammer and
chisel. All of the temples were carved to a depth of 11 metres or so
below ground level. The largest is the House of the Redeemer, a
staggering 33.7 metres long, 23.7 metres wide and 11.5 metres deep.
71. Lalibela is not the only place in Ethiopia to have such wonders. A
cotemporary archaeologist reports research that was conducted in the
region in the early 1970’s when: “startling numbers of churches built
in caves or partially or completely cut from the living rock were
revealed not only in Tigre and Lalibela but as far south as Addis
Ababa. Soon at least 1,500 were known. At least as many more probably
await revelation.”
72. In 1209 AD Emperor Lalibela of Ethiopia sent an embassy to Cairo
bringing the sultan unusual gifts including an elephant, a hyena, a
zebra, and a giraffe.
73. In Southern Africa, there are at least 600 stone built ruins in
the regions of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. These ruins are
called Mazimbabwe in Shona, the Bantu language of the builders, and
means great revered house and “signifies court”.
74. The Great Zimbabwe was the largest of these ruins. It consists of
12 clusters of buildings, spread over 3 square miles. Its outer walls
were made from 100,000 tons of granite bricks. In the fourteenth
century, the city housed 18,000 people, comparable in size to that of
London of the same period.
75. Bling culture existed in this region. At the time of our last
visit, the Horniman Museum in London had exhibits of headrests with
the caption: “Headrests have been used in Africa since the time of the
Egyptian pharaohs. Remains of some headrests, once covered in gold
foil, have been found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and burial sites
like Mapungubwe dating to the twelfth century after Christ.”
76. Dr Albert Churchward, author of Signs and Symbols of Primordial
Man, pointed out that writing was found in one of the stone built
ruins: “Lt.-Col. E. L. de Cordes . . . who was in South Africa for
three years, informed the writer that in one of the ‘Ruins’ there is a
‘stone-chamber,’ with a vast quantity of Papyri, covered with old
Egyptian hieroglyphics. A Boer hunter discovered this, and a large
quantity was used to light a fire with, and yet still a larger
quantity remained there now.”
77. On bling culture, one seventeenth century visitor to southern
African empire of Monomotapa, that ruled over this vast region, wrote
that: “The people dress in various ways: at court of the Kings their
grandees wear cloths of rich silk, damask, satin, gold and silk cloth;
these are three widths of satin, each width four covados [2.64m], each
sewn to the next, sometimes with gold lace in between, trimmed on two
sides, like a carpet, with a gold and silk fringe, sewn in place with
a two fingers’ wide ribbon, woven with gold roses on silk.”
78. Southern Africans mined gold on an epic scale. One modern writer
tells us that: “The estimated amount of gold ore mined from the entire
region by the ancients was staggering, exceeding 43 million tons. The
ore yielded nearly 700 tons of pure gold which today would be valued
at over $7.5 billion.”
79. Apparently the Monomotapan royal palace at Mount Fura had
chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. An eighteenth century geography
book provided the following data: “The inside consists of a great
variety of sumptuous apartments, spacious and lofty halls, all adorned
with a magnificent cotton tapestry, the manufacture of the country.
The floors, cielings [sic], beams and rafters are all either gilt or
plated with gold curiously wrought, as are also the chairs of state,
tables, benches &c. The candle-sticks and branches are made of ivory
inlaid with gold, and hang from the cieling by chains of the same
metal, or of silver gilt.”
80. Monomotapa had a social welfare system. Antonio Bocarro, a
Portuguese contemporary, informs us that the Emperor: “shows great
charity to the blind and maimed, for these are called the king’s poor,
and have land and revenues for their subsistence, and when they wish
to pass through the kingdoms, wherever they come food and drinks are
given to them at the public cost as long as they remain there, and
when they leave that place to go to another they are provided with
what is necessary for their journey, and a guide, and some one to
carry their wallet to the next village. In every place where they come
there is the same obligation.”
81. Many southern Africans have indigenous and pre-colonial words for
‘gun’. Scholars have generally been reluctant to investigate or
explain this fact.
82. Evidence discovered in 1978 showed that East Africans were making
steel for more than 1,500 years: “Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Peter Schmidt and Professor of Engineering Donald H. Avery have found
as long as 2,000 years ago Africans living on the western shores of
Lake Victoria had produced carbon steel in preheated forced draft
furnaces, a method that was technologically more sophisticated than
any developed in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century.”
83. Ruins of a 300 BC astronomical observatory was found at
Namoratunga in Kenya. Africans were mapping the movements of stars
such as Triangulum, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Central Orion, etcetera, as
well as the moon, in order to create a lunar calendar of 354 days.
84. Autopsies and caesarean operations were routinely and effectively
carried out by surgeons in pre-colonial Uganda. The surgeons routinely
used antiseptics, anaesthetics and cautery iron. Commenting on a
Ugandan caesarean operation that appeared in the Edinburgh Medical
Journal in 1884, one author wrote: “The whole conduct of the operation
. . . suggests a skilled long-practiced surgical team at work
conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth
efficiency.”
85. Sudan in the mediaeval period had churches, cathedrals,
monasteries and castles. Their ruins still exist today.
86. The mediaeval Nubian Kingdoms kept archives. From the site of Qasr
Ibrim legal texts, documents and correspondence were discovered. An
archaeologist informs us that: “On the site are preserved thousands of
documents in Meroitic, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, Arabic and
Turkish.”
87. Glass windows existed in mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found
evidence of window glass at the Sudanese cities of Old Dongola and
Hambukol.
88. Bling culture existed in the mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found
an individual buried at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in the city
of Old Dongola. He was clad in an extremely elaborate garb consisting
of costly textiles of various fabrics including gold thread. At the
city of Soba East, there were individuals buried in fine clothing,
including items with golden thread.
89. Style and fashion existed in mediaeval Sudan. A dignitary at Jebel
Adda in the late thirteenth century AD was interned with a long coat
of red and yellow patterned damask folded over his body. Underneath,
he wore plain cotton trousers of long and baggy cut. A pair of red
leather slippers with turned up toes lay at the foot of the coffin.
The body was wrapped in enormous pieces of gold brocaded striped silk.
90. Sudan in the ninth century AD had housing complexes with bath
rooms and piped water. An archaeologist wrote that Old Dongola, the
capital of Makuria, had: “a[n] . . . eighth to . . . ninth century
housing complex. The houses discovered here differ in their hitherto
unencountered spatial layout as well as their functional programme
(water supply installation, bathroom with heating system) and
interiors decorated with murals.”
91. In 619 AD, the Nubians sent a gift of a giraffe to the Persians.
92. The East Coast, from Somalia to Mozambique, has ruins of well over
50 towns and cities. They flourished from the ninth to the sixteenth
centuries AD.
93. Chinese records of the fifteenth century AD note that Mogadishu
had houses of “four or five storeys high”.
94. Gedi, near the coast of Kenya, is one of the East African ghost
towns. Its ruins, dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries,
include the city walls, the palace, private houses, the Great Mosque,
seven smaller mosques, and three pillar tombs.
95. The ruined mosque in the Kenyan city of Gedi had a water purifier
made of limestone for recycling water.
96. The palace in the Kenyan city of Gedi contains evidence of piped
water controlled by taps. In addition it had bathrooms and indoor
toilets.
97. A visitor in 1331 AD considered the Tanzanian city of Kilwa to be
of world class. He wrote that it was the “principal city on the coast
the greater part of whose inhabitants are Zanj of very black
complexion.” Later on he says that: “Kilwa is one of the most
beautiful and well-constructed cities in the world. The whole of it is
elegantly built.”
98. Bling culture existed in early Tanzania. A Portuguese chronicler
of the sixteenth century wrote that: “[T]hey are finely clad in many
rich garments of gold and silk and cotton, and the women as well; also
with much gold and silver chains and bracelets, which they wear on
their legs and arms, and many jewelled earrings in their ears”.
99. In 1961 a British archaeologist, found the ruins of Husuni Kubwa,
the royal palace of the Tanzanian city of Kilwa. It had over a hundred
rooms, including a reception hall, galleries, courtyards, terraces and
an octagonal swimming pool.
100. In 1414 the Kenyan city of Malindi sent ambassadors to China
carrying a gift that created a sensation at the Imperial Court. It
was, of course, a giraffe.
ghtalks
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