1. The human race is of African origin.
The oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern
humans (or homo 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.
|
