West African culture of 15th century
M.McCoy
O'Wheat) wrote:
> em...@domain.com (M.McCoy) wrote:
>
> <snip>
> >
> >Some writers have concluded on the basis of available records that in
> >the fifteenth century, the level of culture among the masses of black
> >people in West Africa was higher than that of Northern Europe during the
> >same period. - From page 276 of 275 of _Africa Counts_ by Claudia Zaslavsky.
> >--------------------------------------
>
> That sounds nice, but to believe it you'd have to throw all evidence in the
> trashcan.
>
> In 15th century Northern Europe, there were thousands of castles, cathedrals
> and churches...the handful of architecture from West Africa during the same
> time doesn't really compare.
>
> Here are some examples of 15th century Northern European art (Netherlands,
> specifically)
> http://users.pandora.be/bernard/Artpics/ENP.htm
> Perhaps you could show some African art from the same period, and explain
> how it shows a "higher level of culture"
>
> How about literature? Here are examples from 15th-16th century Northern
> Europe (England this time)
> http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/index.html
> Similar examples from that vast body of West African literature would be
> nice.
>
> <snip>
Examples of West African Culture in the 15th Century:
Higher education - University & "a professional bureaucracy
which functioned solidly for almost a century"
"Timbuktu was an intellectual center unrivaled at this
time to any other such center in the world"
http://www.xula.edu/~jrotondo/Kingdoms/Songhay/Askiyas01.htm
http://asu.alasu.edu/academic/advstudies/1d.html
Timbuktu was an intellectual center unrivaled at this
time to any other such center in the world. Young people from the Moslem
world came to Timbuktu's world famous University of Sankore to study Law
and Medicine. Even medieval Europe sent its best scholars to the
University of Sankore just to see the excellent libraries with
manuscripts in Aribic and to cosult with the learned mathmeticians,
astronomers, physicians, and jurists whose intellectual endeavors were
paid for out of the king's own treasury.
That the Songhay askiyas were able to build a professional bureaucracy
which functioned solidly for almost a century (from the accession of
Muhammad Turé in 1493 to the Moroccan conquest of 1591) is a testament
to their organizational skills and considerable personal power. Indeed,
their efforts surpass those of the Frankish king Charlemagne, whose
attempts to develop a complex administrative system seven centuries
earlier in medieval Europe met with no lasting success.
----------------------------------------------------
Timbuktu was founded about AD 1100 as a seasonal camp by Tuareg nomads.
After it was incorporated within the Mali Empire, probably in the late 13th
century, the Mali sultan, Mansa Musam, built a tower for the Great Mosque
(Djingereyber).
http://www.islam.org/culture/MOSQUES/Africa/TMp25a.htm
DjinguereBer Mosque, Timbuktu(Fourteenth Century) Minaret, Songhay period
http://xavier.xula.edu/~jrotondo/Kingdoms/Images/Photos/timbInt.html
Grand Mosque of Timbuktu, interior; n.b. flat ceiling of logs (Timbuktu, Mali)
http://www.cultures.com/Africa/timbuktu/timbuktu2.html
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http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/brians_syllabus/28.html
Sub-Saharan African Culture
A caravan approaching Timbuktu. The fabled city of Timbuktu was much
reduced from its former splendor by the time the first Europeans visited
it in the early 19th century. Here the German doctor Heinrich Barth and
his party are arriving in the 1850s.
Gold merchants at Timbuktu in the late 19th century, a scene common in
West Africa for centuries. Gold powder and nuggets were carefully
weighed on scales such as this.
The old mosque at Djenne, Mali, as restored around 1890. Recent
excavations have revealed fixed settlements at Djenne, in the Niger
inland delta, going back to the first millennium B.C. Djenne remained an
important cultural and economic center through medieval times.
The Bambara Mosque at Bougouni, Mali. West African architects and
builders showed ingenuity and resourcefulness in using local materials
and adapting to environmental conditions. The protruding timbers were
used as steps when, due to an infrequent rain, the walls needed
replastering with mud.
The 11th century Gobirau Minaret at Katsina, Nigeria. Mosque
architecture reflects a synthesis of local and imported traditions, some
of great duration.
Reconstruction of the Great Wall of Kano, at the Museum of Traditional
Nigerian Architecture, Jos, Nigeria. Kano, one of seven city-states of
Hausaland that emerged between 1000 and 1400 A D., remained one of the
largest and most important states and a major commercial center. Leo
Africanus, who travelled through the region in 1526, was impressed by
the prosperity and civility of the inhabitants.
A 1959 panorama of Kano, Nigeria. For centuries Kano has been a thriving
commercial, political and cultural center of Hausaland in northern
Nigeria. Islam began to penetrate Hausaland by the 15th century,
introduced perhaps by Wangara traders from Mali in the late 14th
century. Muhammad Rumfa, who ruled Kano during the second half of the
15th century, made Islam the state religion and sought to reform his
administration according to Islamic principles.
An Ife bronze head from Nigeria. According to Yoruba tradition, Ife was
the place where the gods descended to earth. Ife bronze art is unique in
its naturalistic portrayal of the human form. This life size head
represents a dead king, an Oni, in his prime. The holes around the mouth
may have served to attach a mustache and beard. This Ife bronze, and
many others like it, were cast between the 12th and 15th centuries. They
represent the "classical" period of African bronze art.
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http://www.mrdowling.com/609-zimbabwe.html
6. Zimbabwe: the cyclopean architectural style.
European explorers discovered vast stone ruins of the Karanga in 1867.
The site was called Zimbabwe, which means ³stone dwelling² in the native
Bantu language. The Europeans were unwilling to believe that sub-Saharan
Africans could have built Zimbabwe; they theorized that ancient
Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, or Hebrews created the structures.
Excavations in 1932 proved that the indigenous Africans created the
ruins, but the white colonial government of Rhodesia attempted to deny
the site¹s African genesis. The Karanga people ruled a great inland
African empire from about AD1000 to AD1600. The Karanga were great
traders smelted gold and traded it on the shores of the Indian Ocean for
glas beads and porcelain from China.
---------------------------------------------------------------
AFRICAN ART:
Racist theories of the nineteenth century suggested that the beautiful
Ife bronze sculptures of Nigeria must have been produced by Greeks
visiting the area (or that Greeks must have shown them how to make
them), because these were so beautifully naturalistic, so different from
the African art found in other areas, and so similar to naturalistic
Greek sculpture. (Archaeological evidence, of course, has proven beyond
a doubt that this was a wholely native Nigerian artform.)
-----------------------------------------
http://dkr.rapide-pana.com/demo/nigeria/nigeria4.htm
At its peak from the 12th to the 15th centuries, the Ife Art reflects
the continued sophistication and wealth of Nigerian society. Its art
consists of magnificent sculptures in bronze and terra cotta depicting
heads and figures of nobility represented in almost naturalist forms
almost approaching portraiture. The high quality of the art puts it in a
category alongside the great naturalist sculptures of ancient Greece,
the European Renaissance and Dynastic Egypt.
-----------------------------------
http://artnetweb.com/artnetweb/guggenheim/africa/west.html
WESTERN AFRICA
The peoples of the Atlantic coast of western Africa, from Cameroon to Senegal
and as far inland as the Savanna, have developed sophisticated art
traditions.
Western Africa is rich in archaeological finds. Metalworking and
ceramics appeared in this area about two thousand years ago. Iron tools
allowed for efficient clearing of the forest, tilling of the soil, and
harvesting of crops, leading to the establishme nt of settled
agricultural communities, a prerequisite for major art production.
Maiden Mask, Igbo, Nigeria, Wood, William Hughes Hayden Collection,
Iron also facilitated the carving of sculpture in wood. Clayworking led
to efficient storage and cooking vessels and allowed for the development
of ceramic statuary.
The ceramic sculptures of the Nok culture of northern Nigeria, dating
from about 500 b.c. to a.d. 200, are the earliest known examples of
figurative sculpture south of the Sahara. It has been suggested that
they were made by women, an idea in part based o n later evidence from
Ghana that female Akan potters made that society's heads and figures
portraying the royal dead
The practice of casting metal sculpture, in copper alloys of varying
composition, appeared at Igbo-Ukwu in eastern Nigeria in the tenth
century, in Ife (along with clay sculpture) about two centuries later,
and at Benin still later.
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West African medicine - teaching European whites.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi518.htm
SLAVES AND SMALLPOX
by John H. Lienhard
(Theme music)
Today, African servants teach medicine to Colonial America. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
We know Cotton Mather as a famous preacher in Colonial Boston. We hear
much less about his interest in science and medicine. Yet he pressed the
case for smallpox inoculation long before 19th-century science
understood it...
He'd seen it first hand in his African servant. The man showed Mather
his smallpox scar and told him that you
... take the Juice of the Small Pox, and Cut the Skin and put in a drop:
then by 'nd by a little Sick, then a few Small Pox; and no body dye of
it; no body have Small Pox any more.
In 1721 we knew people who had used inoculation for a long, long time.
We learned it from African slaves -- from a far more advanced people
than we thought. We learned it from an old civilization that we still
know too little about, even today.
--------------------------------------------
West Africa - Nigeria culture - Mathematics - Currency before Europe
"they had a unit of currency long before the Europeans, the cowrie shell"
http://www.millersv.edu/~deidam/m301/yor1.htm
A Number System for Mathematicians Only
"One must be a mathematician to learn this complex system" - Cladia
Zaslavsky in Africa Counts
The Republic of Nigeria is the most populous country of Africa, with 1/3
the population of the USA in 1/10 of its area. It is the historical
site of several highly advanced civilzations, including the Nok (500 BC
- 200 AD) and Benin (15th-17th c.).
21% of the people are Yorubas, most living in western Nigeria and
preserving their old traditions.
They were always a trading people, originally with the Islamic peoples
from northern Africa who brought knowledge from the great Islamic
University at Timbuktu in Mali (today 45% of Nigerians are Islamic).
And they had a unit of currency long before the Europeans, the cowrie
shell (sometimes, "cowry" - a spiral-shelled snail).
The Yoruba number system is extraordinarily complex,...
The Yorubas could handle fractions and powers:
1/2
idaja [ divide into 2 ]
1/4
idamerin
4^2
erin lona meji
4^4
erin lona merin
As a consequence of the complexity of the Yorubas' number system, they
became very efficient at mental calculation, a skill useful for going to
the market and for bargaining.