Historical picture of african achievement
M.McGill
<mwp...@xhotmail.com> wrote:
> UNGA!
> BUNGA!
>
> http://video.whiterace.com/video/images/rich_african_history_pic.htm
>
> Above is historical picture of african achievement.
>
AFRICAN NEGRO INVENTIONS:
Smallpox inoculation.
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.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested
in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Rudolph, R. and Musher, D.M., Inoculation in the Boston Smallpox
Epidemic of 1721. Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 115, June 1965,
pp. 692-696.
Mather also read European accounts of inoculation, but only after he'd
learned of it from his servant. It seems that personal experience with
inoculated Africans was the most powerful driver of Mather's enthusiasm.
Mather acquired the servant four years after his children had barely
survived smallpox. The servant's name was Onesimus.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Higher education - University
http://www.xula.edu/~jrotondo/Kingdoms/Songhay/Askiyas01.htm
http://asu.alasu.edu/academic/advstudies/1d.html
5. Songhay: the tomb of the askias
After Mali lost
its power Songhay was there to assume its role as the last of the "
Great Three " ancient West African empires. The Kingdom of Askia
Mohammed's kingdom covered most of West Africa and was greater than all of
the European states combined. Songhay was significant during the 15th
and 16th centuries. The people of Songhay were highly intelligent,
industrious, and aggressively invincible both as traders and warriors.
Under the leadership of Askia Mohammed, Timbuktu became a prosperous
commercial city of 100,000 people, where trader came from Asia the
Middle - East and Europe to exchange there exotic merchandise for the
gold of Songhay. 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.
---------------------------------------
The West African Kingdoms of Mali and Songhay were more advanced than
Northern Europeans.
http://www.worldbook.com/fun/aajourny/html/bh110.html
African American Ancestry
The ancestors of most American blacks came from an area of Africa known as
the Western Sudan. This area was about as large as the United States, not
including Hawaii and Alaska. It extended from the Atlantic Ocean in the
west to Lake Chad in the east and from the Sahara in the north to the Gulf
of Guinea in the south.
From about the A.D. 300's to 1591, three highly developed black empires,
in turn, controlled all or most of the Western Sudan. They were Ghana,
Mali, and Songhai.
In 1235, the Malinke people of Mali began to develop the second great
black African empire of the Western Sudan. By 1240, they controlled all
Ghana. The Mali Empire's most famous ruler was Mansa Musa, who reigned
from 1312 to about 1337. Mansa Musa encouraged the practice of Islam, the
religion of the Muslims. Under his rule, Mali reached its height of
wealth, political power, and cultural achievement.
Beginning in the 1400's, the Songhai Empire gained control of most of
northwestern Africa south of the Sahara, including much of Mali. Under
Askia Muhammad, who ruled Songhai from 1493 to 1528, the empire had a
well-organized central government and excellent universities in such
cities as Timbuktu and Jenne. Like Mansa Musa, Askia encouraged his people
to practice the Islamic faith. Invaders from Morocco conquered Songhai in
1591.
---------------------------------------------
Iron & steel smelting
http://tc.unl.edu/tcforum/nott.3.html
The Origins of Smelting
"More than 1500 years ago, Africans in the vicinity of Lake Victoria
"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" (Shore, 1991)."
-----------------------------------
http://jfa-www.bu.edu/Abstracts/S/SchmidtP_10_4.html
Peter R. Schmidt assisted by D. H. Avery
More Evidence for an Advanced Prehistoric Iron Technology in Africa
Journal of Field Archaeology 10 (1983) 421--434
"These discoveries affirm that one of the most advanced technologies
in the ancient world developed in Africa independent of European
influence."
----------------------------------------
E. Torday, a member of the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Corresponding Fellow of the Anthropological Society
of Vienna proclaimed in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Vol. XLIII:
"I feel convincedÉ that we are indebted to the Negro for the very keystone
of our modern civilizations, and we owe to him the discovery of iron"
--------------------------------
In the September 22 (1978) issue of the scholarly magazine Science, two
Brown professors announced an incredible discovery:
"Assistant professor of Anthropology Peter Schmidt and Professor of
Engineering Donald R. Avery of Brown University, Have
found that as long as 2,000 years ago Africans living on the western
shores of Lake Victoria had produced carbon steel in
preheated furnaces, a method that was technologically ahead of any
development in Europe until the mid nineteenth century."
---------------------------------
As Godfrey C Burns, M.D. points out in "Early African Science," Journal of
African Civilizations, Vol. I No. 1 April, 1979:
" These researchesÉ demonstrations evidence for a prehistoric, iron
smelting technology that produced steel 1500 to 2000 Years before Europe."
---------------------------------------
AFRICAN NEGRO ARCHITECTURE:
1. Architectural achievements of ancient black Africans ... produced
"magnificent stone and brick palaces, temples, churches, cathedrals, wide
avenues lined with palm trees, government buildings, public baths,
water supply systems.
http://www.nicom.com/~ethiopia/hst.htm
2. Ethiopia: lalibella, the cathedral of st. mary (where the ark of the
covenant is said to be stored)
Axum, the site of Ethiopia's most ancient city, today slumbers on
blissfully unaware of its glorious past. The small town's 16th-century
Cathedral of
St. Mary of Zion is built on the site of a much older church dating from
the fourth century AD. Only a platform and the wide stone steps remain
from
the earlier structure. The cathedral is a repository for crowns belonging
to some of Ethiopia's former emperors. According to legend, it also houses
the
original Ark of the Covenant-thus making St. Mary's the holiest sanctuary
in Ethiopia.
The most striking relics of Axum, however, are its obelisks or stelae.
They are made from single blocks of granite carved to represent
multi-story
buildings. The tallest, now fallen, once stood more than 33 meters high
and numbered 23 meters tall. The carving is deep and precise, showing the
beams for each floor and the windows.
http://www.swt.edu/studentorg/kammaasi/afrstates.html
3. Guinea: the tree-lined streets of the city of vaida.
When they (European navigators) reached the Bay of Guinea and alighted at
Vaida, the captains were astonished to find well-planned streets bordered
for several leagues by two rows of trees; for days they traversed a
countryside covered by magnificent fields, inhabited by men in colorful
attire that they had woven themselves! More to the south, in the Kingdom
of the Congo, a teeming crowd clad in silk and velvet, large States, well
ordered down to the smallest detail, powerful rulers, prosperous
industries. Civilized to the marrow of their bones...This flowering the
European conquistadors destroyed as they advanced.
Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist
4. Nubia: temple of dandur, faras cathedral, the monasteries at qasr el
wizz and anba hidra
http://www.xula.edu/~jrotondo/Kingdoms/Songhay/Askiyas01.htm
http://asu.alasu.edu/academic/advstudies/1d.html
5. Songhay: the tomb of the askias
Under the leadership of Askia Mohammed, Timbuktu became a prosperous
commercial city of 100,000 people, where trader came from Asia the Middle
- East and Europe to exchange there exotic merchandise for the gold of
Songhay. 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.
------------------------------------
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.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 łstone dwelling˛ 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 siteąs
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.
7.Ghana
The earliest of these states, Ghana, came into being by the 5th century AD
in what is now southeastern Mauritania. Its capital, Kumbi Saleh, has been
excavated in modern times. By the 11th century, the armies of Ghana,
equipped with iron weapons, made it master of the trade routes extending
from present-day Morocco in the north to the coastal forests of western
Africa in the south.
Because of its vast wealth, many of the residents of Ghanaian cities
constructed homes of wood and stone. -From page xiv _Chronology of African
American History_ by Alton Hornsby, Jr.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains a land of many mysteries. When the Europeans
invaded the land they destroyed many of the historical records, leaving us
asking many questions. The native black people of sub-Saharan Africa have
controlled the entire region for less than two decades. The colonial
rulers that preceded them had no interest in exploring Africaąs glorious
past; in fact they had reason to deny that Africans had a proud history.
Archaeologists are finding new artifacts and changing what we know about
Ancient Africa.
A great deal of what we know about West Africa comes from the griots, but
archaeologists are often surprised by new finds. In the last fifteen
years, scholars have concluded that civilization had developed in West
Africa as much as one thousand years earlier than expected. We now know
that Africa had an Iron Age culture with cities and trade routes about 250
years before the common era.
-----------------------------
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://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.
Mask with Large Spiral Headdress, Ekoi, Nigeria, Animal skin, wood and
natural fibers, Private Collection
Five Figure Plaque, Benin, 17th century, Bronze, Collection of Sidney and
Bernice Clyman
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.
Funerary Head, Akan, Ghana, Terracotta, 33 x 19 x 17 cm
The casting of copper alloys continued to flourish at Benin as late as the
end of the nineteenth century, ending as a royally sponsored art only with
the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, which removed thousands of works
that had decorated the king's p alace and the royal ancestral altars.
Many sculptural traditions in wood (a medium that does not survive
archaeologically) developed in western Africa. Some were associated with
leadership: the royal arts of the Akan of Ghana, the kingdoms and
chieftaincies of the grasslands in Cameroon, and the richly diverse
artistic traditions of the Yoruba of Nigeria.
Works of art were produced to celebrate chiefly prestige, to decorate
shrines, for divination, and to control supernatural forces.
---------------------------------------------------
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHERS & PHILOSOPHY
http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/97may2/20may-game.html
Gilbert Magabotse is the world champion morabaraba player. Morabaraba is a
tactical board game, involving cunning and mental agility, which is played
widely among rural African communities - sort of a cross between draughts
and speed chess.
Webster, who is compiling an anthology on morabaraba, says it
has cultural roots tied to the African concept of ubuntu: "While
Western philosophy is based on the principle, 'I think therefore I
am', ubuntu says 'I am because you are'. So while most Western
games are based on beating the opponent, morabaraba is about
giving your opponent space to move in order to win."
But Webster claims the built-in concept of helping the opponent
(sounds more like trapping to me) means that white players
initially become very lost, because they are out to win and find it
frustrating. "I had a chess master from Russia who looked at the
game and said, 'This is easy.' He was demolished by a 14-year-old."
------------------------------------
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm
African philosophy and way of life called ŚUbuntuą (humanness)
(1) Ubuntu and religion
Ubuntu (a Zulu word) serves as the spiritual foundation of African
societies. It is a unifying vision or world view enshrined in the Zulu
maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, i.e. "a person is a person through other
persons" (Shutte, 1993:46). At bottom, this traditional African aphorism
articulates a basic respect and compassion for others. It can be
interpreted as both a factual description and a rule of conduct or social
ethic. It both describes human being as "being-with-others" and prescribes
what "being-with-others" should be all about.
While Western Humanism tends to underestimate or even deny the importance
of religious beliefs, Ubuntu or African Humanism is resiliently religious
(Prinsloo, 1995:4). For the Westerner, the maxim "A person is a person
through other persons" has no obvious religious connotations. He/she will
probably interpret it as nothing but a general appeal to treat others with
respect and decency. However, in African tradition this maxim has a deeply
religious meaning. The person one is to become "through other persons" is,
ultimately, an ancestor. And, by the same token, these "other persons"
include ancestors. Ancestors are extended family. Dying is an ultimate
homecoming. Not only the living must therefore share with and care for
each other, but the living and the dead depend on each other (Van Niekerk,
1994:2; Ndaba, 1994:13-14).
This accords with the daily experience of many Africans. For example, at a
calabash, which is an African ritual which involves the drinking of beer
(cf. Broodryk, 1997a:16), a little bit of beer is often poured on the
ground for consumption by ancestors. [For all the dead homies]
And, as is probably well known, many Africans also belief in God through
the mediation of ancestors (Broodryk, 1997a:15). In African society there
is an inextricable bond between man, ancestors and whatever is regarded as
the Supreme Being. Ubuntu thus inevitably implies a deep respect and
regard for religious beliefs and practices (Teffo,1994a:9).
(2) Ubuntu and consensus
Ubuntu underscores the importance of agreement or consensus. African
traditional culture, it seems, has an almost infinite capacity for the
pursuit of consensus and reconciliation (Teffo, 1994a:4). Democracy the
African way does not simply boil down to majority rule. Traditional
African democracy operates in the form of (sometimes extremely lengthy)
discussions (cf. Busia, 1967:28). Although there may be a hierarchy of
importance among the speakers, every person gets an equal chance to speak
up until some kind of an agreement, consensus or group cohesion is
reached. This important aim is expressed by words like simunye ("we are
one", i.e. "unity is strength") and slogans like "an injury to one is an
injury to all" (Broodryk, 1997a:5, 7, 9).
Here is a list of African Negro philosophers and their writings:
Maphisa, Sisho. 1994. Man in constant search of Ubuntu: a dramatist's
obsession. Pretoria: Ubuntu School of Philosophy.
Mbigi, Lovemore. 1995. Ubuntu: a rainbow celebration of cultural
diversity. Pretoria: Ubuntu School of Philosophy.
Mbigi, L. & Maree, J. 1995. Ubuntu. The spirit of African transformation
management. Randburg: Knowledge Resources.
Mphahlele, Ezekial. 1974. The African image. London: Faber & Faber.
Ndaba, W.J. 1994. Ubuntu in comparison to Western philosophies. Pretoria:
Ubuntu School of Philosophy.
Sindane, Jabu. 1994. Ubuntu and nation building. Pretoria: Ubuntu School
of Philosophy.
Sono, Themba. 1994. Dilemmas of African intellectuals in South Africa.
Pretoria: UNISA.
-------------------------------------
On African Writing Systems & literature:
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/sci/chem/guides/srs118_literature.html
Wole Soyinka a negro born in Western Nigeria in 1934, won the Nobel prize
for literature in 1986.
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Amharic2.html
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Mende.html
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/List_of_Scripts.html
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/VAI.html
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Nsibidi.html
Nsibidi Script
Nsibidi is a writing system of the Ejagham people of Nigeria. It is seen
on tombstones, secret society buildings, costumes, ritual fans,
headdresses, textiles, and in gestures, body and ground painting.
http://www.in.net/~vkarmo/bassa.htm
We did not know they had writing systems. Let me name half a dozen.
There is the Mande, which occurs more than 5000 years ago in the Sahara.
They also have the Meroitic. We have found at UNESCO more than 800
surviving books in
Meroitic, which means they had a lot more. That's what survived in Nubia.
We found that the hieroglyphic script did not begin in Egypt, but that it
began in Nubia, in the dynasty of Ta Seti, which was at least 200 years
before the first Egyptian dynasty, 3300 BC. We also find they had the Vai
script, which is a variant of the Mande, which is found among the elders
of Sierra Leone. Then there is the Akan script. A new book is being
written about that by a man called Bouah of the Ivory Coast.
The most extraordinary thing we have found is a script that has survived
among the slaves in Surinam, which is known as Asaka. And that is a variant
of the Akan script. That is the only script that we know that traveled from
Africa to America in slavery time.