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(village or desert outpost or forest) was the same the world over, at least before the
industrial revolution. Instancy of communication today -- the fact that we live in
"global village" connected by radio, telephone, and television -- makes it less so.
Thus almost everyone on the planet now can be in instant touch, theoretically with
everyone else. But something very fundamental has remained unchanged. High
technologies (with their complex information networks) are still concentrated in
certain primary centers and still relatively absent or disproportionately dispersed at
the edges. Al that has changed is that the centers of high-technology now lie in
powerful industrial blocs (cities of the super-powers) while whole countries or
continents, with mere scraps of that technology, perch on the periphery.
It is important to understand this if we are understand how a science or technology
may rise and fall with a civilziation, whey the destruction of a center could lead to
the almost instant evaporation of disappearance of centuries of knowledge and
technical skills. Thus a nulear war could shatter the primary centers of 20th century
technology in a matter of days. The survivors on the periphery, although they would
remember the aeroplanes and the television sets, the robots and the computors,
they space machines now circling our solar system, would not be able for centuries
to reproduce that technology. Apart from the almost wholesale slaughter of the
technocratic class, the interconnection between those shattered centers and the
equally critical interdependecy between those shattered centers and their
peripheries, would be gone forever. It would be like the strands of a web which once
stretched across the world, left torn and dangling in a void.
A dark age would certainly follow. Centuries afterwards, the technological brilliance
of the 20th century would seem dream-like and unreal. Until archeology began to
pick up the pieces, those of us to follow in the centuries to come willl obviously
doubt what had been achieved in the centuries preceeding the disaster. This has
happened before in the world. Not in the same way, of course, but with the same
catastropic effect. It happened in Africa.
No human disaster, with the exception of the Flood (if that biblical legend is true)
can equal in dimension of destructiveness the cataclysm that struck Africa. We are
all familiar with the slave trade and the traumatic effect of this on the transplanted
black but few of realize what horrors were wrought on Africa itself. Vast populations
were uprooted and displaced, whole generations disappeared, European diseases
descended like the plague, decimating both cattle and people, cities and towns
were abandoned, family networks disintegrated, kingdoms crumbled, the threads of
cultural and historical continuity were so savagely torn asunder that henceforth one
would have to think of two Africas: the one before and the one after the Holocaust.
Anthopologists have said that eighty percent of traditional African culture survived.
What they mean by traditional is the only of culture we come to accept as African -that of the primitive on the periphery, the stunned survivor. The African genius,
however, was not remain buried forever. Five centuries later, archeologists, digging
among the ruins, began to pick up some of the pieces.
Metallurgy
Astronomy -- Kenya
In the same year that the African steel-smelting machine was discovered, another
team of American scientists -- Lynch and Robbins of Michigan State -- uncovered an
astrnomical observatory in Kenya. It was dated 300 years before Christ and was
found on the edge of Lake Turkana. It was the ruins of an African Stonehenge, with
huge pillars of basalt like the stumps of petrified trees lyiing at right angles in the
ground. The place had an awesome-sounding name, Na-mo-ra-tu-nga, which, in the
Turkana language, means "the stone people."
Not far away the scientists had found stones like these but they were merely
standing in circles around graves. They were probably just ceremonial slabs of stone
marking the sites of ancestors. But the huge stone pillars at Namoratunga II were
different. These -- there were 19 of them -- were arranged in rows, and set down at
such angles that the sense of an order, precise and significant, immediately struck
the observers.
Lynch and Robbins know that modern Cushites in Eastern Africa had a calendar
based on the rising of certain stars and constellations. If this were true, they would
before them the keystone of the system, the prehistoric beginnings. in fact, of one
of the most accurate of pre-Christian calendars.
They decided to check this out more carefully, to see if the stones did line up with
the rising of these starts and the location of these constellations. There was,
however, one problem. The world had not remained in the same precise placesince
300 B.C. There had been gradual changes in its axis of rotation since then.
They made allowances for this and found that their hunch was correct. Taking
observations at various points of this ancient African observatory, they found that
each stone stone was aligned with a star as it rose in 300 B.C. "This evidence," the
team concluded "attests to the complexity of prehistoric cultural developments in
sub-Saharan Africa. It strongly suggests that an accurate and complex calendar
system based on astronomical reckoning was developed by the first millenium in
B.C. in eastern Africa."
star system must have brought this marvelous knowledge down to the Africans.
Humbled by evidence of the scientific advances of the Egyptians and the
Sumerians, whom he links with the later Dogon, Temple arrogantly claims:
"Civilization as we know it was an imporation from another star in the first
place....The linked cultuure of Egypt and Sumer in the Mediterranean areas simple
came out of nowhere." Carl Sagan, superstar of the TV serious Cosmos, goes one
step futher. His solution to the mystery is that some clever European traveller who
appeared among the Dogon before the anthropologists came to study them. This
scienfically literate European, proposes Sagan, exchanged his sophisticated
knowledge of the stars in return for the savages simple lore. When Griaule and
Dieterlen cmae, the black merely played back what they had heard in a parrot-like
fashion. Sagan had not even stopped to consider that no scientifically literate
European, even today, much less before 1931, can speak with the certainty of the
Dogon elders of the one year orbit of Sirius B on its own axis. Nor has it occured to
him that this obsession with the star-system expressed itself in ceremonies among
the Dogon centuries ago nor thaht the tradition they were supposed to have
imbibed from an itenerant white genius and regurgitated to the anthropoligists like
parrots, never surfaced until after 16 years of continuous probing.
Mathematics
The tendency to deny an African astronomical science is due to the fact that such
accurate observations over long periods involve the most precise record-keeping, a
capacity to measure complex distances and times, to calculate orbits and azimuths,
and convergences. The calls for a mathematics and not just the simple handcount of
one, two, many. Very few anthropological works have ever mentioned a
mathematical system in Africa. At the moment only one single book exists -- Africa
Counts: Number and Pattern in Afriacn Culture by Claudia Zaslavsky -- which
attempts to deal with mathematics south of the Sahara.
Why is mathematics so rarely mentioned in the study of the African? One reason, of
course, is the assumption that the African was incapable of developing abstract
thought. Another is the fact that anthrolopology has a love affair with the primitive
and would prefer to set its tent down among the bushmen of the Kalahari than
among African traders who are accustomed to dealing in large sums of currency.
There is a rold of difference between the mathematical thinking of a hunter-gatherer
and a trader from an African city state.
Not all Africans had mathematics, it is true, but neither did all Europeans. Most
Europeans got their mathematics from the Greeks who used cumbersome letters of
their alphabet for numbers. It was not until 1202 that Hindu numeral were
introduced into Western Europe. these the numeral we use today. We call them
Arabic numerals because it was the Arabs who eventually accepted by most
European traders as the Moorish hold was consolidated. The Church at first banned
them. Mathematics progessed very little outside the commercial centers. The
universities only taught some arithmetic and bits of Euclidean geometry, translatic
into Latin from Arabic. Mathematics was viewed with general suspicion. One of the
crimes for the Spanish Inquisition inflicted death was the poassession of Arabic
manuscripts and the study of mathematics. As late as the 17th century, the time of
the persecution of Galileo, "mathematics was looked upon with fear in Europe
because of the magical use of numbers."
Among the earliest evidence of the use of numbers is a find in Africa in the Congo
(Zaire). These are markings -- a notation count -- on a bone 8,000 years old. It is
known as the Ishongo bone since it was found near an ancient fishing site of that
name. The discoveror, Dr. de Heinzelin, says it is a numeration system. Dr.
Marshack, who has examined the notches on the bone, says its a lunar calendar. For
whatever purpose the system was used, it is the first we know of in Africa and
among the first in the world.
Mathematics developes according to a need. If a situation calls for a simple count of
objects a people will develop a simple set of numbers. If their cultural demands are
more complex, a more complex mathematics system will evolve. Thus systems of
numeration may range in Africa from a few numer words among the San people,
who have been pushed into the least hospitable areas of the continent, to the
extensive numerous vocabulary of African nations having a history of centuries of
commerce.
One such nation is the Yoruba and the related people of the city of Benin in Nigeria,
who been urbanized farmers and traders for centuries. They have a complex
number system based on twenty. But a mathematical system is not always
recoverable, is not always blessed with historical continuity like that found among
the Yoruba and a number of large African sommunities. It may be hidden in
architechtural design or in abstract patterns or in measuring systems or in games.
Asante and his wife, Kariamy Asante, both Fulbright scholars, have done the most
recent study of this remarakble ruin.
The ancient plan of this city is in two parts. The king's part, the Royal Enclosure, is
on the top of the hill. the other building -- nine separate stone sites -- are down in a
valley. Among the buildings in the valley is the Great Enclosure where the king really
lived although he spent a lot of time up on the hill. From that hill he could the
coming and going of traders and warriers along that valley for a distance of about
30 miles.
The Royal Enclosure on the hill is a fascinating and mysterious place. Secret winding
passageways and stone steps approach it from the south and withing the hill-top
castle there are vast rooms, among these one for ritual, one for smelting, one for
iron-keeping. The king kept his ironsmiths and copper craftsmen there. There was
also a royal treasure cove made by a huge granite rock.
Down in the valley, where the rest of the ancient city lies, is the largest of all the
buildings, the Great Enclosure. The wall around this palace is 250 meters ling. It is
composed of 15,000,000 tons of granite blocks. It is estimated that 10,000 people
lived in that city, making it one of the largest cities of its day.
But it was not an isolated achievement at all. The Asantes point to the fact that in
that areas there more than 200 stone villages. They are scattered over Zimbabwe
and Mozambique. The site, Great Zimbabwe, was the seat of a civilization in the
South. The same type of structural concept was spread over a very large area
occupied by native Africans. The engineering skill of these Africans was not confined
to architecture. Even before Great Zimbabwe became a seat of civilziation, Afriacns
in the southern part of the continent had dug the most ancient mines found in the
world. Several such ancient mine works and rare minerals were discovered by the
German treasure seeker, Karl Mauch, not far from great Zimbabwe itself.
Yet when this great stone city was found, Europeans not only began to steal the
treasure but even the right of the natrive Africans to lay claim to their own
civilziation. Many books have been written, trying to prove that this archtectural
site, which is right in the heartland of Africa, half a thousand miles away from any
seacoast, was built by Perians, Phoenicians, Portuguese, Arabs, or Chinese. The fact
that there are no prototypes for Zimbabwean architecture and art and ritual among
any of these foreign peoples does not seem to bother the conjectural historians.
Had they stopped at stealing the claim, that would be enough. But they stole
everything they could put their hands on. Not just the faience and glass and celadon
which the Africans imported in the overseas trade but enormous caches of ivory and
gold, copper rings and necklaces and bangels and bracelets, bells and gongs,
sacred birds of soapstone, divination bowls and dishes, even ritual phalli. The
Asantes catalogue the thefts, part of the massive movement ancient African
treasures from their place of manufacture to the museuems of the West. In 1871 a
German prospector even carted away stone posts and confiscated a beautiful
platter which he sold to Cecil Rhodes, after whom that area was solemnly named
Rhodesia. As if that were not enough, the English Royal Horseguards attacked the
Great Enclosure in 1892, gutting the inside of the building, taking everything that
could be removed.
Great Zimbabwe rose in significance from the 12th century and flourished as the
capital of an African empire, known as Monomotapa, for 300 years. The great stone
city housed the emperor, his family, officials of the court, servants, and later,
traders. It was the Shona people who built this center, seat of power for the
southeastern interior of Africa. Like the earlier pyramids of Egypt, this structure not
only "symbolized the power, permanence, and authority of the ruler" but it also
crystallized the science and technology of that people, place, and time.
Navigation
African engineering skill may also be seen in the skillful construction of boats. The
image of jungle canoes promoted by Tarzan movies has created the popular
impression of a fragile and easily capsizable dugout as the hallmark of African
watercraft. The dugout, in fact, is just a building block, "a template," as
oceanographer Stewart Malloy has shown, "for extension and expansion techniques
used world-wide to make a boat seaworthy." Africans in West and Central Africa
developed a variety of boats. They had a marine highway, 2,600 mile long, and on
that highway -- the Niger -- once could find reed boats with sails, like the reed boats
of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia; log rafts lashed together; enormous dugouts as wideberthed, long, and sturdy as Viking ships; double canoes connected catamaran
fashion like the Polynesian; lateen-rigges dhows as used bu the Arbas and the
African maritime peasantson the Indian Ocean; rope sewn plank vessels with
cooking facilities in the hold and jointed boats fitted out with straw cabins.
Malloy has taken a new look at the watercraft of West and Central Africa, a region
which once formed part of a great interlocking trade network running from the
Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea and the from the West Coast to Lake Chad.
Western Africa crisscrossed with a network of trade routes leading to the interior.
These trade links between the West Coast and the Niger River existed for many
centuries before the coming of the European. The nautical skills on the Atlantic
coasts of Africa, which I note in my book They Came Before Columbus, originated
largely, according to Malloy, beyond the coast, particularly on the Niger and in the
neighborhood of Jenne and Timbucktoo, which were major cities in the Mali and
Songhay empires.
When Mali and Songhay feel and Timbucktoo was destroyed, the trade routes
leading to the interior of Africa lost much of their importance. The Niger, it
tributaries, and the Senegambia region no longer enjoyed the vast volumes of
traffic and intercourse. As a result "there was a stagnation in innovative boat
building." Before this technology deteriorated, some travellers reported glimpses of
the varied types of craft used on African rivers and seacoasts.
The journey across the Sahara is twice as long and twice as hazardous as a journey
acorss the open Atlantic.
Agricultural Science
Several plants in the Sudanic agricultural complext -- the bottle gourd, a species of
jackbean and of yam, a stain of cultivated cotton -- have been discovered in preColumbian strata in Middle and South America. The three main currents off the
coast of Africa which such everything that remains afloat from Africa to America,
can explain an unmanned drift voyage before Columbus of the bottle gourd. The
other plants, however, could have come to this continent without the help of man.
This has been clearly established by botanists. They would have either submerged
below and eventually sank or, if held up by driftwood, would have been unable to
preserve their potency during a long drift.
The potential for plant diffusion, whether by accident or design, lay well within the
range of African navigational science. But what of the science that produced the
plants themselves? Science magazine reported in 1979 the discovery by Fred
Wendorf of agricultural sites near the Nile going back more than 10,000 years
before the dynasties of Egypt. There, Africans were cultivating and harvesting
barley and wheat. But not only were the Africans the first in crop science but also
the first in the domestication of cattle. These are the keystone elements necessary
for the development of civilzations. University of Massachusetts anthropologist, Dr.
Charles Nelson, announced to the New York Times in 1980 that his team had
unearthed evidence in the Kenya highlands that Africans had been domesticating
cattle 15,000 years ago. Dr. Nelson said that the finding led them to conclude that
pre-Iron Age Africans in that area had a relatively sophisticated society and could
have spread their mores, living modes, and philosophy, eventually reaching the
fertile crescent of the Euphrates River Valley.
Medicine
African plant medicine was more developed than any in the world before the
disruption of its cultures. In spite of the tremendous knowledge that was lost and
the fact that African medicine today does not reflect the best of what the earlier
doctors knew, the fragments that survive still tell us quite a lot. Dr. Charles Finch of
the Morehouse School of Medicine, writing in the Journal of African Civilizations,
sketches in the background to African traditional medicine, not just its plant science
but its psychotherapy, its approach to the diagnosis of diseases, its very early
knowledge of anaesthetics, anitsceptics, vaccination, and the advanced surgical
techniques in use among African doctors.
African herbal medicine is extremely impressive. No one has yet done a
comprehensive study of it but even the little that has been done so far reveals that
several Western medicines were known to Africans before the Europeans discovered
them. The Africans had their own aspirin. The Bantu-speaking peoples use the bark
of Salix capensis to treat musculoskeletal pains and this family of plants yields
salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. In Mali they had one of the most
effective cures for diarrhea, using kaolin, the active incredient in the American