I spent 4 years at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), London University doing my first degree, and never once, never once in all those years did I learn did I learn anything about any African civilisation.
Christopher Columbus NEVER ONCE set foot on the American continent.
We know little about Africa because of (historians' and anthropologists') fascination with the primitive, and their habit of extrapolating, from these limited observations, books about Africa that tell us little of the quintessential African.
Africa has far less jungle than any other continent comparable with its land space.
A great many Africans are Eurocentric in thought and deed. They do not know where they are coming from, what is going on, or where they are going.
The Europeans Avery(?) and Schmidt(?) in 1978 discovered that 1500 - 2000 years ago, Africans were smelting steel in Tanzania, in a machine using a semi-conductor unknown in Europe until the 20th century. At 1800 degree Centigrade. Producing iron crystallisation process to process a fine blue of carbon steel. In a single stage which was more efficient that Europe's later 2 stage process.
Imaging the holocaust of taking some one hundred million people out of a society over three hundred years. The massive destruction of civilisations so that people can mock Africa and say "why are you so inferior and fragmented now if you used to have such fine civilisations?"
Knowledge about "black" people has become highly politicised.
Then a discovery just a few months after the Tanzanian smelter, by American researchers Lynch(?) and Robbins(?), of an astronomical observatory, a kind of African Stonehedge, in Namaratung(?) in north-west Kenya. They were able to note that that Kenyans had developed an accurate pre- (European) historic calendar in at least 300 BCE. The calender we use today is derived from the Ancient Egyptian. It was invented in 4200 BCE. Babylonians did not have a proper calendar. The astronomical observations of Egyptians helped divided the year into 12 months of 30 days each. They put 5 festival days at the end of the year.
Cheikh Anta Diop discovered a civilisation, a monastic dynasty (Tar-Seti?) in the Nile valley dated at least 2000 years before the first dynasty of ancient Egyptian. At Tar-Seti, they founded not only architectural forms, but also the falcon god Horus, the crown art-form associated with Egypt, the palace facade later used by the Egyptians, and above all, they found heiroglyphs. So the first writing in the world is not even Egyptian, rather it is Ethiopian / Sudanic.
In west Africa, around 13th century AD, about 7 centuries ago, Africans (the Dogon tribe now in Mali) were recording the star system, Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye. Sirius A is a bright star that all can see. The Africans also projected its orbit and projectory up to 1990 AD at the end of the 20th century AND intuited its mass. Europe's reaction: a MIT professor is said to have commented "Africans have no business knowing this kind of thing".
The first scientific evidence of the use of numbers in the world is found in the Congo, Zaire. It is known as Ishango-bone(?) and is 8000 years old. It is a simple mathematics but it is the first evidence avalable. The Yoruba mathematical system is one of the most complex and abstract in the world.
Nobody goes to the semi-primitive communities of Eastern Europe and writes of its inhabitants as indicative of all Europeans, yet that is done with Africa.
The first medical journals, the first mathematical papyrus were WRITTEN in African languages.
A lot of the Greek, ancient and modern European, scholars went to Africa to pick up knowledge and returned to Europe to be proclaimed the father of this, the father of that...
Where is the English script? Cicero said "the English are so stupid, I am not sure we can make successful slaves of them!" There were many scripts in Africa even if only a few (the literate) used them.
By the 13th AD century, Africans were already performing eye cataract surgery, ceasarean?! section surgery, used drugs for hypertension and some phycho-somatic disorders, had perfectly ground spherical lenses, made telescopes...
In modern science, more than 100 patents by African-Americans up to 1913, despite that many inventions under slavery were attributed to plantation owners or to lawyers, as slaves were not considered citizens of the USA. A patent is a contract between the government and a citizen.
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