adminhumanising the world, ie, shaping it in their own image and interests.” It is a collective account of humans giving the world a human form and character that serves human interests rather than jeopardise, distort or destroy those interests.
Black history is therefore the collective record of people of African descent in Africanising the world around them.
More than 60 years ago, Thomas Hodgkin, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (UK), wrote an article for a periodical called The Highway. Part of this article reads as follows:
“It is no doubt flattering to our vanity to imagine that the peoples of Africa were ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarous’ before the penetration of the Europeans, and that it is we [Europeans] who civilised them. But it is a theory that lacks historical foundation. The Empire of Ghana flourished in what is now French West Africa during the dark ages of Western Europe.
“By the 15th century, there was a university at Timbuktu. The Ashantis of the Gold Coast [now Ghana] and the Yorubas [of Nigeria] possessed highly organised and complex civilisations long before their territories were brought under British political and military control.
“The thesis that Africa is what Western European missionaries, traders, technicians and administrators have made it, is comforting (to Western Europeans) but invalid.”
Hodgkin’s article was published in 1952.
He explained the context why relevant information about Africans and their history is not widely known.
“Most of the available material on African affairs,” he wrote, “is presented from a European standpoint – either by imperial historians (who are interested in the record of European penetration into Africa), or by colonial administrators (who are interested in the pattern of institutions imposed by European governments upon African societies), or by anthropologists (who are often, though not always, mainly interested in the forms of social organisation surviving in the simplest African communities, considered in isolation from the political developments in the world around them).”
Modern times
On May 23, 1999, The Sunday Times (of London) carried an astonishing article entitled Jungle Reveals Traces of Sheba’s Fabled Kingdom. Over the next few days, many other papers followed suit.
The Daily Mail asked on 24 May: Was the Queen of Sheba really a black woman from Nigeria?
As the evidence emerged, however, the Queen of Sheba link proved to be hype. The real Sheba was an Ethiopian or possibly half-Yemeni queen who lived 3,000 years ago on the opposite side of the continent.
What was undeniable, however, was that the southern Nigerian rainforests concealed an even more amazing secret.
During the Middle Ages, Africans built by far the largest city the world had ever seen. In size, it dwarfed Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova and Rome. The achievement was on a scale even bigger than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza, Africa’s most celebrated monument.
At one time, scholars used to divide the 3,000-year history of southern Nigeria into four great cultural periods. They used to speak of the Nok Culture, the Igbo-Ukwu Culture, the Yoruba Kingdoms, and the Benin Empire.
This view was boldly challenged by the findings of a Bournemouth University archaeological team led by Dr Patrick Darling. Since 1994, the team has discovered and mapped the remains of yet another Nigerian kingdom previously covered by centuries of forest overgrowth.
Barnaby Phillips of the BBC (now with Al Jazeera English) described the discoveries as possibly “Africa’s largest single monument”. As we shall see, this is typical British understatement.
Ijebu kingdom
At Eredo, in southwest Nigeria, Darling’s team found a huge earthen wall with moated sections. This encircled an ancient kingdom or city.
From the base of the ditch to the summit of the rampart measured a towering 70 feet.
According to Mark Macaskill of The Sunday Times, the rampart was “100 miles” long and formed a rough circle, enclosing “more than 400 square miles”.
The building was on a truly epic scale. The builders shifted 3.5 million cubic metres of earth to build just the rampart alone. According to the BBC, this is, incidentally, “one million cubic metres more than the amount of rock and earth used in the Great Pyramid of Giza”. Therefore, Eredo’s construction is estimated to have “involved about one million more man-hours than were necessary to build the Great Pyramid.
The ramparts may indicate the boundary of the Ijebu Kingdom that was ruled by a spiritual leader called the “Awujale”.
Macaskill, however, disagrees. He describes Eredo as a “city”. If correct, this would make Eredo one of the very largest cities in all of human history. Comparable in size to modern London, it was the largest city built in the ancient and medieval world.
Among the discoveries, a three-storey ruin has been identified tentatively as the royal palace. It had living quarters, shrines, and courtyards.
It is possible that thousands of smaller buildings are still concealed by the forests and will be mapped in time.
Radiocarbon dating has so far established that the buildings and walls were more than 1,000 years old. Dates such as 800 AD have been suggested.
Nok and Igbo-Ukwu
As we shall see later, archaeology has unearthed two other civilisations in the Nigeria region, Nok and Igbo-Ukwu.
Artefacts from the Nok culture were first stumbled upon in 1928 by tin miners who were digging in the region. Various dating techniques showed that the artefacts belonged to a civilisation dated at between 1000 BC and 300 BC.
Iron smelting was conducted in the Nok culture from at least 900 BC. There is evidence of iron slag and also a blast furnance wall.
Isaiah Anozie, a Nigerian gentleman, discovered the Igbo-Ukwu culture in 1938. He unearthed a number of artefacts, quite by accident, when digging in his backyard. Archaeologists have since dated
the Igbo-Ukwu culture at 800-1000 AD.
According to one writer: “The Igbo-Ukwu finds showed evidence of metal working, weaving, and pottery making of unusual skill. The metal work include 110 major and 575 minor copper and bronze objects of very high quality and a very distinctive design.”
The Jos Museum in Nigeria and many other institutions continue to house the rediscovered artefacts, but let’s go from North to South via the western budge of Africa.
North Africa
The Arabs conquered North Africa beginning in 639 AD and are still to this day the dominant population in Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
Egypt and other countries of North Africa are today considered integral parts of the Arab world. Before the conquest during their victorious jihad of 639-708 AD, North Africa was basically Negro, just like the rest of the African continent.
The most ancient monuments in the region were built when North Africa was under indigenous black African rule.
Pharaoh Djoser, the second king of the Third Egyptian Dynasty, a black African, ruled between 5018 and 4989 BC. He built the earliest monuments in the world still celebrated today. Every year, thousands of tourists visit his Funerary Complex in the city of Saqqara. Imhotep, his celebrated prime minister, designed the Complex.
An outer wall, now mostly in ruins, surrounded the whole structure. It was built on a rectangular plan one mile long and with one entrance.
Pharaoh Hatshepsut (1650-1600 BC) of the 18th Dynasty was the builder of one of Egypt’s most popular monuments. Senemut, the overseer of works, constructed her temple in the region now known as Deir-el-Bahri.
Rather than build upwards from a base, the Mortuary Temple was built downwards, being cut out of a mountain. The whole building was hewn from the rocks by hammer and chisel.
Rameses II of the 19th Dynasty also built a temple carved out of a hill. The Temple of Abu Simbel, in Nubia, is of an incredible scale. The façade is 108 feet wide and contains four colossal statues of the pharaoh, each 66 feet high.
Further south, the Kushites (of southern Egypt, and northern and central Sudan) had a very long and ancient history. In their earliest periods, they had a pharaonic culture, much like Ancient Egypt, but beginning earlier than that of the Egyptians. Five thousand artefacts were recovered from a series of early pharonic tombs in Qustul.
Other great periods were centred at cities like Kerma, Gebel, Barkal, Meroe and Naqa. There are a total of 84 pyramids in the city of Meroe alone.
In Sudan as a whole, there are 223 pyramids, in the cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroe. Sudan, therefore, has more pyramids than any other country on earth – even more than Egypt!
The pyramids are generally 20 to 30 metres high and steep side, sloping at around 70 degrees. They were made of smaller blocks than their Giza counterparts.
The pyramids in Sudan, as those in Egypt, were used for royal burials and were entered by underground stairways.
Meroe became the capital of the Kushite Empire from around 590 BC until 350 AD, a period well attested by monuments.
Naqa also contains three important temples, the Temple of Amon, the Lion Temple, and the Kiosk. They date to between 1 AD to 20 AD. Pharaoh Natakamani and Queen Amanitore built the Temple of
Amen and the Lion Temple.
The Kiosk is a strange building that seems to have incorporated many cultural influences. There are arches, possibly reflecting Roman influence, and the capitals of the columns show traces of Greek influence. But there is no evidence that the Romans (or Greeks) built this temple.
Many writers have hinted at this possibility, but in the absence of solid evidence, we must conclude that this is a Kushite monument built by Kushites.
Southern Africa
In Southern Africa, there are at least 600 stone-built ruins in the regions of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. These ruins “show today an extraordinary cultural past”. Most of them are said to date from the Middle Ages, but some authorities give much earlier dates for their construction.
These structures are called Mazimbabwe in Shona, the Bantu language of the builders, and means great houses of stone.
The Great Zimbabwe was the largest of these ruins. It consists of 12 clusters of buildings, spread over three square miles. Its outer walls were made from 100,000 tons of granite bricks. In the 14th century, the city housed 18,000 people, comparable in size to that of London of the same period.
The buildings housed warehouses and shrines. Its industries included 4,000 gold mines, iron smelting, copper and bronze manufacture, and an ivory trade with the Swahili on the East African coast.
Among the products imported were stoneware and green glazed dishes from China, coloured glass from the Near East, and glazed and painted bowls from Persia. The walls of the central enclosure, popularly known as the “Temple”, reach 35 feet in height and 17 feet thick in places. They form an irregular ellipse with a maximum diameter of 292 feet and a circumference of 830 feet.
The bricks were fashioned and arranged to hold together in regular courses without the use of mortar. The floors are of crusted granite and contain drains. One of the earliest visitors to the site, J.
Theodore Bent, commented that: “As a specimen of the dry builder’s art, it is without a parallel.”
The tops of some walls have ornamental patterns, of which chevron and dentelle are the most common. For over 250 feet of its length, the chevron pattern ornaments the outer wall and is perfectly level.
On the summit of the wall above the chevron work, stood a series of granite and soapstone monoliths and also a double row of small granite towers.
Some of the other ruins show check sloping block, and herringbone patterns. The North Entrance has steps that curve inwards in a semi-circular fashion. This leads immediately inside to the great Parallel Passage, a distance of 220 feet.
Though succumbed to the passage of time, cottages once stood within and outside these walls for an area of three square miles. They were circular and thatched. Moreover, they had walls of 12 to 18 inches thick and made of daga, a clay and gravel mixture.
Perhaps the most well known part of the ruined complex is the Conical Tower. The Parallel Passage leads on to this curious edifice. It is 18 feet in diameter at the base and 30 feet high, though once higher.
Next to the tower is a much smaller cone structure. The Conical Tower may symbolise a mound of grain and therefore reinforce the role of the king as provider for the people.
On a hill 350 feet above and overlooking the Temple is a castle, generally known as the “Acropolis”. It has very thick walls, massive conical turrets, narrow entrances, and twisting passageways. The width of the entrances varies from half a metre to just over a metre. The width of the walls varies from 12 to 14 feet at the top to 19 to 22 feet thick at the base.
The site may well have been chosen for security reasons, giving a panoramic view of the city and the surroundings. What is interesting here is that the hill contains huge stone boulders. The builders incorporated the boulders into the walls rather than clearing them.
The “Eastern Temple” was another part of the complex. It was here that the famous soapstone bird sculptures were found. These birds were typically 14 inches long and stood at the top of three-foot long columns.
The Munhumutapa Empire
By the 13th century, or perhaps earlier, an empire was established in the region of today’s Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. In later times, it became known as Munhumutapa. Its rulers controlled the trade with the East African coastal cities. Furthermore, they controlled the all-important gold mines.
Great Zimbabwe functioned as its cultural capital until about 1550, but then it was gradually abandoned. Hundreds of other stone-built structures associated with this and a successor empire exist in the region.
The most notable of these courts were at Khami, Naletale and Dhlo Dhlo. Like Great Zimbabwe, they have walls of dressed blocks, but they also have platforms and terraces where the cottages were built.
The Portuguese sailed around the tip of South Africa in 1499 and landed in the vast empire of Munhumutapa. Called Benametapa in some of the Portuguese accounts, they described its vast gold reserves, ivory trade, and curious architecture.
The empire itself ruled the modern territories of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and parts of South Africa. Assisting the administration was a sizeable bureaucracy financed by taxation, tribute and presents.
The royal family and their officers used most of the bounty but a portion of it went to social welfare.
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 someone to carry their wallet to the next village. In every place where they come, there is the same obligation, under penalty that those who fail therein shall be punished by the king.”
East Africa
In Ethiopia, there are monuments dating back at least 2,500 years. The Temple of Almaqah in Yoha was probably built before the fifth century BC. It has a two storey structure made of dry stone masonry, built on podium. The city of Axum has a series of seven giant stelae 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 13 storey building.
The largest standing obelisk is 75 feet tall and represents a nine storey building. These monolithic towers may have been placed to mark the sites of royal burials.
Their sizes and weight is worth pondering over when it is noted that even modern technology would be taxed by the technological problem of moving and erecting such sizeable structures.
Axum contains the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Zion, one of the world’s oldest Christian cathedrals. Dating to the 4th century, this monument was later rebuilt in late mediaeval times.
To be continued next week.
Online Reporter