ANCIENT AFRICA

BY
JOHN M. WEATHERWAX
PART I
f
Printed for the HeritageProgtam
Community Action Institute
HARYOU-ACT, Inc.
New York City
For convenience, the lecture text is published
in two I1t-rtS. Additional copies, at twenty-
five centS per pamphlet, may be obtained from
the Aquarian Spiritual Center Bookshop, 1302
West Santa Barbara Avenue, Los Angeles 37,
California. (Specify whether Part I or Part II
is desired; each is twenty-five centS.)
July, 1962 .25
Cover: Tut-ankh-Amun's Burial Mask.
The Metropolitan Museum of. An.
The John Henry and Mary LoUisa D$n
Bryant Foundation
Los Angeles 29, California,
,Copyright, 1962, by The John Henry
.and Mary Louisa Dunn Bryant Foundation
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PART I
CONTENTS
Cradle of Humanity ..... " . . . . . . . . . .. 3
Children of Ham .................. " 4
The Earliest Africans .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 6
What Makes Color ................. " 7
The Four Great Rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Early Migrations ..................... 11
Upper and Lower Nile ................ 12
Imhotep ................... '. . . . . . . 14
HatShepsut ..................... ' .... 14
The Temple of Karnak ............... 14
The Sons of Kush ................... 15
God-Kings and Goddess-Queens ......... 16
Meroe, Capital of Kush .............. 16
Musawarat ......................... 16
Ram, Sun, Bull and Lion .............. 18
Phoenicia; Carthage; Crete . . . . . . . . . . .. 19
Punt .. :. . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 20
The Habashan (Abyssinians) ........... 20
The Amharic People of Ethiopia ......... 21
Axum DefeatS Kush .................. 22
Kush, Nubia and Sudan ............... 24
Chief City of Ancient Africa ........... 24
The Coming of Iron to Afrka .......... 25
[)arfur ...................... 27
Lake Chad and The Sao '" ........... 28
Kanem; Bornu ................. . ... 30
The Yorubas of Nigeria. '" .. , ........ 32
The Art of Benin and He .............. 32
The' Akan People of Ancient Ghana .....
The Almoravids .................. 35
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author acknowledges with gratitude the inspi-
ration, advice and constructive criticism of Mrs. Mabel
V. Gray, I.G.H.P., Public Relations Department, Inter-
national Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of
Tabor, in the preparing of this lecrure on early African
civilizations. It was through her that the author firSt
learned, many years ago, of Meroe, a city which was
both the Athens and the Pittsburgh of Ancient Africa.
The ritual of the Taborian Order reaches far back
in history to Meroe. All of its members are of African
descent; it is the oldest and largest fraternal body of
this character in the United States. At the time of its
founding in 1849 by Rev. Moses Dickson it became an
important part of the Underground Railroad, and
earned a highly respected place in the history of the
struggle for Emancipation. The fact that such an
organization in the United States is drawing for ethical
and moral guidance on Ancient Meroeis a fact of pro-
found significance and interest.
The author is indebted for many excellent sugges-
tions (made while this seminar oudine was in manu-
script) by Cyril Briggs, of the Committee for Honesty
in Education.
The author acknowledges gratefully the pioneering
of Richard B. Moore, Founder-Chairman of the Com-
mittee to Present the Truth About the Name "Negro,"
in urging use of the words "African" and "Afro-
american" instead of "Negro"-and in this lecrure
follows that practice.
Of great importance was the suggestion (used
throughout the text) of Charles H. Davis, Jr., that the
anthropological classification "Africoid" should be
adopted wherever the classification "Ngroid" would
formerly have been used. The author/believes such a
change in hmguage is long overdue/ and is therefore
sending a copy of this lecture - first of all - to the
anthropology departments of all Afroamerican colleges,
with a request for comment on changing usage from
Negroid to A/maid.
The author acknowledges, with deep gratitude, the
work done in this field by Basil Davidson and E. W.
Bovill, whose studies made possible the present brief
summary.
Africa is big.
Only one continent-Asia-is bigger.
From north to south, Africa measures 5,000
miles.
From west to east (in its northern half)
Africa is 4,600 miles wide.
Africa is high.
The land of Africa is mostly high plains.
They average 2,000 feet above sea-level.
Africa has four great rivers.
These are the Nile, the Congo, the Niger
and the Zambesi.
The Nile is Africa's great northern river. The
Zambesi flows to the southeast. The Congo
and the Niger are the great rivers of the west.
There are many smaller rivers.
Where the land meets the ocean, the land is
not as high as it is farther inside Africa. And
wherever the rivers flow into the ocean, there
are usually harbors for ships.
Along the north coaSt of Africa there are
many cities. The land near these cities is used
in many places for farming and for raising
cattle. Valuable iron and oil are in the ground
of the north coast countries.
Gibraltar is at the west and Suez is at the
east of Africa's north coast. The water along
this coast is the great inland sea called the
Mediterranean.
Just south of the countries that lie along and
near the north coast is the Sahara Desert.
The Sahara Desert is just about the same size
as the United States.
It is hot and dry. The sand dunes appear to
be endless. Sometimes a wind comes up and
makes a sandstorm. These storms have been
known to cover people. It is easy to get lost in
the Sahara Desert. Many people have died try-
ing to get across it.
Ever since history began, the Sahara has
made it hard for people of the north coast
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countries of Africa to reach the people south
of the desert.
But the Sahara Desert was not always as dry
as it is today.
In very early days, hunting people lived there.
Much later, in fact a great deal latet, cattle-
keeping people lived there.
Rock drawings in the desert have shown that
horses and chariots were used in the Sahara
Desert as early as 1,200 years before Christ.
Camels were not used to any great extent on
the Sahara Desert until a thousand years later.
People who srudy this huge desert say that
at least sixteen different kinds of people
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lived
there in the period of time between the first
appearance of the hunting people and the
cattle-keeping people.
South of the Sahara Desert is a wide band of
grassland. The plains of this part of Africa have
few trees. There are streams and rivers and
animals.
Still farther south is forest country.
Beyond the forest country, in the far south
of Africa, there are again grassy plains.
In the Sahara there is hardly any rainfall;
but in parts of the Congo the rainfall for a year
has been as high as 365 inches. That is an
average of one inch of rain for every day of the
year.
Such rainfalls help to make the Congo one
of the greatest water-power areas of the world.
But this power has not yet been developed.
In fact, the immense riches of Africa are only
partly known even now. Africa has vast mineral
riches-diamonds, radium, uranium, gold, cop-
per, vanadium,cobalt, antimony, manganese, l'
columbite-and immense crops of fruit and
vegetable oils.
Over 200 million people live in Africa.
That is more than live in the United States.
Among the people of Africa are the tallest
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people in the world-the Warusi-and the
shortest-the Pygmies.
Warusi are usually between six and seven
feet tall. Pygmies are usually about twelve
inches shorter than the height of an average
American.
There are seven main groups among the
people of Africa: Hamites, Libyans, Central
Africans, Pygmies, Bushmen, Hottentots and
Banru. All of these, except the Hamites, are
Africoid.
In Africa, there are a great many different
languages and dialects. Bantu alone has 182
languages and dialects. Sudanese has 264. These
are very good languages: clear, exact, and yet
flexible.
As to religion in Africa: there are 115000-
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000 poeple whose religion is native African,
65,000,000 Moslems, and 20,000,000
Christians.
The native African has a different way of
thinking about land than we have. "The
ground, according to the native conception, does
not belong to anybody, neither does it belong
to all. ... In fact the ground is a god that no
one would think of appropriating to himself
and still less of buying or selling." 2 Whoever
used and cultivated a particular piece of land
owned the crop.
Before the white man came to Africa Afd-
coid peoples had forms of social organization
based on the family, clan and tribe. Sometimes
a number of tribes came together in a con-
federation of tribes. Tribal leaders were elected.
In the northern part of Africa this system
broke down and a system of kings was estab-
lished. The right to rule was then inherited.
But in Central and South Africa the original
tribal democratic form of government was the
rule, and tribal chieftains continued to be
chosen by the clans. And just as they were
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elected by the dans, they could be removed
from power by the dans. They could even be
put to death for doing very wrong things.
In the course of thousands of years Africans
developed many great civilizations. African art,
African architecture, belong with the world's
best. African music, poetry, philosophy, dances,
religions, are all important parts of mankind's
development and history.
The present srudy is intended to present
briefly some material regarding the early civili-
zations of Africa.
Over thousands of years, all peoples, all na-
tions, all tribes, have tried to explain the origin
of man.
The people of Surner had their beliefs about
this important matter. The people of Babylonia
had theirs; the Chinese and the Hindus, the
Persians and the Assyrians, the Greeks and the
Aztecs, the Romans and the Hawaiians, all had
their own beliefs on this subject, and all these
beliefs differed from one another.
Not the earliest, but one of the earliest,
efforts to put down in writing what his people
believed, was the Book of Genesis, compiled by
Moses himself.
The Hebrew children believed all mankind
vas descended from Japheth, Ham and Shem.
In the language of the scientists of today, the
first were Indo-European, the second were Afri-
can, and the third were Semitic.
Who, then, were these sons of Ham? Who
were the Africans, according to the views of the
ancient Hebrews, expressed by Moses?
They are listed in Genesis 10, verses 6 to 15,
of the King James version, and with the spell-
ing of the King James period, as follows:
Cush, Mizraim, Phut and Canaan; and the
children of Cush, that is, Seba, HaviIah, Sabtah,
Raamah, Sabtechah and Nimrod. The children
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of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. The children of
Mizraim: Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphru-
him, Pathrusim, Casluhim (from whom the
Philistines went forth) and Caphtorim. The
children of Canaan: Sidon, Heth, the Jebusite.
the Amorite, the Girgasite, the Hivite, the
Arkite, the Sinite, the Arvadite, the Zemarite
and the Hamathite.
Nimrod, in this account, is named as the
founder of Babel and Erech and Accad. and
Calneh, in the land of Shinar (that is, he was
the founder of Babylonia and Assyria) .
Moses knew about the peoples of the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Near East, and these
are the peoples listed in Genesis 10.
North and South America already existed at
that time, and were peopled; Australia and the
Islands of the Pacific existed then, and were
peopled; China and India existed, and were
peopled; and Europe north of the Mediterra-
nean, and Africa south of Ethiopia, already ex-
isted at the time Moses wrote the Book of
Genesis, and they were peopled.
But Moses knew none of these, so none of
them were included in the ancient Hebrew
Table of Nations which appears in Genesis 10.
The Truth God gave him to see was simply
and obviously part of a larger Truth. It was the
whole truth as God gave him to see the whole
truth; but there was much more to be unfolded,
much more to be revealed, to mankind.
"" "" ""
Over millenia-over thousands of years-
mankind's knowledge of the material side of
life has increased greatly.
The study of the elements-such as hydrogen,
carbon, uranium-has opened amazing doors
(that were always there) to new understanding,
doors revealing to man more and more of the
wonders of the universe.
One of the most amazing of these new doors
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was opened when it was discovered that radio-
active Carbon 14 disintegrates at a constant,
unvarying, rate. By determining the amount
l)f radioactivity left in a piece of this carbon,
its age can be determined, it has been found
within one per cent of absolute accuracy. '
Carbon 14 tests and many other methods
of dating ancient sites occupied by man have
(hrown new light on the problem of where
mankind first appeared.
Many of the most capable, the most thor-
ough, the most serious of scientists throughout
(he world are agreed-on the basis of the best
knowledge now available anywhere-that the
earliest known human beings lived in Africa.
(Darwin called Africa the "cradle of hu-
maniey.")
They lived in the vicinity of a great lake
which is surrounded by Kenya, Uganda and
Tanganyika. Their fossil bones and the tools
they used have been found. The period in which
(h('y lived was the period around 1,750,000
years ago,' The stage of human development
in which they lived is called by coday's scientists
the Old Stone Age.
Very ancient human dwelling sites have been
discovered in Asia, also, but none as old as
(hose of Africa.
The early African men lived near the equator.
The darker the color of any particular family,
the greater were its chances of survival. Pig-
mentation of the skin is one of nature's ways
of protecting maa against light and heat.
Over hundreds of thousands of years there
was "a steady selection of the darker types for
mrvival and a steady disappearance of the
lighter types." 4 Thus the characteristic dark
color of equatorial Africans developed.
The process of selection was helped along
hy the kind of food habitually used by any
~ V e n individual or family. What makes skin
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color is the amount of two special chemicals in
the skin. These are carotene and melanin,
present in varying amounts in certain fonds.
The quantity of these chemicals in our skm
is determined partly by what kinds of food o ~ r
ancestors ate.
Melanin makes people dark; carotene gives
the skin a yellowish color."
The first racial types were the Africoid. Later
-how much later we do not know-Mongoloid
racial types appeared.
The colored races came first; the Caucausoid
or white races were a later development.
The very early families were hunters and
fishers.
Not understanding how to grow food, and
without domesticated animals (save the dog),
they did not command their environment
enough to be able to make long migrations.
And so for tens of thousands of years dans and
tribes would stay near one locality. Only the
bravest would venture on' long trips, and the
risks of their not returning were great.
Short migrations took place-of families, of
dans, even of whole tribes.
From Uganda and Tanganyika very dark-
skinned peoples migrated northward to what
is now the Sudan and Egypt, and westward to
what is now Congo and Nigeria and Ghana,
and southward to what is at present called
Southern Rhodesia (soon to be called Zim-
babwe) and South Africa.
The period over which the early migrations
took place was a period of a great deal more
than a million years.
Although it took a very long time, the peo-
pling of Africa took place until there was no
part of the continent that man had not traveled
over or lived upon.
At the northwest boundary of Africa was the
Gibraltar land-bridge to Europe; at the north-
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east boundary was the Suez land-bridge to both
Europe and Asia. Families and dans and whole
tribes-over a period measured in hundreds of
thousands of years-moved over these two land-
bridges into Europe and Asia; and other peo-
ples, chiefly from Asia, moved over those same
land-bridges into Africa.
Strife at home, defeat in war, fear of death
or slavery, famine, caused many to move.
The farther from the equator people traveled,
the more a dark skin became a handicap. The
problem in the north was how to let the sun's
rays in to the skin, not how to keep them out.
And so the principle of selection began to
operate with results the reverse of those at the
equator. A steady selection of the lighter types
for survival and an equally steady disappearance
of the darker types developed the characteristic
white European types.
People who grow flowers can and do develop
white carnations or white sweet peas from
stocks originally colored. In such cases, every
carnatIon in a great field of white carnations is
descended from colored carnations.
This is how the Caucausoid races-the white
races-developed. Caucausoids came into being
through a process of natural selection over very
long periods of time.
(All races have a few albinos. They are
people whose skin lacks melanin and carotene.)
We should remember: "People of browner
complexions simply have more melanin in their
skin, people of yellowish color more carotene.
It is not an all-or-nothing difference; it is a
difference in proportion. Your skin color is due
to the amount of these chemicals present in the
.skin.""
In the United States the present time (the
1960's) it is quite ge'nerally accepted that
Greece and Rome were among the main foun-
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tains of "Western" culture.
Yet Greece achieved her greatest flowering
as a result of contact with "Eastern" and African
cultures; and Romans were of aU races. Julius
Caesar himself was married to, and had children
by, Cleopatra, whose ancestry was black Afri-
can. Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus,
among the greatest of Roman Emperors, were
Africans.
The Roman Empire itself for a time made
Constantinople its center.
The very alphabet used by ancient Rome
(and used today by the entire Anglo-Saxon
world and by all Latin nations) came from
Greece, and Greece got that alphabet from the
Phoenicians (the Canaanites of the Bible) who
in turn got the alphabet from Egypt, 'from
Africa. And so with many other foundation-
stones of "Western" culture.
The use of the terms "East" and "West" to
categorize world cultures and civilizations ex-
dudes Africa from consideration. There is an
astounding arrogance about the kind of "think-
ers" who set up such categories-and are thus
able to pass over an entire continent as if it did
not exist, and eliminate from consideration two
hundred million living Africans.
Any scientific consideration of the founda-
tions of culture must approach all cultures with-
out prejudice and with an open mind.
It is unfortunately true that ignorance about
ancient African cultures is widespread.
Of Africa's fifty countries, only one-Egypt-
has been accorded detailed study by the his-
torians and archeologists of the white race.
Only a handful of these men of science are
studying the early records of the remaining
forty-nine countries.
It is not lack of money that is at the root of
this situation; for hundreds, even thousands of
mining engineers, oil geologists, and
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copper and gold specialists of the white race
swarm over all fifty countries, seeking quick
exploitations. 't
The result of this neglect is an appalling
ignorance. ...
What do the college students of America
know about such African countries as Angola,
Senegal, Burundi, Dahomey, Mali, Somalia,
Malagasy, Rwanda, Tanganyika, Mozambique
or Uganda?
How many U.S. Senators, Congressmen and
Governors know anything at all about such
great cities of ancient Africa as Timbuktu,
Taghaza, Jenne, Gao, Kano, Khami, Inyanga,
Penhalonga, Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe, Nale-
tali, Dhlo Dhlo, Niekerk, Kilwa, Sofala, En-.
garuka, Axum, Adulis, Malindi, Pate, Mom-
basa, Sena, Rhapta, Songo Mnara, Kati, Kua,
Jebel Uri, Bono Mansu and Kumbi Saleh?
To what classes, magazines or libraries would
one go to obtain information about such Afri-
can tribes as the Fulani, Ashanti, Mandingo,
Mesufa, Tschangana, B;-Rozwi, Ndebele, Mata-
bele, Lozi, Basuto, Mashona, Bavenda, Mbulu,
Masai, Son jo, Konso, Kafia, Galla, Somali,
Bahima, Bairu, Dogon, Tumal, Abiri, Yoruba,
Akan, Sao, Fur, Sorko, Gow, Jaba, Biobaku,
Fon, Baoule, Goran, Zaghawa, Bushongo, Bach-
wezi, Sala, Bangala, and Tswana?
What about the origins, history and present
state of the Berber, the Tuareg, the Habeshan,
the Zulu, the Bambara, the Pygmies and the
Hottentots?
Is Swahili an African or an Arabic dialect? t
How does it happen that so many Africans i.
speak Bantu? ,.
When Mungo Park, a European, in 1796
reached Segu on the Niger-the first European
to do so-he said: "The view of this extensive
city, the numerous canoes upon the
crowded population; and the cultivated state of
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the surrounding country, found altogether a
prospect of civilization and magnificence, which
I 1!1;tle expected to find in the bosom of Africa.'"
What were the origins, and what has been
the history, of the Niger River civilizations?
What connections existed, if any, between the
civilizations of the Niger and those of the Nile?
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The four great rivers of Africa, in the early
migrations of man, played a great part in deter-
mining the directions of those migrations.
Until man learned how to carry and store
water, he could not stay long away from fresh
water streams and lakes.
The early Stone Age men of the Uganda-
Tanganyika-Kenya area lived for many hun-
dreds of thousands of years within reach of
many of the sources of both the Congo and the
Nile.
They fished and hunted along these streams.
Searching for food, the areas known to them
gradually widened. Very often the search for
food led them and new settle-
ments in new areas were a result.
In the course of hundreds of thousands of
years, through the migrations short distances of
thousands of Stone Age families, settlements
had been made along all four major rivers, and
the first movements of African Stone Age peo-
ple into Europe and Asia were taking place.
But there were yet no cities; no agricultural
communities; for man had not yet learned how
to plant and cultivate grains, shrubs and trees.
The nomadic movement of hunting and fish-
ing peoples continued for more than a million
and a half years.
In Asia similar migrations of Stone Age
nomads were taking place. Many went over the
land-bridge at what is now Alaska and spread
down through the Americas. Many followed
streams leading to the Yellow River of China.
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Many migrated westward and found food along
the rivers of Siberia and Russia. The Indus, the
Tigris and the Euphrates all were known to
Stone Age peoples.
Meanwhile, floods, ice ages and other major ..
climatic changes beset these early people.
The record in the rocks indicates that East
Africa, during the Stone Age period, experi.
enced four major floods (or pluvials, as the
scientists call them).
But man was now moving toward mastery of
his environment. His tools were improving. His
skills were more varied. He began to domestic-
ate animals, to weave, to make pottery.
A settled community of Old Stone Age
makers of pottery existed at Jos on the plateau
of Central Nigeria 37,000 years before Christ.
In the Rift Valley of South-Central Africa,
near the great falls at Kalambo, a Stone Age
community lived 36,000 years ago.
However, it was not until the period around
6,000 B.c. that settled agricultural communities
first appeared. One of tlIese was in the valley of
the River Jordan in Asia Minor; Jericho, the
first city in that area, was built around that time.
Another was the area around Fayum Lake, near
the delta of the Nile River, where settled Stone
Age communities existed around 4,500 B.C.
The lake has since dried up, but the Fayum De-
pression where the lake once was located is
wellknown to students of early Egyptian
history.
The early people of the Fayum area made
boats of papyrus reeds, decorated pots, carved t
ivory, and made fine jewelry of gold, silver,
lapis lazuli and amethysts. ,.,
The Fayumites were a very dark people.
During the period of the Egyptian Captivity
the Hebrew people intermarried much with the
dark Egyptians of the Nile Delta. At the time
of the Exodus under the leadership of Moses
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(circa 1300 B.C.), many of the Hebrews were
descendants of those unions.
The Africans of the Delta at the time of
Moses were still a dark people; 850 years later
still the Greek historian Herodotus described
the Egyptians. of his time as a dark, wooly.
haired people.
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The rich soil of the Lower Nile area, with
excellent natural irrigation every year, made it
possible for the early nomadic Africans to dis-
cover that seeds could be planted and food
could be grown.
Amazingly, they found they could grow a
surplus of food.
Nomads from the east brought sheep and
goats into the area. Agricultural communities
became possible, with a new kind of social
relationship-the division of labor-and a new
way of living through the building of cities.
As these communties increased in number
their own protection required a centralized
ernment; the maintenance of a government led
to the building of storehouses and granaries and
to calculations in regard to the quantities of
foods in them-that is, to mathematics and to
writing.
To make plans for planting, a calendar was
necessary, and one was developed. In the year
4,241 B.C. Africans started the first 365-d.ay
calendar. The solar year principle they used,
we use today.
Around 3,000 B.c. the First Dynasty of
Egyptian Pharaohs was founded by Menes. By
the time three hundred years had passed, Egypt
was a very strong monarchy. Five hundred years
after the founding of the First Dynasty, the sur
pluses of wealth were so great that Cheops
could and did build the Great Pyramid.
An early great African was Imhotep, sci-
entist, architect and medical genius. He lived
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during the Third Dynasty and was worshipped
as a god in Egypt for 3,000 years. It was he and
not the much later Hippocrates (who died be-
tween 377 and 359 B.C.) who was mankind's
Father of Medicine.
Egyptian medical men were diagnosing two
hundred different diseases two thousand years
before Hippocrates was born.
The very symbol of medicine used today-the
twined serpents surmounted by the winged sun
-is African.
At Karnak, Egypt, is the great temple of
Amen. In this temple are twO basreliefs of
Imhotep.
Karnak itself is one of the architectural
wonders of the world. 86,000 statues adorned
it; 140 gigantic decorated columns supported its
solid granite roof; the main temple is a thou-
sand feet long by three hundred feet wide. (By
way of comparison, King Solomon's famed
temple was one hundred feet long by thirty feet
wide, interior dimensions.) Two tall obelisks
were placed in the temple area; their tops were
burnished gold.
In the words of Queen Hatshepsut: "You
who shall see these monuments in later years,
and shall speak of my works, will say, 'We do
not know, we do not know it was possible to
have made a mountain of gold: ... To gild
them I gave gold by the bushel, as if it were
sacks of grain ... for Karnak is heaven's image
on earth."
The grandmother of this Queen whose lead-
ership and accomplishments were of highest
order, was Nefertari-Aahmes, an Ethiopian,
whose portraits show her as very black.
Queen Hatshepsut built a temple-palace of
her own at Deir el Bahari. It, toO, is one of the
world's great buildings. Smartness, delicacy and
color characterize it. With great taste and bold-
ness of design, white, blue, yellow, red, green
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and orange colors are used against a back-
ground of orange, pink, red and brown to con-
vey an effect of vitality, opulence, splendor and
gayety.
It is hard for visitors to realize that her
temple has stood there, singularly vital, for
almost 3,500 years, evoking powerfully the
spirit of a great African culture that we should
learn to know better.
"" "" ""
In the Bible the word "Ethiopian': refers to
any non-Egyptian African from the upper Nile.
That region, in ancient times, was divided
into twO main countries: Kush and Punt.
Kush was a huge country where Sudan now
is; Punt, roughly, was the same as modern
Ethiopia.
Thus, in the period before the Bible was
written, the Nile had three main regions: Egypt,
Kush and Punt.
Egypt was the most northern of the three;
PUnt was the most southern.
The middle kingdom, Kush, got its name
from one of the sons of Ham.
The main cities of Kush were Naga, Napata,
Musawarat es Safra, and Meroe.
Because Kush was a very great country with
a 100% African native culture, because it was
a black kingdom wielding enormous power as a
center of ideas and techniques, it has been
passed by with scarcely a word by the white
world of science and history. Yet for those very
reasons intensive and deep study of the civiliza-
tion of ancient Kush is needed.
As the Stone Age people of Uganda-Kenya-
Tanganyika-over a period measured by hun-
dreds of millenia-came down the Nile River
one of the centers they established was nea;
present-day Khartoum, on a plateau not far
from the sixth cataract of the Nile.
In the course of time, the area became dotted
15
. =0 :
with many communlt1es. It commanded the
earliest primitive trade along the White Nile,
the Blue Nile and the Atbara. All of these were
tributaries of the Nile. In later centuries the
Atbara caravan route connected North Africa
with the Indian Ocean.
The existence of African communities near
Khartoum five thousand years before Christ has
been well established by Director Jean Ver-
coutter, of the Department of Antiquities of the
Sudan, whose preliminary list of important
Meroitic sites numbered 200 in 1960, and was
growing.
The god-kings and goddess-queens of Meroe
and Musawarat were not Egyptian. Yet Egypt
drew upon Kush for many of its queens. The
people of the ruling circles of Meroe and nearby
Musawarat were regarded by the people of the
Nile as aristocrats; on many occasions when an
Egyptian Pharaoh needed a queen, it was to the
tranquil and cool, colonnaded and terraced
palaces of Meroe and Musawarat he went for
his mate.
In the Bible (Acts 8:26-40) we read of "a
man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority
under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who
had the charge of all her treasure, and had come
to Jerusalem for to worship, Was remrning,
lnd sitting in his chariot read Esaias the
prophet."
The Candace mentioned in The Acts of the
Apostles was Queen Candace of Kush. That
the eunuch wl'lo had "charge of all her treasure"
was reading Isaiah and was baptized a Christian,
throws an interesting light on the degree of
freedom existing at that time in ancient Kush.
("The Treasure of Queen Candace," re-
covered from one of the pyramids at Meroe, was
taken to the Berlin Museum during the period
of great-power raiding of Nile relics of anti-
quity.)
16
l
t
i ij ,4
... 2 . UJQ.:ac:aeiLAiL " '1
Approximately a thousand years after the
founding of Meroe, the wealth and affluence of
Kush had increased to such an extent that a
special and pa:latial residence at Musawarat was
built for the Meroitic kings and queens.
Queen Amanirenas, Queen Amanishakhete,
Queen Naldamak and Queen Amanitere ruled
from the royal residence at Musawarat.
One of the great traditions handed down by
Kush, and evidenced in her many queens, was
the high status of women in Kushite society.
Kush flourished. A harbor at Meroe made it
possible to give better care to the river trade.
Great stables housed the horses, and later the
camels, needed in the overland caravan trade.
Accumulating wealth was turned into fine
buildings, temples, pyramids. Graphic artists
and sculptors created great works of art. Basalt
stelae were engraved with historical records
which even now are still not deciphered.
The intellectual and artistic development of
Meroe made it the Athens of ancient Africa.
Basil Davidson calls Kush "in some respects,
the most truly African of all the great civiliza-
tions of antiquity." 9 He comments on the
neglect of Meroe in these words: "At Meroe
and other points not far away there stand the
solitary ruins of palaces and temples that were
built for a civilization which flowered more
than two thousand years ago, while all around,
still undisturbed by any spade, lie the city
mounds of those who built them and lived
within their shadow." 10
During the reign of Tutmosis I of Egypt, the
southern boundary of Egypt was established at
Kurgus, near the fourth cataract. This was 300
miles north of Meroe. The time: around 1525
B.C.
In the early days of the Kushite kingdom,
Napata was its capital.
17
j
~ '
During the eighth century B.C., King Kashta
o ~ Kush launched a war against Egypt, which
hIS son Piankhy carried to a successful con-
clusion, becoming Pharaoh of Egypt as well as
King of Kush.
The Kushite Pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty
removed from a great Nubian temple at Sulb
a long avenue of granite rams and lions and
transported them to the Meroitie Lion-Temple
City Naga, sacred to the four-armed and three-
headed lion god.
The ram was the sacred symbol of Amen
(sometimes spelled Amun or Amon). The
worship of the ram, the sun, the bull and the
lion were Common along the Middle and Lower
Nile.
To this day, the granite rams of Naga may
be seen at that city; other rams may be seen at
Meroe and many other of the ancient cities of
Kush.
The people of Kush believed that everything
good, everything fertile, everything growing
and useful to man, was the outcome of the
favor of the Ram-Sun God, Amen-Re.
In the African word "Re" may be the origins
of "ray" (of the sun), and of the many Latin
words related to "rex" (ruler), such as "real"
(in "camino del real"). But so little work has
been done by white philologists on the subject
of African sources for European words that even
this is not sure.
The word "N:ubia" derives from the Egyptian
word "nub," meaning gold. The people of
Kush/Nubia were mining gold 4,000 years be-
fore Christ. Kush was an established kingdom
in the time of the Queen of Sheba. Meroe
flowered for a thousand years (800 RC. to 200
A.D.). A continuous occupancy of the area for
a period of 4,300 years has been established.
Although Meroe had its pyramids, its lavish
public bathhouses, its beautifully decorated
18

,
palaces and religious temples, its great im-
portance grows out of the fact that Meroe,
more than any other city of Africa, led the way
out of the Stone Age and into the Iron Age;
Meroe, in short, more than any other city,
passed on to most of Africa the techniques and
skills and knowledge necessary for one African
country after another to emerge from the Stone
Age into the Iron Age-that is, to make the
essential transformation, the essential "break-
through" from Stone Age backwardness to the
techniques of the Iron Age with all of the vast
potential for progress such a transition made
possible.
At the time Kush was rising to world im-
portance, around 1,000 B.C., an Africoid people
dominated the sea trade of the Mediterranean.
These people-whose language was a branch
of the Semitic-were the Phoenicians, the same
people called Canaanites in the Bible.
Hiram of Tyre, who supplied boats for King
Solomon's trade, was a Phoenician.
Carthage, the great power which for so long
challenged the rule of Rome itself, was founded
by Phoenicians. (The Punic Wars between
Carthage and Rome were given that name be-
cause they were wars against the Phoenicians;
the word "Punic" was a shorter, Latin, version
of "Phoenician.")
Still another Africoid country ruled the
southern tip of Arabia. The name of that
country was Sabaea ("Sheba" as the Hebrews
called it).
Queen Belkis of Sabaea (around 1,000 B.C.)
was the famous "Queen of Sheba" mentioned
in the Bible, who gave King Solomon "an
hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of
spices very great store, and precious stones;
there came no more such abundance of spices
as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to
19
1
King Solomon." (II Chronicles 9:9.)
Carrying "gold and silver, ivory and apes
and peacocks" for King Solomon, the famed
ships of Tarshish were owned and manned by
an Africoid people.
Crete and its people, also, were non-Cau-
casian; they were the Africoid Caphtorians;
Crete itself, two thousand years B.C., was called
Caphtor. The "People of the Sea" from Crete
and other islands of the Mediterranean, at-
tempted (unsuccessfully) to conquer Egypt
around 1,200 B.C.
,.. ,.. ,..
Punt, the third kingdom of the Nile, traded
with Egypt. History has a vivid description of
the "marvels of the land of Punt" loaded on
ships of Egypt's Queen Hatshepsut around the
year 1460 B.c.:
" ... all goodly fragrant woods of God's Land,
heaps of myrrh resin, and fresh myrrh trees,
with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of
Emu, with cinnamon wood and incenses and
eye cosmetic, with apes and monkeys and dogs
and skins of the southern panther, with natives
and their children."
Records of trade with Punt at the time of
Tutmosis I of Egypt exist.
The Greeks had a very high opinion of the
people of Punt and Kush. The Iliad speaks of
the "blameless Ethiopians;" Zeus himself, the
chief god of the ancient Greeks, was black;
Greek gods would go to Africa when they
needed "to rest and recuperate." 11
The Habashan (Abyssinians) first appear in
history shortly after 1580 B.C. They lived then
in what is now northwestern Ethiopia in the
"land of Habashat" which was a part of Punt.
One of the most remarkable stories of cour-
age through the ages is the story of Punt/
Ethiopia. That land at the southern end of the
Red Sea was from earliest historic times in-
20
habited by a mountain people of fierce in-
dependence. Although invaded and conquered
again and again these people were always able
to regroup and ultimately throw out the in-
vaders.
The process of conquest and reconquest has
been going on for 3,500 years; and the Am-
haric people of the central Ethiopian mountain
area are still there, and are still the decisive and
determining factor in the life of the country.
Ethiopia developed systems of hillside ter-
racing which are used to this day by the
Chagga people of Kilimanjaro and the Matengo
people of southern Tanganyika.
Ethiopia developed defensive forts at the tops
of hills, particularly in places where access to
the hilltops was most difficult. This approach to
the building of "strong places" was copied as far
away as Mapungubwe, south of the Limpopo
River.
Ethiopians have made use of phallic symbols.
These have been copied by many tribes of
neighboring Kenya.
The Ethiopians developed the art of dry-
stone building which is characteristic of the
early medieval cultures of east and south-central
Africa; many scientists of today believe this art
was transmitted to the eastern and southeastern
African countries by the Amharic peoples of
Ethiopia.
If this proves to be true (and Emperor Haile
Selassie is encouraging study of the archaeo-
logical evidences), then it will be shown that
even Great Zimbabwe, the topmost achieve-
ment of medieval south-central Africa, owes
much to Ethiopia.
During the early and middle period of the
rise of Kush, four successive states of Southern
Arabia dominated the trade and the coastal
cities of what is now Ethiopia and East Africa.
These four states were Ausan, Qataban, Sabaea
21
and Himyar.
Beginning about 1,000 B.c. peoples from
Southern Arabia went across the straits at the
lower end of the Red Sea and settled in Africa.
The area from which they came was the area
now called Yemen and the Hadhramaut.
Migration to Africa greatly increased around
575 B.C., when Persia conquered Southern
Arabia. As a result of the Persian victory, large
numbers of the peoples of the area fled across
the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa, which is
that part of Africa now held by Ethiopia, Soma-
lia and Somaliland.
In the course of time the chief city and
capital in, Africa of those who came across the
Red Sea in successive waves from Southern
Arabia, was called Axum. This city lay directly
upon the Atbara caravan trade route between
Kush and the Red Sea. As it grew, it became
more and more of a threat to the very existence
of the Meroitic civilization.
At Yeha, near Axum, are altars to the pagan
goddesses N aurau and Ashtar (Ashtoreth); the
altars were used by Arabian Semites who in-
vaded Ethiopia during the 4th century B.C.
The Habashan survived the Semitic invasion,
and their power grew. Around 300 A.D. they
were able successfully to challenge Kush in
decisive battle for complete control of the
Atbara caravan route.
The Axumites at the time they defeated Kush .
were a pagan people. One of their monarchs of
the period shortly after this event was Aizanas.
The coins of the early part of his reign are
decorated with a pagan new moon and two
stars; the coins of the latter part of his reign
carry the Christian cross.
It was in the year 341 A.D. that Axum-
Ethiopia was converted to Christianity.
Ausan, the first of the four Southern Arabian
states which dominated the Punt-Ethiopian and
22
East African coaSt, was eclipsed around 600
B.c.; yet the northeast African coast was known
for at least seven hundred years afterwards as
the Ausanitic Coast.
The Greeks and the Romans came to call
the coast of Tankanyika, Kenya and Somll'liland
by yet another name; they called it Azania, a
name by which the area was known for many
centuries.
The first historic appearance of members of
the "white" races in Africa was around the year
5,000 B.c. These people were Hamites, and
came into Egypt over the Suez land-bridge from
the east. Drawings of Hamites and Semites
made in early Egypt lead to the conclusion that
both of these groups were dark-skinned at that
time.
From around 1,000 B.C. onwards, a great
many Hamites came across the Red Sea and the
Gulf of Aden to Ethiopia from southern Arabia
with the Africoid migrations from that area.
Although black in color, many Ethiopians today
as a result of having many Hamitic ancestors
have Causasoid features.
There is a legend-but as yet no historical
evidence-of a son of the Queen of Sheba and
King Solomon being the first emperor of
Ethiopia.
The first use of the term "Negus" (Emperor)
occurs about 1,400 years after the period of
Solomon and Sheba, in a Himyarite inscription
mentioning Gadaret, "Nagashi" (Negus) of
the Habashan.
Axumite and Meroitic civilizations are both
gone; the caravan trade routes over which
Axum and Kush fought are now of little trade
significance; but the ancient port of Adulis
which was the terminal of the caravan routes
still exists, and ships trading with the countries
of the Indian Ocean still put into its harbor.
Following the lead of the Axumite-Ethio-
23
pians, the Nubians became Christians during
the century 500-600 A.D. Belief in the Gospels
and in Christ gave a new strength and unity
to these direct successors of Kush. They re-
mained a Christian people for nearly a thousand
years.
Christian Ethiopia was involved in wars
against the Muslims of the north and various
pagans of the south for eight hundred years-
from the 6th to the 14th centuries.
.. .. ..
Egypt, Kush and Punt all made extremely
important contributions to the advance of man-
kind. But their relative importance cannot be
judged on the basis of the size of monuments
left, nor on the gold value of thrones or jewelry
found in the excavations of the past century.
Of the three, the country that had the deepest
and most extensive influence on the develop-
ment of other African peoples and cultures was
Kush.
Considered in the light of the subsequent
development of Africa, the most important of
these civilizations, by far, was Kush; and by
far the most important city of ancient Africa
was Meroe.
Meroe is not far froJIl Khartoum. Khartoum
is the capital of Sudan; today's Sudan is yester-
day's Nubia; and Nubia in ancient times was
the kingdom known as Kush.
Kush, in its origins, was a civilization com-
pletely and wholly African. In its early period
there were no influences from the outside at
tempting to shape or modify the new civiliza-
tion taking form there.
The Meroitic civilization began early.
Jericho has long been regarded by many as
the world's first city; pottery made there around
6,000 B.C. h ~ been discovered, and its ap-
proximate dates established.
But it now appears, on the basis of recent ar-
24
chaeological discoveries in the Khartoum area,
that African communities, a part of the pre-
Meroitic civilization, were making pottery at
that date or earlier.
From the beginning, Meroe was a dissemi-
nator of ideas. Learning the ceramic arts before
Egypt was in existence, Meroe spread these
skills down the Nile.
Many of the concepts and beliefs, the reli-
gious practices and ideas, of very early Egypt
were brought to that country by the "dark
people of the south" -that is, by the people of
Kush, from whom according to Egyptian tradi-
tion the people of Egypt were descended.
The early dark-skinned Africans of the upper
Nile-the Kushites-were regarded as the peo-.
pie "who brought the Gods to Egypt."
Politically, Kush was dominated by Egypt
for a long time; but around 800 B.C its com-
plete independence was recognized by Egypt.
Not very long afterward, as we have noted,
Kush conquered Egypt.
But now a new factor appeared on the world
scene: iron was being smelted in Mesopotamia,
and soon (666 B.C.) the Assyrians were able
to sweep into north Africa and take Egypt, due
to their temporary superiority in weapons, for
Egypt and Kush had only stone and bronze and
copper weapons.
Kush had to let go of Egypt, but the lesson
of the importance of iron in the making of tools
and weapons was well learned.
By 600 B.c., Meroe was studying this new
metal, not knowing that Kush was destined to
lift at least twenty other African countries out
of the Stone Age and into the Iron Age through
the gift of the techniques of iron technology
developed at Meroe.
When the capital of Kush was transferred,
around 530 B.C., from Napata to Meroe, the
first iron furnaces at the new capital were aI-
25
-:;':'!
ready built.
For the next eight hundred years, Meroe led
all of Africa in the intensive smelting and
manufacture of iron. The work was conducted
prayerfully; the iron smelters of Meroe were
adjacent to the religious temples of the city.
The people of Kush, but more especially the
people of Meroe, created, adapted and devel
oped metal techniques, processes, arts and
crafts; meanwhile transmitting their own and
Egyptian culture to other African countries. In
particular, technologies, religious concepts and
governmental practices transmitted by Meroe
basically influenced many new African civi
lizations.
Descendants of Kush included, according to
the Arab writer Wahb ibn Munabbeh (738
A.D.) : The Qaran, the Zaghawa, the Habesha,
the Qibt and the Barbar.
The first of these probably refers to the
Goran, a people whose home was east of Lake
Chad; the Zaghawa are a people of Wadai and
Durfur; . the Habesha are the Abyssinians; the
Qibt are the Copts; and the Barbar of Wahb
ibn Munabbeh are the Berber of today.
Descendants of Kush traveled over Africa to
the south and to the west according to El
Mas'udi (who wrote these words in 947 A.D.):
"When the descendants of Noah spread across
the earth, the sons of Kush, the son of Canaan,
traveled toward the west and crossed the Nile.
There they separated. Some of them, the
Nubians and the Beja and the Zanj, turned to
the rightward, between the east and the west;
but the others, very numerous, marched toward
the setting sun .... "
That there were many waves of Kushite
migration to the west, southwest and south
there can be no doubt.
Any marching "toward the setting sun" from
26
Egypt would have taken the marchers into
areas which we today call Libya, Tunisia,
Algeria and Morocco - substantially the same
route taken a few hundred years later by the
first wave of Moors after Muhammad's death.
Any marching "toward the setting sun" from
ancient Kush wauld have taken the marchers
first of all into the area which we today call
Chad, for Chad is the country immediately west
of ancient Kush. On the route to Lake Chad,
about three weeks journey from Meroe, was
Darfur.
At tht: time of the defeat of Meroe by Axum
around 300 A.D., one of the most important
migrations was to Darfur.
"Royal personages and priests" from Meroe
crossed the barren wastelands of Kordofan to
the Darfur country. The difficulties were num-
erous, the hardships were great, but a consider-
able number of leading families ~ o Meroe,
Musawarat, Napata and Naga made the trip.
A great many settled in Darfur, bringing to
the people of that region much knowledge and
many welcome skills, and leaving their imprint
on Darfur's architecture and customs. The refu-
gees, as we would call them today, brought to
Darfur not only their technical skills, their
alphabet, their great abilities as artists, but also
their thousand-year-long experience in adminis-
tration, in government.
There were no Assyrians, no Macedonians,
no Romans, no Persians, no Pharaoh's army,
and no Axumite Habesha to harass the sons of
Kush. It had been to avoid all these that many
people of the Meroitic civilization left Kush
after the defeat of Meroe by Axum.
In Darfur, the Kushites were regarded as cus-
todians of all that was best in ancient African
culrure.
Contact over the caravan routes was main-
tained with the far more numerous Kushites
27
7
;;
who remained in the homeland.
Over the centuries that followed, the Fur
people maintained close and friendly connec-
tions with Nubia, successor to Kush.
The civilization built up in Darfur lasted
more than a thousand years. WaIled cities like
Jebel Uri were built by the local Daju people.
At Ain Fara a Nubian monastery of early date
still stands. Some of its pottery fragments (a
thousand or more years old) show such Chris-
tian decorations as the fish, the cross, the dove.
For a period of three hundred years (1603-
1916) Darfor was ruled by the Keiro Dynasty,
maintaining its independence throughout this
period. The last sultan of this dynasty (Ali
Dinar) was defeated by the British, who found
him an obstacle to their plans for building an
empire from the Cape to Cairo.
,. ,. ,.
A few groups of the westward-marching
Kushites had chosen not to stay in Darfur and
had pressed on to Lake Chad, which is a huge
body of water in the heart of Africa, much
farther inland than Darfur - in fact, around
twelve hundred miles from Meroe.
The good reports of the area, sent back by
these initial small groups, were doubtless a fac-
tor in drawing some modest additional move-
ments of Meroitic peoples to the lake; but it
was not until five centuries after the first large-
scale migration from Meroe to Darfur that a
large-scale movement of peoples westward
through and from Darfur (and southward from
Bilma) took place.
Lake Chad, bounded on its east shore by the
state called Chad, is bounded on the south by
Cameroon, and on the west by Niger and Ni-
geria, two large countries of approximately the
same size.
Chad itself is larger than Egypt; and Sudan
(successor to Nubia, and thus also successor to
28
T
r
.
ancient Kush), Chad's eastern neighbor, is
twiee the size of Egypt.
In short, the disrances for people traveling
on foot and in great numbers "toward the set-
ting sun" were very great.
Lake Chad was a natural stopping place for
a large column of people. The soil near the
lake was rich; food was easy to grow there;
hunting was plentiful; there were no large
bodies of armed enemies for a distance of a
thousand miles in any direction; and there was
a water barrier to the west and a sand barrier
to the n( rth.
But five hundred years had passed since the
initial Meroitie migrations west and southwest;
an intermingling with many local central Afri-
can tribes had taken place; and though knowl-
edge, skills and techniques had been transmitted
from father to son, a new nation, a new people,
had come into being: the Sao people.
The Sao built cities on the east bank of Lake
Chad, and developed the surrounding territory
agriculturally. They were complete masters of
tin, copper, bronze and iron-working. They had
smithies and smelters. They were jewelers. They
used the famous "lost wax" method of casting
bronze long before the artists of Benin used it,
and were probably the transmitters of that tech-
nique to the Nigerian craftsmen. They created
beautiful and durable pottery, utilizing design
elements drawn from Meroe pottery, sculpture
and religion. And they still worshipped the ram
and the sun as did the people of ancient Meroe.
It is noteworthy that the Sao had a very deep
respect for women, who held influential posts in
their system of government .
The changes made by the Sao in the areas
just east of Lake Chad, and to some extent north
of the lake, changes toward greater prosperity,
greater stability, and a higher cultural level,
made an enormous impression throughout cen-
29
tral Africa.
In retrospect, the Sao were regarded by those
who followed them as "giants who easily sub
dued the 'little men' whom they found." Rooted
in an area midway between the Niger and the
Nile, astride the main overland trade routes
between the two great rivers, and with cultural
ties going back for millenia to both Kush and
Egypt, the Sao of Lake Chad became a major
factor in the dissemination throughout the
Western Sudan, Nigeria and Ghana of the
ideas and techniques of the higher and older
civilizations of the Nile.
Their successors, the Kotoko, continued these
ties and traditions, bringing to the changing
culture of the area an Islamic aspect.
'*' '*' '*'
Migrant bands of Sao reaching the west bank
of Lake Chad, and moving toward the Niger,
farther west, lived among the native Sudanese
of the region, and, together with them, created
the Kanembu nation.
Kanem, just east of the Niger, became an
immensely important factor in lifting the cuI
tural level of what is now northeast Nigeria.
Situated between the Niger and Lake Chad,
and with travelers from many Sudanese coun-
tries passing through its territory, Kanem - and
the Sao - became more and more influenced
by the governmental forms and practices of the
Western Sudan.
Controlling vital sectors of the caravan routes
from Nigeria to 'the upper Nile, and moving
toward political unity of the various tribes
along the western shores of Lake Chad, Kanem
became a military force of great size and
strength.
From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries
A.D. the old empire of Kanem was the main
civilizing force of the Central Sudan. Kanem
was one of the greatest of the African kingdoms
30
i
I
r
\
r'
i
t -
during the period of the Crusades. Its power
was respected by the great Saladin. At Kanem's
height of power, during the rule of Sultan Mai
Dunama Dibbalemi, the area it controlled
extended from the middle Nile in the east to
. the Fezzan in the west, a truly immense
territory.
Under the name of Bornu the later empire
continued from the thirteenth to the seven-
teenth centuries.
Thus Kanem-Bornu was both the largest of
the states between the Niger and the Nile, and
the longest-lived.
One of the most striking features of Kanem
was its Council of Twelve. This body consisted
of the principal officers of the Empire. It met
whenever an important decision was to be made
by the Ruler of the Empire. Each member of
the Council was appointed for life, and held
real power.
In order that the affairs of the Empire should
be conducted with harmony, every effort was
made to achieve a unity of view within the
Council before the pronouncements of the
Ruler were made.
There is no doubt that this structure of gov-
ernment was one of the main reasons for the
stability achieved by Kanem-Bornu.
At ancient Meroe, the secrets of iron-working
were tighdy guarded and were transmitted only
to selected individuals; the blacksmith trade
was a guild, and the art itself was called a
"mystery."
This high regard for the skill, and the factor
of secrecy, were noted at widely separated places
by Europeans a thousand years after the destruc-
tion of the Meroitic civilization.
European explorers at the edge of the Congo
in the fifteenth century learned that Bantu-
speaking kings of the Congo were blacksmiths
31
and very proud of it. Far to the south in Zulu
country, secrecy and honor surrounded the
blacksmith trade. Among the Dogon people of
West Africa the same tradition persisted. -"The
Tumal people of northeast Africa, and the Suk
people of EaSt Kenya became skilled smiths.
All of this dissemination of essential iron-
working skills bears the imprint of Meroe.
Particularly noteworthy, the "lost wax"
method of casting brass and bronze heads, prac-
ticed in Meroe, was used in Ife and Benin
Nigeria. '
The method came to its fullest flower in
Nigeria during a five-hundred-year. period be-
ginning in the thirteenth century and ending in
the eighteenth century.
But what wonders these brass and bronze
heads were! In their design, in the perfection
of their artistry, and in the peace and serenity
they expressed - in all these they astonished
and silenced the art experts of Europe who
could not believe that people from the heart
of Africa could produce such perfection in art
without a Greco-Roman (that is, a European)
tradition.
The ties between Nigeria and Kush were not
alone in iron-working and in art.
The people of He and Benin were Yorubas.
Their national god, Shango, wore the mask of
a ram - the ram of Meroe. Also, the coiled
serpent was used in the religions of both the
Yorubas and the ancient Kushites. The ideas
about divine kingship, and about immortality,
of both Kush and the Y orubas show a most
distinct and close relationship. And the legends
of the Yorubas themselves indicate migrations
of their ancestors from the east into Nigeria
between 600 A.D. and 1,000 A.D.
Thus the religion of the Yorubas, and their
legends, point clearly to Meroe and the Nile
for many of the deep roots of their culture.
32
Like the Sao people, and like the Akan
people of ancient Ghana, the BaOule people of
the Ivory Coast, the Fon people of Dahomey,
the people of Cameroon, and of Congo, all have
honored and respected legends of their own
origins from people who tame from the north
and/or east.
Many west coast Africans, seized and chained
and sent into slavery to the Americas during
slave-trading days, reached the western hemi-
sphere bringing with them memories of ances-
tral rituals and forms of organization which had
come cen uries earlier from Meroe and the Nile.
Long before the Iron Age came to Nigeria,
however, highly developed artistic skills were
possessed by its people. From 900 B.C. to 200
A.D. - that is, for a period of over a thousand
years - the Jaba people of Nok, Zaria Province,
. Nigeria, developed particular skill in the mak-
ing of figurines. An artistic tradition thus
existed in Nigeria long before the period of
the Benin masterpieces.
Politically, Benin was more advanced than
the European feudal monarchies of its period.
"The divine right of kings" expressed the es-
sence of European feudal rule; but in Benin,
'as in so many central African communities, the
rule of a king was always subject to the laws
of the tribal collective. That is, the tribal coun-
cil could give consideration to a proposed action
of the king; and its recommendation for or
against was final.
As in Kanem, African collectives in many
parts of the continent consisted of twelve re-
spected and tested leaders; the practice of rely-
ing on such a top controlling body was highly
democratic, efficient and effective.
'*' '*' '*'
The slow pre-history penetration of the cen-
tral African forests over hundreds of thousands
of years had created an all-black native popula-
33

don of that huge area.
Toward the end of the Stone Age, those com-
munities which first learned how to smelt and
work and use iron were better able to survive
against attack from other tribes. Possession of
weapons of iron gave such communities a con-
siderable advantage over those using bone,
stone and wood weapons.
Among the forest peoples first to learn the
use of iron' were the people of ancient Ghana.
Their first use of iron dates from around 300
B.C. Whether they first learned iron technology
from Libya or from Kush was still not definitely
known in 1961.
The first capital of ancient Ghana was lo-
cated at Bono Mansu, approximately a hundred
miles north of present-day Kumasi. The build-
ers of this city, according to the Akan people
of Ghana, whose roots go back to that period,
had come from the north, had come in fact all
the way across the Sahara Desert.
Ancient Ghana was located to the northwest
of present-day Ghana. It was on the gold trade
routes north and northwest-of the upper Niger, .
and was first called "Land of Gold" around
800 A.D. by EI Fazari.
The famous Moorish writer Abu Obeid EI
Bekri (1028-1094), writing in the year 1062
A.D., stated that the King of Ghana hath fight-
ing force of two hundred thousand, 40,000 of
these warriors armed with bows and arrows.
By the time of EI Bekri, the capital of Ghana
had been moved to Kumbi Saleh, located
approximately two hundred miles north of
present-day Bamako. El Bekri deSC1'ibes the
court of the King of Ghana:
"When he gives audience to his people, to
listen to their complaints and set them to
rights, he sits in a pavilion atound.which stand
his horses caparisoned in cloth of gold; behind
him stand ten pages holding shields and gold-
34
- -
,4.
mounted swords; and on his right hand are the
sons of the princes of his empire, splendidly
dad and with gold plaited into their hair. The
governor of the city is seated on the ground in
front of the .king, and all around him. are his
vizirs in the same position. The gate of. the
chamber is guarded by dogs of an excellent
breed, who never leave the kings seat, they
wear collars of gold and silver ... The begin-
ning of an audience is announced by the beating
of a kind of d.nim which they call deba, made
of a long piece of hollowed wood."
It' was the iron technologies that came down
from the north a'nd northeast that made it pos-
sible for Ghana to emerge as a strong, central-
ized state around the year 800 A.D. As late as
1060 A.D. Ghana waS still able to maintain its
pre-eminence because of this superiority; its
immediate neighbors who still fought with bars
of ebony were easily subdued by the warriors
of ancient Ghana with their metal swords and
spears and arrow-points.
However, after a fourteen-year struggle end-
ing in 1076, the capital of Ghana fell before
still better armed invaders from the Maghreb
(that is, from the western areas of the north
African coast).
The invaders were the Almoravids from
Abu Bake.
This Muslim group came into existence in
1042 when the orthodox preacher Abdullah ibn
Yacin (who died in 1057) decided upon a
jihad against the Jedala and the Lemruna, who
had rejected the doctrines of Muhammad. A
short 26' years after the Almoravid defeat of
Ghana, the Muslim group was ruling a ttemen-
dous territory extending all the way from
Senegal to the Ebro River in Spain.
The victory of the Almoravids resulted in
the destruction of the authority of the Kings
of Ghana and of their state, which was soon
35

seized by a Qeighbofing people, the SoSso;, ana
in the year 1240 the empire Of ancient Ghana"
ended; its capital was completely hi"
Sundiata, ,the second, ruler' of the ,,' Mandingo'
state which history knows as Mali.
But before taking up the rise of Mali,
Songhay, the Hausa states,- and:other western
and central African countries, . let us tum our
attention to the manner in which the North
and East Coast of Africa and Southeast Africa
developed anciently.
,.. ,.. ,..
NOTES AND BIBLIOORAPHY
'Literally, "at least sixteen,. different phases of occupa-
tion" are indicated. '
,.,f'
'Maurice Delafosse, "The Negroes of Africa," p. 280.
Associated Publishers, Washington, D.C., 1931.
SWilliam' H. Mathews III, "FossiJs," P. 169. Bariws '
and Noble, N.Y., 1962 .
"Understaodins 9m y. 6; Southern '
Regional Co,tncil, Adanta, 1945. . "
s"Race: Science and Politics" by Ruth Benedict, p. 175.
Viking, N.Y., 1961. ' '.
6ibid., p. 176.
'''Travels of Mungo Park" by
E. P. Dutton & Co., N.Y.,
Edition) . "_-
8In spite Of these .,.jit ..
pagated of' a whKe.,(W-."," __ 1Qa
archaic, stiff and
Greek types than to ,
reinforced by popular'IDm 'peseittations ,
such showmen as in
white (or "ery slighdy"tin) Yul!lJynnerS _., __
beth Taylon Mve decidedly blacff$taves.
. .. ".'::.
9Basil Davidson; "The Lost ".
Little, Brown, Boston, 1959. - ' '
':"
tOibitl., p. 37.
"W. E. B. DuBois, "The World and Africa." p. 119.
Vildng, N.Y., 1947. ...

ANCIENT AFRICA
BY
JOHN M. WEATHERWAX
PART II
Text of opening lecture, Seminar on African
and Afroamerican Cultures, given at the head-
quarters of, Los Angeles CORE, 1115 W.
Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles 15. California,
July 9, 1962.
Printed as a public service through the cour-
tesy of Mr. James A. McGann, Founder-Presi-
dent, West Indian American Club, 923 E.
Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles 11, California.
For convenience, the lecture text is published
in two Additional copies, at twenty-:
five cents per pamphlet, may be obtained from
the Aquarian Spiritual Center Bookshop, 1362,
West Santa Barbara Avenue, Los Angeles 37,
California. (Specify whether Part I or Part II
is desired; each is twenty-five cents.)
Printed for Vanguard Socie of America,
1160112 N. Westmore Los
Angeles 29, California,
tion.
July,
.25
"Cover: !lenin
The John Henry and Mary Louisa Dunn
Bryant Foundation
Los Angeles 29, California
Copyright, 1962, by The John Henry
and Mary Louisa Dunn Bryant Foundation
Printed in the Ucited States of America
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PART II
CONTENTS
Carthage and England ................ 37
Carthage and Rome .................. 38
The Origins of Swahili Culture ......... 40
The Zanj ......................... :40
Africa's East Coast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
The Coming of Islam ....... , ......... 41
MaIindi, Mombasa, Sofala ............. 42
What The Portuguese Did ............ 45
Engaruka, Niekerk, Inyanga ............ 47
Metal Technologies Were Developed
Before The Whites Came ............ 48
The Monomotapa Empire ............. 49
Zimbabwe ......................... 49
The Finest Gold; The Finest Steel ........ 50
The Guns of The Whites .............. 50
Mapungubwe and The Bavenda ......... 53
Mozambique, Tanganyika, Uganda ....... 54
Songhay ........................... 55
Mali .......................... ' .... 56
Mansa Kankan Musa ................. 56
Timbuktu, Jenne, Gao ......... 56
Sudanese Culture .. " ................. 56
Sonni Ali;, The Great ............ 58
. The Gold' of Wangara ................ 59
The Battle of Alcazar ................. 60
El Mansur and Marrakech ............. 60
The Plunder of Songhay .............. 61
The Hausa States .................... 62
The Fulani; Usuman Dan Fodio ......... 63
A Mountain of Crimes Against Africa .... 65
The Slave Hunters ................... 66
The Degradation of Slavery ............ 67
80,000,000 Africans Killed; 20,000,000
Enslaved ......................... 67
The Urgent Need for Study of African
History and Cultures ................ 71
I
1
In Kenya, at Hyrax Hill, a stone age settle-
ment with walled enclosures, cemetery, and
other evidences of continuous dwelling, has
been found. It dates from 3,000 B.C. In North-
ern Rhodesia, the life of a forest people called
the Nachikufu, dating from around 4,000 B.C.,
has been well established. They used polished
stone adzes, grinding stones, pestles, digging
sticks, awls of bone and grew :md ate vege-
tables, including the yam. Similar evidences of
early populations of the East and Southeast
exist in many areas. All of these people were
dark -skinned.
Similarly, communItIes of dark-skinned
peoples (before the Iron Age) had developed
at many places along the north, the Mediter-
ranean, coast of Africa.
As the centuries passed, these northern com-
munities developed into cities. The Africoid
Carthaginians controlled much of this northern
coast for a thousand years; Carthage itself in
500 B.c. was a great city.
The Carthaginians traded timber, ivory,
purple dyes, grain and ostrich feathers with the
countries across the Mediterranean. Gold,
brought to Carthage by the Gatamantians of
north Africa, was also traded. The African car-
buncle, famous in olden times, and in great .
demand, was called the "Carthaginian stone."
The black African Phoenicians of Carthage
traded with the British Isles and with the
peoples of Brittany on the French Coast before
France as a country had come into existence.
Before Anglo-Saxon times, the native inhabi-
tants of England and Scotland were non-
Caucasian.
Dark-skinned miners dug for lead and tin in
the Carthaginian settlements of Cornwall,
England. Words from the Phoenician - such as
"sack" - were left in the English language and
are used by all English-speaking people today.
37
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Even the word "Europe" derives from "Europa,"
a Phoenician princess.
Like Bible Hebrew and Canaanite, Phoenic-
ian - including Carthaginian - was an Hebraic
language. The very name "British" derives
from the Semitic tongue and means "Covenant
Men." London itself was not called London in
those early days; it was called New Troy
("Troynovant") after the East Mediterranean
trading city.
The Phoenician -Carthaginians, direct des-
cendants of the Canaanites, visited Iceland and
learned of the existence of a vast continent
beyond. After the defeat of Carthage by the
Greeks and Romans, many Carthaginians chose
to sail across the Atlantic to new homes in the
western hemisphere rather than become slaves
to Greece and Rome.
1t
Many evidences of the trans-Atlantic voyag-
ings of Africans exist; a three-volume studyl3
of Africa and America, by Harvard professor
Leo Wiener, gives much information regarding
the ancient connections between the two con-
tinents.
A five-ton stone sculpture - a magnificent
African face reflecting immense power and
serenity-depicts a god worshipped around 500
A.D. by the Olmecs of the western hemisphere.
A reproduction of this gigantic work of native
art is on exhibit at the American Museum of
Naturad History in New York; photographs
of it have been printed in several books by J.
A. Rogers. 14
Despite the existence of much evidence,
however, little is popularly known about the
pre-Columbian connections which existed be-
tween Africa and America.
After the seizure of the Carthaginian cities
of north Africa by the Romans, north Africa
became the main source of supply of corn for
38
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Rome. North Africa in that period was often
called "Rome's granary."
The lions of north Africa were in demand
for gladiatorial contests. Caesar used 400 in
one day; Pompey set 600 lions on the gladiators
in a single day. When the Colosseum was
opened to the public, 9,000 animals were
turned loose on the gladiators, among whom
were many Africans.
Rome built, in north Africa, aqueducts, dams
and cisterns to help increase proJ,'ctivity; they
also built huge amphitheatres, one of them (at
Thysdrus, modern EI-Jem) seating 60,000 spec-
tators.
The great Roman Emperor Septimius Severns
came to power in 193 A.D. and died in York, .
England, in 211; he was an African and spoke
Latin with a Punic accent, as historian E. W.
Bovill (a specialist in north African history)
points out. 15 Severns spent the equivalent of
many millions of dollars building up his native
land after he became Emperor. He was born
at Lepcis, gateway to the North Sahara; to com-
memorate his own name he made Lepcis a
fine harbor; magnificent ruins at this spot are
visited by tens of thousands of tourists annually.
From the fourth to the seventh centuries,
A.D., the cities of the north African coast were
in constant turmoil over persecutions arising
out of religious conflicts, and over rebellions
and invasions. The most important of these
came shortly after the death of Muhammad
in 632. His followers swept across the whole
of north Africa, taking Tripoli in 643 and
reaching the Atlantic Ocean in the year 681.

The first regular trade along the northeast
coast of Africa was carried on by the southern
Arabia country of Ausan. The Qataban, Sabaean
and Himyar states which followed it as dom-
inant factors in that trade, brought many Arabic
39
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cusroms and words with them to the coastal
cities of Kenya and Tanganyika and Somaliland.
In the course of time a new language and a
new culture developed. It was the language
and the culture we call Swahili. The language
has a Bantu base, but many Arabic elements.
In 510 B.c., a Greek pilot named Scylax, of
Caryanda, sailed down the Red Sea and along
the east coast of Arabia to the Indus River
and back. He was the first European to make
such a trip. The famed pilot of Alexander the
Great, Nearchus, duplicated (in 327-326 B.c.)
the feat of Scylax. After Nearchus, many other
mariners did the same, until trade with India
by way of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
was commonplace. In the Arabian ports these
early European sailors heard glowing accounts
of the many dties of East Africa.
It was soon after Alexander's time that the
word "zanj" first appeared in history. It was
first used in Persia in 293 B.C. "Zanzibar"
means "coast of the Zanj." Today the word
"zanj" in Arabic means "very dark" and "very
dark people." It refers also to the East and
Southeast coast of Africa ("the ZanY').
Interest in trading with the east and southeast
coastal dties of Africa led to the preparation,
in 60 AD., of a "periplus" or maritime atlas,
te11ing many handy bits of information useful
to navigators sailing along the African east
coast. It cal1ed the land of that area "Azania,"
as was common then; and it mentioned the
ivory, tortoise shells, palm oil and other articles
of commerce obtainable there; and it told also
what the east coast Africans wanted in trade.
In that period, India wanted African iron
for dagger hilts and swords, and wanted ivory
for chessmen.
China was interested in trading with Africa,
too; and during the period 25-220 A D., dur-
ing the late Han Dynasty, it began its maritime
40
trade with the Arab ports near the Red Sea.
Immediately after, during the period 221-265
AD., China developed four-masted seven-
masted ships for the long trips to the Indian
Ocean. This was approximately fifteen hundred
years before the development of the three-
masted American clipper ships.
Malayan and Indonesian were also
making the trip to Arabia anI.. Africa. In
fact, Java and Sumatra colonized in
the second century A.D.
T?e cities of the EaSt Coast, wit!.
PerSIans, Arabs, Chinese, Malayans, Indonesians
and Bantu-speaking Africans became more and
more cosmopolitan; and the Swahili language
and culture absorbed much from all of these
people.
The Arab merchants settled in the EaSt Coast
communities, adopted as their own the Swahili
language, married the local dark-skinned wo-
men, and became a part of the life of the
African people of the East Coast.
The Arabs were there to trade, not to
conquer.
Since it was easier for the people of southern
Arabia to reach the east COast of Africa than
it was for people from the Far East, and since
the religious and dynastic rivalries of Arabia
were causing more and more Arabs to leave
their native land, great numbers of Arabs
on the East CoaSt during the early
centunes of the Christian era, giving Swahili
a strongly Arabic aspect.
.. .. ..
Islam came to the East Coast during the
,eventh centUry. At least eight Islamic settle-
ments dating from that century have been
located by archaeologists along the East Coast.
During the seventh and eighth centuries the
nainland dties of the East Coast remained as
:hey had always been, basically African; yet
41
the Swahili culture of the area became more
and more Islamic.
In China, the fabulous Tang Dynasty was
in power during the eighth century; its ships
came to Africa for rhinocerous horns, used by
magicians against evil spirits, copper, used in
making bells, ivory elephant tusks for chairs
and for carved works of art, frankincense, cam-
phor, ambergris, sandal wood and gold.
. El Mas-udi, one of the great early Arab
authors, wrote in 947 that the ships of China
put in at Oman, Siraf, Obillah and Basra; and
that Arab ships from those ports sailed to
China for goods.
The East Coast of Africa sent an envoy to
China in 1083; three years later it was known
that the Chinese had an ingenious device for
telling directions at sea or on land: the mag-
netic compass. The Chinese used this device a
century before it came into use in the Mediter-
ranean or in Europe.
Having learned the usefulness of minted
money from the Chinese, the east coast dty of
Kilwa established a mint prior to 1300 A.D.
By 1414 another east coast dty, Malindi, had
enough trade with China so that it found it
desirable to send an ambassador to the Emperor
of China, with a gift of a giraffe, the first ever
~ n in China.
A great Chinese mariner named Cheng Ho
made seven historic voyages from China to the
Far West (that is, to India, Arabia and Africa).
The "Three-Jewel Eunuch" (as he was called)
was a Muslim and enjoyed the trust of the
Emperor to such' an extent that after his first
trip to Kenya in 1417-1419 he was given
command of fleets so large that by 1431-1432
(the number is still in dispute among histor-
ians) between 27,000 and 37,000 men sailed
with him to the Persian Gulf, with a large
part of these continuing on down i:he African
42
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--.. - ~ ~ - ~ ~ . - - ~ ~ . . . - ....
EaSt Coast.
In short, there was a vast amount of trade
transacted in the African East Coast cities; silks
and brocades were on display; Ming bowls and
vases, Sung porcelains, fine carpets from the
Middle East, copper, silver, jade and gold
jewelry from Sultanabad and Nishapur, ivory
figures from Canton, extraordinary mahogany
and teak carvings from Indo[a::'ja, were all
there for trade.
The blue cotton garments of the native
Africans, with their red shoes, the turbans and
red fezzes and black skull-caps of traders, the
bustle and glitter and chatter and gayety of
peaceful and very active international com-
merce, made the East and Southeast Coasts of
Africa centers for civilizing influences.
Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Songo
Mnara, Lamu, Brava and Mogadischu on the
East Coast, and Mozambique, Quelimane,
Chinde and Sofala on the Southeast Coast,
all shared in this prosperity and stability. Arab
and oriental traders knew all of these portS,
and were welcome, for more than a thousand
years before the Portuguese and destruction
arrived.
The famous Portuguese Prince Henry the
Navigator 0394-1460) and his no less enter-
prising brother Don Pedro, searching for Afri-
can gold, during the fifteenth century encour-
aged many voyages down the west coast of
Africa.
Each of the trips Henry and Pedro encour-
aged extended European knowledge of the
African west coast; Joao Diaz rounded Cape
Bojador (1434), Diniz Diaz reached Cape
Verde, Cadamosto (a Venetian in Portuguese
service) visited the Guinea Coast (1455) .
("Guinea" is from the Berber word aguinaou,
meaning "black.")
43
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But it was not until a generation after the
death of Prince Henry that the most exciting
discovery of all was made.
Bartholomeu Diaz de Novaes (probably a
relative of the other Diazes) On February 3,
1488 discovered the Cape of Good Hope. He
continued some distance on until the coast line
began to take him consistently northeast. He
then knew he had found a sea-route around
the southern tip of Africa to the trade portS
of the Orient. He turned back before reaching
Sofala.
Another explorer, Pedro de Covilhao, in the
same year went down the east coast of Africa
as far as Sofala.
The reports of Diaz and Covilhao decided
the King of Portugal on a major effort to place
Portugal ahead of all other European powers
in dominating the new trade possibilities with
the ports of the Indian Ocean. The King was
all the more eager, since expectation of discov-
ery of the new southern route had existed ever
since Fra Mauro in 1459 had presented Prince
Henry with a map showing the great southern
cape of Africa.
It was in 1497-1498 that four small Portu-
guese boats, under command of Vasco da
Gama, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
sailed up the east coast of Africa. They were
the first European ships to do this. Da Gama
and his companions were astounded at what
they saw: a world of commerce and wealth
surpassing that of most European cities.
The Africans did not have a high opinion
of the Portuguese. At one point, stated the
logbook of Da Gama's flagship, the Sao Gab-
riel, "twO senhores of the country came to see
us. They were very haughty; and valued noth-
ing which we gave them. One of them wore
a cap with a fringe embroidered in silk, and
the other a cap of green silk. A young man in
44
their company-so we understood from their
signs-had come from a distant country, and
had already seen big ships like ours."
At Sofala the Portuguese learned that gold
was brought down to the coast from an inland
empire of great size and'power. This was what
they had come for. Now, they thought, they
were near the source of African gold. They.
continued to India, returned a, 1 reported to
the King of Portugal.
The Portuguese decided to seize the
entire East Coast-Indian trade; all of it. They
had a convenient excuse: a group of Portu-
guese left in India by the first expedition after
Da Gama had been murdered; the excuse would
be to "avenge" these deaths.
Da . Gama was placed in command of twenty
warshIps and returned to the African east coast
and India .in 1502 with instructions to begin
the executIOn of Portugal's criminal plans.
The magnitude of the Portuguese effort to
control the East Coast and Indian trade can be
seen from the fact that during the first twenty-
five years after Da Gama's first visit to the
East Coast, Portugal commissioned 247 ships
to sail to India via the East Coast of Africa
every year.
R. S. Whiteway states
16
that cruelties "were
adopted as a line of terrorizing
polIcy by Vasco da Gama, Almeida, and Albu-
querque, to take no mean examples. Da Gama
tortured helpless fishermen; Almeida tore Out
the eyes of a Nair who had come in with a
promise of his life, because he suspected a
design on his life; Albuquerque Cut Qff the
noses of women and the hands of men who
fell into his. power on the Arabian Coast."
Basil Davidson briefly summarizes
l1
what the
Portuguese did on the African East Coast:
"It was at Mozambique, during his first
voyage, that da Gama exchanged the first
45
shots. Back again on the coast in 1502, this
time with a score of ships from home (the
largest but one of the Beets that Portugal
would send to the golden East), da Gama
threatens to burn Kilwa unless its ruler will
acknowledge the supremacy of the king of
Portugal and pay him yearly tribute in gold.
Ravasio does the same at Zanzibar and Brava.
Meeting resistance, Almeida storms Kilwa and
Mombasa, burning and destroying. Saldanha
ravages Berbera. Soares destroys Zeila. D' Acun-
ha attacks Brava. And this last place, comments
Barbosa, who went out in one of the earliest
fleets and knew the sacking of Brava from the
men who were there, 'was destroyed by the
Portuguese, who slew many of its peoples and
carried them into captivity, and took great spoil
of gold and silver and goods.' There survives
a letter from the ruler of Mombasa, after
Almeida's disastrous invasion, to the ruler of
Malindi. Returning to their blackened city
after the Portuguese had gone, it says, the
Swahili and Arab people of Mombasa found
'no living thing in it, neither man nor woman,
young nor old, nor child however little. All
who had failed to escape had been killed and
ourned.'
"All this was as easy for the Portuguese,
and for much the same reasons, as it was in
India whenever they met with resistance to
their greed and theft. They were better armed.
They were trained to ruthlessness. They wanted
more than a simple monoply of trade, ruinous
though that would be for the coastal cities;
they wanted loot as well."
To burn, to sack, to loot, to kill: this is what
Europeans brought to the civilized East Coast
of Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, A. D. "White terraces of tall houses,
ringed with strong walls, paved with firm
quays, crowned by forts and palaces ...... their
46
fame barely survived; often it vanished alto-
gether. Some of them, today, are entirely lost
...... " No wonder the Swahi1i poet wrote of
his city of Pate:
Madaka ya nyamba ya zisahani
Sasa walaliye wana wa nyuni.
(Where once the porcelain stood in the
wall niches
Now wild birds nestle their fledglings.) 18
But in spite of such disasters, the Swahili
civilization of the coast cities was far from
Kilwa's people, for instance, said a
SIxteenth century (1583) observer, van Lin-
schoten, "are all most white-apparelled in silk
and clothes of cotton wool: their women weare
bracelets of gold and precious stones about
their neckes and armes; they have great quan-
titie of silver workes, and are not so browne
as the men, and well membered: their houses
commonly made of stone, chalke and wood,
WIth pleasant gardens of all kinds of fruit and
sweet flowers. "19
'" '*' '*'
Inland, among the hills of the Kenya-Tan-
ganyika border, only a short time later (around
1660 A.D.) Engaruka, a city of 6,300 houses,
was built by Africans skilled in mining ores
and working metals.
Inland, also, and around that same time,
the terraces and fortresses of Niekerk were built.
Niekerk and its neighbor, Inyanga, built around
a or so earlier still, were mining and
agrtcultural communities.
Including Penhalonga, the "many forts and
dwellings, storepits, and terraced hillsides of
eastern Rhodesia and western Mozambique are
now known to extend across an area of two or
square miles, and a proper
lflspectlon of Mozambique may yet reveal them
as still more extensive."20
Up to the year 1905 this vast complex of
47
structures had never been reported Il.;x>n in
any European publication; yet,' as one of the
early European visitors to the area said' in
amazement, "There has been as much labour
expended here as on the building of the Pyra-
mids, or even more."
The peoples of eastern and sot1tnern
Rhodesia, the peoples of Katanga and of Trans-
vaal, mined, smelted and worked metals before
any white person appeared in those areas.
When and from whom did they learn these
extremely important processes and skills?
A thousand years before the great terraces
of Niekerk and Inyanga were built, Meroe
brought iron technologies to the people of
that region, and to the areas south and west
of it. Over deserts and wooded mountains,
along trade routes and forest paths used for
centuries upon centuries, Meroe, the Pittsburgh
of Ancient Africa, sent its products and its
ideas out to the communities south and west
of Kush. ;
One of the earliest of the South African
inland communities to milke the breakthrough
to the Iron Age was one at the southern end
of Lake Tanganyika. By 4'0 B.C. this com-
munity was working iron.
There were some areas that did not move
directly from the Stone Age intp the Iron Age.
Katanga worked bronze before iron; and the
Hottentots of South Africa worked gold and
copper (probably) before iron.
But in general, following the Meroe pio-
neers, combining, transforming, adapting teCh-
niques. and ideas to local conditions, tribe
after tribe, area aftel;' area, country after coun-
try, underwent revolutionary economic, techni-
cal and social changes growing oui: of the
dissemination of the skills and techniques of
iron-working.
One of the greatest of these changes occurred
48
in southeast Africa.
After twelve centuries of continuous develop-
ment of metal skills, there were in this area
sixty thousand recorded ancient mine workings
(gold, copper, tin and iron).
Most of these were a part of the Monoma-
tapa Empire. .
During the middle ages rumors and legends
about a gigantic empire south (1t Ethiopia had
passed on to Europeans by the Abyssin-
lans. The ruler, temporal and spiritual, of this
tremendous empire was said to be _ Prester
(Priest) John, a Christian. Some of the legends
Prester John in Asia. The locating of
thIS Prester John and his huge empire was one
0: .the objectives of the early Portuguese expe-
dItIOns to the African east coast.
is little doubt now that the actuality
behmd the legends. of an exceedingly large
empire, inland, inaccessible, and very wealthy,
was the Monomotapa Empire.
The chief center of this vast kingdom was
Zimbabwe, which is located seventeen miles
southeast of present-day Fort Victoria in South-
ern Rhodesia.
The chief port through which the metals of
the empire could reach Arabia, India, China
and Indonesia was the southeast African port
of Sofala.
Zimbabwe was two hundred and fifty miles
inland from Sofala; but it took twenty-six days
for carriers to make the trip.
It was, of course, the existence of the thriv-
ing seatrade that made possible the develop-
ment of the extremely widespread mining oper-
ations inland.
Africans with iron-age skills founded Zim-
babwe around the sixth century, A.D. For a
thousand years it maintained connections with
Katanga, Natal and Bechuanaland. Sometime
around 950 AD. the considerable group of
49
walled and towered stone buildings now known
as Great Zimbabwe were commenced. The
main structure, still standing, is three hundred
feet long and two hundred twenty feet wide.
Its walls are thirty feet high and in many
places twenty feet thick.
The Monomotapa Empire was gradually
built up over a period of around three hundred
years; and then for the five-:.hundred-year period
1250-1750 it flourished. It was at its peak
when the Portuguese saw, in Sofala, the evi-
dence of its riches at the time of Vasco da
Gama's voyage of 1497-1499. Barbosa wrote
about it in 1517; and in 1583 the gold of the
Monomotapa Empire was described as "the
finest gold that can be found."
The famous Damascus steel blades of the
Crusades were made from iron mined in the
Monomotapa Empire. The iron was sent down
the mountain trails to the coast; from Sofala
and other east coast ports it was shipped to
southwest India. After forging, it was shipped
to Arabia. In the Near East it was made into
the hardest and sharpest cutting weapons the
world had ever known, and into chain-mail.
The fine weapons of the Saracens were an
important factor in their ultimate victory over
the Crusaders.
Iron was ,important to the Portuguese, but
it was gold they wanted most of all. By 1607
they had forced the Monomotapa to cede to
them all right and title to his mines. But this
was not enough. The Portuguese wanted all
non-Portuguese traders to leave the empire.
And $), in 1628-1629 they sent two hundred
fifty Portuguese soldiers and thirty thousand
Kaffirs against the Monomotapa.
Most of the important leaders of the empire
were killed, ml emperor was deposed, and a
new emperor was put on the throne. The new
emperor (coercect'by the murderers who called
50
themselves Christians) agreed to be baptized
as a Christian and agreed to expel all Moors,
giving the Portuguese the right to kill any
that did not leave.
After this capitulation the power of the
Monomotapa was gone. The Rozwi invaded
his kingdom in 1700 and largely destroyed it.
They rebuilt it, however, in 1725, and for
another hundred years the empire lingered on,
being finally destroyed around 1825 by a south-
land people, from Natal, the Nguni.
The last Ba-Rozwi ruler was flayed alive in
1835 by the Swazi.
Khami, another great southeast African in- '
land city, built around 1600 A.D., was des.-
troyed in 1834 by a chief named Zwangendaba;
and about the same time Inyanga and Penha-
longa were devastated, never to recover, by
Tschangana tribesmen from Mozambique.
In order to make it impossible for any whites
to work the Manica gold mines, ,Mzila, a Zulu
chief, in the 1860's ordered all native workers
in the area killed, leaving it a wilderness.
The amount of gold taken out of the mines
of the Monomotapan Empire is indicated by the
money value of the captaincy of Sofala: 200,-
000 quzados every three years, worth more
than the equivalent of 800,000 United States
1962 dollars.
Each of the other 'east coast ports had its
Portuguese "captain;'; the King of Portugal
got his truly tremendous income; and the
traders got theirs; and the basic for' all
this wealth was the labor of coast' and 'fnllind
Africans, and the gold of the Monomotapan
Empire.
It had taken over two thousand years of
patience, probity and industry to build a net-
work of trade rek ,', ,1'1S between East Africa and
China, Indonesia,' India and Arabia. In
sixty years the POI tuguese had completely des-
51
i.
troyed that network of trading intereSts, and
with it, the civilizations of the hinterlands that
depended for their very existence on that trade.
Rigid, bureaucratic, imperial procedures and
greed, permeating their entire colonial appar-
atus, plus barbarous cruelty, contributed to the
downfall of the Portuguese in East Africa.
The use of Portuguese troops and firearms
first on one side and then on another, among t
the inland tribes, fatally weakened the inland .,.
civilizations.
When no one would any longer work the
gold mines (and the gold was still there in the
hills and mountains of Zimbabwe), the Portu-
guese turned to black gold, turned to traffic in
human. bodies, turned to the wholesale slave
trade. And every act of bloody ctuelty made
more and more of their subjects hate them,
just as the bloody actions against native Afri-
cans of Angola and Mozambique make a later
generation of Portuguese colonists despised and
hated today.
"Having ruined the states they found, they
ruined themselves," summarizes Davidson.
,. '*' '*'
South of the Monomotapa Empire, long be-
fore the Portuguese came, was the "Land of
Waq Wag."
The Waqlimi were not a Zan; people. Just
what and who they were, the archaeologists
will no doubt some day find out.
In the land south of Monomotapa, however,
at a spot southern boundary of t
ern Rhodesla, 10 the Transvaal, there ltved-.:
before the discovery of agriculture-a commun- f.,.
ity of Stone Age Hottentots. They had cere-
monial beaSt burials similar to those of Badar-
ian, pre-Dynastic Egypt.
Around 450 A.D. there was a migration
into the area of an Africoid population from
the north. They intermarried with the Hotten-
52
..
tots and in the course of time, doubtless for
greater security, moved the community to a Bat
mountaintop now called Mapungubwe.
The newcomers brought know ledge of agri-
culture with them.
Rich soil was carried up to the mountaintop
and essential crops were planted there.
The newcomers also brought with them the
techniques of metalworking.
They were Bantu-speaking people; probably
Sotho and Shona.and Venda peoples, like those
around Zimbabwe. Their numerous descend-
ants, the Basuto, the Mashona and the Bavenda,
live in the general neighborhood stilL
In the 1890' s and the 1900' s it was rumored
among the white settlers south of the Limpopo
River that the Vehda people of the area had
golden treasures hidden on a sacred hill.
Because the hill was sacred, the Venda people
kept its location secret. It was not until 1932
that a white man named van Graan found the
hill. It could be climbed only through a chim-
ney which had small climbing-holes on two
facing sides.
Van Graan, his son and three other whites
climbed the chimney and came out on a level
plateau a thousand feet long. Almost at once
he and his party found seventy-five ounces of
gold. It was in the shape of ornaments: brace-
lets, beads, little gold rhinoceroses, and so on.
These were the wrought gold objects
ever found in South Africa.
The Royal Mint at Pretoria pronounced them
"gold of great purity."
The Government of South Africa at once
took steps to gee title to Mapungubwe from its
absentee owner.
Soon twenty other occupation sites in the
vicinity had been found. A royal cemetery was
located. It was soon evident that Mapungubwe
had been the dwelling place of venerated Afri-
53
can rulers in pre-European times.
But the nature of the civilization, its connec-
tions, beliefs, origins, customs, are now only
beginning to be studied.

Needing study, also, is the history of Nyasa-
land. Very little is known of it; and archaeo-
logically, Nyasaland is almost a blank. When
work begins there in the fields of history and
archaeology, many connections, many links,
between northern and southern African civi-
lizations will doubtless be uncovered.
Mozambique, Tanganyika and Uganda are
in like need of historical and archaeological
study.
The world needs to know a great deal more
than it now knows about the origins and his-
tories of the Bantu-speaking peoples of east,
central and south Africa. "The product of
migration, intermarriage, and multiplication
over many centuries," these people are the
chief key to the future for the southern third
of the entire continent.
There are earthworks, for example, in West-
ern' Uganda which are among the largest in
the world, and pe"haps- the world's largest. At
Bigo tw,09.t three years ago a huge
lfu1lt jn an 'elliptical form remi-
niscent of Zimbabwe. Why were the earthworks
and the fortress built? Who were their builders?
Throughout Africa there are impressive re-
mains of civilizations. We need to know
more, much m6re, about those civilizations than
we do.
'" '" .
In the course of the seven centuries after
300 A.D.-the centuries during which the
metal-working techniques of Meroe spread
throughout much of the continent - an increas-
ing mastery of environment developed. With-
it came a new mobility of tribes. Great quanti-
54
..
ties of iron-tipped weapons made possible the
mobilization of tens of thousands of warriors
armed formidably.
A familiar feature of African tribal sociery
from earliest times to the present, has been the
division of dans through the "secession" of
one group or another. This tendency to divide
increased with the increasing militarization of
the tribes. And because there was an apparently
endless supply of land, the "seceding" or divid-
ing groups always had a new place they could
go to and call their own.
Thus the peopling of many parts of central,
east and south Africa went forward with greatly
increased speed as a result of the advent of the
Iron Age.
Among the new tribes formed in this process
were the Sorko and the Gabibi. The Sorko were
fishers; the Gabibi were farmers; in legend
they came to the middle Niger to an area then
inhabited only by two dans who were referred
to as "masters of the water" and "masters of
the land."
Both settled near the Labbezenga Falls in
the Dendi country of the middle Niger .. ,Migrat-
ing upstream in their boats, the Sorko founded
a city: Gao.
In the ninth century Za Aliamen, a Lemta
Tuareg, seized the countty nearby. Other fishing
and agricultural communities were established
in the vicinity over a long period. Together,
under Lemta leadership, these communities,
consisting of the native peoples and the newer
migrant tribes such as the Sorko and the Gabibi,
formed the Songhay state.
Around the year 1009 A.D. K;ing Kossoi of
Songhay to Islam. _
meanwhile had become a trading as well
community; its rich
merchants and ttaders, acting on the principle
"Islam and.Commerce" urged Kossoi to take
55
Gao from the Sorko, which he did, making that
city the Songhay capitaL
Farther up the Niger River Mandingo tribes-
men under Allakoi Keita founded the state of
Mali (1213 A.D.).
In the course of its growth, and during a war
against the Sosso rulers of Ghana, Sundiata,
successor to Keita on the Mali throne, destroyed
the capital of Ghana (1240).
By the year 1300 the Mandingo people had
built a thriving city, quite as civilized as most
of the cities of medieval Europe. The name of
this city was Timbuktu. Another of their cities
was Walata.
Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) visited and de-
scribed Mali. The Walata women, he found,
were of "surpassing beauty" and were "shown
more respect than the men." He was surprised
when he found that "No one claims descent
from his father, but on the contrary from his
mother's brother. A person's heirs are his sister's
sons, not his own sons."
Although the people of Mali were Muslim,
the family relations, such as matrilineal suc-
cession, were Sudanese.
In the year 1307 Mansa Kankan Musa came
to the throne of Mali. Seventeen years later he
made the pilgrimage to Mecca, passing through
Cairo on his way. The echoes of his trip con-
dnued for centuries afterward. For the scale
of Mansa Musa's expenditures was staggering;
no one had ever seen such wealth and mag-
nificence in Cairo; the gold market of the city
fell, and did not recover for more than a decade.
The Emperor of Mali, traveling on horse-
back, was preceded by five hundred slaves, each
carrying a staff of gold weighing six pounds.
And in order to pay the way for his soldiers
and the many members of his court who accom-
panied him, the caravan included a hundred
camel-loads of gold, each camel carrying from
56

Timbuktu three hundred pounds of the yellow
metal.
While the King of Ghana had a nugget of
gold so big and heavy that he could tether his
horse to it, the King 6f Mali had gold beyond
the dreams of any king of tht: world of his time.
His kingdom was larger than all of western
Europe, and, more civilized. When
someone asked him, 'in Cairo, how big his
country was, he replied, "About a year." That
is, it would take about ,a year for a man to walk
across it. Muklim scholars of the period, wish-
ing to be very conservative, said it could be
done in four months.
On his return home, Mansa Musa visited
Gao, which his army commander had taken
from the Songhay while Musa was on his trip
. to Mecca. Arriving home in Timbuktu, Mansa
Musa caused a fine mosque, the Sankure
Mosque, to be erected'in that city, following
the design of a poet of Granada, "whom the
emperor had come to in Mecca and per-
suaded to r.eturn with him."
El Omari (born in 1301) wrote of the Em-
peror of Mali whopreteded Kankan Musa,
that he led a fleet of four hundred ships, two
hundred filled with men and two hundred "with
gold" (and, no doubt, supplies), to "the west-
ward," that is, the w.estern hemisphere. The
captain of the last boat of the fleet got fright-
ened or could not keep up with the fleet, and
returned home; he was unable to report whether
the other ships arrived or were lost. Certain it
is, however, that many Africans made the trip
to the Americas centuries before Columbus;
Professor Leo Wiener's three-volume study,
mentioned earlier, gives ample evidence of their
widespread influence in the western hemisphere.
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) stated that cara-
vans of 12,000 camels at a time, representing
. a huge commerce, used to travel from Mali
57
across the Sahara Desert by way of the Hoggar
Mountains. Mali imported horses, Damascus
swords, silks, cottons, and many other commodi-
ties from the Mediterranean. The prosperity of
the kingdom increased from year to year.
Meanwhile, the power of neighboring Song-
hay was rising.
In 1464, Sonni Ali came to power in Song-
hay, the eighteenth king in the line founded
by King Kossoi around 1009. In four short
years Sonni Ali made Songhay so powerful that
it was able to seize Timbuktu, the capital of
the Mali srate. By the time he died in .1492,
Songhay was the most powerful country of
the Western Sudan.
Sonni Ali's son was the last of the Lemta
Dynasty which had ruled Songhay with great
success for eight centuries.
Muhammad Toure, who assumed the title of
Askia (and was later called Askia the Great)
took over the kingdom from Sonni Ali's son,
and ruled it for nineteen eventful years.
Referring to Askia the Great, the famous
traveler and writer Leo Africanus said in 1510:
"Here (in Timbuktu) are great store of doc-
tors, judges, priests, and other learned men,
that are bountifully maintained at the king's
cost and charges. And hither are brought
divers manuscripts or written books out of
Barbarie, which are sold for more money than
any other merchandise.'>2t
Both Mali and Songhay contributed to the
development of Timbuktu and Djenne as cen-
ters of learning. Djenne was one of the greatest
of such medieval African centers of learning.
The town was regarded as "hallowed," and
people came from far and near to study and
trade and live there.
Askia the Great's rule ended in 1528 with
abdication. He lived out the rest of his life on
an island in the Niger River, bothered greatly
58

by frogs and mosquitoes.
Songhay itself was invaded in 1591 by the
Moroccan armies of EI Mansur, in search of the
gold that had made Mali and Songhay famous.
Timbuktu and Gao were captured by the in-
vaders, and the armed forces of Songhay were
defeated and scattered. By 1600 the Songhay
srate was no more, its cities the prey of maraud-
ing neighbors, with no force able to prevent
them from being seized and looted again and
again.
The source of West African gold puzzled the
world for a very long time. "Wangara" was
the country it came from, everybody said; but
no-one (at least, no European) knew where
,Wangara was.
It was known that the Wangara gold-diggers
wore lip-disks; that as a result, the lower lip was
stretched to very great size, and when the lip-
disk was not in place, the lip actually hung
down upon the chest. Because of this custom
of stretching the lower lip, the people of Wan-
gara had to have large quantities of salt, which
was sprinkled on the lip to keep it from be-
coming infected by insects, dust, scratches or
sun.
It was also known that the Wangara were
very secretive about their work; that the trade
was silent, and women played a big part in it.
Cadamosto reported to Prince Henry the
Navigator that the Wangara gold was traded
for salt. Slabs of salt were carried by "a great
army of men on foot" to the trading area;
then, "all those who have the salt pile it in
rows, each marking his own. Having made these
piles, the whole caravan retires half a day's
journey. Then there come another race of blacks
who do not wish to be seen or to speak. They
arrive in large boats, from which it appears
that they come from islands, and disembark.
59
Seeing the salt, they place a quantity of gold
opposite each pile, and then turn back, leaving
salt and gold." Thus, "by long and ancient
custom, they carry on their trade without seeing
or speaking to each other:
m
So closely was the secret of the source of
the gold kept that it was two thousand years
~ f o r the location of the Wangara goldfields
was established.
They were at Bambuk-Bure and at Lobi.
'*' '*' '*'
It was the Battle of Alcazar (1578) that
elevated 29-year-old Mulai Ahmed EI Mansur
to power as the She reef of Fez.
In that battle, in six hours, 26,000 Portu-
guese were slaughtered or captured and en-
slaved. Less than one hundred escaped.
Due to the death of his uncle in the battle,
Muial Ahmed inherited his uncle's position as
Shereef - and added the title HEI Mansur" (the
Victorious) to his name.
Europe was staggered by the terrible strength
Of the blow at Alcazar, and hastened to make
peace with the Moors. A ruby as big as a man's
fist, an emerald the size of an apple, were
among gifts showered on the young man by
the monarchs of Europe and the Near East.
Within six years after the Battle of Alcazar,
EI Mansur had completed at Marrakech, Mo-
rocco, one of the most magnificent palaces in
the world. Named' EI Bedi, it was built of
Italian and Irish marble, and decorated by the
finest Moorish artisans with semi-precious stones
from India; its gardens were oo'a scale in keep-
ing with the princely magnificence of its thou-
sands of columns.
After finishing this great structure, EI Mansur
secretly began preparations to invade the west-
ern Sudan and take over the routes through
which the gold of Wangara reached Europe.
At that time salt was an extremely important
60
f
and valuable article of commerce not only for
the Wangara gold trade, but throughout the
western Sudan. One of the main sources for
this commodity, for the trade of the western
Sudan, was a group of salt mines at Taghaza,
operated by black slaves of the Mesufa Tuareg,
who were themselves vassals of the King of
Songhay.
EI Mansur's first step toward the domination
of the western Sudan was the seizure of the salt
mines of Taghaza. He closed them down, work.
ing great hardship on all the people of the
Sudan. Defying him, the Songhay reopened the
mines.
EI Mansur at once gathered an army of 4,000
and put Judar Pasha in charge of it. There
were 2,000 infantry armed with the arquebus,
500 mounted arquebusiers, and 1,500 light
cavalry, armed with lances. 600 sappers and
1,000 camel drivers, together with 8,000 camels
and 1,000 pack.horses completed the force,
which had to travel 1,500 miles across the
desert before reaching the enemy.
The army left Morocco in October, 1590, and
arrived at Songhay in February, 1591. During
1593, Timbuktu and Jenne were plundered.
The Moroccan army was constantly harassed,
but, through many changes of command, and
with epidemics cutting their numbers greatly
(four hundred Moorish deaths in one period
of two weeks), and with sickness killing the
transport animals, it held on.
At last, after ten years in Songhay, Judar
Pasha returned to Marrakech, with three mil-
lion dollars in unrefined gold for EI Mansur.
It took thirty camels to carry the gold.
J udar Pasha also brought slaves and the
virgin daughters of the King of Gao for El
Mansur.
The invasion of Songhay cost Morocco
. 23,000 troops over the period of Morocco's
61
i'
occupancy of the Sudan. It made El Mansur
rich. But since he spent the gold as fast as it
came in, there was nothing in his treasury at
the time of his death.
EI Mansur died in 1603; fifteen years later,
Morocco gave up the effort to hold Songhay,
leaving the Moors on the Niger to be assimi-
lated by the Sudanese.
By 1670 Timbuktu had been taken by the
Bambara of Segu, and Gao had become a vassal
of the Tuareg.
Still later (1672)' a private army of Sudan-
ese, under a Moroccan named Ali ben Haidar,
moved against a Moroccan ruler named Mulai
er-Rechid.
By the time Haidar's army of Sudanese
reached Morocco, er-Rechid was dead and Mulai
Ismail was in power. Since Haidar had nothing
against him, the army was turned over to Mulai
Ismail. Built up to a strength of 150,000
through constant recruiting, this Sudanese force
proved to be Mulai Ismail's most dependable
army.
Mulai Ismail himself being very black, liked
the idea of a very dark army. He himself had
25,000 white slaves, among them Alexander
Selkirk, the hero of the famous book "RQbinson
Crusoe."
Mulai Ismail kept a stable of 12,000 Arabian
horses; a black and a white slave cared for each
horse; and for each horse there was in the
stable a running stream of water.
a

. . ,.,
Between Lake Chad and the Niger River, in
the period 950-1000 A.D., the seven Hausa
states were founded: Daura, Kano, Zazau, Go-
bir, Katsina, Biram and Rano.
Legend states that Abu Yazid, who came to
Daura from the neighboring state of Bornu, .
killed the Sacred Serpent of Daura, married
the queen, and began ruling.
62
Seven minor Hausa kingdoms, known as the
Banza Bokwoi, were also established. Their
names: Kebbi, Nupe, Gwari, Yelwa, Horin,
K wararafa and Zamfara.
The Hausa kingdoms later became a part
of northern Nigeria.
Kano, one of the more important Hausa
kingdoms, had its first Bagoda king in the
year 999 A.D. From that time to 1892, Kano
had forty-eight kings. It was at the height of
its power around the time of Christopher
Columbu.
c
Its king then was Muhammad
Rimfa.
The Hausa people were skilled tanners,
leather-workers, weavers and iron-smiths. Their
cities retained local autonomy, and were walled.
The wall around Kano was thirteen miles long.
Two branches of the Fulani arrived among
the Hausa states from the west in the thir-
teenth century. One branch - the Bororoje-
were pastoral nomads and pagans; the other -
Fulanin Gidda - were Muslims with a liking
for city life. Popularly, the two branches were
called the Cow Fulani and the Town Fulani.
Five hundred years later the Fulani occupied
many of the highest positions in the Hausa
states.
One of the most important of the Fulanin
Gidda clans was the Torobe or Toronke (the
people of Toro). They were a very dark people
who came from Senegal, migrated east, leaving
a number of settlements along the upper and
middle Niger, with the main mass of the
Torobe settling finally in Gobir.
It was from these Toronke of Gobir that
the great national hero of the Fulani of Hausa
arose: Usuman dan Fodio, who came to power
over the Hausa states during the period 1804-
1808. Shehu, as he was called, gave each of
his most trusted followers a flag, and the
promise of a Hausa city or province when his
63
jihad was over. He blessed each flag, and sent
his followers out to rid the world of un-
believers.
The Fulani rallied to Shehu (Sheik) with
great enthusiasm. By 1810 he controlled a huge
territory that extended from Timbuktu to the
Black Volta, and as promised, each of the flag-
holders was put in charge of a dty or province.
He was not able to conquer the Yoruba in the
forest counrry of the south, nor the Bornu,
whose homeland was west of Lake Chad.
Usuman dan Fodio died in 1817, and is
buried in Sokoto, where his tomb is the object
of pilgrimages.
" " "
Europeans have quite generally been stunned
at the magnificence of such ancient African
palaces as Deir el Bahari, and at the medieval
splendor of El Bedi in Marrakech.
Europeans have made many reports of the
courtesy and kindness with which they were
received by African monarchs. Hospitality was
the rule.
Duarte Pires, for instance, representing the
King of Portugal at the court of the King of
Benin reported (1516): "He pays us high
honour and sets us at table to dine with his
son, and no part of his court is hidden from us
but all the doors are open."
Portuguese Captain Gamitto, reaching the
court of the King of Lunda in the southern
Congo, reported (1831) "great elegance and
good taste" and a great deal of etiquette and
ceremony at court.
Early English traders, such as Richard Wind-
ham (1554), reported a most friendly cor-
diality extended to them by West Coast Afri-
can monarchs.
The Hungarian Emil Torday, acting (1909)
for the Belgians, traveled up the Congo River,
then up the Kasai, then up the Sankuru; there,
64
,
I
far into the interior, he reported, he was re-
ceived with courtesy and kindness.
These were not isolated, occasional, instances;
they were typical and habituaL Back of these
actions and attitudes was a long tradition; when
Torday visited the Bushongo they gave him "in
measured phrases" a king-list of one hundred
twenty names back to the founding of their
nation. One of these kings was Shamba Bolon-
gonge, who "abolished warfare with the throw-
ing knife, and introduced raffia weaving and
other arts of peace." The Bushongo were espe-
cially proud of such accomplishments, indicat-
ing their own deep respect for the "arts of
peace."
But when the European powers moved to
subdue and rule the West Coast tribes, the
resistance of the people amazed the would-be
rulers.
Using every form of torture and atrocity to
intimidate the Congolese, it took the Belgians
(using guns against spears) twenty years to
conquer the Congo. The British lost six different
wars (1803-1874) against the Ashanti before
finally subduing them (1894); and even then
the use of Jamaican and other United Kingdom
black troops made British victory possible-for
the Ashanti came out and threw their arms
about their black brothers.
It was only because of access to superior arms
that the Belgians in the Congo and the British
in Nigeria were able finally to impose their
wills on the entire native populations of those
huge areas.
. " .
Often hypocritically justifying their barbarity
as "saving souls" the white European powers,
for a period of five hundred years, have com-
mitted a mountain of crimes against Africa
and Africans.
In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
65
centuries an unspeakable horror descended upon
the peoples of Africa.
Slavery had existed in Africa long before
the Europeans made a profitable business of
it. The Egyptians enslaved many peoples, the
Assyrians enslaved Egyptians, the Romans en-
slaved Carthaginians and many others; and
literally hundreds of African tribes had slaves.
But, as has been pointed out," the mass
slavery imposed on Africa by the white Euro-
pean powers during the sixteenth, seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries differed from the ear-
lier slaveries in that it broke every link between
the slave and his own culture, and smashed the
very structure of his society.
Through mass murder and the dispersal of
those deemed suitable for slavery, many tribal
'societies came to a complete and final end.
In the earlier forms of slavery, slaves were
an organic part of the society they served; when
large numbers of slaves worked on specific
projects, they were sometimes able to retain
their own social relationships, and in some
cases were encouraged to do so.
The mass exodus of Hebrew slaves from
Egypt was possible because the clan structure
and practices of the Hebrews had been retained.
But slavery of Africans by Europeans, which
involved the taking of over 100,000,000 Afri-
cans from their homes by force, ended the very
existence of scores of African cultures, rent and
tore social fabrics in many cases hopelessly be-
yond repair, and set an entire progressive conri-
nent back in its development by several hun-
dred years.
A Netherlands historian cites an 1823 ac-
count writren from Liberia by an American
about a local chief "who had received goods
on credit from a French slave-hunter." In order
to make payment, the chief searched among
the peaceful neighboring tribes: "He singled
66
out the Queaks, a small agricultural and trading
people of most inoffensive character. His war-
riors were skilfully distributed to the different
hamlets, and making a simultaneous assault on
the sleeping occupants in the dead of the night,
accomplished, without difficulty or resistance,
in one hour, the annihilation of the whole tribe
- every adult, man and woman, was murdered
- every hut fired! Very young children generally
shared the fate of their parents; the boys and
girls alone were reserved to pay the French-
man."2'
Of the 1 00,000,000 Africans seized in slave
raids, only about twenty million lived to become
slaves in foreign lands; approximately ten mil-
lion in Europe and ten million in the Americas.
80,000,000 African lives were lost in the
bloody welter of slave raids, kidnappings, mas-
sacres of the very old and the very young, slave
sales and slave-ship transport deaths.
Shackled side by side on decks that in some
cases were two feet apart, rolling naked night
and day on the bare boards of kennels stinking
with excreta, blood, vomit and sweat, many of
the victims died before the long middle passage
voyage was completed.
In 1784, for instance, the captain of the
slave ship Zong threw 132 sick slaves over-
board. In 1819 the captain of the French slave
ship Le Rodeur threw 39 African slaves over-
board. They had contracted opthalmia, an eye
disease; had become blind and unsalable; but
since they had been insured, they were thrown
overboard "to enable the owners to collect the
insurance."
The degradation of slavery, and the despera-
tion of its victims, resulted in many insurrec-
tions. Harvey Wish, in the "Journal of Negro
History" lists sixty-one slave mutinies aboard
ship alone. Slave revolts in every country to
which the Africans were taken, were features
67
"I
i
of this resistance. Over two hundred slave in-
surrection plots are of record.
Suicide by stabbing, hanging or drowning
was a way out for multitudes of the victims.
Fear of being eaten drove many insane . "Their
sobs and songs of sadness have often troubled
my soul," said the pious captain of the slave
ship Degrltndpre.
That Africa has recovered :it all from the
loss of a hundred million of her people, from
the smashing of scores of tribes, and from the
debasement of those structures which remained,
is the wonder.
The centuties-long ravaging of every African
people they could get at, the callous disregard
of human decency, the branding with a hot
iron on cheek, arm, thigh or chest of millions
of Africans, as if they were no more than cattle,
the senseless slaughter of orher millions of old,
or weak, or siCk or too young Africans, earned
for the white slave-trader countri.es a legacy of
contempt and bitter hate.
"" "" ""
There were three kinds of slave trade: do-
mestic, overland and overseas.
The domestic slave trade was much the same
as practiced in all parts of the world.
Overland slave trade was carried on by
caravan for thousands of years. In its final
centuries, such roads as the Fezzan-Kawar road
were lined by the skeletons of many thousands
of victims, mostly young girls and women, who
were unable to survive the ordeals of desert
travel to the slave markets of Tripoli and
Benghazi.
Overseas slave trading - the "modern,"
"wholesale," "systematic" kind - began in 1444
when the first group of slaves taken from the
area north of the Senegal was transported to
Lisbon and sold there. By 1517 Spanish Bishop
Las Casas was officially allowing twelve slaves
68
r
i
t
I
to each Spaniard who went ro the New World
to seek his fortune. By 1537 the Pope had OK'd
the Lisbon slave market. At the wharves of
Luanda . bishops sat in ivory chairs, to
baptize, wholesale, the slaves rowed beneath
them in chains to the waiting slave-ships. And
aiding England's chief slave-trader, Sir John
Hawkins, to carry on his bloody trade, was the
good ship Jesus, and the fiction that the slave- .
trader brought the slave eternal salvation.
During the first fifty years of the trade, the
price of a slave in Benin was from twelve to
. fifteen brass or copper bracelets.
From Angola alone in the period 1486-1641,
more than 1,300,000 slaves were taken. In a
period of only ten years (17831793) there
were nine hundred voyages out of Liverpool
alone for the slave trade; these nine hundred
voyages yielded 300,000 slaves which sold at
around fifteen million pounds sterling, with a
net profit of approximately twelve million
pounds sterling going to the captains and the
ship owners.
The Dutch West India Company in the
twelve-year period 1637-1648 transported
23,163 slaves from Africa to Brazil. They paid
40 to 50 guilders each for the slaves in the
Congo, and sold them in Brazil for 200 to 800
guilders per slave. Their book keepers reported
receipts of 6,714,423 guilders and 60 cents for
the period.
And who were the great New World slave-
traders?
"The Puritan colonies ranked as the greatest
slave<arrying section in the New and
the "slave trade developed into New England's
greatest industry," states Lorenzo Johnston
Gteeae.
26
American slave-ship owners often made
100% on their investment at the end of a
single voyage.
69
The city of Newport, Rhode Island, later a
center of the world of fashion, had 22 distil-
leries during slave-trading days. In these dis-
tilleries rum was made to be traded in Africa
for slaves. Many of the slaves so purchased
were taken to the West Indies for sale. There
molasses was purchased, which was taken to
Newport to be manufactured into rum, com-
pleting the vicious triangle.
In the slave marketS of the world, African
blood was transmuted into gold in the coffers
of the white slave-trading countries; the capital
accumulation secured in this way laid the base
for the further financial growth of those coun-
tries; and slave labor itself, in those countries,
added for centuries to that capital accumulation.
Those responsible for the deaths of eighty
million Africans and the enslavement of twenty
million, those responsible for. the rape of a
continent for centuries called themselves civi-
lized, and called their victims uncivilized; those
who organized the most vast, the most cruel, the
most destructive and savage manhunt of all
time called their victims savages.
"" "" ""
Those who participated in the slaughter of
eighty million Africans and in the enslavement
of twenty million, and those who are trying
with every means at their command to continue
the exploitation of Africa and Africans today,
have done their beSt to project an image of an
"Africa without history and without mystery,"
an Africa barbaric, untrained, and badly need-
ing "trained" (i.e. white) "help" (i.e., exploi-
tation),
Having stood on the necks of Africans, and
having ridden on their backs, the current crop
of these image-makers now speak of their vic-
tims as "backward" and "underdeveloped." In
a rush to have their representatives sit at the
head table, where the pickings (it is hopefully
70
expected) will be the best, those monied "pro-
tectors" and "defenders" of Africa move con-
stantly along lines of economic and financial
and military ties that will strengthen their posi-
tion for the continued profitable. exploitation
of A(rica under the new conditions forced on
them by the rapid advance of African national-
ism.
The neo-colonialists would like, if they could,
to bury African history; and if unab(e to do
that, to bypass it; and,if this, too, proves diffi-
cult, to cbscure it; arid as obscuring it becomes
harder, then to distort and minimize it.
For - contrary to the interests of the New
Colonialists with t h ~ i gikof economic-military
chains - the faccsOf :African history reveal an
immense African capacity for progress; an in-
nate and general sense of the collective, and a
rejection of the methods and structure of exploi-
tation; an unquenchable idealism; and a steady i
drive toward jus#ce and democracy. \
Freedom, everyone in Africa knows, is the .
weapon and the road leading to the full reali- .... ,
zation of Africa's aspirations.
Knowledge of African history-in this period
especially - becomes a light to assist the users
of the weapon of Freedom, and the travelers
along Freedom Road, and the Friends of Afri-
can Freedom.
Education thus assists Action.
But the need for the study of African History
is urgent. A deeper and more aceurate know I- . l
edge of African Cultures is essential if weare 1
to move toward closer relations with our Afri- I
can brothers. I
It is to help provide material for this study, 'J
and for study of Afroamerican culture, that this .. ,l
Seminar has come into being, Other lectures
in the series will deal with other aspects of
African and Afroamerican cultures.
71
, NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
12Charles M. BoJao.d. ''They All Discovered America. ..
Doubleday, N.Y., 1961.
'"Leo Wiener, "Africa and the Discovery of America."
3 vols. Innes and Sons, Philadelphia, 1920-22.
14J. A. Rogers, "Nature Knows No Color-Line," p. 234.
J. A. Rogers, N.Y., 1952. , ' .
15K W. Bovill, "The Golden Trade of the Moocs,"
p. 44. Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1961.
16in his "The Rise of the Potruguest' Power i_D India.
1497-1550," published in 1899.
l1Basil Davidson, "The Lost Cities of Afria," p. 200.
Little, Brown. Boston, 19551.
18ibid., pp. 193,199.
19ibid., pp. 288-9.
2ibid., p. 277.
"Leo "The History and Descripcioo of
Africa," Vol. nt, p. 825; uanslated by John Pory 4t.
1600; edired by Dr. Robert Brown; Hakluyt sOciety,
London; 1896. The first realistic reportS of the interior ,
of the Western Stldan to be printe4 in Europe were
those of Africanus. They were issued first,by G. 8.
Ramusio 'in his "Navigationi eViaggi,"
15631574.
22Gerald R. Crone, "'I'he Voyages of Cadam0stt>.,7
pp. 22-23. Halcluyt Society, London, .1937.
23A detailed descriptionof Mulai Ismail's cateer and
of his Suda.pese army may be,found in I 01
J. A. Rogers' invaluable 'W<Qrld's' &eat '. Men: 01
Color." .
Uby A. Ihle in "Das .!JteI(onigreich KOO8Q," 1m",.
2&]. W. 'The People)'hat WIIIk
in Darkness," p. S. iklltUirjnf:, New ,Yerk, 1960.
2eLorenzo JOMStQft Greene, "The Negro in CoIoOw
New England," pp.. 316, 317. Columbia Ulli\'eWty
Press, N.Y;, 1942.
.25