It is immensely interesting to see the de-westernization of modern archaeology .. it seems to be being forced by the artefacts themselves, which provide ample motivation and evidence that western ideals need not be applied to ancient ways.
It is one of those subjects where the intersection of religious fervour and scientific rigour has produced endless falsehoods - yet with every scrape in the dirt we get more and more truth behind human history.
As an armchair fan of archeological endeavours from Gobekli Tepe to the forests of the Amazon, I can only hope that the elevation of Great Zimbabwe in the human lexicon results in further enlightenment with regards to our human history. It is very rewarding to see the veils of christian political movements falling from the stage of archeological accomplishment. We need more of this.
It's less "de-westernization" and more a internationalization and the removal of racist ideology in archeology. Archeology was for decades deeply affected by racist believes, both directly and indirectly by building on-top of research which was affected without realizing it.
Idk. why but people often forget that the race ideology (crossed with nationalism and religion) which is today often seen a "being a nazi thing" was very wide spread even before the German Nazis became a thing all around the western world (and also outside of the western world replacing "european-white supremacy" with e.g."japanese-asian supremacy", but that kinda doesn't matter for this discussion).
A good example how the mindset affected "historic" research for a long time, is how for a long time it was believed that in pre-human history in each step of evolution there where always a few "evolved" sub-subspecies from a human predecessor and only one survived "by itself/without mixing". Which as it turns out is complete bs as there was a constant interbreeding of such species and the modern human is a result of this interbreeding (sure some species traits dominated, but either way it wasn't still constant DNA exchange of sub-species, i.e. "pre-humans" which are noticeable more different then any two modern humans of different ethnicity).
Or do you consider that the rising economies and cultures of Africa are 'part of the west', now?
I think it says a lot that a non-European archeologist had to do the field work on this site to start to convince the world that the prejudiced conclusions made decades ago were incorrect.
I concur with you that people discount the racism of our cultures that existed prior to nazism - heck they do it with our extant cultures in the modern era too. There are plenty of examples in the modern era where racism and prejudice preclude an honest look at a nation states pre-history (cough Australia cough) and these, in many cases deep-rooted prejudices are most definitely an affliction of our modern era.
Which is why it is great to see a non-Western academic address the issue of Great Zimbabwe in a way that reveals the truth of the matter - naysayers in the entrenched, hallowed European halls be damned ..
de-westernization == removal of (modern) western researchers from the topic
Internationalization == adding researchers of many/all nations
Also I'm not so sure about the premise of "says a lot that a non-European archeologist had to do the field work on this site to start to convince the world".
EDIT: I'm also not saying it's not a problem.
I'm pretty sure I have seen "western" docus years ago which point out this problem (in general not necessary specific to that case).
Why would you think de-westernization of archeology has anything to do with it or is even relevant?
He won 2 awards for his research, 1 in 2019 from Antiquity. Which is from the UK and so western.
I think most people want to find out the truth and that's it.
The problem was that there was not much similar evidence for this architecture to buy build nearby, so some archeologists had wrong conclusions.
It don't think anyone benefits from pushing a false dogma.
At least, i don't see how they could benefit x centuries afterwards.
On the contrary, the named archeologists could have had more success by acknowledging it's history ( even though they didn't acknowledged it) and helping investigation.
> Why would you think de-westernization of archeology has anything to do with it or is even relevant?
Because it was mentioned in the article that the original discovering western archeologists, who were incredulous that such advanced construction could have come from the 'races' in the era, completely overlooked the fact that these buildings could have been constructed by the local indigenous people, for decades, until a non-western-indoctrinated archeologist came along and provided the counter argument. It was a wealth of information made unavailable to the local culture because of prejudice and bigotry, plain and simple - and this has been seen time and again in western archeology, which is not innocent in the "racist prejudice" department.
>I think most people want to find out the truth and that's it.
I think it depends whether the truth aligns with your funders goals and purposes or not. Certainly in the 19th and 20th centuries there are countless examples of 'archeology' degrading itself for the purposes of the institutions from where the funds are derived. And even today we still have the heinous situation that cultural artifacts are still 'being protected' in predominantly white european institutions (museums) due to the prejudices of the institutions towards the people from where the artifacts were stolen.
The article doesn't say they are doing it on purpose. Some archeologists didn't align with his thinking because 1) other similar locations aren't there and 2) not understanding of the Shona culture.
2) Those institutions actually awarded him 2 times for his discoveries, making him the only person to win it twice. Do you have an indication of something factual except a disagreement on interpreting findings?
3) As far as I know, a lot of those artifacts are bought by museums because of a seller or given in custody by a private collector.
I don't know the circumstances of those transactions, but i don't even see how that's related to the article... ?
Zimbabwe is interesting, but hard to compare to recent work that shines light on the pre-Saharan civilizations that led through migration during climate change to the earliest dynasties of Egypt. Africa has a really long and complex history with Zimbabwe being a relatively late and modest component elevated largely because of a not entirely rational obsession with stone building remains. In a similar way it is only recently that some of the earliest artifacts are being uncovered in South America because so few stone buildings were left behind.
The breathless language of this 'presentation'--and the silly superlatives like 'a triumph of engineering' tell me this is some kind of agenda presented as 'archaeology'.
1. If you had read the wikipedia article carefully , you would see that the Timbuktu manuscripts are written, not only in Arabic, but also in West African languages like Songhay and Tamasheq.
As for story buildings, have you heard of the Lalibela Churches? [1] Granted they are hewn out of rock, but this is a quote form the linked article:
> The churches were not constructed in a traditional way but rather were hewn from the living rock of monolithic blocks. These blocks were further chiselled out, forming doors, windows, columns, various floors, roofs etc. This gigantic work was further completed with an extensive system of drainage ditches, trenches and ceremonial passages, some with openings to hermit caves and catacombs.
Unless you don't consider Ethiopia to be a sub-saharan country (which to me is even an absurd distinction)
I agree that making a distinction like "Sub-Saharan" is often unhelpful (like it would be to divide European history entirely by the Alps, say). I think some of this may be quibbling over terms, but my impression is that the Timbuktu manuscripts are all written with Arabic orthography, but in several languages (much like we're happily using the Roman alphabet here!) There are clearly multiple other indigenous scripts native to Africa[1]. Axum and Lalibela are remarkable architecturally, and Timbuktu itself certainly has multi-storied buildings[2].
> sub-saharan country (which to me is even an absurd distinction)
Why? Sahara was for bigger natural barrier than Mediterranean Sea, so for populations/civilizations it makes more sense than continental distinction (Africa/Asia/Europe). It is true that Ethiopia is kind of exception here due to Nile and Red Sea.
Songhay is from the 15th century and was developed after contact with other civilizations.
Tamasheq is not sub-Saharan as it was developed in North Africa.
I commented about Ge’ez and how it’s fairly modern (1k years old). So I agree that it’s sub-Saharan, but just not that old and unlikely to be used in the area that is presently Zimbabwe.
There may be other written languages in sub-Saharan Africa that we don’t know about that were used in ancient times where we would be impressed with these engineering structures.
Your first link describes the Malian documents that were written in Arabic and a language developed in the 15th century.
I think GP meant that written languages weren’t developed at times similar to other ancient civilizations (ie, Sumerian was 4K years ago).
Your second link describes an Ethiopian written language that came about in the 10th-14th century.
So I think the point is that written languages developed (or at least there’s not evidence of) much later in civilizations like where Great Zimbabwe was created.
This is different than other parts of the world. And if the Great Zimbabwe had been made in Siam or Persia or Japan or England, the cultures there had written languages at that time.
So I think the conflict is in the interpretation of time periods. I think GP’s point is valid as when I think of ancient civilizations having languages (or even the civilization that built this cool structure) I don’t think they had written languages.
Although there are many great civilizations that didn’t have written languages (eg, Inca had their knot system) and built lasting structures. So I don’t think the presence of written language is some sort of agenda.
> In 1889 Willi Posselt, another German explorer, bribed a local bigwig and stole one of Great Zimbabwe’s bird carvings which had spiritual importance for the local Shona people.
Stole, or bought? Increasingly common to erase all acquisition as theft because it happened a long time ago. Can think of other examples too. The famous cock from Cambridge "returned" a few months ago. For example
I think "stole" is appropriate given that (1) the "local bigwig" wasn't likely the rightful owner of the bird carving, and (2) colonialism has historically relied on asymmetrically informed "sales" to export wealth back to the West.
See also: Manhattan's "sale" for $24 of beads. Contemporary Americans spend years in court arguing that sums far less were stolen from them in far more legitimate "sales."
What are the contemporary moral considerations for who gets to ‘own’ ancient artifacts like these?
The government currently controlling the surrounding land? Ethnic tribalism? Genetic essentialism? Protection of the artifact? Exposure/accessibility of the artifact? ‘Feelings’-based reasons like ‘spiritual’ significance or paternalistic rich nations graciously returning things to the poors?
These are all perfectly reasonable points that archaeologists, anthropologists, and preservationists are currently dealing with as part of the broader movement to repatriate artifacts.
They're more qualified to answer these questions than I am, but my layman's opinion is that a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient. There are, doubtless, exceptions.
> a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient.
Wouldn’t this boil down to a might-is-right approach in almost all cases? Don’t really see how a contemporary government annexing the land by force is much different than a foreigner simply taking the artifact. Other than that it might evoke more ethnic/tribalist gripes from people.
But less flippantly: it's no more "might-makes-right" than the original theft/"sale" was, and is arguably less so, given that national museums tend to survive regime changes (usually for nakedly political reasons, such as the incoming regime lashing its legitimacy to the country's heritage).
And on the aesthetic side: all things being equal I, a mostly disinterested Westerner, would rather see artifacts in their regional and cultural contexts than in a dimly lit room in the British Museum.
>it's no more "might-makes-right" than the original theft/"sale" was, and is arguably less so
Clearly the specifics matter, but it gets more interesting when these 2 ‘sides’ have equally tenuous claim to the artifact, as IMO is quite often the case.
I suspect like in most ambiguous situations we’ll get a lot of politics/feelings based decision making. But again I don’t know, which is why I’m interested.
I use NoScript to block unnecessary JavaScript on websites, so I'm used to pages failing to load. But this article's nice scrolling 3D animation works fine on mobile with only the 'economist.com' domain allowed to run JS.
Africa is full of so many great civilization stories, that they highlighted this relatively recent one from 1200 to 1550:
in its prime, from around 1200 to 1550, Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres, more than twice the area of New York’s Central Park.
-----
From Ancient Egypt to Carthage to the Malian Empire (with wealthy cities like Timbuktu) there are so many remarkable parts in Africa.
> Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres
That seems... absolutely tiny? 7km^2, so a reasonably fit person could run around the entire country in an hour. Population of 10k at a time when the total population of Africa was in the tens of millions. Not a value judgement, but I'm honestly shocked how small those numbers are.
Is it tiny! But not relative to other pre-modern cities: Ancient Rome was only about 15km^2, counting the area within the Aurelian Walls[1] (which includes the massive Campus Martius in addition to the famous hills).
Rome was significantly more densely populated, but that can also be explained by geographic and economic factors (seafaring economies, &c.).
Edit: the area within the inner Servian Walls was ~1/3rd that of Great Zimbabwe (~2.5km^2).
Ah it appears I was confused by the word "state"-- according to Wikipedia, the thinking is it was more of a capital and/or the seat of a ruler and territory controlled could have been a lot bigger, although we don't know for sure.
A 250 meter long wall 11 meters tall is far from "triumph of engineering" even in 1200. "Drainage channels" are far from "evidence of a sophisticated civilisation". They could even be naturally formed by water along the unpaved ground and other parts of the world had sewer systems a lot earlier. I could go on and talk about 10k people and so on...
"Drainage channels" are far from "evidence of a sophisticated civilisation".
The term "civilization" has a technical meaning in archaeology which includes things such as permanent settlement and a hierarchical social order. Walls and drainage are absolutely treated as evidence of civilization when discussing other ancient civilizations such as the Sumerians and the Maya.
The fact that Great Zimbabwe is not as sophisticated as other civilizations of the same time-period is a moot point because the thing that is interesting about it isn't how it stacks up to contemporary Eurasian society but the fact that it apparently is an entirely home-grown civilization in southern Africa.
> The fact that Great Zimbabwe is not as sophisticated as other civilizations of the same time-period
Then why call it "sophisticated"? Nobody would have had a problem with the article if it just stuck to proof of civilization. Even an extremely small enclosed area like this (not even a village) is still proof of people working together, ornaments speak for themselves, etc. That is clearly a civilization. They clearly had some engineering skill. But "sophisticated" and "triumph" are pathetic exaggerations which result in the exact opposite effect than what was intended.
Because archaeologists call everything sophisticated including stone-aged hand-axes if they're comparing it to something less-sophisticated, such as the pastoralist communities that people usually think of when considering southern Africa. "Sophistication" in this context though, I think is referring to social complexity rather that strict technological sophistication. I have no comment on the use of the word "triumph", except that it's very subjective and the kind of thing I tend to ignore.
My house is sophisticated to the point where doing any electrical rewiring is a pain. Hiding it all in the walls? Whose bright idea was that? And encasing nails in plastic for the nailgun? No thanks, I’ll use a hammer and try to spew less plastic on the ground. Et cetera.
I'm not sure if a joke is going over my head, but it seems that you're intentionally using the synonyms for the secondary definition of sophisticated [0], when in context the author clearly means to use the primary definition.
The nowadays standard understanding of IVC is that it was before the Aryan migration. I should have have added an /s to that earlier comment to make that clear.
Because of a history of archeology degrading the people of the region, perhaps, and a desire to apply the same civilization-building moral standards to Africa as the rest of the world?
A 250 meter long wall, 11 meters tall .. made out of nothing but bricks (no mortar, remember) .. surviving mostly intact after 10 centuries? That is definitely a triumph of engineering, by anyones standards ..
By virtue of trying to prop up this wall, I think the same "civilization-builiding moral standards" aren't being applied here. More realistically, it's a tinge of Zimbabwean nationalism shrouded in archeological dressing being applied here.
Well, given that the people of the region were told for decades that their ancestors were too sub-human to have advanced well enough to develop the technology to build a wall out of bricks with no mortar, which subsequently survived centuries .. I would posit that it is not appropriate to label this as anything more than 'cultural relief that the racist view is being removed from their zeitgeist, because: science, bitches.'
The Great Zimbabwe site was built by a people who clearly had more understanding of the world of physics during their time than we allowed for in our pro-European narratives, so far.
The same is true of many, many other sites around the world, which don't fit the narrative of western academics' world view of themselves and their Eureopean cultures, and which undermine the perspective that prior civilizations were primitive in their approach to technology and application of scientific discoveries.
The hubris and arrogance of this field is slowing being peeled away, layer by layer, and replaced with facts which update the context of human history. Its not without some relief that I personally note that this is no longer the exclusive purview of european academics with an agenda ..
I feel like this is the main point people are missing. Literally every time there's a "feature" of anything that isn't already accepted by mainstream audiences, people start trotting out all the millions of reasons that isn't special, but ignore that these reasons aren't unique at all.
See basically any technical media created by women for thousands more examples of this. Some woman makes a video about coding or something and people focus on how she doesn't use vim efficiently enough, she doesn't have a good enough mic set up, she is only working on "basic crud apps" etc etc.
The desired end-point narrative changes with the political objective.
120 years ago Cecil Rhodes was keen to prove that Zimbabwe was fantastically advanced for its time and place, because it would prove it could not have been built by the locals, and therefore he could take the land from the present occupants, because they had taken it from someone else.
As Michener puts it in his (fictionalized) account:
"So now, if Rhodes could prove that no black society had ever been advanced enough to have built Zimbabwe, his theft of Matabeleland would seem more palatable. It would, after all, be rather ugly to have stolen a kingdom in order to bring it civilization if that kingdom had once been civilized."
I agree. This really felt patronising to me. Like they were trying too hard to be impressed. At the very least such claims require some contextualisation, which the article does not really supply. And I think it’s obvious why that context is never provided.
it would be difficult to be impressed by this structure if you have passing familiarity with what contemporary civilizations were building. it’s obviously of historical and archaeological significance but my assumption based on the superlatives in the article was that it had been built 1-2k years before its actual construction, roughly contemporaneous with eg notre dame and roughly aligning with the social & technological sophistication of contemporary stone age peoples in the americas. it’s interesting but the text of the article does seem patronizing.
> To black nationalist groups, Great Zimbabwe became an important symbol of achievement by Africans: reclaiming its history was a major aim for those seeking majority rule. In 1980 the new internationally recognised independent country was renamed for the site, and its famous soapstone bird carvings were retained from the Rhodesian flag and Coat of Arms as a national symbol and depicted in the new Zimbabwean flag. After the creation of the modern state of Zimbabwe in 1980, Great Zimbabwe has been employed to mirror and legitimise shifting policies of the ruling regime. At first it was argued that it represented a form of pre-colonial "African socialism" and later the focus shifted to stressing the natural evolution of an accumulation of wealth and power within a ruling elite.
These are important details that the article does not mention. I presume that's to heighten the appeal of "Great Zimbwawe" to other nationalists who share similar insecurities about their state's eminence in the world but don't actually benefit from Zimbabwe's internal politics.
Don't get me wrong, the actual ruins look like a noteworthy accomplishment. But exaggerating it into a wonder of antiquity seems like a ploy by a small group of people to gain clout at the expense of African history. As other commenters and wikipedia points out, Rhodesia also played the same game with the ruins, just in reverse.
These comments are unreal to me. The context is right in the beginning of the article. The site was originally deemed too impressive to be built by locals, and later it was too impressive to be built without outside influence, and now that research is showing it was indeed built by locals, it’s no longer impressive. Incredible.
Yes, these comments are unreal to me too, and I think we are witnessing a great deal of white guilt manifesting itself as cowardly dismissal. It is incredible to be witnessing here on HN, but it speaks to how much work is still left to be done in the world, to deal with the hubris and arrogance of western moral authority -- which is as much a fallacy as anything.
Peoples investment in the authority and altitude of their own cultures is like a giant boat that won't be turned by anything but a major current. We are but waves on these arrogant bows, friend.
It's hardly unique to Africa, and the opposite exists, too. People do their best to tear down past accomplishments that were previously hailed as special.
Why? I think it's to make themselves feel better in comparison. They get some kind of happiness or satisfaction from elevating their own ancestors, or degrading others'.
Personally, I believe it's for the same reason there's an Afrofuturism exhibit at The Met in NYC speculating a history which never was. It's the same reason Black Panther grossed 1.4b. It's the same reason Ian Smith is painted as a racist and Mugabe is now remembered fondly as a controversial but well-meaning champion of the people.
I'm not sure how to phrase this without being accused of dog-whistling, but I do think there's a subversive effort, especially in the media, in painting the history of Africa into something that it's not.
> but I do think there's a subversive effort, especially in the media, in painting the history of Africa into something that it's not.
Well, I'm not sure how you come by that conclusion. I do hope you are familiar with the civilizations of Kush, Aksum, Congo, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, etc. If you are, it seems disingenuous on your part to claim that African history is being portrayed as something it is not.
If anything, popular depictions of African history are woefully lacking in the knowledge of these and other civilizations that existed in ancient times. We need more dissemination of what is known to academia regarding African civilizations, and more research into these barely explored sites.
The exhibit and movie you mentioned are clearly meant to be fiction, so I'm not sure what they have to with a supposed "painting the history of Africa into something that it's not"
The Mali Empire is particularly fascinating. Mansa Musa, who ruled that empire c. 1324, remains by some estimates the richest man who ever lived. His net worth is estimated by historians at around $400 billion USD. Elon Musk's net worth today is around $280 billion, for comparison.
Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves, who were forced to mine gold and made up much of the Empire's military. Slavery in Mali continues to this day with an estimated 200,000 people held in direct servitude to a master [1]. Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the Mali Empire, or the Ghana Empire for that matter. Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.
> The [Viking's] wealth was built almost entirely by violent plunder of other nations .... Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the [Vikings]...
Oh wait, we continually hear about the glorious "exploits" of the Vikings.
You ignored the explicit meaning of my comment, rewrote it to mean something entirely different, and now claim to have disproved that version of it. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
>As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?
Again I'll refer you to my original comment, specfically the "before colonization" section of the Slavery in Mali Wikipedia link. It cites various books and articles written and researched by professional historians.
You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves. I will provide a detailed rebuttal to this idea.
Firstly, it seems highly unlikely that the wealth of the West African empires was primarily from slave use and trading. This is an argument that is made by people who do not actually understand the region and its history. Even the eminent Henry Louis Gates makes a similar error in an article [1], where he says:
> the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.
The Ashanti could not have been importing gold, since they were rather the source of much of the gold in the region. The wikipedia article on the Ashanti Empire [2] contains this statement:
> Before the Ashanti Kingdom had contact with Europeans, it had a flourishing trade with other African states due to the Ashanti gold wealth.
More generally, this is what [3] has to say about the economy of the west African empires with respect to gold:
> From the seventh to the eleventh century, trans-Saharan trade linked the Mediterranean economies that demanded gold—and could supply salt—to the sub-Saharan economies, where gold was abundant. ...Increased demand for gold in the North Islamic states, which sought the raw metal for minting, prompted scholarly attention to Mali and Ghana, the latter referred to as the “Land of Gold.” For instance, geographer al-Bakri described the eleventh-century court at Kumbi Saleh, where he saw gold-embroidered caps, golden saddles, shields and swords mounted with gold, and dogs’ collars adorned with gold and silver. The Soninke managed to keep the source of their gold (the Bambuk mines, most notably) secret from Muslim traders. Yet gold production and trade were important activities that undoubtedly mobilized hundreds of thousands of African people. Leaders of the ancient kingdom of Ghana accumulated wealth by keeping the core of pure metal, leaving the unworked native gold to be marketed by their people.
Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading. And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves. And gold was much more likely to bring in a lot of income than slave trading. Clearly, the source of Mansa Musa's great wealth was gold. This is attested to by the story of gold losing its value in Egypt because he gave so much of it away during his pilgrimage to mecca.
So I don't know where you get this idea that the wealth of the west African empires was primarily based on slave trading.
Secondly, even if slave trading was widespread, other empires and nations have done worse, and we still hear about their exploits. We hear about the supposed heroism of the Vikings and Columbus and his cohort all the time, even though they committed many, atrocities, including exterminations and genocides.
This is the third time you have misunderstood and misrepresented my thesis. I will not respond to a fourth time.
>You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves.
Here is the sentence from my original comment which I asked you to re-read:
>Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.
To be painstakingly clear, we don't hear much about the Mali Empire in popular discourse because their wealth was built on the back of slaves, AND the slaveholders were black. In the USA where I live, a dominant political framing device is that white people are responsible for slavery, period. The existence of rich black African empires built on slavery and conquest challenges this narrative. Therefore these empires, despite the examples they provide of black Africans building powerful, complex, and influential civilizations, are not frequently mentioned.
>Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading.
It was mostly mined by slaves. See sources cited in that article I asked you to read. I said Mansa Musa's wealth was "built almost entirely by slaves", not "by slave trading." You're confusing your words for my own and responding to things I never said.
>And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves.
I see we're at the part where you just make stuff up. Here is what actual historians say; from "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa" [0] by Michael A. Gomez [1], a recent and excellent history of the Mali Empire:
>Mali as a critical source of servile labor is overshadowed in the immediacy of the eighth/fourteenth century by its mineral resources, so much so that the extensive nature of slavery in Mali is not readily grasped. But from every indication, slavery was entrenched and ubiquitous, hidden in plain sight.
>While estimates of the enslaved accompanying the mansā vary, all agree there were thousands upon thousands, with several reports particularly taken with the high number of females, perhaps as many as fourteen thousand. Given their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, they may have been viewed by Egyptians as a veritable harem in motion, a misogynistic moveable feast, the largest ever witnessed.
>As for soldiers, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa reports the mansā was always accompanied by 300 armed slaves, while al-‘Umarī distinguishes between these 300 and the thirty mamlūks or “Turks and others” brought from Egypt.
>The enslaved served in other capacities, working in the salt mines of Taghaza and, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa records, both enslaved men and women (al-‘abīd wa-‘l-khadam) performed the arduous work of mining copper at Takedda (and maybe “Zkry”).
>Yet another task assigned to the enslaved, male and female, was transporting commodities. As previously cited, Ibn Khaldūn mentions the Malians “use only slave women and men for transport but for distant journeys such as the Pilgrimage they have mounts,” a convention confirmed by Valentim Fernandes, who wrote that “each [Jula] merchant has with him 100 or 200 black slaves or more, to carry the salt on their heads from Jenne to the gold mines, and to return from there with gold.
>This mostly qualitative evidence indicates slavery was rapidly evolving in the region, and while a more thorough analysis awaits the recovery of greater detail with the emergence of imperial Songhay, what can be stated here is that these differentiated servile deployments—from domestics to soldiers, and from office holders to their exploitation in mining and possibly agriculture—represent, in the aggregate, something distinct from earlier epochs in Ghana and Gao. There is a noticeable increase in their numbers as well as the variety of their occupations under Mali, further suggesting such expansion was part and parcel of the imperial project in West Africa, and predicated on such myriad mobilization.
Well, the Swahili coast is nowhere near the Nile/Mediterranean and it was quite advanced. But that was connected to the Arab world via trade and I think what you mean is did any African societies develop to a similar level of sophistication without influences from outside of Africa?
That's a complicated question that I'm not qualified to answer (Congo maybe?), but I'd point out that even in the ancient near east, trade and contact with foreigners preceded the development of civilization in those regions and European civilization especially owes a lot of its success to contact with outside civilizations. So the fact the most well-known African civilizations had regular trade contacts with Eurasia should not do much to diminish the accomplishments of those civilizations as such.
For example, it's possible that iron smelting began in the Sahel in Africa, and from there spread to the Near East/Mediterranean rather than the other way around which would mean that Africa entered the iron age well before the rest of the world. [1]
Is that a rhetorical questions or you genuinely seek to expand your knowledge?
In case it’s the latter, then your slant of:
> northern Mediterranean/Nile influenced groups
is weird. Many European cultures were influenced by the Romans, who were influenced by the Greeks, who were influenced by other cultures. The flow of ideas across time and space is what actually gives rise to civilizations.
So what if an African civilization was influenced by another civilization? Does that make it less meaningful?
As for what civilizations Africa had, you can read about Kerma/Napata/Kush/Nubia, Aksum, Kongo, Swahili coast, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Egypt, etc. However, I suspect you have your mind made up, hence the dismissive “Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?”
There's lots of people in this thread demonstrating exactly what this Great Zimbabwe project is about. The history of Africa that many of us have been taught is basically "there were a bunch of black people living in mud huts forever, and then the White Man came and gave them civilisation". This is an ideological and inaccurate portrayal history designed to make African people look backwards. In actuality, despite a challenging climate, various African groups built cities and civilisations.
The idea to use European civilisational and technological development as the measure for all other places is also absurd, because you could sample various points in time where e.g. Britain was a place of warring tribes with pointy sticks while China or the Middle East had thriving civilisations. Real life history is not a game of Civ where everyone starts at the same point and races through a bunch of predetermined milestones.
Why do you think everybody is just stacking technologies on top of a shared pool? That's a post-globalisation concept.
African people discovered plenty of technologies including metal forging - but they were less technologically advanced than Europeans when they were invaded. Why? Because the material situation in Europe is ideal for technological development. The climate is temperate, food is abundant, the Romans went everywhere dumping their own advanced tech on everybody, probably other factors a historian could elaborate. There are plenty of alternative explanations to the one you're implying, and the one that's been historically taught, which is "black people are not capable of developing civilisation or technology".
Edit given you appended "at any point in time": basically no milestone technological development has happened anywhere for quite some time now, excluding computers and the Internet. Everything's incremental now. Plus for much of that time many African countries have either been trying to recover from colonialism or been caught up in civil war (which should be expected when a power vacuum is created). I would say that mobile money is a good candidate for a meaningful invention though, and that came out of Nigeria.
The "uncomfortable truth" (that black people are socially or intellectually inferior to white people) /is/ the established idea. We're only just now looking for alternative explanations because it turns out black people are regular people too and can function perfectly well within our "superior white civilisation", assuming they're not too busy being lynched or pushed into ghettos.
White superiority (dare I say, white supremacy?) has only just become uncomfortable instead of the accepted truth, because the evidence points to other explanations, and we've recently noticed what racial ideology leads to. It is not those looking at material explanations and examining African culture and development that are dogmatically clinging to ideological explanations - it's those who still think that colonial propaganda and white savior mythology represent a disinterested examination of the evidence.
This conversation has been done to death, there's no value to be had from racial ideology because it's been disproven for a long time.
To be clear, this isn't a discussion - I'm trying to hand hold you into thinking about your positions. I have nothing to learn from the "race realist" position; I've seen the arguments for and against and it's really easily disproven. You may think that the "race realists" are holding onto the secret truth that's been suppressed by the woke postmodernist academics, but the reality is that you've fallen for some online conservative propaganda and the academics are just trying to find the truth.
> Jared Diamond posits the first theory, as well, in Guns, Germs, Steel.
No, he doesn't. GGS explicitly rejects any sort of pseudo-racial theory of civilizational superiority. The entire book is a methodical dissection of why different regions experienced different paces of development in the pre-colonial era, with climate, geography, and endemic food species being the leading factors.
As long as someone doesn't change their point, if someone wants to make their comment more clear by simplifying phrasing or adding more detail or examples, it's fine by me.
I'd rather a fleshed out idea than a off the cuff rough draft. That's actually one of the best parts of digital communication.
But that's what I was saying as well - that civilisational development is not driven by some concept of racial traits, but that it's driven by material conditions.
Racialized theories of civilization are, on face value, absurd (and, well, racist). GGS goes to significant lengths to debunk them, including thoroughly collapsing the racial categories that colonial and post-colonial Westerners use.
The question of whether race or location is the causal factor seems to just be different dimensions of the same thing, no? Given that they pretty much correlate though most of history.
Out of 55 countries in Africa, if you exempt the mediterranean countries, out of the free flow of ideas across time and space on the African continent throughout history, what major technological advancements emerged from continental Africa?
Inoculation, iron metallurgy and myriad practices in agriculture including rice cultivation and terraced irrigation. There are also technologies not adopted that are still pretty cool, including talking drums.
This is a weird dichotomy, given that the Roman state has its origin in a series of tribal unifications and that "technologically advanced" is a relative term (i.e., relative to neighboring societies and groups) when doing anthropological research on ancient civilizations.
The main difference seems to be that when we have history and art exhibitions dedicated towards the unrealised visions of white people or successful comic book films featuring [mostly] white characters or reconstructions of Anglo Saxon earthworks which were pretty unimpressive compared with neighbouring and preceding civilisations, nobody claims that its a "subversive" effort...
Not sure where you're getting the idea that Mugabe is fondly remembered or that Ian Smith wasn't a racist either tbh
We seem to be getting a large amount of successful African American actors and directors and producers in Hollywood with wealth accumulating in A.A. individuals and groups, that could fund A.A. specific productions.
In music African Americans have thrived and lifted each other up and created all kinds of amazing music.
Black Panther...was a good movie? And people liked it? I'm a little confused about your "in the media" comment--wouldn't the box office receipts represent, you know, what the market actually liked?
There's a painting of the Congolese ambassador to the Dutch Republic in the Danish National Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Don_Miguel_de_Cast...). The history of this painting reflects the significant political power held by West African kingdoms--I for one (having had a standard American historical education) was struck by how little I knew about the complex cultural and political institutions in sub-Saharan Africa before and during the early slave trade.
In a way, it's not surprising; as David Graeber wrote in "Debt", it was culturally convenient for Europeans--who at the time in many ways appeared quite culturally backwards!--to misrepresent the power and cultural dynamics and justify their own barbarism. In that light, while we certainly should hold research everywhere to the same evidentiary standards, we shouldn't be surprised to learn about more sophisticated cultural histories in Zimbabwe as well, or other places skipped over by the standard history.
(Another odd aspect of my American education: I was given the distinct impression that civilization went from Greece to Rome to Enlightenment Europe to America. Strange how nobody questioned who preserved the thinking of all those Greek philosophers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.)
But just because you don't know something--just because the history you were taught must be revised--doesn't make it revisionist history.
I'm from Africa and never have I heard Mugabe remembered as a well-meaning champion of the people. Here, he's mostly seen as a corrupt despot who likes spewing silly quotes on the side that became a meme and trend of people attributing every silly quote on earth to him.
There’s a decent contingent of South African Twitter “intellectuals” who will tell you that 1. Zimbabwe is flourishing and it’s western propaganda that says it isn’t; 2. Mugabe was well-meaning.
I’ve never met one in person, and never met an actual Zimbabwean who believed such nonsense.
Ian Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Smith) was a racist. He let a white supremacists government to UDI and civil war because he believed that black people were incapable of self-government. It doesn't get much more obviously racist than that.
Both? The use of "statistics" to make a fundamentally racist argument, that it was right for white colonists to invade black countries, permanently deny them self-government, and maintain this state at gunpoint (e.g 30,000 dead in Zimbabwe)? That remains racist regardless of any other historical fact; it is irrelevant how bad the subsequent Mugabe government has been, or any other black-majority government in Africa.
The colonialism has left significant damage. It is impossible to disentangle how badly various African countries are doing from the fact that they achieved independence relatively recently, and many had substantial interference during the cold war as various communist/anticommunist factions fought it out.
It is important to remember that the "cold" war between the US and the USSR (which also deserves blame) had considerable casualties, it's just that they were outside those two countries.
Here's a convenient map for just the US's involvement in Latin America[1]. African countries are harder to quantify due to the number of European powers involved, but I think it's safe to say that the majority of African countries experienced significant instability during the post-colonial period.
I wonder if the drug cartels destabilize the region more than United States interference or if the U.S. is more destabilizing?
For example if you did a survey of the people of some of these countries that were destabilized if they think the United States or the drug cartels cause more problems for them.
I wonder what they would say. My suspicions lean towards the drug cartels just reading about how they treat reporters and students and police.
The US, famously, funded many of the early drug cartels and trafficking networks in Latin America as part of its goal of destabilizing Latin American governments[1].
The even more extreme (and somewhat, but not completely, publicly substantiated) claim is that the USG used those illicit funding networks to additionally destabilize minority communities in the US by introducing heroin and "crack" cocaine.
There is no "either/or" with US foreign meddling and drug cartels. They're two sides of the same foreign policy.
Edit: The above focuses on Iran-Contra. Here's a link to broader allegations of drug trafficking/support for cartels in LatAm[2].
You're using isolated incidents from the 60 and 80's to claim the U.S. is responsible for the entire modern multi billion dollar international drug trade?
So to be clear.
The blame is on the U.S. for the entire drug trade.
The blame is on the west for colonialism causing African countries problems in modern times.
The blame is on racial repression for minority groups problems in the U.S.
The trend seems to be that minority groups are at complete mercy of western repression.
So if both african countries and one of the large most power country actively destabilize a nation. Why would smaller and less powerful nations be the primary cause instead of the big one? but yeah, the one does not rule out the other
Well I just mean that if you look at a country like Poland which has been invaded literally dozens of times, either being severely destabilized or completely conquered in the process but yet is still doing quite well for itself, I don't see how you can solely blame foreign interference for a country's current state.
I mean, look at Ethiopia. Forget Western powers, Ethiopia has never been successfully invaded by any foreign power. Despite this, it is one of the poorest countries on the planet today.
It'd be lovely to get references or links to verify your claims.
I'm having doubts regarding that art exhibit titled "Afrofuturism" which is "speculating about history which never was". My main issue is that the exhibit name contains "futurism" which would imply anything related to a potential future, not past history.
Reluctant to dig around on the web as I sense some bullshit logic in the previous statement.
The impressive past of Africa is the, now, myth of Atlantis. That's where it began, but not where it ended. And that's the crux of those archeologists' struggle: they really want to find that past glory of Africa for ideological reasons, but they dont really want to find it, also for ideological reasons. It's as if they are digging sand with their right hand, but their left hand is actively sabotaging the process.
why does the west feel its their job alone to write the history of African countries instead of letting them research and write their own history instead?
ooh, I can answer this one. It seems abundantly clear that the premise of the article is that many people don't believe that African civilizations in that time period could have built walls or drainage channels like this.
It was little clues in the text that gave it away, like this: "That is because, says Mr Chirikure, Great Zimbabwe should be a “symbol”, not just of Africa’s power and potential, but of how outsiders have too often told Africans’ stories—and got them wrong."
If the prevailing idea is that this relatively rudimentary technology was too advanced for the people of the region, then this discovery is evidence to disprove that. It doesn't have to be "sophisticated" on an absolute scale. Only relative to expectation.
Imagine a 5 yr old wrote working Java code. Any working program, even the equivalent of a drainage ditch, would be worthy of praise. And something as simple as a linked list could be described as a "sophisticated technique" (for a 5 yr old)
Understanding context and reading the article are, as ever, the keys.
Is this satire? The construction of New England's rock walls is well documented and occurred primarily between 1700ish (starting date varies greatly based on location) and 1840ish (when it became substantially less economically useful to clear land to graze sheep for wool) with a long tail extending up until the industrialization of the 1870s.
Your quoted math is nonsense. There's ~250k miles of stone wall in New England. Divide by a ~100yr construction period, and you get 2500mi/yr. Average pop was say 1.25mil (I'm underestimating for easy math) over the period so you get 1.25mil person*years per year.
The mathematical writing should be on the wall at this point.
Do you have any conception of how many rocks that you turn up plowing a field in New England? And that's in the places where somebody has been plowing the field for 300 or more years, picking rocks out of it every spring. I don't know where they come from, but there is a never-ending supply...
Give me a text version with a separate widget to look at the 3D and this would be usable. I hate faffing with this scrolling one sentence at a time nonsense.
It is one of those subjects where the intersection of religious fervour and scientific rigour has produced endless falsehoods - yet with every scrape in the dirt we get more and more truth behind human history.
As an armchair fan of archeological endeavours from Gobekli Tepe to the forests of the Amazon, I can only hope that the elevation of Great Zimbabwe in the human lexicon results in further enlightenment with regards to our human history. It is very rewarding to see the veils of christian political movements falling from the stage of archeological accomplishment. We need more of this.