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Africa has made many outstanding contributions to world civilization, of which the following are a few selected examples:
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Despite suffering through the horrific system of slavery, sharecropping and the Jim Crow era, early African-Americans made countless contributions to science and technology (1). This lineage and culture of achievement, though, emerged at least 40,000 years ago in Africa. Unfortunately, few of us are aware of these accomplishments, as the history of Africa, beyond ancient Egypt, is seldom publicized.

Sadly, the vast majority of discussions on the origins of science include only the Greeks, Romans and other whites. But in fact most of their discoveries came thousands of years after African developments. While the remarkable black civilization in Egypt remains alluring, there was sophistication and impressive inventions throughout ancient sub-Saharan Africa as well. There are just a handful of scholars in this area. The most prolific is the late Ivan Van Sertima, an associate professor at Rutgers University. He once poignantly wrote that “the nerve of the world has been deadened for centuries to the vibrations of African genius” (2).

Here, I attempt to send an electrical impulse to this long-deadened nerve. I can only fly by this vast plane of achievements. Despite this, it still should be evident that the ancient people of Africa, like so many other ancients of the world, definitely had their genius.

Math:

Surely only a few of us know that many modern high-school-level concepts in mathematics first were developed in Africa, as was the first method of counting. More than 35,000 years ago, Egyptians scripted textbooks about math that included division and multiplication of fractions and geometric formulas to calculate the area and volume of shapes (3). Distances and angles were calculated, algebraic equations were solved and mathematically based predictions were made of the size of floods of the Nile. The ancient Egyptians considered a circle to have 360 degrees and estimated Π at 3.16 (3).

Eight thousand years ago, people in present-day Zaire developed their own numeration system, as did Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. The Yoruba system was based on units of 20 (instead of 10) and required an impressive amount of subtraction to identify different numbers. Scholars have lauded this system, as it required much abstract reasoning (4).

Astronomy:

Several ancient African cultures birthed discoveries in astronomy. Many of these are foundations on which we still rely, and some were so advanced that their mode of discovery still cannot be understood. Egyptians charted the movement of the sun and constellations and the cycles of the moon. They divided the year into 12 parts and developed a yearlong calendar system containing 365 ¼ days (3). Clocks were made with moving water and sundial-like clocks were used (3).

A structure known as the African Stonehenge in present-day Kenya (constructed around 300 B.C.) was a remarkably accurate calendar (5). The Dogon people of Mali amassed a wealth of detailed astronomical observations (5). Many of their discoveries were so advanced that some modern scholars credit their discoveries instead to space aliens or unknown European travelers, even though the Dogon culture is steeped in ceremonial tradition centered on several space events. The Dogon knew of Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, the spiral structure of the Milky Way and the orbit of the Sirius star system. Hundreds of years ago, they plotted orbits in this system accurately through the year 1990 (6). They knew this system contained a primary star and a secondary star (now called Sirius B) of immense density and not visible to the naked eye.

Metallurgy and tools:

Many advances in metallurgy and tool making were made across the entirety of ancient Africa. These include steam engines, metal chisels and saws, copper and iron tools and weapons, nails, glue, carbon steel and bronze weapons and art (2, 7).

Advances in Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago surpassed those of Europeans then and were astonishing to Europeans when they learned of them. Ancient Tanzanian furnaces could reach 1,800°C — 200 to 400°C warmer than those of the Romans (8).

Architecture and engineering:

Various past African societies created sophisticated built environments. Of course, there are the engineering feats of the Egyptians: the bafflingly raised obelisks and the more than 80 pyramids. The largest of the pyramids covers 13 acres and is made of 2.25 million blocks of stone (3). Later, in the 12th century and much farther south, there were hundreds of great cities in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. There, massive stone complexes were the hubs of cities. One included a 250-meter-long, 15,000-ton curved granite wall (9). The cities featured huge castlelike compounds with numerous rooms for specific tasks, such as iron-smithing. In the 13th century, the empire of Mali boasted impressive cities, including Timbuktu, with grand palaces, mosques and universities (2).

Medicine:

Many treatments we use today were employed by several ancient peoples throughout Africa. Before the European invasion of Africa, medicine in what is now Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, to name just a few places, was more advanced than medicine in Europe. Some of these practices were the use of plants with salicylic acid for pain (as in aspirin), kaolin for diarrhea (as in Kaopectate), and extracts that were confirmed in the 20th century to kill Gram positive bacteria (2). Other plants used had anticancer properties, caused abortion and treated malaria — and these have been shown to be as effective as many modern-day Western treatments. Furthermore, Africans discovered ouabain, capsicum, physostigmine and reserpine. Medical procedures performed in ancient Africa before they were performed in Europe include vaccination, autopsy, limb traction and broken bone setting, bullet removal, brain surgery, skin grafting, filling of dental cavities, installation of false teeth, what is now known as Caesarean section, anesthesia and tissue cauterization (3). In addition, African cultures preformed surgeries under antiseptic conditions universally when this concept was only emerging in Europe (2).

Navigation:

Most of us learn that Europeans were the first to sail to the Americas. However, several lines of evidence suggest that ancient Africans sailed to South America and Asia hundreds of years before Europeans. Thousands of miles of waterways across Africa were trade routes. Many ancient societies in Africa built a variety of boats, including small reed-based vessels, sailboats and grander structures with many cabins and even cooking facilities. The Mali and Songhai built boats 100 feet long and 13 feet wide that could carry up to 80 tons (2). Currents in the Atlantic Ocean flow from this part of West Africa to South America. Genetic evidence from plants and descriptions and art from societies inhabiting South America at the time suggest small numbers of West Africans sailed to the east coast of South America and remained there (2).
Contemporary scientists have reconstructed these ancient vessels and their fishing gear and have completed the transatlantic voyage successfully. Around the same time as they were sailing to South America, the 13th century, these ancient peoples also sailed to China and back, carrying elephants as cargo (2).

People of African descent come from ancient, rich and elaborate cultures that created a wealth of technologies in many areas. Hopefully, over time, there will be more studies in this area and more people will know of these great achievements.

Iron Technology:
On the assumption that there had been a single centre (the Middle East) from which iron metallurgy had spread, most historians thought that ironworking had been introduced into Africa from western Asia, first into ancient Egypt and then into West Africa, in the third century B.C. via Carthage or Nubia. They were mistaken: “Copper smelting had been going on in the West African Sahara and Sahel since at least 2,000 B.C. That could have been the precursor to an independent African discovery of iron metallurgy. Strengthening that hypothesis, the iron-smelting techniques of smiths in Sub-Saharan Africa were so different from those of the Mediterranean as to suggest independent development: African smiths discovered how to produce high temperatures in their village furnaces over 2,000 years before the Bessemer furnaces of 19th-century Europe and America”. (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997).
A subsequent UNESCO scientific study confirmed Diamond’s hypothesis. The study concluded that iron technology did not reach Africa from western Asia but that Africa had independently invented its own iron technology 5,000 years ago. Tests conducted on iron residues, excavated in the 1980s, show that iron was worked at least as long ago as 1500 BC at Termit, in eastern Niger. Material excavated at Egaro, west of Termit, has been dated to 3000-2500 BC (Christopher Ehret, “The Civilizations of Africa”, 2002). It would suggest that African iron technology is as ancient as that of the Middle East, the region from which Europe acquired its irontechnology much later – circa 1000 B.C.
Moreover, indigenous African iron technology is not only very ancient but its inventiveness and the range of metallurgical practices displayed are unequalled anywhere in the world. “In fact, only in Africa do you find such a range of practices in the process of direct reduction [a method in which metal is obtained in a single operation without smelting], and metal workers who were so inventive that they could extract iron in furnaces made out of the trunks of banana trees.” (Unesco, “Iron in Africa: Revisiting History”, 2002).
The Creative Arts:
The remarkable inventiveness displayed in ancient African iron technology is also reflected in African art: “Few remaining sculptures of the Dan people [Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia]…. are much more than a century old; yet the range of invention found in their work far outdistances that of court arts of much longer periods – even millennia of Ancient Egypt after the Old Kingdom.” (William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 1984).
African art also demonstrates extraordinary levels of technical skill. The bronze castings discovered in a tenth-century burial site at Igbo-Ukwu (eastern Nigeria) are considered to be among “the most technically accomplished and daring castings ever undertaken”. (P. T. Craddock, “Man and Metal in Ancient Nigeria”, British Museum Magazine, Vol.6, 1991). Because of their astonishing technical sophistication, Western experts initially doubted the accuracy of such an early dating for the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes. Those doubts were dispelled when the mines that supplied the metal ore used in the castings revealed that they were worked between A.D. 895-1000.
In the early years of the 20th century, progressive European artists were seeking alternatives to an art style whose possibilities for development they felt had been exhausted, leaving them little or no scope for originality. That felt need coincided with a growing interest in new ways of combining the ideal and the real and of synthesizing the conceptual and perceptual. African art came to their rescue. Where Western art was narrative in content, tribal African art was iconographic; where Western art was perceptual and representational in style, African art was conceptual and ideographic; where Western art was naturalistic in its proportions, African art eschewed naturalism. It was the “discovery” of African art that provided the springboard which permitted young European artists to make the leap of imagination that freed them from the aesthetic constraints of the classical tradition. With cubism and, to some extent, surrealism Western art acquired a magical, spiritual quality – one that is quintessentially African.
Picasso spoke of the “shock” and “revelation” he experienced when he saw African tribal masks for the first time. “At that moment”, he said later, “I realized what painting was all about.” Picasso confided to his companion, Françoise Gilot: “It isn’t an aesthetic operation. It’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terror as well as our desires.” Picasso later described his famous cubist painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, as his “first exorcism picture”. (Rubin, 1984).
Agriculture:
 
The World Bank has called traditional plantain and banana production in West Africa, which utilizes no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides, “one of the most productive food production systems known.” (David Seckler, “Agricultural Potential of ‘Mid-Africa’: A Technological Assessment”, in Susan Gnaegy & Jock R. Anderson (eds), Agricultural Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1991).
The West African rice zone contains a greater diversity of production systems and agronomic practices than rice zones in Asia, the only other region where rice was domesticated. Rice production in areas inundated by seawater in Senegambia’s rainfed-marine ecosystem, is attuned to a precise knowledge of soils, marine tides and techniques to reclaim land from the sea. It requires the manipulation and regulation of several types of water regimes in order to permit year-around cropping. This highly complex, sophisticated system, which sustains continuous cultivation and high yields that require neither fallowing nor crop rotation, has won the admiration of Western experts. “By integrating variation in soil type, topography and moisture regimes with food production objectives, West African farmers have managed to evolve an agricultural system that minimises the impact of production constraints. The first Portuguese to reach the Senegambian littoral in 1444 marvelled at the human ingenuity that had crafted this food production system – just as do those who study its operation more than five hundred years later.” (Judith Carney, “Indigenous Soil and Water Management in Senegambian Rice Farming Systems.” Agriculture and Human Values, Winter-Spring, 1991).
Gender equality:
 
In Dahomey’s mythology, the divine world is managed by several pairs of twins of mixed sex, which provided the inspiration for the country’s uniquely original system of gender pairing in its public administration during the 18th century. Every male official had a female counterpart who worked closely with him and also monitored his work. Dahomey’s administrative system, which placed the female in the position of “controller” vis-à-vis the male, incorporated “institutional checks of a rare effectiveness.” Moreover, its system of gender pairing enabled Dahomey to achieve genuine gender equality in the work place, in a manner that ensured excellence, effectiveness, and public probity: “The administration of Dahomey attained excellence in the way of honesty, precision, and reliability.” (Karl Polanyi, “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy”, 1965). No other country in the world has succeeded in emulating that stunning achievement.
Governance:
 
R. S Rattray, an English anthropologist, found “a really remarkable likeness between the constitution of ancient Greece and that of the Ashanti.” (“Ashanti Law and Constitution”, 1929). He considered the Ashanti Constitution to be more advanced in some respects than Britain’s, and the Ashanti democracy to be closer to the Democratic ideal than British democracy: “Here then we have a far more real equality than any which our [English] laws confer on us.” Where Ashanti law and constitutional practices were not superior to those of Britain, they were similar in quality: “Ashanti customary law engendered rules of behaviour and of conduct which were not dissimilar from ‘our’ [English] ethical and moral code.“
The Gada democratic system of the North-East African Oromo people, which first came to the notice of the West in the 16th century, was also considered by Europeans to be more democratic than those of contemporary Europe. A number of Western travellers, who were able to study the Gada system at first hand in the 19th and early 20th centuries, deemed it uniquely democratic. (Hamdesa Tuso, “Indigenous Processes of Conflict Resolution in Oromo Society”, in I. William Zartman (ed), Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts: African Conflict “Medicine“, 2000.) An English traveller who visited Abyssinia in the 19th century declared the Gada system of democracy superior to all existing republican systems of government in the world. (W. Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia, 1868).
Several African countries had developed very effective conflict resolution systems. The Arusha conflict management system (East Africa) has attracted high praise from Western specialists. Professor Kenneth Carlston considered the Arusha conflict resolution process an “ingenious”, “innovative”, “sophisticated” one that could serve as a model for resolving national and international conflicts: “They developed the mediation process to a degree that capital and labor groups in national societies and states in international society might well envy and emulate today…..The experience of the Arusha points to a possible new model of an international society of peace.” (Social Theory and African Tribal Organization: The Development of Socio-Legal Theory, 1968).
An effective, indigenous African “Ombudsman” institution appears to have been a standard feature in pre-colonial Africa. Institutions performing a function similar to that of the Swedish Ombudsman were so ubiquitous in pre-colonial Africa that William Zartman, Professor of Conflict Management at Johns Hopkins, observed: “The Ombudsman seems to be an African invention, even if better known in the West by a Scandinavian name.” (“Changes in the New Order and the Place for the Old”, in Zartman, 2000).
– A former diplomat (Trinidad and Tobago) and international civil servant (UNESCO), Meryvn Claxton is a researcher and consultant on culture and development, with a special interest in Africa. His research focuses on the potential of a people’s culture to provide solutions for problems of political, social and economic development.

References

1. Kresge, N. “A history of black scientists.”ASBMB Today. February 2011.
2. Van Sertima, I. “The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview.” Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. 7–26 (1983).
3. Woods, G. Science in Ancient Egypt (1988).
4. Zaslavsky, C. “The Yoruba Number System.” Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. 110–127 (1983).
5. Lynch, B. M. & Robbins, L. H. “Namoratunga: The First Archeoastronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Afraica.” Science 4343, 766–768 (1978).
6. Adams, H. “African Observers of the Universe: The Sirius Question.” Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. 27–46 (1983).
7. Brooks, L. African Achievements: Leaders, Civilizations and Cultures of Ancient Africa. (1971).
8. Shore, D. “Steel-Making in Ancient Africa.” Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. 157 – 162 (1983).
9. Asante, M. et al. “Great Zimbabwe: An Ancient African City-State.” Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. 84–91 (1983).

Sydella Blatch
Sydella Blatch

Sydella Blatch is an assistant professor of biology at Stevenson University.