INTERESING FACTS ABOUT AFRICA

• In the Middle Ages the art of Benin was of the very best quality. A specialist of these things in the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde stated that: “These works from Benin are equal to the very finest samples of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini cannot have cast them much better, nor could anyone different before or after him… Technically, these sculptures represent also, the highest possible achievement. ”

• Winwood Reade described his visit to the Ashanti Royal Palace of Kumasi in 1874: “We went to the king’s palace, which is made of many patios, each surrounded with verandahs  and alcoves, and having two gates or even doors, so that just about every yard was a thoroughfare… But the best part of the palace was a stone property, Moorish in its design… with a flat roof along with a parapet, and suites of apartments around the first floor. It was built by Fanti mason’s decades ago. The room’s upper level will remind you of Wardour Road. Each was a great Old Curiosity Shop. Books in most languages, Bohemian glass, silver plate, Persian rugs, clocks, old furniture, Kidderminster carpets, images and designs, numberless boxes and coffers. A sword bearing the inscription From Queen Victoria towards the King of Ashantee. A copy of the Times magazine, 17 October 1843. ”

• In the mid-nineteenth century, William Clarke, an Uk visitor who happened to be in Nigeria that time, said that: “As good an essay of cloth can be woven through the Yoruba weavers as by means of any people… in strength, their cloths far exceed the prints and home-spuns regarding Manchester. ”

• They recently discovered the ninth century Nigerian city of Eredo. When they found it, the city was surrounded by a wall that was 100 miles long and seventy feet high in some places. The internal area was a staggering 400 square miles.

• When we speak of cloths, Kongolese textiles have been also distinguished. Various European writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote about how delicate crafts of the peoples in eastern Kongo and nearby regions who manufactured were. Crafts such as satins, taffeta, velvet, sarcenets and cloth of tissue. Professor DeGraft-Johnson made the curious observation that: “Their brocades, the two high and low, were much more valuable than the Italians.”

• On Kongolese metallurgy in the middle Ages, one modern scholar wrote that: “There isn’t a doubt… the existence of an expert metallurgical art inside ancient Kongo… The Bakongo were conscious about the toxicity of direct vapors. They planned prevention and curative methods, the two pharmacological (massive doses: pawpaw and palm oil) and mechanical (exerting of pressure to free the digestive tract), for fighting direct poisoning. ”

• Within Nigeria, the royal palace inside the city of Kano goes to the fifteenth century. Begun by Muhammad Rumfa (ruled 1463-99) it has gradually evolved over generations in to a very imposing complex. A colonial report about the city from 1902, described it as “a circle of buildings covering a location of 33 acres and surrounded by a very high wall up to 20 to 35 feet on the outside and 15 feet inside.”

• A sixteenth century traveler visited the central civilization of Africa, in Kanem-Borno and commented: the emperor’s cavalry had fantastic “stirrups, spurs, bits and buckles.” Even the ruler’s dogs had “chains with the finest gold”.

• One of many government positions in mediaeval Kanem-Borno was Astronomer Royal.

• Ngazargamu, the main city of Kanem-Borno, became among the largest cities in the seventeenth century world. By 1658 AD, according to an architectural scholar, the metropolis, the city had “about quarter of a million people”. It had approximately 660 streets. Many had been wide and unbending, reflective to the towns planning.

• The Nigerian city of Surame flourished inside the sixteenth century. Even in ruin it was a remarkable sight, built on a vertical grid. A contemporary day archeologist described it as: “The walls of Surame are generally 10 miles in circumference and they also include many large bastions or even walled suburbs running at right angles towards the main wall. The large compound on Kanta is still visible, with ruins of a lot of buildings, one of that is said to have already been two-storied. The striking feature in the walls and whole ruins would be the extensive use of stone and tsokuwa (laterite gravel) or very hard red building mud, evidently brought at a distance. There is an enormous mound of this at the north gate about 8 feet high. The walls show courses of masonry to approximately a height of 20 feet and even more in several places. The top preserved portion is that often known as sirati (the bridge).The main city walls here seem to have provided an extremely strongly guarded entrance about 30 feet wide. ”

• The Nigerian city of Kano, in 1851 produced about 10 million pairs of sandals and 5 million hides annually for export.

• In the 1246 AD, Kanem-Bornos Dunama II exchanged embassies using Al-Mustansir, Tunis king. He sent the North African court a pricey present, which oddly enough included a giraffe. An old chronicle noted that this beautiful and rare animal “created a sensation in Tunis”.

• Through the third century BC metropolis of Carthage on the coast of Tunisia was opulent and impressive. The item had a population somewhere between 700, 000 people and might as well have approached to a million. Lining both sides regarding three streets were series of tall houses, 6 stores high.

• The Ethiopian city of Axum has some 7 giant towers of which date from possibly 300 BC to 300 AD. They have details designed into them that characterize windows and doorways of several different stores. The greatest tower, now fallen, is certainly “the largest tower ever made anywhere in the entire world”. It really is 108 feet long, weighs somewhere between 500 tons, and signifies a thirteen-storey building.

• Over 1, 500 years ago, Ethiopia minted its own coins. One scholar wrote of which: “Almost no other modern state anywhere in the world could issue in gold, a statement of power reached only by Rome, Persia, and the Kushan Empire in northern India back then.”

• The Ethiopian script with the 4th century AD inspired the writing script of the Republic of Armenia. A Russian historian mentioned that: “Soon after their creation, the Ethiopic vocalized script started to influence the scripts of the Republic of Armenia and Georgia. D. A. Olderogge suggested of which Mesrop Mashtotz used the vocalized Ethiopic script when he invented the Armenian alphabet. ”

• “In the very first half of the 1st millennium CE,” says a new well-known archeologist, Ethiopia “was ranked as one of the world’s greatest empires”. A Persian cleric with the 3^rd century AD identified it as the third most important state on the planet after Persia and Rome.

• Ethiopia has 11 subterranean mediaeval churches built by being carved out from the ground. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, Roha became the new capital with the Ethiopians. Considered as the New Jerusalem by its inventor, Emperor Lalibela (c. 1150-1230), it has eleven churches, all carved out from the rock of the mountain tops by hammer and chisel. All of the temples were carved to some depth of 11 meters below the ground level. The greatest church is the House with the Redeemer, an amazing 33. 7 meters long, 7 meters wide and 11. 5 meters deep under the ground.

• Lalibela is not that one single place in Ethiopia to have such wonders. A new archaeologist analyzed research that was conducted in this region in the early 1970’s when: “surprising numbers of churches that were built in caves or partially or completely cut through the living rock were revealed not simply in Tigre and Lalibela but also in Addis Ababa. At least 1, 500 churches were identified. And probably there are other churches waiting to be reviled. ”

• In 1209 AD Emperor of Lalibela in Ethiopia sent a group to Cairo bringing the sultan abnormal gifts including an elephant, a hyena, a zebra, along with a giraffe.

• In Lower Africa, there are at least 600 stone built ruins inside regions of South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. These ruins are called Mazimbabwe in Shona.

• The Great Zimbabwe was the largest of these ruins. It consists 12 clusters of houses, spread over 3 miles. Its outer walls were created from 100, 000 tons of bricks made out of granite. In the fourteenth century, the location housed 18, 000 men and women, as much as London housed in the similar period.

• Bling culture existed in this area. The Horniman Museum in London had exhibits of headrests with the entire caption: “Headrests have been utilized in Africa since the time when Egyptians had pharaohs. Remains of headrests, covered in gold foil, happen to be found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and burial sites like Mapungubwe dating towards the twelfth century AD. ”

• Dr Albert Churchward, writer of “Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man”, pointed out that writing was found in a stone built ruin: “Lt.-Col. E. L. de Cordes… who has been in South Africa for four years, informed the writer that in the ‘Ruins’ there is a ‘stone-chamber, ’ with a large amount of Papyri, covered all over with old Egyptian hieroglyphics. Some Boer hunter discovered this, and a large quantity was helpful to light a fire and yet still a bigger quantity remained there now. ”

• Monomotapa, that ruled over this vast region, had written that: “The people dressed themselves with various ways: at court with the King, his graders put on clothes of damask, gold, satin, silk cloth and rich silk,  these are generally three sizes of silk. ”

• Southern Africans mined gold while on an epic scale. A modern, well-known writer tells us of which: “The estimated amount that they mined of gold rocks through the entire region by the ancients was astounding, beyond 43 million tons. The ore yielded nearly 700 tons of pure gold which today will be valued at over $7. 5 billion. ”

• Apparently the Monomotapan royal palace at Mount Fura had chandeliers hanging through the ceiling. An eighteenth century geography book provided this data: “The inside consists of a great variety of luxurious apartments, large and high halls; all adorned having a magnificent cotton tapestry, the manufacture with the country. The floors, ceilings, beams and rafters are either golden or plated using gold, as may also were the chairs, tables and benches. The candle-sticks and branches are made from ivory mosaic with gold, and hang from the ceiling by chains with the same metal. ”

• Monomotapa had a good cultural system. Antonio Bocarro, a Portuguese contemporary, informs us that: “shows great charity towards the blind and maimed, for they are called the king’s weak, and have land and profits because of their hard life, and when they wish to pass through the kingdoms, wherever they come food and drinks get to them, and when they leave that place to attend another they are given what is necessary for their journey, information, and someone to carry their wallet to another village or location. In every place where they go, there are the same obligation. ”

• Many southern Africans have native and pre-colonial words for ‘gun’. Scholars have generally been unwilling to analyze or explain this

.

• Evidence discovered in 1978 demonstrated that East Africans have been making steel for 1, 500 years: “Assistant Professor of Anthropology Peter Schmidt and Professor of Engineering Donald H. Avery have found out that 2, 000 years ago Africans living around the western beaches of Lake Victoria had produced a method to preheat the carbon steel. Which was a method that was technologically more sophisticated than any development in Europe until 19th century

• Ruins of a 300 BC astronomical observatory were available in a city of Kenya called Namoratunga . Africans were mapping the movements of stars such as Triangulum, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Core Orion, in order to manufacture a lunar calendar of 354 days they also were mapping the moon.

• Autopsies and caesarean functions were routinely and effectively performed by surgeons in pre-colonial Uganda. Their surgeons routinely used sterilizers, anesthetics and cautery iron.

• Sudan inside mediaeval period had monasteries, churches, castles and cathedrals. Their ruins are still in good shape today.

• The mediaeval Nubian Kingdoms held archives. From the site of Qasr Ibrim real texts, documents were discovered. An archaeologist lately notified us that: “There are well-kept of thousands of documents in Meroitic, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, Persia and Turkish.”

• Style and fashion existed in mediaeval Sudan. A dignitary at Jebel Adda inside late thirteenth century AD used to wear a long coat of red-colored and yellow patterned damask folded over his body. Beneath, he wore plain cotton trousers of long and baggy cuts and couple of red leather. When he died his body was wrapped in enormous bits of gold.

• The East Coast, from Somalia in order to Mozambique, has ruins of approximately 50 towns and metropolitan areas. They flourished from the ninth towards the sixteenth centuries AD.

• Chinese records with the fifteenth century AD realize that Mogadishu had houses that were “four or five stores high”.

• Gedi, at the coast of Kenya, is also known as the East African ghost villages. Its ruins, dating through the 14^th or 15^th century, include the city partitions, the palace, private homes, the Great Mosque, and several tombs.