Posted by TheBlackList on February 4, 2009 at 1:47am
by Asar Imhotep:
To accurately address the scope and breadth of African history in one article is like trying to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to fifth graders in 20 words or less: it’s impossible. The reason why this is such a monumental task is because what we call African history is in fact human history. The time needed to fully address the course of human history would take several lifetimes (as human history expands more than three million years). It is a known fact, after decades of debate, that the genus Homo Sapiens (from which modern humans are derived) originated and migrated to populate the rest of the world out of Africa. The earliest human remains (to date) were found in a little town called Herto in modern day Ethiopia. The remains are said to be 160,000 years of age and paleoanthropoligsts have given it the name of Homo Sapien Idaltu.
The reason why this is such an important issue to address is because certain members of the human family felt compelled to enslave other members of the human family and then rewrite history to better suit their political and economic needs. The reason why we have such a thing called Black History Month (derived from Negro History Week created by Dr. Carter G. Woodson) is because contemporary scholars and historians made the claim that Blacks (African people) did not have a history. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said in an interview for the PBS special Wonders of the African World:
You see European philosophers said that Africans had no indigenous writing systems. We had no writing, we had no memory. If you have no memory you have no history. If you have no history, you're not a human being.
So there are people within the human family who would like to dehumanize African people by saying that we are animals and because we are not human (in their eyes), we couldn’t have contributed to the “progress” of human civilizations. We will in this brief essay reintroduce some of the known verifiable historical facts that will refute such elementary analysis. We will come to realize that the very ones who claim African people owe a great debt to them for bringing “civilization” to Blacks, are the very ones indebted to those classic African civilizations: their cosmologies, political systems, arts and scientific inquiries.
Since the initial argument by some historians is that African people didn’t contribute to human civilization, we will primarily deal with the fundamental inventions the Africans have produced that makes any modern technology, philosophy or science impossible without this African foundation. We will primarily deal with concepts that predate any European formation of a political state (roughly around the 8th century BCE).
Mathematics The very foundation of mathematical knowledge was first attested to in Africa. The oldest verifiable archeological find for mathematics is that of the Ishango Bone with an archeological date between 18 – 20,000 BP (Before the Present). It is actually a fibula bone of a baboon and it was found in Ishango which is located between Uganda and the Kongo at the edge of the Nile River.
(This is a excerpt)For the rest of the article, goto:http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=4075&magazine=214#
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