Overlooked Civilizations of Africa By Slater Johnson Africa is the cradle of mankind and civilization. Archeological expeditions have discovered the oldest examples of early man in the fossil records. Africa is a continent of magnificent treasures and cultures -- from the breathtaking stone architecture of 1,000-year-old ruins in South Africa to an advanced 16th century international university in Timbuktu. However, for centuries, many of these African wonders have been hidden from the world, lost to the ravages of time, nature and repressive governments. Here is a very brief look at some of the overlooked cultures of ancient Africa. Most people just think of ancient Egyptians when asked about African civilizations, but there are numerous others that have been largely overlooked by European news sources. This is partially due to the fact that most of the great structures and monuments of many African civilizations were long ago destroyed by natural erosion or man. This article will look a just a few of the major civilizations/cultures in Africa: the Kush, Aksum, Ghana and Zimbabwe. KUSH The Kingdom of Kush was located on the Nile River south of Egypt from 750 BC to AD 200. Kush, the Egyptian name for ancient Nubia, was the site of a highly advanced, ancient black African civilization that rivaled ancient Egypt in wealth, power and cultural development. The first capital of Kush lay at Kerma just south of the Third Cataract of the Nile. Here dwelt powerful and wealthy black kings who controlled the trade routes connecting central Africa with ancient Egypt. The Egyptians, who had few natural resources of their own, sought the precious, exotic products of central Africa to satisfy the demands of their luxury-loving populace. By about 1500 B.C., the Egyptians, feeling threatened by the Nubian kings, invaded Kush and conquered it. For the next four centuries, the Egyptians exploited Kush as a colony. Egypt's wealth in gold came from the desert mines of Kush. The Egyptian word for gold is nub, which is thought by some to be the origin of the name Nubia. Centuries later the prophet Isaiah would refer to "Kush ... of whirring wings," likening it's army to a locust plague. Around 730 B.C., Kush's warrior hordes turned the tables on a weakened Egypt and conquered it. This event established the black Pharaohs of Kush. They ruled an Egyptian-Nubian empire that extended from the Mediterranean to the confluence of the Blue and White Niles for sixty years. Historians would count their reign as Egypt's 25th Dynasty. The Kushite pharaohs promoted a renaissance in Egypt and incorporated Egyptian culture, art, and philosophy into their homeland. They built magnificent temples at Jebel Barkal and Meroë, filling them with statuary, cultic implements and religious papyri, which became the inspirational force for their culture for centuries to come. The pyramid, abandoned as the proper tomb type by Egyptian kings a thousand years earlier, was revived by the Kushites and used by their monarchs for a thousand years, which is why today there are many more pyramids in the Sudan than in Egypt. Due to invasion and internal rivalries, they eventually declined - their civilization lost to the sands of time. AKSUM Located in northern Ethiopia, Aksum reached its height between the 1st and 10th centuries, recalled in later centuries as a golden age. This was a kingdom of great wealth and sophistication, controlling the caravan routes from the hinterland of Africa, and the ancient Greek geographers describe its trade in ivory and slaves. Aksum‘s kings minted a gold coinage when almost no one else in the world was rich enough to afford it or sophisticated enough to require it. Aksum's mythical past has been preserved in the famous epic known as The Glory of Kings. This describes the Queen of Sheba traveling from Ethiopia to visit King Solomon in Jerusalem in the hope of learning something of his famous wisdom. The king is fascinated by her beauty and her intelligence, and the son who is born from their union becomes the founder of the Ethiopian dynasty. When he travels to Jerusalem himself to be anointed by his father, the Ark of the Covenant, the chest containing the tablets of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments accompanies him to Ethiopia, where it will remain until the End of Time and the Last Judgment. According to Ethiopian tradition, the Ark of the Covenant remains at Aksum today, under close guard of a priest. Surrounded by Muslim powers, the predominantly Christian Aksum endured numerous attacks both culturally and through wars. The burden was too heavy, and they too faded away. GHANA Ghana was located between the Senegal and Niger River from AD 500 to 1076. Their king was considered the god, but Muslims were welcomed. Then, the Almoravids invaded and seized the capital. The Empire of Ghana has no geographical connection with the modern African state of that name. Rather, its boundaries would have included most of modern Mali and parts of modern Senegal and Mauritania. Modern Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast during the Colonial Era, was named after this great state of African antiquity. By the time Arab geographers began to write of West Africa in the 8th century A.D., the Empire of Ghana -- described as a "land of gold" -- was already in existence. This ancient state's origins, however, remain unclear. The Tarikh as-Sudan, a book of West African history written in Timbuktu around 1650 A.D., claims that the Empire of Ghana had 22 kings before the beginning of the Muslim era (622 A.D.), and 22 kings afterwards. If this is anything more than an exercise in symmetry, then we may expect the origins of the Empire of Ghana to extend back to the first few centuries A.D. Certainly there is good archaeological evidence for the existence of large towns within, and north of, the Inland Niger Delta by ca. 300 A.D. During the 10th and 11th centuries A.D., Ghana's fame grew and it is described in some detail by geographers and compilers of travelers' tales at that time. In these writings, Ghana is depicted as a great military power, which could put "200,000 warriors in the field, more than 40,000 being armed with bow and arrow." The king, it was said, controlled the flow of gold from the south, and the traffic of salt from the north. In 1076 A.D., the capital of Ghana fell to the Almoravid Berber jihad , launched from Morocco. The once great Empire decomposed into a number of small feuding kingdoms. Out of this disorder would arise the greatest of West Africa's pre-Colonial Empires -- that of Mali. Led by the great King Sunjata Keita (ruled ca. 1245-1270 A.D.), the Malinke conquered their oppressors (the Sosso) and gained control of the trans-Saharan trade routes. In the fullness of time, the Empire of Mali expanded, reaching its height under the rule of Kankan Musa (ruled ca. 1312-1327 A.D.). By that time, the Empire's territory comprised most of modern Mali and Senegal, and parts of Mauritania and Guinea. Many monumental mosques were constructed during the reign of Mansa Kankan Musa who is still remembered as a great Islamic ruler. However, Mali would not last long, driven by internal dissent and military conflicts with the Tuareg, the Empire gradually dissolved during the 15th century A.D. Zimbabwe is located in the country that still bares its name - ZIMBABWE The Great Zimbabwe is the most famous of a large group of stone-walled enclosures on the Zimbabwean plateau. In the language of the Shona people of eastern Zimbabwe, the word Zimbabwe means "stone building." The highest point of the site is a fortress that has a commanding view of the surrounding grasslands, and can only be approached through a series of narrow defiles. According to scholars, the structure was erected by Shona people over the course of about four hundred years, beginning in the early 11th century. At its height in the 13th century, Great Zimbabwe's capital was home to as many as 18,000 people. Subsistence to support such population concentrations remained crucial, and it is likely that cattle and agricultural surplus played a highly visible role in the maintenance of power. The collapse of the Great Zimbabwe occupation is dated to the mid- to late 15th century, when most of the site was abandoned. Reasons posited for Great Zimbabwe's collapse have included the possible exhaustion of local gold, arable land, or water resources, and the disruption of the Indian Ocean trading sphere by the Portuguese. Majestic successor states such as Khami, located farther in the interior, soon sprang up, but none ever achieved the power of Great Zimbabwe, which remained an important religious shrine until the 19th century. The geography of Africa varies greatly across the continent, from scorching hot deserts to lush tropical rainforests. The longest river in the world is located in Africa. The Nile River flows all the way from Egypt to Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. It has some of the greatest resources of any continent, but its harsh environs and poorly developed infra-structure limit the abilities of the native peoples to benefit from the minerals, oil and other raw materials as well as other continents have seemingly done. Africa is the cradle of mankind as archeological expeditions have discovered the oldest examples of early man in the fossil records. The slave trade was the capturing of Africans and exchanging them for goods. The Europeans were interested in Africa because of trade, gold, Christianity, and power. The slave trade lasted for centuries with the Africans as slaves. The cycle of the slave trade started with the capturing of slaves. This was often done by rival African tribes who would raid villages of their enemies and sell the captured villagers to the European slavers. Then, the Europeans would take off for the East Coast in a large ships with hundreds of slaves in each ship. This part of the trip was called the Middle Passage. Slaves would be packed together for about 1-2 months and occasionally, they would be brought on deck for exercise. When they got to the East Coast, there would be an auction where plantation owners would bid for them. This cycle would start over and over again thousands of times. Finally, in the 1807, slavery was banned in Britain, but it kept going illegally. It was also banned in the United States in 1865, but unfortunately, conditions similar to slavery still exist today in some Third World countries and even in Africa itself. Unfortunately the slave trade added to the destruction of African culture in several ways. First it caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Africans who would have otherwise been in Africa building and preserving their culture. Second the fighting between many tribes was increased substantially due to the European slavers literally paying Africans to attack and destroy other Africans and their cultures. Third the imposition of the European culture on Africa, pushed the African culture even further into the background. Many aspects of African culture and history are forever lost because it was simply plowed into the ground by settlers, or burned by missionaries. The spiritual and earth based cultures of Africa were no match for the technological and territorial culture of the Europeans. The tattered remains of these African civilizations are all that remains for us to study and ponder upon.

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