Who ruled Africa while Rome ruled Europe? How did they come to be forgotten?

A quick scan of online message boards will tell you that worldwide awareness of African empires — aside from ancient Egypt — is seriously limited, to say the least.

A Quora commenter asks, “Why hasn’t a single prominent civilization come out of Africa?” On Reddit, someone poses (or rather, begs) the question, “Why were there so few empires in Africa?”

Although responders quickly mopped the floor with those commenters’ loaded questions, millions of other people around the world have never bothered to ask in the first place.

But this knowledge gap about Africa is a fairly new phenomenon.

The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt actively exchanged goods and ideas with the southern kings of Kush, who were “proud of their black faces.” The Ethiopian kings of Aksum, who traded as far afield as India and China, were the most powerful rulers between Byzantium and Persia.

Centuries later, an emperor of Mali would become the richest person in all world history.

Oh, but this goes back much, much further. Once you start digging into the history of Africa, you begin to encounter ages and dates that are really hard to wrap your mind around — and yet, there they are, staring you in the face.

Let’s use ancient Egypt as a point of reference. The Great Pyramid was built about 4,500 years ago. Recognizably Egyptian culture dates back about twice that far.

But people in Ethiopia and Eritrea were actively building and farming long before Egypt— at least 10,000 years ago.

If you’ve read my article, “Time’s Orphans Have Names,” you’ve seen the writing of the people of Kish and Eridu, around 4,000 BCE. Now we’ve gone back a full 5,000 years before that—

And that’s nothing. We’ve barely even gotten started!

At least 13,000 years ago, linguistic and genetic evidence shows, the common ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Arabs, the Hebrews, and many other East African and Levantine peoples lived around the Red Sea, concentrated on the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the Sinai, and what’s now Ethiopia (and possibly further south in Africa).

These Proto-Afroasiatic people spoke a language so ancient that it was the common grammatical ancestor of ancient Babylonian and modern Swahili. Try getting your head around that one.

Ever heard of the San people — a.k.a. the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari? They’re one of the most genetically diverse human populations in the entire world.

In fact, San people’s DNA also carries genetic traits so old that they likely split off before the earliest Homo sapiens migrations out of Africa, about 200,000 years ago. Their language, too, contains some of the oldest features of any surviving language on earth.

Musical accompaniment for this story:

A set of stone tools essentially identical to modern San equipment have been found in a cave in South Africa, and dated to 42,000 BCE.

This means the San people’s culture dates at least as far back as the last Ice Age — when Neanderthals were still alive and well.

If you ever find yourself in a conversation about living cultures with the longest continuous histories, drop in a mention of the San people (or the Australian Yidindji people, whose oral traditions clearly describe a sea level rise that happened when the Ice Age glaciers melted, 13,000 years ago).

Facts like these expand the whole scale of the discussion.

Because of these staggering timescales of Africa’s history, I’m going to have to skip and condense a lot over the course of this series. We’ve already reached the length of a short news story, and I haven’t even started describing the actual empires yet!

For that reason, I’m going to focus only on the biggest, wealthiest and most influential African empires — which means that in this series, we won’t have time to go into smaller city-states like Opone, Mosylon, Cape Guardafui and Malao

In fact, I won’t have space to discuss even relatively small empires like Bornu Empire, the Mossi Kingdoms and the Kingdom of Zimbabwe; or ancient civilizations on which there’s still a lot of work to be done, like the bronze-age Igbo-Ukwu culture, the Kingdom of D’mt, and the mysterious Kingdom of Yam and Land of Punt.

For the sake of length, I’m also going to have to restrict myself in terms of time periods; focusing on African empires from antiquity, and from the medieval era.

I’m truly, genuinely sorry that I won’t have time (at least, not in the immediate future) to talk about the mighty Songhai Empire, or the nineteenth-century Benin Empire, or the Zulu Kingdom — or many, many other great and powerful African states.

Each of those African empires and kingdoms was populated by real people, every one of whom had favorite foods and life goals and romances every bit as heartfelt as yours and mine.

Unfortunately, when covering an entire continent with at least 50,000 years of continuous cultural history, we’ve got to limit our range. Still, I highly recommend opening all those links above in new tabs, so you can check them out later.

Across thousands of years, Africa was recognized throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean as one of the great global centers.

The continent was renowned as a cultural anvil that hammered out powerful militaries, influential technologies, and wealth by the boatload. But by the 1800s, the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten all about Aksum, Wagadu and Mali.

Such a massive loss of prestige demands an explanation.

Thus, I’d be shortchanging you here if I didn’t explain that Africa’s loss of historical renown occurred due to deliberate, calculated effort by European writers.

While slavery and slave-trading had been practiced in some African cultures since time immemorial, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an explosion of aggressive colonial expansion by European powers like France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Holland and Spain. This “Scramble for Africa” was justified by the myth of the sub-Saharan “savage,” who had never created any “real civilization” of his own.

At least some nineteenth-century Europeans must have known this myth of savagery was false. Invaders would have seen the Nubian Pyramids and the ruins of Aksum as they pressed westward and southward into the continent.

What’s more, literate Europeans surely encountered Roman, medieval and Arabic mentions of their powerful African contemporaries, whose rulers traveled to meet as equals with their fellow kings.

Even so, European writers from the 1870s to the 1930s churned out “tendentious and Eurocentric” accounts of African culture.

These writings spread the idea of Africa as a “dark continent.” Many Europeans celebrated colonialism as a “civilizing mission.” Still more atrocious was the philosophy of “Social Darwinism” (never endorsed by Charles Darwin himself) which claimed that African peoples had always been “culturally inferior” because they were “genetically inferior” to Europeans.

What do you think the San people have to say about that claim?

However, as more African peoples threw off their colonial chains, especially from the 1950s onward, African and international scholars began to fight back against this smear campaign.

Experts churned out thousands of books and papers that not only debunked European colonialist dogma, but also argued for an active “rehabilitation” of African historiography, energized by people of African descent.

Today, African archaeologists, geneticists, linguists and historians partner with teams from all over the world — and a new generation of curious travelers are coming to see the wonders of Mali and the natural beauty of Ethiopia for themselves.

Check out my Instagram feed, and you’ll see I’ve recently spent time in Ethiopia, Morocco, Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa.

I highly recommend visiting all those places, and talking with people who live in them, so you can learn more about their lives and struggles for yourself.

Africa’s road to cultural recognition has been a long, hard one — and even now, the continent’s history is nowhere near fully rehabilitated from the damage done by colonialist writers.

Many archaeological sites are astonishingly under-studied, the scholarly literature remains notably undersized, and many ancient African cultures are still very poorly understood in comparison to their European and Asian contemporaries.

But despite all this, one thing remains abundantly clear:

Africa has never been a “dark” continent.

All the way back to the earliest days of humankind, it’s always been a center of light and life; a forge of innovation and creativity; a stage for breathtaking pageantry and drama.

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Bibliography

1. The Antiquity of Man by Mike Brass
2. Ethiopia, the Unknown Land by Stuart Munro-Hay
3. Ancient African Civilizations: Kush and Axum by Stanley Mayer Burstein
4. Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity by Stuart Munro-Hay
5. The Empire of Ghana by Rebecca L. Green
6. Ghana by by Rodrigo Quijada Plubins, Ancient History Encyclopedia
7. Ghana: A West African Trading Empire by Teachers’ Curriculum Institute
8. The Empire of Mali by Carol Thompson
9. Mansa Musa and the Empire of Mali by P. James Oliver

Africa ancient history