Africa; An Overview

Africa, the second-largest continent with approximately11.7 million square miles including adjacent islands, covers 6% of Earth's total surface area or 20% of its land area. As of 2018, it was the second most populous continent with 1.3 billion People. This represents 16% of the world's population and also the youngest. This very young population has a median age of 19 years old compared to a worldwide median age of 30.

Africa is the richest continent on Earth. Its unimaginable mineral resources in uranium, cobalt, oil, gold, silver, chromium, copper, manganese, palladium, titanium, diamonds, platinum etc… have made it the envy of the rest of the world and Europe in particular. As a result, the continent has had to suffer multiple socio cultural catastrophes (Davidson, 1980)¹ including but not limited to the Atlantic Slave Trade, multiple European colonial invasions (Berlin Conference of 1884), and the legacies of the Cold War.

Today, the continent continues to battle the economic and financial consequences of a neo-colonialism paradigm couched under a new terminology called globalization that has become synonymous with the terminologies and ideologies governing the concepts of domination, exploitation, and oppression when talking to African populations on the ground. These constant external frictions from neo-colonial powers trying to access Africa's mineral resources by any means necessary are the primary causes of the continent's inability to elect its own stable and far-sighted governance.

Africa is boarded to the north by the Mediterranean Sea with an opening to the Atlantic Ocean via the strait of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez (construction beginning as early as 1854 the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes the massive island of Madagascar and various archipelago (Seychelles, Zanzibar etc.). As of today, the continent of Africa counts 54 independent states and a number of territories. The West African country of Nigeria (former colony of Great Britain is the largest by population (201 million) and Algeria is Africa's largest country by surface area (919,595 square miles).

The African Union, was a glimmer of hope and unity promulgated by Africa's first pan Africanist scholar and prime minister of the country of Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) Dr. Nkwame Krumah. He led the establishment of the African Union headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The African Union was created to allow African member countries to plan and coordinate economic, politic and military approaches to address issues and challenges of continental consequences, in their proportions and scope.

Africa straddles the Equator. While the majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, it has a significant number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Its biodiversity is baffling in scope and it is the continent with the largest number of animal, insect, and plant species in the world. Given its size the continent is also widely affected by environmental issues such as droughts, and global warming which contribute actively to the widening desertification of the Sahara to the north of the continent and expansion of the Kalahari desert to the South, including but not limited to man-made deforestation, water scarcity, sprawling urbanization, local and western nations imported waste etc. Climate change has had a great impact on the continent and its scientists are working overtime to try to mitigate the challenges and ecological consequences of such climatic consequences.

Africa is the birthplace of humanity. The scope of humanity's birthplace extends from the Ethiopian plateau of Hadar to the region of the Great Lakes, to Tanzania and South Africa. This information has been verified by the scientific community since the beginning of the 20th century after the discoveries of British/Kenyan Drs. Louis and Mary Leakey (Leakey, 1934)²³ and confirmed by Drs. Johanson and Gray (Johanson, Gray, 1981)⁴ and again in the 21st century through the works of Dr. Jeremy Thomson (Thomson, 2000).⁵

From early humanoids named Lucy approximately 3.2 million years in Hadar, Ethiopia to the possibly even older South African fossils discovered by Drs. Way and Herries (Herries, Way 2020)⁶, Africa and its eastern and southern parts have been recognized as the locations of origins of our human cradle. Historically, it was established that the earliest high civilizations in Antiquity had grown from Africa and had begun with the Nubians (Sudanese of today) in the Eastern part of the continent, and the Egyptians in the northeastern part but we are now finding evidence of high civilization in West Africa (Mali) predating the Nubians and Egyptians (Gus Casely Hayford, 2010).⁷

Dating 10,000 years BC, vestiges of advanced pottery indicative of highly evolved human civilizations were found in the Bandiagara Region of today's Mali. The pyramids of Giza, Egypt are 3250 years BC. In 2017, the government of Sudan (ancient Nubia) stated that its pyramids were 2000 years older than those of Egypt. The time lag and the archeological and cultural evidence of high civilizations presence from West Africa, Mali 10,000 years BC all the way to the East to Sudan and Egypt is overwhelming and who could overlook the Sphynx, this enormous majestic feline like carving whose carbon dating nuclear datation places it at around 9000 BC. Imagine the size and grandeur of the civilizations that built the Sphynx!

One of the great historical academic falsifications still alive today has been the baffling effort by Western academics to disconnect socio culturally thus racially Egypt from Nubia (Sudan), and from its continent Africa, hence the fabrication of the geo-political term Middle East. Everybody knows that there isn’t a middle of anything on a sphere. This futile academic/political agenda to claim Egypt as a non-African civilization is clearly a testimony to the significance of Egypt's cultural, scientific, mathematical and spiritual magnificence. While in the construct of chronology of civilizational cultural foundations race may matter, respect for chronology must matter.

There is a simple thing western academia does not seem to understand when it comes to Africa, namely the place of Black people in the story of humanity's development and that's the concept of chronology. Let me try to explain it this way, Africans were the first on the planet, Africans were Black, therefore Black Africans gave birth to humanity in its entirety (Africans built the foundational concepts of civilization from science to spirituality for the rest of humanity to borrow, why? Again, because Black Africans were the first on the planet…hence chronology…

However, these same western academics stop right at Egypt for they cannot explain Nubia, south of Egypt. Nubia (current Sudan) was the well known and established socio cultural and scientific aquifer that fed Egypt. Nubians are so dark in skin tones that it completely defeats any European purpose of trying to portray the ancient Egyptians as Europeans/Caucasians hence the failed Hollywood mythology of lovely Liz Taylor becoming a Pharaoh of Egyptians etc…While it is important to recognize that there has been a significant migration of populations from Arab nations into Northern Egypt since the 7th century it is in the scale of humanity's chronology and certainly Black Africa a recent migration phenomenon. Migrating Arab populations were not the cultural foundation of the Egypt of Antiquity, they were not their Pharoahs and never were the engineers or architects of such a civilization. The Greek scholar Herodotus who was himself an eyewitness described the Egyptians without ambiguity as very Black with woolly hair (Finch, 1987)⁸ and you would have to be on some serious controlled substances to believe that this was the description of a Caucasian.

University professors Drs. Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal and Theophile Obenga of Congo demonstrated time and time again as early as the 1960s, both scientifically and through the etymology of the linguistic process that Egypt was an entire part of cultural Black Africa (Diop 1953)⁹ and that Egypt owed its civilizational heights to African populations from sub Saharan origins (Davidson 1980). The 1974 Cairo Conference on Egyptology saw a masterclass given by the African professors Diop and Obenga to a large audience of Egyptologists on the Black African origins of Egyptian culture of Antiquity. Scientists present at the conference were left baffled and the pseudo academic attempt to Europeanizing the Egypt of Antiquity has been in a state of seizure ever since.

The massive immigration into northern Africa by populations from Arabic countries such as Irak, Syria and the Arabic Peninsula on the northern part of the African continent is in term of chronology of migration a recent mass phenomenon. The evidence of that is in the etymology of the term that the Greeks gave to people of Black skin living in the northern part of Africa i.e. Moors which means Black in Greek and not White with a tan or Arab as some of my Westerner friends pretend, for the Greeks themselves are Whites with a tan and they never called themselves Moors… for they knew better…

What is true however, is that the splendors of Egyptian and Nubian cultures create a conundrum for the European colonial ideology of White supremacy and there is a reason why there are no pyramids in Greece or in Macedonia. That reason is that Africans in general but specifically Egyptians and Nubians did not trust the Greeks or the Romans who came and studied for hundreds of years in Africa and that is why they never shared with them the mathematical formulas that allowed for the construction of these architectural African feasts of technology that we call pyramids.

Unlike some flawed history channels on television would like you to believe, no green Martians built the pyramids, Africans did, and these African scholars and high priests kept the mathematical formulas away from the Greeks and the Romans through the African process and wisdom of the oral tradition through the initiation of the selected worthy, otherwise you would have pyramids in Greece and elsewhere in Europe twice the size of those of Giza. Why? You might ask, because it is in human nature…to compete…

1Davidson, Basil. Africa Series. Davidson Collection, 1984.

2Leakey, L.S.B. Some Aspects of the Kikuyu Tribe. Man, 34,59, 1934.

3Leakey, L. S. B., Leakey, M. Recent discoveries of fossil hominids in Tanganyika: At Olduvai and near Lake Natron. Current Anthropology, 6, 422-424, 1965.

4Johanson, Donald, and Maitland Edey. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

5Thomson, Jeremy. Humans Did Come Out of Africa,. Journal Nature, 2000.

6Way, Amy & Herries, Andy. Australopithecus, Paranthropus. Australian Museum, 2020.

7Casely-Hayford. Gus. Lost Kingdoms of Africa. BBC Series 4, 2010.

8Finch, Charles III. The Black Roots of Egypt's Glory. Washington Post, Oct 11,1987.

9Diop, Cheikh Anta. The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa. Paris: Subsequent English Edition, 1959.

Africa; The Historical &

Political Context

Africa, where human civilization began and yet as one of its noted scholars Dr. Augustus Casely Hayford remarked we know less about this continent than anywhere else in the world and this is where we need to begin when we talk about Africa. The statement from Dr. Casely Hayford needs to be taken very seriously for it gives us all a context for the examination of that reality. Why don’t we know more about Africa since it is where humanity began?

The answer is both simple and complex. Simple, because reality has observed that national politics drive the agenda of education and academic scholarship and that the Western powers who dominated the economic and technological landscape had no vested political interest in hailing Africa and African culture previous majestic heights. Yet, it is true that Africans invented linear writing. Nubians wrote before anyone else and Egyptians wrote scientific essays on papyrus, formulas of chemistry, precepts of medicine, protocols of surgery on humans and animals, poetry, and legal briefs. The term alphabet itself is a combination of African words (Obenga, 1973).¹⁰ They wrote laws and judgments, advanced concepts of mathematics both algebraic and abstract, they wrote essays in geometry, in physics, in astronomy. We use their calendar system today. These Africans wrote about affairs of the State, practices related to land management matters, they wrote about currency exchanges and commercial practices. They wrote about military strategies and religious concepts using both emic and etic perspective contexts to define their languages and cultures through the prism of the dynamics of symbolism and their hermeneutics.

As early as 2700 BC they had invented the paper but as a general rule in accordance with long existing African traditions, the oral tradition was the preferred mode of transmission of knowledge for it allowed for the process of initiation to take place. Initiation of individuals as a process of selection allowed knowledge to be disseminated to those individuals who had been subjected to the rituals of initiation and had been deemed worthy of that knowledge by the high priests of Africa. There is an intuitive belief on the continent of Africa, west, north, east, south and center that with knowledge comes responsibility and as such not all knowledge should be made available to all and/or transmitted freely.

In 1939, scholar Sigmund Freud wrote a disturbing book entitled Moses & Monotheism¹¹ about the monumental impact of these African populations of Egypt and Nubia and how the Greeks, European culture and the entire Judeo Christian communities borrowed from African cultural, technological and spiritual concepts as he explains why the Father of a European thought i.e. Alexander the Great built his capital Alexandria not in Greece or Macedonia but in Africa, in Egypt because it was the center of academic, scientific, technological and spiritual human know how.

Almost fifty years later, in 1974, at the UNESCO Conference of Cairo, Egypt, university professors and Drs. Cheikh Anta Diop¹² and Theophile Obenga reaffirmed Dr. Freud's (1939) disturbing statements to Western academia armed with incontrovertible experiments based on nuclear physic and rooted in science. As a result of that conference miffed Western scholars began using the term Afrocentric to anyone in academia who dared defining humanity's socio cultural, political, spiritual and technological progress from the logical vantage point of humanity's chronology, as if Europe had ever been considered the beginning of civilizations when it has been in actuality the full beneficiary and stands on the shoulders of all of the African socio cultural and civilizational might and scientific contributions. Did the Greek Pythagoras really deserve to have the laws of triangles attached to his name for our children to remember when the only civilizations who demonstrated the mastery of the laws of geometry attached to triangles are the Nubians first and the Egyptians second, some 4,000 years before Pythagoras was even a concept and Freud tells us that Pythagoras spent 27 years studying in Egypt? Has anyone seen a single pyramid in Greece, in the Arabic Peninsula, in Irak, in Turkey, in Italy, in Germany, in England, in Spain, in France? Sorry I forgot…there is one in Paris in the middle of the Louvre Museum built in 1989 by a Chinese American architect by the name of I.M. Pei. It is not a pyramid. In reality, it look more like a big Native American tipi covered with glass…so you get the point…so how did the laws of triangle suddenly become attached to the Greek Pythagoras for the last 150 years in western academia? We must be honest and recognize that this is just another flagrant example of western appropriation of African science in this case, geometry and I am not even raising all the borrowing issues associated with Euclides, Thales etc…and their so called discoveries all of whom studied in Egypt for years (Freud, 1939). So today, these so called western scholars who are still trying to disconnect Egypt from Black African culture would try to make you believe that it is the populations from countries from Europe or the Middle East, those who demonstrably never built a single pyramid in their entire existence on the planet, who were the pharaohs of Egypt. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad, particularly when academia knows full well that Nubians (Nubia current Sudan located south of Egypt) are the only human group known to have built pyramids some older that those of Egypt and that Nubians are undeniably Black Africans. This shows that racism is alive and still thriving in western academia. These continuous kinds of western academic slights against Africans and people of African descent are what contribute to a general feeling of exhaustion on the continent and in the Diaspora. Another scary example of supreme and willful disinformation was that of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA and this one I witnessed in my lifetime growing up in Senegal, West Africa in 1970. For all the talks in education departments all over