Page 17 - Afrika Must Unite

2 AFRICA MUST UNITE
Africa can have exerted any civilizing influence over other
people is shunned or denied.
O f late, another school of thought is re-assessing the evidence
and applying more objective standards of judgem ent. Some
historians and anthropologists think that civilization dawned
contemporaneously in Africa and in China. Very much ex­
ploration for further evidence which will determine the early
history of m an in Africa remains to be done.
L. S. B. Leakey1, has this to say:
In every country that one visits and where one is drawn into
conversation about Africa, the question is regularly asked by
people who should know better: ‘But what has Africa contri­
buted to world progress? . . . not the wheel, not writing, not
mathematics, not art . . . not this, not that and not the other
thing . . .* These critics of Africa forget that men of science
today are, with few exceptions, satisfied that Africa was the
birth-place of man himself, and that for many hundreds of cen­
turies thereafter Africa was in the forefront of all world progress.

It is certain that the origins of European culture trace their
roots to the ancient civilizations of the Nile valley. Early
geographers and chroniclers speak of well organized African
states and empires on both sides of the continent. North Africa,
before the Islamic invasion inhabited by the Tuareg and
Berber people, maintained flourishing societies and centres of
trade. It was with the spread of Islam that the mass Arab drive
reached into Africa’s northern belt as well as Egypt. From the
discovery of written records in Arabic going back as far as the
ninth century, we are learning something of Africa’s past. They
tell us that Ghana was already a centralized state in A.D. 800.
This kingdom, whose centre lay some 200 miles north of the
watershed between the Senegal and Niger rivers, was one
of the earliest of West African kingdoms. Though Ghana
was seriously weakened by the Almoravid invasion of the
eleventh century, its traditions of government and empire did
not die. They reached even greater heights in its successor state
of Mali, which flourished in the fourteenth century, and which
possessed intellectual centres, such as Djenne and Timbuktu,
1 The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa (O.U.P. 1961): Lecture 1, The
Progress of M an in Africa, p. 1.