When most people think of ancient history, their mind usualy goes to the Romans or the Hebrews of biblical scripture but the Ancient West African Tichitt Civilization of Mauritania and Mali is older than both the Romans and the Hebrews. Beginning 2200 BCE
"Southern Mauritania have revealed a wealth of rather spectacular stone masonry villages which were occupied by prehistoric cultivators.... It is argued that the inhabitants of these villages were Negro and very probably Soninke"
- Professor Patrick J. Munson
"Striking resemblances between the prehistoric ceramics and the present Soninke pottery manufacture, Munson concluded that the present-day Soninke are descendents of early prehistoric inhabitants of the Dhar Tichitt region"
- Professor Augustin F.C. Holl
"Architecturally, the villages of Dhar Tichitt resemble those of the modern northern Mande (Soninke), who live in the savanna 300-400 miles to the south"
- Dr. Susan J. Herlin
"Racially, the Sahara affiliates with the Sudan. It had an indigenous Negroid population at the time of the Arab invasions"
- Anthropologist George Peter Murdock
"The archeological discovery of a tall Negroid skeleton 250 miles north of Timbuktu indicates that the inhabitants had not undergone ethnic change since Paleolithic times"
- Anthropologist George Peter Murdock
"Specific oral traditions from Jenne that the earliest agriculturalists (Nono) in the Upper Delta came from Bassikounou ("gateway" from the Aoukar plains fronting Dhar Tichitt and Dhar Oualata to the Middle Niger) via Mema."
- Anthropologist Roderick J. McIntosh
"MacDonald thus believes the principle ancestral populations of modern West Africans were living in North Africa at the end of the Pleistocene...... populations were not Afro-Asiatic speakers but rather Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan speakers"
- Dr. Hamdi Abbas Ahmed Abd-El-Moneim
"The civilisation of Tichitt which comes from the Central Sahara at ca. 4000 bp (and is linked by oral tradition and archaeology to the subsequent Mande
peoples of West Africa)."
- Dr. Hamdi Abbas Ahmed Abd-El-Moneim
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Ancient Nigerians in Nsukka started smelting iron some time between 2631 - 2458 BCE, long before the arrival of Nok people
The dufuna canoe, Nok canoe art and Atlantic seashell terracotta may be evidence of Nok long distance trade with iron metallurgists, down the Niger River
"Some very early iron dates include 1895–1370 BCE at Tchire Ouma 147 in the Termit Massif region of Niger; 2631–2458 BCE at Lejja in Nsukka region, Nigeria"
- Foreman Bandama
"The beginning of iron production sometime between 750 and 550 BC"
- Louis Champion
"In Taruga he recovered terracotta fragments in context with iron-smelting furnaces. Radiocarbon measurements dated the site to the mid-first millennium BC"
- Dr. Nicole Rupp
Oral Tradition and Archeological Evidence For the Mande origin of the Ancient Tichitt Civilization
(THREAD)
"During this final phase the Dhar Tichitt-Walata counts 90 villages built...before settling again and forming the kingdom of Ghana"
- Professor Augustin Holl
"Neolithic sites there are attributed by the present nomadic population of the country to the Gangara, who were probably ancestors of the Soninke. Indeed, Azer, a Soninke dialect, is still spoken in Walata, Nema, Tichitt, and even in Shingit"
- Professor George E Brooks
"At some point before the coming of
Islam, however, the arrival of another discrete people from the north is attested by the oral traditions. These people are termed the "Nono" in the Tarikh as Sudan (Es-Sadi, AD 1650) and in numerous Mande oral tradition"
In 1595 an anonymous Spaniard living in Morocco wrote about how the Kanem empire acquired guns from Turkish soldiers. He mentions that this empire boarders a Kingdom of Black Christians converted by the Portuguese, referring to the Kongo.
Quote from: "Relation de la Jornada que El Rey Marruecos he hecho a la conquista del reyno de Gago" by an anonymous Spaniard, 1595
We can only imagine how differently history would've been recorded had the kingdoms of Kongo and Angola sought out a alliance with Kanem or at least created trade relationships with them.
Ruth B. Fisher, a British missionary wrote about the pre colonial African science and surgery of Uganda in 1911 :
"Vaccination for small-pox was known long before European influence reached them, as people were inoculated with the lymph taken from the arm of an affected person"
"knowledge of surgery....Possessing no surgical implements, they operated clumsily but often successfully with their ordinary septic belt knives"
- Twilight tales of the Black Baganda, Ruth B. Fisher, 1911
"In cases of comminuted fractures, which are frequent (as the people live in such close contact with wild animals), the custom has been to cut out the shattered pieces of bone and insert a piece freshly taken from an ox or goat, then bind the limb up"
- Ruth B. Fisher, 1911
"If there had not been an Nkrumah and his followers in Ghana, Ghana would still be a British colony"
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
"Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first, that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it"
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
"And if Nkrumah and the people of the Gold Coast had not stood up persistently, revolting against the system, it would still be a colony of the British Empire
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Look at how narratives about Africa are purposely angled in a certain way to down play the oppression of African people, there were traitors among the Jews in Nazi Germany and traitors among Native American tribes and no one would dare minimalize their experiences.
Purposely misleading narratives about the trans Atlantic slave trade conveniently ignore African Kingdoms like the Nri of Nigeria that never sold slaves or King Amador who lead a Maroon rebellion on the African island of São Tomé & Príncipe against the Portuguese in 1595.
These narratives also ignore people like the African queen of the Kongo Dona Beatriz, who died trying to end slavery and unify Central Africa in the 18th century.