Season 3 Episode 19, “Africa in Early World History “ - a podcast by Stanford Green aka. Cee Bee

It his episode Ceebee is reading an article written by John Henri Clarke.

THE distinguished Afro-American poet Countee Cullen began his I famous poem "Heritage" with the question: "What is Africa to me?" In order to understand Africa and its place in world history, we must extend the question by asking, "What is Africa to the Africans and what is Africa to the world?" There is a need to locate Africa and its people on the map of human geography.

Our own great historian W.E.B. DuBois tells us: "Always Africa is giving m something new. . . . On its Black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, and grew so mighty that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilder- ness."

Dr. DuBois tells us further that "Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of Africa. It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world. In Africa the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of the last gasp of Byzantium, and it was again through Africa that Islam came to play its great role of conqueror and civilizer."

It is generally conceded in most scholarly circles that mankind orig- inated in Africa; this makes the African man the father and the African woman the mother of mankind. This is where we began our assessment of the role of Africa and its people in world history.

Early men in Africa became geniuses at surviving under harsh circumstances. Present-day archaeologist have dug up and preserved the evidence of their achievement. They made hooks to catch fish, spears to hunt with, stone knives to cut with, the bolo with which to catch birds and animals, he blow-gun, the hammer and the stone axe. In his pamphlet "The African Contribution," the writer John W. Weatherwax gives us this additional evidence: African use of power. Africans gave mankind the first machine; it was the fire stick. It is the making of tools that sets man apart from, and, in a sense, above, all living creatures. Africans started mankind along the tool-making path. Canoes made it possible for man to travel farther and farther away from his original home. They began to explore the many rivers in Africa like the Nile, the Congo and the Niger. It was in this way that the early peopling of Africa started and organized soci- eties began. At some time, years later, Africans driven by curiosity or some force of nature began to leave Africa in large numbers. They be- came the most widely dispersed of all people. Evidence of their pres- ence, at some time in history, has been found in nearly every part of the world. Africa was already old when what we now call Europe was born. The Ghanaian historian Joseph B. Danquah called attention to this fact in his introduction to the book United West Africa (or Africa) at the Bar of the Family of Nations by Ladipo Salanke ( 1927 ) when he said: "By the time Alexander the Great was sweeping the civilized world with conquest after conquest from Chaeronia to Gaza, from Babylon to Cabul; by the time this first of the Aryan conquerors was learning the rudiments of war and government at the feet of philosophic Aristotle; and by the time Athens was laying down the foundations of modern European civilization, the earliest and greatest Ethiopian culture had already flourished and dominated the civilized world for over four and a half centuries.

Drawing by E.Harper Johnson of Piankhy the Great, King.

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