subject: Current Mythology About Africa [print this page] Roland Oliver, former professor of African History at the University of London in England once commented;
When the peoples of Europe overflowed into the rest of the world betweenthe 16th and 19th centuries, the indigenous populations of most colonized lands went under. Indians in America and aborigines in Australia were completely taken and reduced to insignificance. But the Africans in Africa were the masters of their environment to be overtaken completely, nor were their culture destroyed.
Basil Davidson, was a distinguished English author who has traveled widely through the African continent. Davidson won many scholarly awards for his thoroughly mastered findings on archeology, anthropology, and excavations. Basil Davidson has this to say about Africa and its people:
For many centuries Africa and its people seemed mysterious and even perverse to the rest of the world. Generations of traders anchored their ships off the continents glittering surf line and pushed their caravans through its dry, abrasive plains. They knew and valued Africas gold and ivory, but the continent itself remained a puzzle. Where had Africans come from? Why were they so different from other people? What was the explanation for their strange customs, so unlike those of Europe?
Many answers were proposed, but most of them served only to deepen the darkness that surrounded the image of Africa. At last the Europeans resorted to an easy conclusion one that reflected their inability to judge any culture except in terms of their own. Africans, they decided, were just savages, inferior beings, and had always been so. Africans were believed to be monsters, with souls as black as their skin. It was solemnly reported that they cooked and ate each other, gave birth in litters like dogs, and sometimes did not even look like the rest of the human race. This simple minded answer to the riddle of Africa has lasted right up to modern times
On the contrary Africans have a long lively history. Africa has not been, after all, a land of unrelieved savagery and chaos. Africans created cultures and civilizations, and pursued the inner life of the spirit with a consuming passion that has produced some of the finest art known to man
the beginning of this evolution lies unthinkably far away: it appears that Africa may have been the birthplace of mankind. From the evidence of fossil skulls and bone fragments found few decades
Far from being the helpless victims of their own ignorance, Africans had actually gone far toward taming their continent long before Europeans appeared on the scene. This achievement, so essential to survival, rested upon social and cultural advances of great antiquity. Africans conquered their environment out of bitter necessity and in the face of formidable obstacles, but they did not do it by physical means alone but through spiritual values. And it is this strong spiritual values that enabled Africans to build close-knit societies without which they could have perished or obliterated by Europeans just as the Indians were obliterated in America.
African history is a record of accomplishments achieved in isolation against tremendous odds
by: Dr Chris Kanyane
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