ABSTRACT

It is a paradox that in the fifteenth century, when Europe was about to embark on its sea voyages of explorations and conquest, Africans, who were far from being backward would be chained and shipped to the New World as slaves. According to historians Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage, “[i]n pre-historic times-at least through all the long millennia of the Paleolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’—Africa was not even relatively backward: it was in the lead” (Oliver and Fage 14). These historians contend that until the late nineteenth century African peoples were organized into states and communities powerful enough to deter invaders and migrants from overseas. They state that “[t]he real reason why the Europeans did not go inland and seize the gold mines of West Africa or Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), for example, was that the Africans there were already well enough organized to exploit these resources themselves. It was in large measure the progress already made by the Africans in earlier centuries that enabled them to resist the modern age for so long” (Oliver and Fage 14). Michael Craton in his Sinews of Empire notes that medieval European traders and commentators, hesitant to concede that African kingdoms were powerful and sophisticated enough to deter intruders from penetrating into West Africa, often cited geographical and climatic reasons (Craton 15). In her recent book Race in North America, Audrey Smedley points out that during the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers (who knew more about the geography of the world than their European counterparts) left “excellent descriptions of great states, from the empire of Mali in West Africa to those of India and China”

(Smedley 43). Among these Muslim travelers was Al-Idrisi, geographer and cartographer of the early twelfth century, one of the first geographers to reveal that the world was round (Smedley 43).