ABSTRACT
The spirit of the research that informs this book embodies a commitment to systematically and concisely illuminate a vast historical and socio-cultural record that is little known to the New World. Even today it remains practically unknown to generations of African descent people here and there. By balancing written history with oral tradition, this book will also identify various links between Africana peoples’ history and their unexpected connections with European history. Indeed, no people lives and evolves in a vacuum without connections to other people. As Thomas Hodgkin, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, wrote concerning Africans and Europeans in a periodical titled The Highway:
It is no doubt fl attering to our vanity to imagine that the peoples of Africa were “primitive” and “Barbarous” before the penetration of Europeans, and that it is we (i.e., Europeans) who civilised them. But it is theory that lacks historical foundation. The Empire of Ghana fl ourished in what is now French West Africa during the dark ages of Western Europe. By the fi fteen century there was a university at Timbuktu. The Ashantis of the Gold Coast (i.e., Ghana) and the Yoruba (of Nigeria) possessed highly organised and complex civilisations long before their territories were brought under British political and military control. The thesis that Africa is what Western European missionaries, traders, technicians and administrators have made it is comforting (to Western Europeans) but invalid. (cf., DeGraft-Johnson, 1954, p. ix)
Furthermore, it is diffi cult to learn to appreciate any people if you do not know about their history and culture. Dr. Edward Robinson, an African American educator, offered this important observation:
It is one of the paradoxes of history that Africa, the mother of civilisation, remained for over two thousand years the Dark Continent. To the moderns, Africa was the region where ivory was sought for Europe and slaves for America. In the time of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) as the
satirist informs us, geographers in drawing maps fi ll in the gaps with savage pictures. Where towns should have been, they placed elephants. (cf., Ben Jochannan, 1971, p. 191)
Consider also what the learned German historian, Professor Leo Frobenius, wrote about Africa:
Let there be a light in Africa-in that portion of the globe to which the stalwart Anglo-Saxon Stanley gave the name “dark” and “darkest”. Let there be light upon the people of that continent whose children we (i.e., Europeans) are accustomed to regard as types of natural servility with no recorded history. [But] the spell has been broken. The buried treasures of antiquity again revisit the sun. (cf., Ben Jochannan, 1971, p. 196)
To some extent this concept of “darkness” that has been associated with Africa is partially due to European unawareness of Africa’s rich cultural heritage. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a great deal of historical data has not been properly deciphered regarding Africa’s past, and this is so, even in contemporary scholarship. Indeed, how can any scholar or explorer, for that matter, accurately decipher a given people’s history and heritage without being educated in their language, culture, and traditions?
