The disregard of ancient African civilizations and kingdoms in Western Anthropology, and therefore disregard of African scholars by popular science media.
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”
–Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1963, lecture at University of Sussex
I wasn’t surprised that the best-selling popular anthropology book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind seemingly left out Africa. Sure, the author Yuval Noah Harari makes a point to address anti-Blackness and anti-African sentiments within the study of humans and the framing of history. Yet, after establishing East Africa as the birthplace of sapiens and later returning to discuss the historical, heirarchal and anthropological consequences of the Transatlantic slave trade and colonization, the continent, especially the land and culture sub-Saharan, fades into blackness. Harari describes human developments through patterns in an astonishing way, weaving in tales, data, and narrative. He hooks the reader. Pulling us through a hefty volume of history framed in his thoughts. He travels across the globe and across time, linking puzzle pieces through the epochs and athwart oceans, protracting motifs existent throughout human history. Nonetheless, besides brief mentions here and there, the least puzzle pieces are connected in Africa, leaving a glaring hole in its history succeeding the evolution of “wise-man” and prior to European and Western interception.
When Harari discusses the emergence of commerce and the global economy, the empires of Africa outside of those northernmost are absent. When he discusses war, those kingdoms don’t appear. When he dedicates the majority of a chapter to nuanced outcomes of imperialism, treading on positives, and it’s apparent natural connection with human culture, the ancient empires of Africa barely get a line of text. They are invisible in the realm of technological advancements, in the patterns of fictions, mythology, religion, and customs, and glossed over in pursuit of brevity. The book is described as “spy satellite view” of humankind, but what does that mean when this treatment is given to civilizations that have been immensely studied through both an anthropological and historical perspective such as the Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian empires, and an even more zoomed out version is gifted to those which have been in large part, abandoned by popular media in the discipline? What does it mean to do so when postcolonial Africa is rarely spotlighted in scientific academia? When, to quote an essay by Francis B. Nyamnjoh, “African anthropologists seeking recognition find themselves contested or dismissed by fellow anthropologists for doing “native”, “self” or “insider” anthropology, and are sometimes accused of perpetuating colonial epistemologies.”
Put well by writer OluTimehin Adegbeye, in her review of Sapiens, “This is where the difference between erasure and invisibility becomes decidedly irrelevant: they both result in the same cognitive obscurity.”
The Kingdom of Aksum, in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, was one the first empires to adopt Christianity with a religious legacy that still evades today, an anecdote which may have been tactful in illustrating the point of fictions that bond humans together with deep traditions that transcend centuries. The Kingdom of Aksum lasted from roughly from the third or fourth century A.D. to the seventh or eight. And yet, the kingdom’s bequest is the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a religion that 43.1% of Ethipoians follow today.
In terms of global economies, Great Zimbabwe leaves vast evidence of such. In sub-Saharan Africa, an imposing assemblage of stacked boulders towers over pastures of green. They once served as defensive stone towers carved from granite blocks. While the donjon has been a topic of myth, once perceived to be the home of Biblical Queen Sheba, historical scholars have evidence that the rock citadel was the capital city of an indigenous empire. Between the 13th and 15th century, this empire thrived, ruling over land which is now much of modern Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Mozambique. A trade route connected the region’s gold field with the Indian Ocean coast, and there is evidence of a robust richness in cattle and precious metals, exotics that were also traded. Further, within the stony ruins, artifacts of Chinese pottery, European textiles, and Arabian glass have been uncovered.
To highlight these examples is not to place a crown of importance or value on them over other historical and cultural anecdotes utilized in the book. Rather, we must question why examples like these are so often overlooked. In the book, the author often places a separation between his work and colonialism, investigating the phenomena like an omnipresent scientist looking back on the history of sapiens. This is useful and successful in many regards, chiefly in luring out and analyzing transgenerational patterns. Yet, when so much of Africa’s ancient ruins are left unpreserved due to colonial destruction much closer to our current history than ancient, the modern consequences of exploitation cannot be separated from anthropology and ad rem media.
Behind the 16,000 kilometer long walls of ancient Benin, sat a complex mathematical system of the ancient world, a system that, as pointed out by OluTimehin Adegbeye, would have been a valuable inclusion in the section of the book that discusses the relationship between data, math and sapien history. Called “fractal design,” this system was used for city planning and deliantion, employing careful rules of symmetry, proportionality, and repetition. To quote Ethomathematician, Ron Eglash, “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”
Benin is a lost city. Not because of wars of the time or invasion, like the cause of many other ancient ruins. The city fell in the 15th century. While the decline was provoked by internal conflicts catalyzed by the European slave trade at the borders of the Benin Empire, the city was later looted, burned down and razed by British troops in 1890. In the grand scheme of human history, this was not that long ago. Similar fates are endured by other African ruins, thus it brings to question, what is it to disinclude rather recently destroyed history? Especially when these stories can be easily studied by science communicators by researching the work of and talking with African anthropologists, historians, and scientists of other disciplines.
In going through the references Harari uses for Sapiens—140 in total—merely one is an African scholar. In one science communication class early in my undergraduate career, we were challenged with balancing both the genders and races of our references and sources, in an effort to push back on how little minority scientists are footnoted in popular science media. Their work is engaged with less, referenced less, and read less. When popular science media such as Sapiens gives less space to African history than others, it succumbs to the goal of colonialism: forgottenness. And it disregards the work of African scholars and scientists, deeming them as forgotten.