Yemi Olakitan

The sentence "Africa had no civilization before European contact" was never true. It was not even close to true. It required ignoring Egypt, which any map confirms is in Africa. It required ignoring the Kingdom of Kush, which conquered Egypt and ruled it as the 25th dynasty: Black pharaohs from what is now Sudan, ruling another African civilization the West most wanted to claim. It required ignoring Axum, which was a major world power in late antiquity, with its own script, its own coinage, its own trade networks reaching Rome and Persia and India. It required ignoring Mali and Songhai, which at their peaks controlled more territory and more gold than most contemporary European kingdoms. It required ignoring the Kingdom of Kongo, which had established a powerful and centralised state, with its own capital, political institutions, taxation system, and extensive trade networks, long before the Portuguese arrived in the late fifteenth century. It required ignoring Great Zimbabwe, which European archaeologists initially attributed to Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone, before the evidence forced an acknowledgment that Africans had built it. It required ignoring Timbuktu, with its universities and its hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, its scholars producing work on astronomy, medicine, law, and mathematics while Europe was in its medieval period. It required, in other words, an extraordinary act of sustained collective will. A decision, made and remade across generations of scholarship, to not see what was there. That decision was not innocent. It was not ignorance. It was a choice made in the service of a story. A story that needed Africa to be empty. Because a full Africa made the colonial project something other than civilization arriving where there had been none. It made it something that required a different name.