Page 78 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 13

MY AFRIKA

Africa, Queen Nzinga of Angola, city of Kano dates back to the
Queen Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana, fifteenth century. Begun by Muham-
Queen Amina of Nigeria. mad Rumfa (ruled 1463-99) it has
We are talking here about Empires, gradually evolved over generations
Kingdoms, Queendoms, Kings, The beautiful city of Loango was destroyed by into a very imposing complex. A co-
emperors, the richest man in the European fortune hunters, pseudo-missionar- lonial report of the city from 1902,
history of humanity in Africa. ies and other kinds of free-booters described it as “a network of build-
ings covering an area of 33 acres
Were these Kings and Queens column containing prime numbers and surrounded by a wall 20 to 30
sleeping on banana trees in between 10 and 20, and the right feet high outside and 15 feet inside .
the bushes? Were they dressed column containing both added and . . in itself no mean citadel”.
with tree leaves, with no subtracted numbers.” Source: Ta A sixteenth century traveller visited
shoes? Neter Foundation. It is on view in the central African civilisation of
If they were not sleeping in trees, a museum in Belgium. – Excerpt Kanem-Borno and commented that
covered with leaves, where are the from “The Invisible Empire” by PD the emperor’s cavalry had golden
remainder of their palaces, their art Lawton “stirrups, spurs, bits and buckles.”
work? Even the ruler’s dogs had “chains of
“On the subject of cloth, Kongo- the finest gold”.
In the mid-nineteenth century, lese textiles were also distinguished.
William Clarke, an English visitor to Various European writers of the One of the government positions
Nigeria, remarked that: “As good an sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in mediaeval Kanem-Borno was
article of cloth can be woven by the Yoruba wrote of the delicate crafts of the Astronomer Royal.
weavers as by any people . . . in durability, peoples living in eastern Kongo and Ngazargamu, the capital city of Ka-
their cloths far excel the prints and home- adjacent regions who manufactured nem-Borno, became one of the larg-
spuns of Manchester.” damasks, sarcenets, satins, taffeta, est cities in the seventeenth century
The recently discovered 9th century cloth of tissue and velvet. Professor world. By 1658 AD, the metropolis,
Nigerian city of Eredo was found DeGraft-Johnson made the curious according to an architectural scholar
to be surrounded by a wall that was observation that: “Their brocades, both housed “about quarter of a million
100 miles long and seventy feet high high and low, were far more valuable than people”. It had 660 streets. Many
in places. The internal area was a the Italian.” were wide and unbending, reflective
staggering 400 square miles.” Robin of town planning.
Walter On Kongolese metallurgy of the
Middle Ages, one modern scholar The Nigerian city of Surame
Loango City in the Congo/Angola wrote that: “There is no doubting . . flourished in the sixteenth century.
area is depicted in another drawing . the existence of an expert met- Even in ruin it was an impressive
from the mid 1600`s. Yet again, a allurgical art in the ancient Kongo sight, built on a horizontal vertical
vast planned city of linear layout, . . . The Bakongo were aware of grid. A modern scholar describes
stretching across several miles and the toxicity of lead vapours. They it thus: “The walls of Surame are
entirely surrounded by city walls, devised preventative and curative about 10 miles in circumference
bustling with trade. The king`s methods, both pharmacological and include many large bastions or
complex alone was a mile and a (massive doses of pawpaw and palm walled suburbs running out at right
half enclosure with courtyards and oil) and mechanical (exerting of angles to the main wall. The large
gardens. The people of Loango had pressure to free the digestive tract), compound at Kanta is still visible
used maths not just for arithmetic for combating lead poisoning.” in the centre, with ruins of many
purposes but for astrological calcu- buildings, one of which is said to
lations. They used advanced maths, In Nigeria, the royal palace in the have been two-storied. The striking
linear algebra. The Ishango Bone feature of the walls and whole ruins
from the Congo is a calculator that is the extensive use of stone and
is 25 000 years old. “The so-called tsokuwa (laterite gravel) or very hard
Ishango bone`s inscriptions consist red building mud, evidently brought
of two columns of odd numbers from a distance. There is a big
that add up to 60,with the left mound of this near the north gate
about 8 feet in height. The walls

78 | we tell the true afrikan story City of Kanem-Borno known as Ngazargamu