Page 73 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 26

Art & Culture
a complete absence of a rul-
ing class. There is no palace,
no signs of upper class resi-
dences, no statues or monu-
ments have ever been found
within the vast city wall.
“…we have no hard evi-
dence of a state-like, top-
down, elite-driven political
engine powering this kind of
urbanism through time. We
find no indications of kings,
citadels, palaces, or, indeed,
any obvious elites. The polit-
ical and economic organiza-
tion of the late first millenni- parts of Africa and spread
um BCE and later urbanism
in the Middle Niger seems
heterarchical . That is, one
identifies separate, if some-
times overlapping, domains
of authority, all functioning
in an interactive field, not a
vertical hierarchy of kings
and subjects and unidirec-
tional flows of information.”
( Ibid )
As in the case of Great
Zimbabwe, the very well
preserved Medieval city in
Zimbabwe, academia has
long denied the indigenous
population the ancestral
connection. It has long been
claimed that sea-faring
Phoenicians constructed
Great Zimbabwe and not
the indigenous people who
once were the gold-trading
Monomatopan Empire that
stretched from Mozambique
on the Indian Ocean to in-
land Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Image: courtesy of wikicom-
mons. figure found at Djen-
né-Djenno, still being held
by De Young Museum, san
Francisco
In the case of Djenné-Djen-
no it was long claimed that
the Arab world civilized
peaceful Islam, never the
reverse and that the culture
of Niger and Mali could only
have produced architecture
as exquisite as the mosque
of Djenne after the arrival of
Arabs. It is since proven that
this region was the bread-
basket of the Sahel and the
source of the civilized cul-
ture long before the arrival
of Arab traders.
image: courtesy of wikicommons. figure found at Djenné-Djenno,
still being held by De Young Museum, san Francisco
ISSUE 26 | APRIL 2024 73