432 Centuries of Recorded Science and Technology in Black Africa

Abstract

Abstract During the 1970s and 1980s, American and European investigators discovered evidence of such African scientific achievements as the following: (1) the domestication of assorted plants in The Egyptian Nile Valley ca. 18000 BP; and domesticated cattle in the Kenyan Highlands, ca, 15000 BP. These were achieved thousands of years before plant and animal domestication in South west Asia, the hitherto presumed place where domestication first occurred; and (2) the making of Carbon steel in Tanzania, in the 1st c. BC, using techniques the discoverers called “semi-conductor technology – the growing of crystals”. These and other records of advanced scientific achievements, and at such dates, should prompt a profound revision of our understanding of the scientific knowledge developed by pre-20th century Africans before Europeans conquered and colonized and shattered African societies. They should also prompt a revision of the history of science in the world. In this article I shall present 13 exhibits drawing from the history of spectacular African achievements in science and technology. They range in time from ca. 43200 BC to 1952 AD. And they cover, geographically, Lesotho in Southern Africa; to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa; to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa; to Egypt in North Africa; and to Liberia and Nigeria in West Africa.