Maps were also, of course, technical tools that enabled European exploration and mercantile expansion. But Africans provided more map content than they were credited with until recently. "Indigenous Mapmaking in Intertropical Africa" (Bassett 1998) offers numerous examples of how African geographical knowledge undergirded early Western understanding of the continent (see link to series and volume 2, book 3 below).
The Red Sea Kingdom of Axum (in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea) was a key trade hub from the time of the Roman Empire (with archeology indicating it supplied the empire with elephant ivory), declining in the 6th-8th centuries (Devisse and Vansina 1981:778; see link below to General history of Africa vol. 3). Trans-Saharan trade routes provided African gold to Egypt and the Middle East, the Roman Empire, and medieval Europe; domestic servants, slaves, soldiers, and concubines to North Africa; and scare but essential salt to West African empires. Vasco de Gama circumvented the Spice Trade land route when he established the Cape of Good Hope trade route in 1498.
There are many examples of African technical innovations in addition to the mapping technologies noted in Bassett above (1998). UF archeologist Peter Schmidt demonstrated that the Buhaya people of Tanzania successfully smelted carbon steel by preheating the air pumped into specialized kilns up to 2000 years ago (Avery and Schmidt 1978). Mathmatician Ron Eglash credits Africans with creating binary number systems and fractal structures: "When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very 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" (from his TED Talk: The fractals at the heart of African designs).
Teaching of the General History of Africa, a vision for the future
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Note: these advanced resources may include content unsuitable for the classroom without instructor mediation.
Carter, Gwendolen M. (focus on South African Apartheid era)
Cohen, Ronald (Kanuri oral histories collected and written by Nigerian university students)
Derscheid, J. M.: Collection of materials on Rwanda and Burundi (Belgian biologist was a conservation advocate in 1920s, conducted mountain gorilla census, created first national park in Africa)
East African Professional Hunters' Association (early 20th c. conservation in Kenya)
Fortune, George (Shona language, Zimbabwe folktales)
Jolles, Frank (Richard Ndimande's Studio Photographs) Zulu photo studio images
Manis, W.E. (Scrapbooks collected by an American rubber breeder working for Firestone Co. in Liberia, 1940-'41; includes image of Liberian men playing Mancala)
Onitsha Market Literature (pamphlet-bound books, wildly popular among the first literate generation of Igbo people in the mid-20th c.). See also Univ. of Kansas Onitsha Market Literature
Parker, Ian S. C., (Established the first independent wildlife conservation consultancy in Africa, researched elephants and international ivory trade)
Rikli, Martin (Addis Ababa and Ethiopia just prior to/during Italian colonization 1935)
Africa through a lens (UK National Archives photography)
Rock Art Archives: Ancient Geometry: Writing Systems, Art, Mathematics
Music resources
South African Music Archive Project (offers many mp3 recordings of traditional music in wide range of styles). Note that page also links to Talking Drum, a newsletter with many articles on teaching African indigenous music in elementary schools.
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