What do great civilizations have in common?
"What common attributes do great civilizations share? They typically possess access to both local and global markets, the capacity to attract a diverse population eager to settle for the purposes of commerce and education, accepting influence and reflecting influence, I will use African examples, but this is true the world over.
There was a saying "To cure mange for a camel, use bitumen; to cure poverty, go to the Sudan." this was said at the time of the Wagadu or Ghana empire when great trading trains were crisscrossing the Sahara, both the Wagdau and Gao were mentioned as the richest kingdoms in the world and their Kings the most wealthiest beyond compare, this was hundreds of yrs before the now famous Mansa Musa of Mali, it’s ultimate successor.
These conceptions do not need to extend outside the continent although the more extensive the better, example.
These connections between West and West-Central Africa to the world are anathema to historical traditions in which ‘Africa” s isolation from the rest of the world, before contact began with Europeans, is assumed. But they emerge from a number of factors. As the historian Jan Vansina showed, similar techniques in wood-carving found from Yorùbá regions as far south as Loango suggest shared techniques and exchanges. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century carvings from the Kuba kingdoms depict the playing of warri, a game found widely further north in West Africa, as well as in East Africa.
Other evidence suggests that these exchanges then interconnected with the long-distance routes linked to the Sahara – and these patterns may in turn have influenced how the Kongolese reacted when the Portuguese first arrived in the 1480s.
Kongo’s connection to long-distance trade routes is the only logical explanation for how sugarcane – long cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Arab worlds – grew in Kongo before the Portuguese arrival.
Long-distance trade can also help to explain the use of a shell currency in Kongo (the nzimbu), for the use of the nzimbu surely was not unrelated to the experience of the use of the cowrie-shell currency in West Africa and the Sahel; the Kalahari regions to the south were connected to the Indian Ocean trade by perhaps the ninth or tenth century, and cowries may have been involved in this trade – which offered a route for this influence to spread to Kongo addition, there seems to have been an important spiritual dimension that connected the forest Kingdom of Kongo with that of Benin to the north, for it is noteworthy that both Edo and Kongo peoples (and, indeed, peoples of the Kingdom of Ndongo in northern Angola) used diamond-shaped crosses as a religious symbol prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. In Kongo, the ‘cosmogram’ connected the worlds of the living and the dead, and was used widely on textiles and bowls used for daily life, as well as later in Christian art.
The use of the cross as a religious symbol among the Edo also suggests some cultural and perhaps commercial connection between Edo and Kongo peoples, as does the shared use of shell currencies, similar wood-carving techniques and the presence of sugarcane in Kongo, since all had likewise existed in Benin prior to the Portuguese arrival.
Yet how did these connections develop, in a region famous for its thick forests and swamps? As we have seen in other parts of the continent, rivers and seaways were roads. Many peoples along the coasts of West-Central Africa were good boat-builders, with the Vili of Loango remarked upon as such by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. There were fishing groups to be found everywhere, and their skill in making seagoing ships is shown by the presence of Bubi peoples on the Island of Bioko by the time the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century.
But The idea that Europeans ‘brought’ seafaring to Africa must also, therefore, be challenged. Thus, it was most likely through African navigators that related religious and aesthetic practices grew up; and when the manikongo Afonso I wrote in 1526 of a number of traders from Benin resident in the Kongolese port of Mpinda, it is possible that they found their way there in local embarkations rather than through Portuguese networks.
The Kongo ‘cosmogram’ Kongo may not, therefore, have been as isolated from other parts of West Africa as has hitherto been supposed.
From the book A Fist Full Of Shells, By Toby Green
