5 More Things You Might Not Know About Pre-Colonial Africa

To celebrate the success of Black Panther, here are more things you probably don't know about pre-colonial Africa.


In its second weekend, Black Panther raced past $700m in global box office sales, prompting Disney to donate $1m to the Boys and Girls Club of America to establish STEM Centres of Innovation in “underserved areas” like Oakland, Harlem and Atlanta.

While the donation is a good start, there’s still plenty of work needed to break down the long-held biases in the tech industry, with the startling lack of diversity across STEM industries obvious at a glance. According to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), African-Americans make up just 7.4% of the tech workforce and that figure plummets to just 2% when you look solely at executive positions.

This lack of representation is just one reason Black Panther’s heavy focus on Wakanda’s technological advancement is so encouraging for young black people. Shuri’s tech wizardly is especially important, offering an alternative to the real world where black women are basically invisible in the tech industry –  making up just 3% of the workforce.

With that lack of representation in mind, here are five more things you might not know about pre-colonial Africa:

6. Pre-Colonial Africans Were Among the Greatest Thinkers on Earth

The idea of a dark and savage Africa that required Europeans to drag it out of the Stone Age was popularised across the Empire by writers like G.A. Henty, Rudyard Kipling and H Rider Haggard.

This, of course, was nonsense.

While we’ve always been happy to credit figures like Pythagoras, Aristotle and Picasso as great thinkers, they all benefitted hugely from African innovation. Scholars actually believed they’d reached the height of mathematical thinking until they discovered fractal geometry across Africa. Likewise, the binary system has its roots as in ancient Africa.

Ancient Africans were also among the first civilisations to look up and study the skies. As far back as the 15^th-century, they had an understanding that wasn’t present in Europe for centuries. In Sahara, Michael Palin described old manuscripts owned by the imam of Timbuktu as:

“It’s convincing evidence that the scholars of Timbuktu knew a lot more than their counterparts in Europe. In the fifteenth century in Timbuktu, the mathematicians knew about the rotation of the planets, knew about the details of the eclipse, they knew things which we had to wait for 150 almost 200 years to know in Europe when Galileo and Copernicus came up with these same calculations.”

While indigenous cultures are often mocked for their herbal remedies and traditional medicines, this scepticism is a modern construct. Westerners were glad to adopt and appropriate many of these techniques, with small-pox inoculations only introduced in the West because of a slave named Onesimus.

African’s helped pioneer caesarean sections, which they mastered as early as the 18^th century, although it looked a little different.

Banana wine was used as an anaesthetic, reeds were used to perform episiotomies and bleeding was stopped by cauterising with hot irons. The patient was stitched up with iron spikes, root paste applied, and bark used to bandage the wound – with the “stitches” ready to be removed after just six days.

7. They Built Incredible Things

Ancient Africans’ incredibly advanced thinking helped them build impossible structures and you don’t need to look any further than Egypt for evidence of this. Not only are the Pyramids of Giza immense, but the correlation with the stars is too perfect to be accidental.

Of course, there are theories that ancient aliens built the pyramids, but if you’d rather believe in extra-terrestrials than African excellence, it might be time to reflect on your biases.

Throughout Africa, you’ll find plenty more evidence of breath-taking structures, like the city of Benin.  Located in what is now southern Nigeria, the city originally known as Edo dates back to the 11^th century and was a marvel to behold. It was described in 1691 by Lourenco Pinto, the captain of a Portuguese ship, thusly:

“Great Benin, where the King resides, is larger than Lisbon … The houses are large, especially that of the king which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no door to their houses.”

A reminder that at this time London was considered to be a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and thriving black markets.” 

The Walls of Benin were the real wonder though, so large in scale they were often compared to the Great Wall of China and estimated to be four times as long at one point. Sadly, there is nothing left of Edo after British Forces looted it and burnt the entire city to the ground in 1897.

8. They Travelled to America Before Columbus

Despite the common myth that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America (apparently the indigenous people hadn’t realised it was there), explorers from Mali actually crossed the Atlantic centuries earlier.

Two large Malian maritime expeditions, the second speculated to be as large as 2000 ships, were sent to explore what lay to the west of Africa in 1311 AD – as noted by Egyptian scholar Ibn Fadl Al-Umari in a book published sometime around 1342.

It’s possible some Africans made that trip even earlier, with the female ruler of the Nigerian city of Ile-Ife ordering that it be paved with decorations originating in America, from as far back as 1000 AD.

9. Their Understanding of Gender was Progressive, Even by Modern Standards

One of the reasons Black Panther was such a breath of fresh air, was it put women of colour in starring roles. Not only were these characters three-dimensional and diverse, they were allowed to drive the narrative.  

This reflects pre-colonial Africa, where from the very inception of human history women were actively involved in pottery making, body art, traditional medicines, science, technology and cloth making. They were centuries, if not millennia, ahead of their western counterparts and played a central role in governance, politics, family issues and community affairs.

Famous queens like Nefertiti, Cleopatra and Makeda are well known historical figures, with many other women reigning, leading armies and fighting European invasions. Perhaps the most famous example of warrior women was the Dahomey Amazons, who protected what is now Benin with a ferocity and skill renowned across Africa.

One of the world’s greatest ever explorers, Ibn Battuta, left Morocco at 21 to wander some 75000 miles across Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. He noted that the social position, political and economic status of women in pre-colonial Africa was superior to many other cultures and was impressed by the liberty they enjoyed.

Pre-colonial Africa didn’t just defy Western notions of gender-roles, many societies also showed an understanding and acceptance of gender existing on a spectrum, rather than as a binary. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe), shines a light on this diversity and is well worth reading if the subject interests you.  

10. They Were Also Accepting of Sexuality Being Fluid

Despite some African leaders proclaiming homosexuality is “un-African” as they ushered in strict laws against homosexuality, nothing could be further from the truth. Again, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands reveals evidence of a diverse range of relationships proving ancient Africa was a hotbed of LBGTQ+ activity.

In what is now Zimbabwe, there are cave paintings that are over 2000 years old and depict men having anal sex with other men – an act described by anthropologists as “common enough to be socially acceptable”.

The notion of Europeans introducing homosexuality to Africa seems even more laughable considering many traditional African languages have ancient words for non-binary genders and same-sex relations, including:

• ·         “Koetsire” to describe men considered sexually receptive to other men (Khoikhoi people of South Africa, 18^th century)
• ·         “Soregus” was used for a friendship which involved same-sex masturbation (Khoikhoi people of South Africa, 18^th century)
• ·         "Mudoko Dako" was used for effeminate men who were treated as women (Langi people of northern Uganda, 18^th century)

Early accounts from colonising forces also act as proof of same-sex relationships, regularly noting their “unnatural damnation”. Andrew Battell encountered the Imbangala of Angola in the 1590s, declaring that “They are beastly in their living, for they have men in women's apparel, whom they keep among their wives."

As colonising forces from across Europe made themselves at home in Africa, they bought their laws and standards of behaviour with them. British colonial law was quickly spread across the globe, enforcing Christianity and traditional gender-norms on Africans – whilst outlawing sodomy.

The root of Africa’s new wave of anti-LBGT+ laws can be traced back to this moment in history and are just one horrifying legacy of British colonial rule.

At the same time as British colonisers were importing these laws, they were also exporting anti-African bias, painting indigenous Africans as savage, uncultured and simple people – completely necessary to “justify” colonisation, the slave trade and centuries of looting.

Sadly, this bleeds through to modern views of Africa and much of today’s racism, whilst less overt, is left over from this period.

We aren’t taught the extent of Africa’s incredible history because it would mean having to accept and own up to the damage caused by British rule. After all, slavery is much more palatable when you believe it helped civilise a continent, and the myth of European excellence is easier to sell when you ignore how much of it was stolen.