Sudan, Africa's most misunderstood country
bbc.com
bbc.com
I was deeply disturbed to understand that concepts that were deeply engraved in me as Africa as a "terra nulla", without history, without writing systems or even buildings, were huge lies. Sudan, Ethiopia and Erythrea have a rich history which goes thousands years back linking Egypt, the middle east to India. Later it was a milestone on the road from the Roman empire to India. Most of what we call as Egyptian history is in fact a mix of Lybian, Assyrian, Egyptian and Nubian (Sudanese) history. One thing that is not mentioned is that Sudan and Ethiopia have their own writing system [0].
I suggest also to have a look at Jos Plateau (Nigeria) prehistory which goes back hundred of thousand years. Jos Plateau is also probably one of the areas at the origin of the great Bantu migration. And how those people mastered Iron metallurgy and also to the rice invention in the mega lake Chad area where was found the most ancient boat in the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroitic_alphabet
(edited)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axum
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashanti_Empire
[3]http://richard-hooker.com/sites/worldcultures/CIVAFRCA/SWAHI...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songhai_Empire
The Mali Empire was so wealthy that Musa I's pilgrimage to Mecca destabilized the gold market of the eastern Mediterranean.
Not so large, but noteworthy for the admiration Europeans showed for Benin City / Edo, and for its centuries of history of trading extensively with Europe (and even employing European mercenaries to assist in attacks on surrounding states). E.g. a Dutch account from the 17th century (from the Wikipedia link):
> The king's palace or court is a square, and is as large as the town of Haarlem and entirely surrounded by a special wall, like that which encircles the town. It is divided into many magnificent palaces, houses, and apartments of the courtiers, and comprises beautiful and long square galleries, about as large as the Exchange at Amsterdam, but one larger than another, resting on wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles...
The "special wall" was the Benin Earthworks[1]:
> They extend for some 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometres) in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They cover 2,510 sq. miles (6,500 square kilometres) and were all dug by the Edo people. In all, they are four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet.[3]
... and it was destroyed by the British [2] as they conquered, burned and looted the city.
Unfortunately, the programmes are not available on iPlayer (the BBC's online TV and radio catch-up service, which isn't available to anyone outside the UK). But do a search on YouTube and you'll find all eight episodes.
Here is a link to the BBC site that lists each episode
I tend to only focus on E Africa when reading (since I live in Uganda), but Richard Reid's writings are the best for understanding the region's history.
And yet before my wife and I started homeschooling the children, their understanding of Africa was basically a ginormous jungle with some backwards cities along the coasts that existed by hunting animals to extinction and selling their body parts to foreigners.
It is really depressing. I'd love to see at least a semester of 'history' for each of the 7 continents.
I'm graduating next year in Canada which has a relatively short history and yet in history we didn't have much free time to plug other topics.
Imagine doing this in a country with richer history (i.e. any European country)
In my school system, we taught history from 4th grade onwards as state history, world history, US history (for 2 years), civics, skip (•), world history, US history, and finally US government. World history usually hits Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Crusades, Reformation, Renaissance, Age of Discovery, maybe ancient China and India. I'm also pretty sure we somehow got a tiny bit of Mesoamerica squashed in there (although it was little more than "here's Olmecs and Maya and Aztecs, and there was this thing called Inca in the Andes"). You'll notice that everything after the founding of the US is pretty much ignored in world history, so you'll learn that (barring electives) mostly when you talk about it in the context of US history. Even though I often complain that "world" history usually just means European history, you'll also notice that an awful lot of European history is skipped. No discussion of major political events like the War of Spanish Succession, the Thirty Years' War, or the Spanish Reconquista (except as maybe a throwaway like "Spain was recently united and reconquered from the Muslims when Christopher Columbus came to court...").
Given the problems with history already, I don't think there is much hope for being able to give African history any decent coverage. Quite frankly, history classes are mostly geared towards nationalism (hopefully more about positive national pride and not about jingoism and ideas of national superiority) and focusing on foundations of Western thought, neither of which really benefit from learning about Africa. That said, it's probably worth expanding the unit on colonization to include brief histories of the colonized polities prior to colonization. For example, touch on Timbuktu's and Djenné's roles as major centers of Islamic learning in the Early Modern. A full picture of Africa is probably impossible to impart, but effort should be taken to avoid thinking of it only as lands just waiting to be colonized by Europeans.
• I went to a magnet school which had slightly different scheduling than other schools in the county. I think it's supposed to be normally two years of world history, but the course in 9th grade was replaced with a technology course and you'd be expected to grab another credit of history via some elective... which is how I got a course that was history of art, architecture, and technology.
Unfortunately, Africa gets a double-shafting here. During the main phases of European world exploration, Africa had the misfortune to be mostly explored in the era of greatest racism, when Africans were usually held with little more than contempt. In contrast, the racism that held during the exploration of the Americas mostly manifested in the idea of the "noble savage" which generally included some mild appreciation for native culture (particularly more distant).
Since I found the extreme Eurocentrism of "world history" in school to be distasteful, most of my subsequent fascination of history has inclined to the Americas, and sometimes Africa, instead. The Bantu migration is one of the two impressive preliterate migrations we know (the other one being Austronesian colonization of the Pacific and Madagascar).
Unfortunately, the reassessment of history, particularly in popular accounts, takes a long time. It's only been a few decades since historians started realizing that earlier historians were often racist egoists who didn't mind making stuff up to suit their agendas. Popular accounts still get the Medieval era wrong, despite it being most of what's shoved down students' faces (e.g., witch hunts didn't really start up until the Renaissance, and people were generally obsessed with cleanliness in the Middle Ages).
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."
Surely blocking UK citizens like me from seeing the page leaves both the BBC and me strictly worse off vs letting me browse the page and see the same adverts as international viewers?
> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.
Ridiculous.
A "license" is a permit from the government to do or use something, and carries the implication that it's something that can be denied.
I know it 100% functions as a tax and not in any sense as a license. And the idea of requiring government permission to have a TV carries less weight in the internet age than it would have in the past. But the wording alone still makes my blood boil. It sounds like something you'd find in North Korea.
That said I don't have a TV License anyway since I have no requirement for one, the few bits of TV I do watch are handily covered by Netflix.
Broadcast TV is horrible the few times I watch it when I'm at the GF's, after 4 years without it you forget just how bad.
Ironically I consume vastly more content from the BBC via their radio content (BBC Radio 4 is heroin) which is all free without a license anyway.
You wish. Taxes are mostly proportional to the payer's income, or wealth, or to the value of some owned good. Instead, so called "tv licenses" are fixed, such that the poorest citizen, owner of a 10inch tv found in the trash bin, is bound to pay as much as the richest taxpayer, with his multi wall-sized home cinema devices.
In this respect it works exactly as the annual subscription to a TV service (it's actually called "subscription" in some countries) and it's clearly a remnant of the times when TVs were rare, expensive objects that were in themselves a proof of the wealth of their owners.
We have a similar bit of bullshit in British Columbia, where government health insurance is paid through premiums, administered outside of the tax system (which is annoying as hell, and doesn't happen in other Canadian provinces), which are progressive only up until $30k (£18k) annual income, and fixed after that at $900 (£550) /person/year. Which is 3% of $30k/year, but 1% of $100k/year, etc.
... actually laid out like that and looking at the inhuman shitshow in the US, I think I might withdraw my complaint.
But, back to naming because obviously that is what really matters, a regressive tax[0] is still a tax.
Those premiums come no where near actually covering the cost of government health insurance.
Ontario has a similar scheme - although administered inside of the tax system - which brings in approximately $3.5B from health premiums. The province spends over $50B on health and long-term care.[0] The health "premium" should really be called a surtax because that is what it is.
Looking at BC's provincial budget[1], which plans to cut them, MSP premiums will bring in just over $2.5B in revenue this year. This is inline with a previous year's forecast[2]. According to both of these sources', BC spends over $17B on health care.
Its 2017 budget claims that BC is the only province which charges health premiums - I suspect that this refers to the method which BC uses to charge people. In Ontario, the "health premium" is collected along with provincial income taxes.
[0] http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/budget/ontariobudgets/2016/ch3b.... Scroll down to table 3.22 for expenses
[1] http://bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2017/bfp/2017_Budget_and_Fiscal_Pl... Table 1.7
[2] http://bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2015/bfp/2015_budget_and_fiscal_pl... Table 1.7
>A "license" is a permit from the government to do or use something, and carries the implication that it's something that can be denied.
In Canada you can't have certain basic freedoms, even without a licence. (Certain drawn pornography or even dolls are examples). I don't mean to say that the situation in the UK is any better; I agree that the "TV license" phrasing is bad.
It goes to show that arguably many such countries (Canada, Aus, NZ, UK) have no libertarian (by this I mean civil liberties) core or basis, as the US, I would argue, does.
at least that's what I use to see this stuff
Slides 4, 6, 8, 11, and 13 looks like they're doing some kind of more protected video, but I've never done any kind of web development, so I don't know how to track down how it works. I'll note that I've got an h.264 plugin from Cisco and a Widevine DRM module installed, and that might have something to do with how it works for me.
Firefox 50.1.0 on Mint 18, if that makes a difference.