Great empires, sex and power: The history of Africa we never hear about

Can you name the richest man who ever lived? Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Paul Getty?

It was probably Mansa Musa, the 14th Century King of the Mali Empire, with wealth equivalent to $400bn (£320bn) in today’s money.

This merely hints at how little we know about Africa and its history, says Zeinab Badawi, who is on a mission to put the continent’s little appreciated history and culture on the map.

The BBC broadcaster and hopes her new book An African History of Africa will show how much of the continent’s culture that we never hear about; that there is more to it than Tutankhamun and the Benin Bronzes.

Badawi details the incredible stories of the Kush empire in Sudan, her homeland. The Kush civilisation empire saved Ancient Egypt from invasion and even gave it some of its pharaohs.

Zeinab Badawi with Kenyan freedom fighter, Gitu wa Kahengeri (Photo: Zeinab Badawi/Penguin Random House)

And she looks at the African culture, art and architecture that has been banned from school books as recently as the era of apartheid South Africa and what was white-ruled Rhodesia.

“A greater appreciation of the culture and history of Africa will serve the continent very, very well. We need to learn about this. So too, do many Africans,” she says.

Books and films covering Africa, have usually viewed the continent from Western perspectives.

Does Badawi think that instead of black actors being handed scraps with historically suspect parts in insipid Jane Austen imitations, they could be playing the incredible personalities and enacting stories from Africa, which broadcasters and Western-centric history courses never tell us about?

She nods enthusiastically and points to the incredible lives of Queen Njinga or Changamire Dombo, both the bane of Africa’s Portuguese colonisers in the 17th century, or warrior Queen Kahina in North Africa.

“They’re huge personalities,” she says. “And that’s what I tried to do in my book is to very much tell the history through personalities because, as I said, I think history is best understood if it is seared into the imagination.”

Changamire Dombo, she says, is “one of the key figures missing from our understanding of Africa”.

He was a single herdsman who rose to establish the Rosvi empire across much of modern day Zimbabwe, north-eastern South Africa and parts of Botswana and Mozambique. His strategic cunning allowed him to frequently best the heavily armed Portuguese sniffing around for land and resources.

Badawi notes that Jada Pinkett Smith did produce a docuseries, African Queen, about warrior Queen Njinga for Netflix, although this majored on entertainment rather than the historical facts.

The available evidence suggests Njinga was clever, ruthless, very handy with a fighting axe and sexually voracious.

Badawi informs us that the warrior queen “enjoyed the trappings of male power…and indulged in the services of male concubines whom she required to dress in female clothing and address her as king”.

From early in her reign that begun in 1624, Njinga, like Dombo, also defied Portuguese invaders – who had already abducted thousands for the slave trade – and successfully waged successful diplomatic and military campaigns against them.

With a wry smile, Badawi notes, however, “she was no angel. She did provide enslaved people to the Portuguese in large numbers, and that’s glossed over”. It’s likely, too, that she murdered her nephew to gain power and attacked rival Africans. She eventually wrote to the Pope asking to be accepted as a Christian monarch.

Badawi’s dive into African history and culture is all the better for not being a hagiography of the continent and its peoples. The book looks, for instance, at the involvement of the Arabs and black Africans in the slave trade.

It also examines this epochal scar on human history from neglected angles, including the effects it had on those left behind – from family tragedies to economies denuded of the young workforces they needed to grow and develop.

Economic as well as moral arguments were behind the abolition of slavery. By the 19th century, as the West switched to industrial capitalism, it needed cheap labour back in Africa to facilitate the import of cotton rubber and palm oil.

Next came colonisation, which continued well into the 20th century; due to the extraordinary cruelty of the Belgians it culminated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The thorny issue of reparations is not one that the book tries to resolve. But it does lay out some convincing arguments over why it needs to be discussed.

But more than anything the book is an illuminating look at how the continent’s art and culture has been buried, discarded – or denied.

The remains of the Great Zimbabwe Kingdom of the 12th century, 240km (149 miles) east of Bulawayo, have been plundered and left to rot a-nd worse disappeared. The white colonisers of southern Africa insisted that the structures were too sophisticated to have been built by black Africans.

In 1871 the German geologist Carl Gottlieb Mauch said this elaborate 11th Century culture had to have been the work of Phoenician or Israelite settlers, possibly under the instruction of the Queen of Sheba.

Read Next

‘There is no British history without me’: How black artists are reshaping the past

Arts

‘There is no British history without me’: How black artists are reshaping the past

Read More

By the start of the 20th century, respected archaeologists were sure the civilisation was native African. But thanks to Prime Minister Ian Smith all books on the subject were censored until 1980. His government ruled that no publication could “state the Great Zimbabwe was an African creation”.

Badawi also cites the beautiful golden rhinoceros from the 13th century kingdom of Mapungubwe in southern Africa. This object was just kept hidden away by the apartheid regime in South Africa and never put on display “because it was an inconvenient truth to their myth that it was an empty land devoid of civilisation”.

“I think Africans themselves are bereft of knowledge about their own continent, and people outside of Africa plus Africans in the diaspora, and this is what I discovered on my journeys,’ Badawi says. “I would go with a film crew when I was interviewing people and they would also at the end of the filming session, be listening to this or that academic, and they never knew that their own country had so much history.”

Towards the end of the book, she quotes the Kenyan environmentalist and Noble Peace Prize Laureate, Wangari Maathai: “you cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, understands itself and values itself.”

Armed with an awareness of its history and its present riches – for example, the vast mineral deposits that will fuel the technology of this century, and its young and ambitious population – Badawi argues Africa’s future can be brighter than its past.