Status Updates From An African History of Africa

“They [The Capsians] ate enormous quantities of land snail and built large structures formed from thousands of snail shells — a unique form of prehistoric shelter, hence the Capsians are sometimes referred to as the escargotières… Today, land snails are still consumed throughout North Africa even though many Muslims elsewhere prefer not to eat them.”

That’s a lot of snails to eat to make a house! So cool!

“According to legend, he was marked out for greatness when a swarm of bees surrounded him at his birth around 1162. This was an omen that he would one day be a strong and prosperous king. The name Lalibela means ‘bees obey him’ in the local language.”

“The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have historic roots in this region and until the last century all three communities lived in Ethiopia. The last of the Jews of Ethiopia, known as the Beit (or Beta) Israel community or Falasha, were airlifted en masse to Israel in the 1970s. People… were ethnically alike, enjoyed similar cultures and spoke the same languages.”

“The Ethiopian account of Sheba and Solomon is set out in the Kebra Nagast: the book of the ‘Glory of the Kings’. The Kebra Nagast is a compilation of legends, folklore, and traditions relating the heroic deeds and victories of Aksum’s king and queens. It was written in the Ethiopic language Ge’ez in the thirteenth century, possibly by monks, and plays a central role in Ethiopian culture to this day.”

“The veteran Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet… believes that much has yet to be discovered and excavated there. He said in 2017: ‘We have here [in Sudan] an extraordinary history of the world; maybe after some years we will have Sudanology as strong as Egyptology.’ Few people today realize that a substantial number of Egypt’s monuments were built by the Kushite kings.”

“The Kushites spoke their own language, and their writing system differed from the Egyptian one. ‘Meroitic hieroglyphics’, as they are known, cannot be understood; experts have an idea of how words might have sounded but not their meaning. Until we can decipher the script, inscriptions on Kushite monuments remain a mystery…”