Kayla’s Reviews > An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence > Status Update
Kayla
is 26% done
“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!
— 10 hours, 8 min ago
That’s a lot of snails to eat to make a house! So cool!
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Kayla’s Previous Updates
Kayla
is 23% done
“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.”
— 11 hours, 7 min ago
Kayla
is 22% done
“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.”
— 11 hours, 39 min ago
Kayla
is 20% done
“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.”
— 12 hours, 44 min ago
Kayla
is 18% done
“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.”
— 13 hours, 52 min ago
Kayla
is 18% done
“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…”
— 13 hours, 59 min ago
Kayla
is 12% done
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar sidetracked me to looking up when the Julian calendar was invented — proposed in 46 BC and put into effect Jan 1, 45 BC — and subsequently learned that the calendar we use currently is not the Julian one but the Gregorian Calendar proposed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII which is kinda interesting!
— Feb 08, 2026 01:12PM
Kayla
is 9% done
Reading the span of the Egyptian dynasties— 445 years, 380 years, 800 years—it’s a reminder that our own country, 249 years old currently, is nothing in the grand history of the world. We’ve had this country for next to no time at all. It’s wild to think about.
— Feb 08, 2026 12:20PM
Kayla
is 7% done
“Modern-day tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia, where 85 per cent of the Blue Nile flows, are centered on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which opened in 2020 and uses the Blue Nile to provide hydroelectric power, leading to anxiety among Egyptians that this will reduce their own water capacity.”
— Feb 08, 2026 10:09AM
Kayla
is 5% done
“In this way, traditional African religions are often less about the individual and more about the community. Many readers are familiar with the southern African word ubuntu which means “humanity to others” or “I am what I am, because of who we all are”, which captures the essence of Africa’s indigenous beliefs.”
— Feb 08, 2026 05:29AM
Kayla
is 5% done
“This practice, called alloparenting by anthropologists, is not unusual in Africa. Among the Kung of Botswana, for instance, each child is looked after by many adults and older children also contribute to the care of the younger ones. One study of the Efe people… infants had an average of 14 alloparents a day by the time they were 18 weeks old.”
— Feb 08, 2026 04:50AM
