Kayla’s Reviews > An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence > Status Update

Okay this whole section on jihadism is interesting but this maybe is the best quote: “As the emir put it to me: ‘Certain social and economic conditions are fertile ground for breeding violent movements — be they religious extremists, ethnic militias or just criminal gangs. Religion simply becomes a rallying point and ideology, but the real discontent lies in politics.’”

Mansa Musa, worth the equivalent of 400 billion today, who spent so much he destabilized economies and took decades to repair… his spending caught the attention of Europeans and his image — “maps like this one [1375 Catalan Atlas] may well have encouraged later Europeans to invade Africa in pursuit of the riches they depicted.”

Getting the sense that Timbuktu of the Mali Empire was like the Arabic Library of Alexandria for its fame and renown. Super cool!

“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…”

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!