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Comment by okal | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to google Great Zimbabwe, Old Ghana, Mwene Mutapa or Timbuktu. I could give you a tonne of other examples but your ignorance, I fear, is incurable. All the same, Rome != Europe, and Africa is not a fucking city. And how - what I presume to be a - German, interprets the feats of a culture whose development is only remotely connected to his own, is something beyond my African capacity to comprehend.

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His argument is completely flawed. All areas surrounding the Mediterranean benefited greatly from being able to cover large distances by boat. This allowed trade to flourish and civilizations to prosper in this part. The fertile crescent was the hub of all this, you can trace the origin of European civilization to this point. You could simplify it and say that it went like this: Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe. Meanwhile, there was a huge dessert isolating Sub-Saharan Africa. You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu for example didn't spring out of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

Other places were able to get their own civilization thanks to one reason or the other, e.g. Eastern China.

All that has to do with achievements of different societies. Now at the individual level, how do we know whether groups with Caucasian genes would have been able to develop a civilization if they had lived in a place with the same geography and conditions as Sub-Saharan Africans? We can't know.

What we know though is that the conditions are there now for individuals with predominantly Sub-Saharan ancestry to show what they are capable of. Eventually they'll produce someone like Mozart, Newton, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Jabir ibn Hayyan or Abbas ibn Firnas. Or maybe they won't. Perhaps too early to tell.

One of the points I was trying to make was, "Africa" as an entity does not exist, save for in Western and post-colonial Pan African texts. We do not see ourselves as African, identifying primarily as one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of distinct ethnolinguistic groups - tribes, if you will. I am a Luo. I only see myself as a Kenyan when I'm outside the country. African cultures - specifically Black African cultures - tend to have strong oral traditions that do not lend themselves well to transcription using Western templates for historical writing. In my tribe, there's a legend of a man known as Lwanda Magere, who conquered nations surrounding the Luo. This would be our equivalent of Alexander the Great. My guess is you've never heard of this, or the million other similar stories from Black Africa. The Mozart's of your world exist because you developed writing or borrowed it from close by civilizations. It's all about records.

>You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu for example didn't spring out of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

This would be like calling Sicilly an Arabic city. Timbuktu grew as a center of trade within Black Africa as a result of trade with the northern Arabic and Arabized Berber states. This does not make it any less valid as an example.

PS: May not look like it, but I largely agree with you.

Sicilly is not a city, is an island with a lot of cities. Before the Arabs even existed, Greek colonists founded Syracuse (which is around 2700 years old) the birth place of Archimedes.

>You could simplify it and say that it went like this: Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe.

Not necessarily. The first big European civilization was the [Cucuteni-Trypillian culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture) which developed north-west of the Black Sea and was quite ahead of what was developing in the Middle East or elsewhere at the time (they had better pottery, barter tokens, biggest settlements in the World - up to 15000 people-, and were possibly the authors of the first writing system, 1000 years before the Summerians).

Fortified church build by a small German village of less than 1000 people around 1100, in Transylvania.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feheregyhaza2.jpg

Now compare that with anything build by the Great Zimbabwe, Old Ghana or Timbuktu. Don't worry, that fortified church is just one of many.

I'm sorry we didn't adopt Christian architecture, in pre-Christian Africa. I find that to be subjective, simply a matter of taste. We have wildly different cultures so I should expect the same of our aesthetics. I find it absurd that you expect Greco-Roman or Gothic architecture in places that were never at any point under the respective empires. Black Africans did not share European sensibilities, and attempting to use that single, alien yardstick to gauge all civilizations under deprives you greatly from enjoying all the beauty humanity has got to offer. But that's your loss, not mine. I'm only able to appreciate the beauty of the Sistine Chapel because MY education system exposed me to your culture. This doesn't make me view the shrines of the Mijikenda as any less beautiful, nor the temples of my Hindu countrymen and women. Aquired tastes my friend. You're only looking to enforce your world view, and pathetic as I think that is, it's not my place to deny you.

Thanks for the Sicillian clarification BTW. I'll be sure to go there next time I'm in Greece. Oh, wait...

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