Chicago style: The Free Library. S.v. When we ruled.." Retrieved Nov 26 2023 from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/When+we+ruled.-a0152985582 At one time, scholars used to divide the 3,000-year history of southern Nigeria into four great cultural periods. They used to speak of the Nok Culture, the Igbo-Ukwu Culture, the Yoruba Kingdoms, and the Benin Empire. Yet he has managed to free his mind and boldly confront the very subtle and equally sophisticated attempts to smother his consciousness and his intellectual outlook with cultural and national biases. urn:oclc:record:1391908079 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier whenweruledancie0000walk Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s285r4zfk5p Invoice 1652 Isbn 095510680X Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_autonomous true Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9878 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng+Latin Old_pallet IA409425 Openlibrary_edition The old fallacious scholarship dies slowly. In linguistics Mr. Walker points out that the language of the ancient Egyptians was not genetically related to any Semitic language, even though Semitic languages developed in Africa-not Arabia.

Robin Walker has placed the history of Africa at the beginning of human history where it belongs. For too long the world has been flooded with the racist dogmas coming out of Europe, especially Germany. These dogmas and ideologies masquerading as scholarship declared with absolutely no evidence that Africa had no history.

About the Author of When We Ruled PDF Free Download Book

The tops of some walls have ornamental patterns, of which chevron and dentelle are the most common. For over 250 feet of its length, the chevron pattern ornaments the outer wall and is perfectly level. Further south, the Kushites (of southern Egypt, and northern and central Sudan) had a very long and ancient history. In their earliest periods, they had a pharaonic culture, much like Ancient Egypt, but beginning earlier than that of the Egyptians. Five thousand artifacts were recovered from the early pharaonic tombs in Qustul. Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017) arrived in Britain in 1962 from Nigeria and spent the rest of her life in London. The author of 20 books, primarily novels, as well as television plays, she was a literary trailblazer who has never been properly recognised in Britain, although her reputation in Africa and America was sealed a long time ago. Whenever I mention her name to most people in the UK, they’ve never heard of her and have certainly not read her books, which is testament to how much she has been undervalued. Trapeze has scooped books by authors historian Paula Akpan and UK women’s correspondent Maya Oppenheim.

When I discovered his poetry in my 20s I fell in love with the haunting quality of his voice. For years I quoted his lines to friends. I knew someone who could recite the whole of Labyrinths, his only volume, and not to be confused with the same title by Borges. Though I think Borges would have loved him. Here are some lines, chosen at random: The architects of Lalibela seem to have absorbed or developed a wide range of styles. The House of Golgotha has pointed arch windows, with a tendrille-like tracery topped by a cross, similar to a Maltese cross. Other great periods were centred at cities like Kerma, Gebel, Barkal, Meroe and Naqa (all found in modern Sudan). There are a total of 84 pyramids in the city of Meroe alone and a total of 223 pyramids in the whole of Sudan, making it the country with the most pyramids on Earth, even more than Egypt.

when we ruled: the ancient and mediaeval history of black civilisations pdf

The East Coast, from Somalia to Mozambique, has ruins of well over 50 towns and cities. They flourished from the 9th to the 16th centuries due to their role in the Indian Ocean trade. One of these cities is Kilwa, a former seaport on the coast of Tanzania. In the 14th century, Kilwa was a very fine place. One visitor described it as "one of the most beautiful and well constructed cities in the world."

Yosef Ben-Jochannan, who wrote the book Africa: Mother of Civilisation, and the work of John Coleman De Graft Johnson, were also major influences. These historians set him on a new path. Rameses II of the 19th Dynasty also built a temple carved out of a hill. The Temple of Abu Simbel, in Nubia, is of an incredible scale. The facade is 108 feet wide and contains four colossal statues of the pharaoh, each 66 feet high. Walker pulls no punches. “They see us as inferior” he says. “Eventually the whitewashed landscape of history will have to change. But, of course, power concedes nothing without demand.” We have big plans for the future, and I can’t wait to publish these incredible books by Paula and Maya that have the ability to reach readers in all corners of the world. Trapeze has always had community and empowerment at its heart, and I’m grateful to be able to work with authors that bring so much joy."Pharaoh Djoser, the second king of the Third Egyptian Dynasty, ruled between 5018 and 4989 BC. He built the earliest monuments in the world still celebrated today. Every year, thousands of tourists visit his Funerary Complex in the city of Saqqara. Imhotep, his celebrated prime minister, designed the Complex. An outer wall, now mostly in ruins, surrounded the whole structure. It was built on a rectangular plan one mile long and with one entrance. It is extensively well referenced, extremely well structured and is written in a very concise but very entertaining way. Writers of colour such as Hughes, however, were nowhere near the school syllabus, which was overwhelmingly monocultural. I hope for future generations that will change, and that budding writers of colour will believe that their story belongs in a book – and see their dreams become reality.” Among the discoveries, a three-storey ruin has been identified tentatively as the royal palace. It had living quarters, shrines, and courtyards. It is possible that thousands of smaller buildings are still concealed by the forests and will be mapped in time. Radio-carbon dating has so far established that the buildings and walls were more than 1,000 years old. Dates such as 800 AD have been suggested, but let's go sequentially--from North Africa to East Africa via the western budge of Africa. In When We Ruled, historian Paula Akpan takes us into the worlds of these powerful figures, following their stories and how they came to rule and influence the futures of their people. Through deep research and discovery, Akpan will uncover new truths and grapple with uncomfortable realities, allowing us to be immersed in countless moments of bravery, intrigue and, for some, the unravelling of their rule.

A contemporary of Franz Fanon, Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant comes to mind as someone who deserves to be read now more than ever. At once philosophical, political, aesthetic and ethical, Glissant’s writing offers a way to approach the world that allows for the utopian to coexist with practical political commitments. Anyone who enjoys the linguistic interrogations of Maggie Nelson, Donna Haraway, or the novels of Maryse Condé, will find Édouard Glissant worthwhile. His theories on identity in relation – as personhood subject to constant transformation – stand as a necessary alternative to cosmopolitanism or the more capital-fuelled, globalised context of today. A good place to start: Introduction to a Po etics of Diversity and Sam Coombes’s A Poetics of Resistance. His novel Mah agony (translated by Betsy Wing) was also recently reissued by the University of Nebraska Press.” I have read two books from the series: the ones on the Lake District and New York, and will go on reading him. There is a wide-eyed curiosity in his travelogues. Humour is abundant, both in his prose and in his illustrations. A first glimpse may mark his work as childlike, but there is an undercurrent of restrained melancholy, starting with his Chinese penname, which in translation was The Silent Traveller. As a citizen of the world, he seemed at ease in all places, though those places, one imagines, were far from home. In his writing he expressed Chinese philosophies that a wise man should retain his childlike mind, and humankind should aspire to gain freedom from too many desires. His travel books, in a sense, are all works of longing for peace and harmony.” I first discovered the writing of Langston Hughes as a teenager browsing the bookshelves in my home town library, Manchester Central Library. ‘Hold fast to dreams’ were the first words I read, such welcome advice when my dreams of becoming a writer seemed so out of reach. I got goosebumps reading the lines: ‘I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’ I felt how nature could be written about in a visceral, soulful way, and such language came to haunt and flow through me as I walked by the local River Irwell for my own bookHughes’s humane writing, his clarion call for equality, inspired so many during the civil rights movement, showing that we are all a part of nature, that people of colour are not inferior objects but also have souls as deep as rivers.

Antonio Bocarro, a Portuguese contemporary, informs us that: "The emperor shows great charity to the blind and maimed, for these are called the king's poor, and have land and revenues for their subsistence, and when they wish to pass through the kingdoms, wherever they come food and drinks are given to them at the public cost as long as they remain there, and when they leave that place to go to another, they are provided with what is necessary for their journey, and a guide, and someone to carry their wallet to the next village. In every place where they come, there is the same obligation, under penalty that those who fail therein shall be punished by the king." This huge book surveys the rise of the various Africa kingdoms after the collapse of the earlier Nile Valley cultures. Ghana, Mali, Songhay , Great Zimbabwe , the kingdoms of the Yoruba and Ibo, among many, many others. The book is a treasure house! The book is organized into various sections, each focusing on a different civilization or era. Walker takes us on a journey from ancient Egypt and Nubia to the great empires of Mali and Songhai. He doesn't just stop at political history; he also explores the social, economic, and cultural facets of these civilizations. The book is replete with maps, photographs, and illustrations, making it visually engaging and easier to grasp the geographical and historical context.