One of Africa's best kept secrets - its history

 

Africa has a rich and complex history but there is widespread ignorance of this heritage. A celebrated British historian once said there was only the history of Europeans in Africa. Zeinab Badawi has been asking what is behind this lack of knowledge and looking at the historical record for an African history series on BBC World News.

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo is rightly considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But travel further south along the River Nile and you will find a thousand pyramids that belonged to the Kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan.

Kush was an African superpower and its influence extended to what is now called the Middle East.
The kingdom lasted for many hundreds of years and in the eighth Century BC, it conquered Egypt and governed for the best part of a century.

What remains of the kingdom is equally impressive. More than 300 of these pyramids are still intact, almost untouched since they were built nearly 3,000 years ago

Some years ago I visited these pyramids. On my return to the UK, I asked my parents what they knew of their country's historic sites. Not much, it turned out.
This was odd since both of them could tell you a lot about Henry VIII and key points in British history.
I wondered given that my parents did not know enough about their own country's history whether this was likely to be true of many other Africans.

And as I talked to people I discovered that this was indeed the case.
A few years later, at Unesco's Paris headquarters, I saw on the bookshelves of Ethiopian-born Deputy Director-General Getachew Engida a collection of volumes - the General History of Africa.
This, it turned out, is one of Unesco's and the continent's best kept secrets: Africa's history written by African scholars