INDEPENDENT INVENTIONS OF AFRICA

         The advancement of  Africa as the dark continent has greatly affected the World view of the African continent. There is the erroneous belief that Africa has contributed nothing to civilization or human knowledge. However, research has portrayed that African history is a part of world history. This article will discuss four independent inventions of the African continent.

          Scholar Christopher Ehret wrote that "Africans South of the Sahara were active innovators and not, as they have often been depicted, the passive receivers of things invented elsewhere". Africans independently invented a surgical procedure for circumcision, usually when people of the Western world think about the origin of circumcision,  they usually picture Circumcision in connection with the Abrahamic religion and this does not do justice to African history. According to Christopher Ehret, "Africans are not only the most likely to be the human inventors of circumcision but also the cultural disseminators of the procedures for those who will later form the foundation of the Abrahamic religion, one other custom, the circumcising of boys, very likely goes back to the earliest eras of the African cultural tradition, to well before 9000 BCE. The early African grain collectors who moved across Sinia into Palestine, in all likelihood brought the practice of male circumcision with them. The modern-day presence of this custom in Judaism and as a subsidiary cultural aspect of Islam - two religions started by people who spoke languages of the only Asian branch of Afrasan, Semitic - undoubtedly traces back to this ancient aspect of Afrasan civilization". Afrasan used in the context refers to a particular language group originating in Eastern Africa. The independent invention of Circumcision within the African continent contributed to its practice among the Abrahamic religions.

      

            The next independent invention of Africa is the iron technology. The development of Iron technology was a crucial period in human history. The Iron Age is traditionally considered the final stage after the Stone and Bronze Ages. Some historical scholars are of the view that Africa completely skipped the bronze age and went straight to the iron age. Christopher Ehret writes that "in the case of ironworking, the earliest dated sites in the world for the smelting of iron, going four thousand or possibly more years are located in the Central African Republic and neighbouring parts of Cameroon in the middle of the Continent, further research credits the side of Oboui and Batooro located in the Central African Republic and Cameroon. Some historical scholars dated the site for this iron technology to be between a period of 2500 BC to 2000 BC. Christopher Ehret writes that "At Oboui, all the steps in the smelting and forging of iron - all of what archaeologists call the chaine operator - are represented in materials from the excavated workshop: furnace structures, tuyeres, iron bits, slag and stone anvils for hammering the iron, along with large quantities of datable charcoal. These sites around four thousand years ago, represent the earliest ironworking, yet known not just in Africa, but everywhere in the World. They are not just too early but separately by far too great a geographical distance, to allow for any possible outside of Africa source for the  technology." Some scholars question the very method of dating used, however, this does not change the reality of an independent invention.

           Africans were the first to invent furnaces capable of producing high temperatures. Christopher Ehret writes that "African smelters were the first centuries before anyone else to develop furnaces able to generate heat for a single step production of Steel. Yet there is still another remarkable fact in iron technology that we must take into account ... African iron smelters living in the African Great Lakes region began to construct furnaces capable of generating sufficiently high temperatures to produce carbon steel directly from the smelt. And this is no small matter. Europeans did not learn to produce steel by a single step until the invention - two thousand years later- in the nineteenth century. The Chinese were also ahead of the West in this respect. They had developed capacities for directly producing steel by the eleventh Century CE but even their advance took place centuries after African smelters already attained this capability."

         The last independent invention for discussion is rice cultivation. West Africans are said to have begun the rice cultivation process around the inland Delta region of Niger. Though, they may not be the first to introduce the rice cultivation process. West Africa introduced this skill to South Carolina. Enslaved Africans brought this technology across the Atlantic to South Carolina where their skills and knowledge made possible the colonial prosperity of Coastal Carolina in the 18th century. Rice can be said to be an essential food to humanity and the fact that Africans established its development in early America is unacknowledged.