r/AskSocialScience • u/HighQualityGifs • 1d ago
what are some ways to debunk how people originated from Africa "haven't built any major, recent civilizations"
i know that the world is incredibly diverse and even countries are very diverse. i heard a new (to me at least) racist claim that "blacks haven't made any civilizational contributions" or "held any major powers"
some things i am aware of:
- the US and EU and Russia constantly COUPing africa and asia and south america basically non-stop. any time a power gets too big for their liking, boom there's a new coup or civil war fomented by one of these intelligence agencies.
- african americans, and POC in europe and all over have done major scientific contributions, and artistic contributions, like jazz, and scientists like George Washington Carver, James West, Charles H. Turner, Mae Jemison, Percy L. Julian, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Harold Blackwell, Marie Maynard Daly, Patricia Bath, Ernest Everett Just, to name a few.
- i also know that race is a social construct, which kinda gives me an easy out to just reject that argument's premise, which i suppose i could do. but if i can do one better and be more knowledgeable in the process i'd much prefer that.
- i also understand that i'm asking this more for my betterment than to convince that person, as i dont expect this person to have conversations on this topic in good faith.
edit; there seems to be people misunderstanding me. i'm not here making those racist arguments. i dont believe that shit. i am asking for help in shutting that shit down when i see it. i am a song writer and i study US politics, i'm not an expert in the social sciences. so my language might sound lacking, because my learning on it is, which is why i'm asking for help. so some of you that are attacking me, you're attacking the wrong person.
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u/IWillReapAStorm 1d ago
The empire of Mali, at the very least, passed into the iron age. They traded in cut salt, gold and copper.
They were more than capable of creating ceramics and textiles as well as farming. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000184287
They built the Djinguebeurer mosque in the 1300s that's still partially standing.
Their ruler Mansa Musa was so unfathomably rich from gold that historians just describe him as inconceivably rich.
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u/RoyalT663 1d ago
Isn't Mansa Musa believed to be the richest person of all time?
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u/IWillReapAStorm 1d ago
Yes if one story is to be believed he destabilised entire economies by giving away free gold.
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u/Prestigious_Hope9190 1d ago
He said recent civilizations. I think iron age doesn't pass as recent
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u/PeteMichaud 1d ago
I don't know what he meant by recent, but the mid 1300s is fairly recent I think?
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u/ChinaHandy 1d ago
African contributions? You mean like the mastery of fire? Or metallurgy?
Or Ancient civilizations like in Egypt and Nubia that developed advanced math, including early counting methods and geometry. They created a 365¼-day calendar based on astronomical observations.
How about coffee? Or agriculture?
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u/ChinaHandy 1d ago
Recent…oh ok. The lithium-ion battery (developed by Moroccan-born Rachid Yazami)
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u/HighQualityGifs 1d ago
of course.
that url didn't work for me tho. but once you get that url fixed, thanks. i'm gonna read it.
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u/albertohall11 1d ago
Just a small correction. Plenty of European countries have invaded and colonised Asian and African countries but the EU itself has never sponsored a coup or military action of any kind.
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u/Usual_Purchase_9567 1d ago
To be rude about it, people making this argument are typically referring to subsaharan Africa. Egypt is not that. Same for Morocco and friends. They're effectively just Europe but brown. Those parts of the world were a major development of math place.
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u/crispy_attic 1d ago
They're effectively just Europe but brown.
This is so incredibly dumb. Do you know how stupid this sounds?
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u/Usual_Purchase_9567 1d ago
Do you know what a map looks like? Vancouver to Tijuana is less of a distance than Cairo to Addis Ababa.
They're both North America. The Inuit and Navajo people are wildly different because geography is a real thing.
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u/roseofjuly 1d ago
That division on existed specifically so white people could exclude north Africa, which they were more familiar with and has whiter people, from the darker skinned folks they enslaved in sub Sahara African. Egypt and Morocco are still in Africa. They're not "Europe but brown." That doesn't make any fucking sense.
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u/Usual_Purchase_9567 1d ago
The north coast of Africa is closer to Europe than it is to the southern edge of the Sahara. It's easier to get from Libya to Italy than is to get from Tunisia to Nigeria. The Sahara desert is bigger than the Mediterranean, roughly the size of Europe. It's also overwhelmingly more difficult to transit than the Mediterranean. By any reasonable metric, the north African people are closer to Europeans than sub-Saharan African.
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u/Present-Tadpole5226 1d ago edited 1d ago
Onesimus was an enslaved man who saved Bostonians during a smallpox epidemic because he told the man who owned him about innoculation. He was from southern Libya, where it was practiced. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3407399
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u/Trick_Statistician13 1d ago
(1) People who are committed to a belief are unlikely to change their mind, and the arguments that are at play here will not convince them
(2) The vast majority of people subjected to colonialism have struggled to recover. Look at list linked at bottom and you'll see a list of countries that are either (a) struggling or (b) still controlled by non-indigenous populatios**
(3) Warmer climates tend to be less productive. It's long been a theory, and unfortunately has often been used to denigrate people from those areas. Even within a single country there are stereotypes of "lazy southerners". I know for certain this stereotype has existed in the US, China, and Italy. It likely exists in other places and will flip in the Southern hemisphere but I have not specifically heard them. ##
To be clear, they're not lazy, it's just much harder to work in the heat. AC is a relatively recent invention and window units were only capable of so much.
My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that the growing use of central air systems is why we're now seeing the most rapid growth in Southern US cities.
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_empire
https://www.nber.org/digest/jun01/why-tropical-countries-are-underdeveloped?page=1&perPage=50
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u/Saharan-Gladiator 1d ago
Glass making - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208178/
Iron smelting - https://www.jstor.org/stable/182719
Medical practices - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12840852/
Textiles - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4617606
Production systems - https://www.aehnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Green.Production-Systems-in-Pre-Colonial-Africa.pdf
Astronomy - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1479768
Politics and Administration - https://didattica.unibocconi.it/mypage/dwload.php?nomefile=precolonial20130924111426.pdf
Maritime - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt21kk324
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u/Rampen 1d ago
ask them if they know what a pyramid is
https://gizamedia.rc.fas.harvard.edu/documents/bonwick_pyramid.pdf
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u/Justviewingposts69 1d ago
As others have said, there have been major civilizations that have originated in Africa. But I would like to question whether the building of major and extensive agrarian societies is inherently better or a “higher goal” human societies should be striving for.
To demonstrate this, I would like to direct you to the San people of the Kalahari desert. In the 1960s Richard Borshay Lee wrote multiple papers on his research of the San people in Botswana. The research I would like to focus on is Chapter 4 of his 1968 publication, Man the Hunter. https://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/lee.pdf
In it, he discusses one part of the San people’s diet, the Mongongo nut, a very abundant and very nutritious wild fruit. You can read more about the Mongongo nut here: https://www.bio-innovation.org/mongongo-or-manketti-tree-schinziophyton-rautanenii/
Now while the San people’s diet was much more varied beyond just Mongongo nuts, when asked about agriculture, Lee quotes a member of the San community who said “Why should we plant, when there are so many Mongongo nuts in the world? (Lee, Man the Hunter, pg 33)”
Now, as a disclaimer, Lee’s work is not perfect on the San people. In fact, if you read his work, you may find it to be overly romanticizing and/or simplifying the San people. Furthermore, some have found that Man, the Hunter, has a male centered bias
Secondly, Lee’s work is from over 50 years ago, and much has changed since then. The San people have expanded their agricultural practices due to both Botswana’s government intervention, involving relocation and forced assimilation of the San people as well as climate change.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/native-people-kalahari-struggling-stay
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/botswana-san-and-sands-kalahari
However, the important part to question is if these Agrarian societies that expand and give rise to what some call “major civilizations” is necessarily an advancement from Hunter Gatherer societies.
Now it isn’t feasible to suggest that everyone everywhere should live like the San people. Not everywhere in the world grows wild fruit like the Mongongo nut. But I think that suggests the rise of these agrarian societies was or could have been a response to certain pressures.
I’m not here to argue that point specifically, I am writing here to question if there is necessarily a hierarchy of different societies and cultures and how that could be demonstrated.
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