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[QUOTE]Originally posted by markellion: [QB] Africans were actually very good at keeping order and stability; there were many highly organized states whose authority ensured a high level of peace and prosperity through much of the central Africa. Many kingdoms developed complex urban societies and representative government that had well established checks and balances that made sure no group or individual could gain too much power and become despotic. Don’t forget an art tradition that had much inspiration to modern art in the western world which makes the notion African cultural backwardness absurd This is from “Lost Cities of Africa” by Basil Davidson middle of P. 319 and beginning of 321 [QUOTE] Now all this reflects the presence and general recognition, within a pre-industrial society, of reasonable and self-confident modes of life and manners of thought, and suggest, for anyone who cares to ponder on it, how far these peoples of the interior had traveled in creative adaption to their environment. Much else might be laid beside it. [b]The arts of Africa, so often shocking to the Victorian eye, could have come only from societies which had found creative answers to the age-old problem of the one and the many, the individual and the collective. Their philosophies, their thoughts about man and the universe, echoed the same distinctive genius.[/b] Neither art nor religion was the crude and wretched thing that suburban Europe, traveling in “darkest Africa,” would generally say it was, neither revealed the shallow growth of yesterday, nor the hopeless gibbering surrender to violence and magic that Europeans would so generally imagine. Here was much that might evoke surprise, and a good deal that would call for nothing, in the general structure and conception of society, that could allow a charge of natural inferiority. In the middle of the twentieth century one may see all this more clearly. Barred as they often were from many currents and crosscurrents of thought and action that had fertilized and deepened civilization elsewhere, African peoples had moved by their own dynamic of advance, found their own way forward, worked out their own solutions. Stubbornly, slowly, they had gone ahead across the lonely years. Only where the slave trade made its worst ravages were they altogether stopped and their achievements rendered sterile; and much of the far interior was spread that fearful curse. The Lozi of western Zambia, for example, were entirely spared it; [b]and Lozi law and order, Lozi conceptions of the judicial process, can be found to support none of the assumptions of paternalist trusteeship. On the contrary, the basis of Lozi legal judgments would emerge, on examination in the twentieth century, as mature and solid as in European or American courts. In both, Gluckman has contended, the judicial process was basically similar. “On the whole,” he goes on, “it is true to say that the Lozi judicial process corresponds with, more than it differs from, the judicial process in western society. Lozi judges draw on the same sources of law as Western judges – the regularities of the environment, of the animal kingdom, of human beings; and custom, legislation, precedent, equity, the laws of nature and of nations, public policy, morality.”[/b] The fabric of society, therefore, was strong and could survive. Yet it remains true that the states of southern Africa’s Iron Age undoubtedly declined and fell. Their rulers were dispersed or diminished to a shadow of their former greatness. Their strong stone settlements and forts, built across the years, were abandoned to an empty solitude.[/QUOTE]Book “Lost Cities of Africa” http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Cities-Africa-Basil-Davidson/dp/0316174319/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213629531&sr=8-1 Some information on ancient Congo: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL AFRICA “Kongo” http://www.endingstereotypesforamerica.org/kongo.html The Old Congo by John Henrik Clarke http://www.africawithin.com/clarke/LumumbaCongo.html "Urban origins in central Africa: the case of Kongo" http://www.arkeologi.uu.se/afr/projects/BOOK/dema.pdf Ibn Battuta writes admiringly about the peace and stability of west Africa, he said “blacks” were the most just of all people in the world. Note that Ibn Battuta was the most well traveled person of his time from China to Mali [IMG]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71NZZYNEY1L._SL500_AA240_.gif[/IMG] sshaun002, are you trying to encourage hatred against white people? [/QB][/QUOTE]
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