TV SERIES REVIEW: LOST KINGDOMS OF AFRICA

Series Logo with Benin Bronze

My minister recently suggested to me the four episode series Lost Kingdoms of Africa, which is currently on Netflix. After watching the series he commented on how little civilizational development could be found on the Dark Continent. Curious, I decided to watch the series as well.

‘Lost Kingdoms’ is a good description of pre-European Black African society because, as the series painfully displays, all of the civilizations are still lost (because they don’t actually exist). The series is broken up into four sections: Nubia, Ethiopia, Great Zimbabwe, and West Africa. Each episode runs about 50 minutes. Although the series was probably imagined as a great display of organic Black-African culture and achievement I imagine that all of the creators of the program have now been converted to racial realism after failing to find any signs of Black African innovation on the second largest continent. My minister said that after watching the series he became absolutely convinced of Black-African intellectual inferiority (although he was already leaning in that direction).

I encourage everyone to watch the documentary because it actually manages to achieve the exact opposite reaction of what it was created to produce. After watching 200 minutes of endless speculation and fluff one will be utterly assured that Black-Africans never achieved anything in the course of human history. Lost Kingdoms of Africa was created to impress the audience with Black achievements; instead the series displays the complete lack of any Black innovation.

NUBIA

The first episode details the Nubian civilization located to the South of ancient Egypt.  Before I watched this show I had actually been under the impression that Nubia was far more impressive than it actually was. Pictures of the pyramids of Nubia jutting from the Sahara sand seem incredibly impressive, however, after the narrator walked up to some of the pyramids in real time I realized that the structures are actually miniscule. I imagine that given a year’s time, I could create a pyramid of the same size and quality working solo. The most impressive temples in Nubia are smaller then the average modern single bedroom apartment, and the hieroglyphics are poor copies clearly ripped off their Egyptian counterparts. The episode does not display a single element of uniquely Nubian cultural development. 

The program writers were so desperate to try to make Nubia something original that they attempted to claim that a frieze of cows makes Nubian civilization somehow more then a bad off brand version of Egypt. I was surprised that the program openly admitted that the ancient Egyptians always referred to Nubia as a miserable backwater kingdom that was only good for providing slaves (the word ‘Nubia’ is derived from the Egyptian word for ‘slave.’). No ancient source suggests that Nubia was ever known for anything other than being the last point of something resembling a real society before entering the vast savagery of sub-Saharan Africa. Even Lost Kingdoms acknowledges that the Nubians never developed anything resembling culture until after the Egyptians had imperialized their lands.

While it is true that one Nubian dynasty did overrun Egypt, the time of that invasion is long after Egypt’s glory days, and, in fact, the Nile kingdom had been in terminal decline for centuries. As the first episode clearly displays Nubia was not a Black African civilization, but rather a result of Egyptian imperial ambitions in their southern sphere of influence. Nothing of the ancient Nubian ‘achievements’ are uniquely Black, but rather are poor imitations of what these peoples saw from their Mediterranean Egyptian overlords.

ETHIOPIA

          The show devoted to Ethiopia is barely worth acknowledging because all of the Ethiopian cultural achievements discussed in this episode are the result of Christian/Islamic importation. The written language of the Ethiopian Church is a script created in the southern Arabian Peninsula and exported to Ethiopia through Yemenis imperialism. The episode shows off a castle constructed by an Ethiopian emperor, but also mentions that it was only constructed in the 1600s in the Islamic and Portuguese styles. The paintings covering the ceilings of imperial chapels are depictions of Middle Eastern/European saints with White faces. The monolithic stone churches of Lalibela are impressive, however, they are not particularly old (late middle ages), and the Ethiopians only built them with the help of northern Coptic outsiders who influenced the style of the buildings significantly. 

Haile Sallassie I

          Nothing about Ethiopia is uniquely Black African. Its entire culture, from religion to language, is a copy of Arab or Christian developments. Besides this, the Ethiopians cannot racially be considered purely Black-African. Ethiopians are almost entirely mixed with ethnic Arabs and, in fact, many groups of Ethiopians speak a Semitic language. Looking through portraits of the Ethiopian Imperial family clearly demonstrates this fact. Judging by pictures of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Sallassie I, I would imagine he is only about 25% genetically Black African. It is hardly fair to consider Ethiopia a truly Black African kingdom if its population is not truly Black African, and neither is its culture.

GREAT ZIMBABWE

          I sat with some friends as I watched this episode. We spent the entire 50 minutes laughing at how horrible it was. There is so little civilizational development in southern Africa that the first half of the episode was devoted to an island off the coast of Madagascar whose population became Black only after foreign traders had imported large quantities of African slaves. The mosque on the island was built by Muslims with forced Black slave labor (hardly a Black accomplishment). There is no stone on the island so the traders constructed the mosque out of coral, which once again proves that lack of resources has almost nothing to do with civilizational advancement (a truly intelligent people will innovate through any disadvantage).

          The latter half of the episode details two settlements in southern mainland Arica that contain stonewalls. The program attempts to assert that these were constructed by Black Africans even though there is no known Black African artifacts found at the sites. Among the artifacts recovered were Arabic coins, Chinese items, and several strange carved birds. The narrator openly admits that foreigners were coming to the region to acquire ivory and slaves, but dismisses the obvious conclusion that the stone forts were constructed by outside traders as ‘racist.’ The assertion of Black construction almost becomes absurd when it is revealed that certain kinds of grazing grasses had been introduced around the settlements for use by foreign livestock types. The most obvious conclusion is that foreigners constructed the forts for trading, and brought cattle with them, thus necessitating the need to also begin growing grass in the region that their imported cattle could eat. There is no documented example of primitive Blacks domesticating any kind of animal, and even if they had, why would they import grass from another region of the world so that their native livestock could eat exotic plants? Furthermore, if a Black society truly did have the ability to construct such a large fortress isn’t it bizarre that this same society couldn’t manage to develop any other element of culture to leave behind?

'Great' Zimbabwe

          Even if, against all evidence, Blacks did construct the fortress settlement of Great Zimbabwe the structure is simply composed of stacked stones. The wall is not even particularly large, and is certainly not stylized or architecturally impressive.

          Despite a lot of biased guesswork no one knows when the fortress settlement was built, or by whom. The greatest southern Black African civilization is still simply speculation built upon speculation. My guess, it almost certainly never existed.

WEST AFRICA

          The West African episode is about nothing but the Benin Bronzes. The bronze friezes are admittedly interesting, however, they were only constructed in the late 1500s after the Portuguese inspired the locals to create them. The Black African natives melted down the Portuguese gold and fashioned some reasonably interesting figures. The Benin Bronzes are more the product of European contact then of any kind of Black African achievements.