In the last issue of our history, I discussed how our forefathers founded the present calendar before the controversial one of the Greek and Egyptians.
In the last issue of our history, I discussed how our forefathers founded the present calendar before the controversial one of the Greek and Egyptians.
Today I am unveiling the oldest maps of Africa drawn by the Chinese and Greek people.
This time I am confirming that the Greek were not as great in knowledge as we know them today, though this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize their achievements.
Our forefathers are the pioneers of knowledge, and the Chinese did a lot before the Greek and the Egyptians embarked on civilisation.
For centuries, the history of our region dating back to about 6000 BC (see Ishango bones) was hidden from its people.
The fact that our ancestors had a highly civilized society a thousand years before the Greek was simply difficult for the colonialists to bear.
That is why when you tell people today that the African continent down from South Africa up to Egypt was inhabited by one people and that it is around this same people that every thing evolves, it is a hard fact to believe.
However, with the findings that are being discovered today, this truth is emerging so quickly that in a few decades to come, every student of history will be amazed to learn about the kind of civilization this region brought to the world.
This vast region I am writing about, out of which humanity, civilization, knowledge and religion emerged, is that part of Africa from today’s Southern part of Egypt to Monomatapa.
Most kingdoms known today for being ancient African kingdoms emerged after the fall of the Batembuzi civilization. When we say from today’s Southern Egypt or Nubia in other word, we want to say that today Northern Egypt was not in existence.
The African continent at that time could not go beyond Nubia. Northern Egypt was a sea, impossible for inhabiting people.
It was believed that the Greeks and other Europeans drew the first African map between 1508 and 1700 BC.
The Mapping of Africa, a book by Richard and Penelope Betz published between 1508 and 1700 BC, provides an overview of all printed maps showing the African Continent.
Authors of these maps include Greeks like Homer, Hecateus, Eratosthenes and Ptolemy. Others are the German cartographer Mattheus Seutter (1735), Portuguese Giovanni Botero (1596) and Ortelius Abraham.
In the mapping of Africa, the Greeks show a large ocean surrounding a very small area.
Their world was as a circle with a centre somewhere in Greece. For them the world was so small and extended no further than India in the East.
It also never extended in far south and west than Egypt. In their world maps, America and Australia are non-existent.
In the late sixth century map drawn by Hecataeus, there are only two continents, Europe (extending from Hercules to the Caspian Sea) and Asia (covering Libya, Egypt, India and Arabia).
However, centuries before their mapping of Africa, the Chinese had drawn a map of Africa, showing the continent from today’s Southern Egypt (Nubia) to South Africa.
The Great Lakes Region, where humanity evolves; the region including part of Ethiopia, Burundi, DR Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda seem to be water bodies on their map. Every one knows that water is a symbol of life.
As I said in my earlier articles, people from these countries pre-date other human beings. It is under the leadership of Batembuzi, around 6000 BC, that people started moving from these countries to occupy other parts of the world, including India, Iran and then China. Ishango bones that were found at the border of Uganda and the DR Congo confirm this. It is dated back to 6000 BC.
During this era, Egypt was emerging from water; this was due to a lot of sands, brought by the River Nile from the Great Lakes Region and Ethiopia.
Ancient people of China knew Africa more than the Greeks.
They were among the first immigrants from Africa.
The oldest map
In 1389, centuries before Greeks knew the existence of Africa, the Chinese had already drawn a map of the African Continent.
The replica of the map by Chinese "Da Ming Yi Tu” has been displayed in Cape Town, South Africa since November 2002. The exhibition of this map includes other maps of the world known by Chinese in 1389.
The world map drawn by Chinese has neither North nor South poles.
Places and names in the maps are written in an ancient language that needs to be translated by someone who knows the language? We hope so, only that the language is not understood by our people in the region.
According to scholars, the people who drew the maps used to speak Dravidian and African languages.
At this time, and during the reign of Bacwezi, our ancestors used to visit China and they discussed in a language they could understand. However, some scholars don’t believe that there was any contact between Africans and Chinese at that time.
To explain to these scholars how Chinese used to travel to Africa and sailed the entire continent, Karen Harris of the Historical and heritage studies department at the University of Pretoria had a chance to be among the first scholars to see these Chinese maps.
Karen Harris said, "At that time the Chinese were seeking a mark of tribute and not trade for their emperor and therefore would not have set up bases or left behind significant markings as was the case for Europeans.”
She said that it would be difficult to uncover evidence in support of Chinese having been in Africa, adding that "You wouldn’t find human remains because the Chinese took their bodies back to their ancestral lands.”
Bailey on the other hand said that there is some circumstantial evidence in South Africa to suggest that Chinese had navigated around Africa long before Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.
Chinese pottery has been found in Limpopo Province dating back to around the 13th Century.
There is a rock art in Eastern Cape depicting Chinese-looking characters,” said Bailey.
British researcher and submarine engineer, Gavin Menzies, said that Chinese admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the globe between 1421 and 1423; this is 100 years before the crew of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who died before the end of his tour. Zheng He was a eunuch who never travelled with fewer than 300 ships, the biggest carrying 1000 people.
He is long known to have visited Asia, India, Gulf countries and Somalia, from where he took back giraffes and lions.
Many Chinese travelled around Africa and the world before the Greek, Portuguese and Spanish.
That is why they were able to map Africa than the first Europeans cartographers.
Description of the Chinese map of Africa
From the map itself, it is clear that the Chinese knew Africa before the Greeks. The map has the Great Lakes Region in the middle of the African Continent.
The Nile origin is clearly mentioned from these lakes. It seems that for them, people lived only North and south of the Great Lakes region, where were kingdoms of Nubia, Kush and Kerma in North and Monomatapa in South.
Recalling the article on the era of God’s Kings, we said that there were diplomatic ties between China and the Bacwezi dynasties.
There are records in China of the Sung dynasty leader paying a visit to the Bacwezi Ambassadors in 1071 and in 1083; this took place two hundred years before this map we are talking about was drawn.
Another interesting element on this map is that they knew the existence of today’s South Africa and the Red sea. For them, Saudi Arabia and India are a long land from Northern Africa to South Africa.
They used to travel around India to South Africa and while travelling to Africa, they closed Red sea.
One question came to my mind when for the first time I saw this map; how did the ancient Chinese come to know Africa better than the Greeks and other Europeans?
The answer lies in the fact that the ancient Chinese, just like all human beings, originated from Africa. Since their migration from Africa, they never ceased to be in touch with their original roots.
Africans in China
Just as we said earlier on, it is after the fall of the Batembuzi that Africans started migrating to other parts of the world.
It is known today that around 5000 BC one group of Africans from Kush began to migrate from Africa to China and central Asia from Iran. Another group sailed from Eastern Africa and reached China by sea.
This migration created two groups of Africans in China. One group in Northern China known as Kui-Chuang (Kushana, which is similar to Kush), while the second group was called Yi and Li-man Yueh.
After their arrival in China, Africans founded many civilizations. The three major empires of China were the Xia dynasty (1900-1700 BC), Shang/Yi dynasty (1700-1050) and the Zhou dynasty.
The Xia and Shang dynasties were the first Chinese civilizations and people who migrated from Africa founded them. According to records in China, both the Xia and Shang came from similar ancestors.
The Chinese mound culture known in China began around 3000 BC; a thousand years after a similar culture had developed in Africa. One of the most important mound cultures of China was the Hu Shu.
The Hu Shu mounds were man-made knolls called "terraced sites.”
These mounds served as burial palaces, religious centres and habitation grounds. This culture was known in most parts of Africa.
Ancient skeletal remains in Southern China were of African origin. The Tzu-Yang and the Liuchian skulls prove this. These Africans entered China from North and East Africa through India. The skeletal evidence from Shantung and Kiangsu show the modern African type.
According to a Chinese newspaper Ming Pao Daily, a research team led by Jin Li of Fudan University in Shangai has found that modern humans evolved from a single origin. Based on DNA, Spencer and other scientists have been able to prove out of 100,000 samples gathered from around the world that human beings evolved from East Africa. East Africa includes Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Sudan and to some extent part of the DR Congo.
According to that newspaper, it has been proven that the 65 branches of Chinese people share similar DNA mutation with the peoples of Eastern and Southern Asia. It is said that the Shangai scientists were part of an international team made up by researchers from Russia, India, Brazil and other nations.
It was a five years project studying the geographic and genealogical routes related to the spread and settlement of modern humans.
Imbert H., a French scholar, wrote in Les Negritos de Chine dated 1928 that "In the first epochs of Chinese history, the Negritos were all in the south of this country and the Island of Hanai…”
There are many references to these Africans in the Chinese literature. According to T.De lacoperie, these Africans are spoken of in the Zhou Li, composed under the Zhou dynasty (1122-259 BC.) They are also spoken of in the Sha Hai King, written a few centuries before the Christian era.
We would therefore like to say that our history that has been stolen will one day dominate historical studies all over the world. People will know what Africans were, how they developed the world and how many discoveries that are said to be Greek and Egyptians’ legacy were actually discovered by Africans many centuries before.
Athletism was known in Rwanda thousands of years before the Greeks. Philosophy, Science and technology, literature, medicine, astronomy, all these sciences attributed to the Greeks and Egyptians were known by every culture around the world before the Greeks and Egyptians.
As Marcus Garvey said, " If we don’t wake up to know the truth about our prestigious history, and to face the artificial complexities of this fabricated world by becoming ourselves, we will thenceforth remain a people just copying other people’s identities, culture and "knowledge” and we will remain at war among ourselves.”
After reading the article on the origin and the rise of Babanda and Bashambo, many people asked me to write on the origin of Rwandan clans.
The next article will focus on this starting with the origin of Basinga, the first Rwandan family to take on a clan name.
The Author is an independent Researcher, author and historian