Africa's Great Civilizations
Source: http://www.pbs.org/weta/africas-great-civilizations/home/

In his new six-hour series, Africa's Great Civilizations, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes a new look at the history of Africa, from the birth of humankind to the dawn of the 20th century. This is a breathtaking and personal journey through two hundred thousand years of history, from the origins, on the African continent, of art, writing and civilization itself, through the millennia in which Africa and Africans shaped not only their own rich civilizations, but also the wider world.

Africa's Great Civilizations is a production of Inkwell Films, McGee Media, Kunhardt Films and WETA Washington, D.C., in association with Nutopia Productions.

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Episode One - "Origins"

Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. introduces viewers to the African continent through a series of expansive views and myth-busting revelations. His six-hour exploration of the African past begins at the origins of human existence. Through anthropological and scientific discoveries viewers learn that Africa is the genetic home of all currently living humanity. Only between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago did some of humanity's common ancestors leave the continent to spread across the rest of the world. These great African migrations culminated in the diverse global peoples and societies that viewers know today. Beginning with this great revelation, Gates then traces the roots of agriculture, writing, artistic expression, and iron working to their birthplaces on the continent.

Gates first arrives in present-day Ethiopia, where the 1997 discovery of fossil remains near the Omo River was the first discovered connection between modern humanity and the oldest known traces of the species to have walked the earth some 195,000 years ago. Following this ancestral thread, Gates visits Africa's most respected paleoanthropologist, Dr. Richard Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya. His team's ground-breaking discoveries have opened our eyes to the ways our species evolved in Africa, and how the diversity observable around the world today came from the vast genetic makeup of the continent. Through this visit, viewers also meet Mitochondrial Eve, the hypothetical mother from whom 200,000 years of descendant daughters have received portions of their DNA. Gates next points us to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans collide and the earliest known examples of human creative expression go back almost 80,000 years. He shows how the Sahara Desert was once a lush savannah where agricultural practices developed and the first complex societies on the continent were formed, before a changing climate shifted migratory patterns. Ancient people soon settled the fertile lands of the Nile Valley, and this region became home to the ascending, interdependent, and sometimes warring kingdoms of Egypt and Kush.

A tomb at Abydos, south of Cairo, is believed to be the final resting of the Scorpion King, the ruler who consolidated Ancient Egypt in the fourth millennium B.C. This site also reveals small ivory tags covered in precursors to Egyptian hieroglyphs, indicating that ancient Egyptian writing developed independently of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, partly as a tool for consolidating royal power. The episode also takes viewers to the Great Pyramid of Giza, for thousands of years the tallest building on Earth, and up the Nile River to present-day Sudan, where the ancient Kingdom of Kush boasted gold and copper reserves that made it an important trading power and a target for Egyptian conquest. It was the rulers of Kush, first under the conquering King Piye, who would eventually rule as the Black Pharoahs of Egypt's 25th dynasty.

Far from Egypt, in the heart of Africa, other major developments were taking place just as early. In today's Central African Republic, a birth of iron-working technology took place between 1800 and 1500 B.C., at the same time as the better-known separate development of this technology in the Middle East. Gates also presents viewers with the Nok Terracottas, captivating archaeological finds from around 900 B.C. representing the earliest ceramic sculptural art known in Africa outside of Egypt. He recounts next the Bantu Migration, which, from 3000 B.C. on, witnessed a massive shift of people and technologies that would change the face of Africa.

Gates concludes the first hour of the series in Mero, the later capital of the independent Kingdom of Kush. After the fall of Cleopatra's Egypt to the Roman Empire, it was Mero's Queen Amanirenas who used her military leadership skills and her kingdom's iron weaponry to lead raids against Roman Egypt that would result in the capture of a statue of the Emperor Augustus and force the Romans to the treaty table in 22 B.C. The vast spans of time and space that Gates covers in "Origins," along with those he interviews at the cutting edge of science, make clear that the African continent helped design the blueprint for civilization itself.

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Episode Two - "The Cross and The Crescent"

The second hour of "Africa's Great Civilizations" charts the emergence of two powerful forces of global change, Christianity and Islam. Viewers will learn how pervasively "the Cross and the Crescent" reshaped the landscape and people of Africa between the first and 12th centuries A.D. -- and for centuries to come. Setting the stage, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers to the horn of Africa, the meeting place of the Red and Arabian Seas and a trade corridor between Africa, the Middle East and Europe for thousands of years. A book written in Greek in first century A.D., The Periplus of the Eythrean Sea, speaks of the Red Sea's illustrious port Adulis, the gateway to Aksum.

This African kingdom, located in present-day Ethiopia, once stretched into Southern Arabia and was one of the ancient world's most dominant and well-resourced powers, rich with such valuables as frankincense, myrrh, ivory and gold. Gates brings viewers to the excavation of Axum's city center, where he walks among the 100 stelea erected between the third and fourth centuries A.D. to mark the graves of the kingdom's elite. An impressive feat of architectural skill, these stelea were taller than any other monolithic monuments crafted in the ancient world. Ethiopia also was home to an even earlier state, D'mat, where the city of Yeha featured the pre-Christian Temple of the Moon and a towering, 3,000-year-old palace. At this palace's excavation, Gates discovers a blending of African styles with those of the Southern Arabian kingdom of Saba, known for its ties to the biblical Queen of Sheba.

Debunking the myth that Christianity came to Africa with European colonialism, Gates shows that in the northeastern corner of Africa, Christianity is as ancient as anywhere in the world. This is revealed in the early monastic practices of Egypt's eastern desert in the second and third centuries. Some of early Christianity's most important writers and theologians were Africans of Berber descent.

But just as Christianity was beginning to spread south beyond Egypt and Aksum to Nubia, the new religion of Islam was transforming large areas of Africa through conquest and trade. By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslim rulers controlled not only Egypt, but all the former provinces of Byzantium across present day Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, with a base at Tangier from which the Islamic Berber warrior Tariq ibn Ziyad launched his attack on Spain in 711 A.D. The importance of his attack is immortalized in the Rock of Gibraltar at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula, which derives its name from him. Further, these Muslim conquests stimulated a new age of flourishing growth in commerce across the Sahara between West African and North African peoples, which lasted down to recent centuries.

Gates next returns to Ethiopia to tell the story of the rise of the Zagwe dynasty, best known for King Lalibela, later recognized as a saint of the Ethiopian church. He oversaw the construction of several churches belonging to an astounding complex of churches. Hewn out of the living rock in the Ethiopian highlands during the 12th and 13th centuries, these churches were built before many of the great cathedrals of Europe. Tracing the close connections between Ethiopian Christianity and the Holy City of Jerusalem, Gates concludes the second episode among the monasteries at Lake Tana with the story of Menelik, who is believed to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum. Through Menelik, later Ethiopian royalty have claimed to have a blood connection to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and, through this extraordinary heritage, Christianity continues to play a profound role in the religious life of modern Ethiopia.

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Episode Three - "Empires of Gold"

The third hour in the series marks an era of great commercial and manufacturing growth throughout several regions on the continent. It begins with the revolutionary transformation of North and West Africa. On the shores of the Sahara Desert, farmers, traders, warriors and nomads turned this region into the crossroads of some of history's most advanced, and wealthiest, civilizations. Intricate networks of long distance trade would link up productive commercial centers established by rulers of empires and kingdoms.

Strolling the streets of the Medina of Marrakesh in present-day Morocco, a walled city within the city, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains how a collection of mud-brick huts became a sophisticated metropolis of trade in the 11th century through the story of Abdallah Ibn Yasin, a Muslim Berber. Ibn Yasin sought to bring the teachings of his faith to the Sanhaja of the Sahara Desert. When faced with resistance, he withdrew and traveled across the Sahara to found the Almoravid ("the people of the frontier fortress") movement. Out of Ibn Yasn's 1,000-mile journey, the Almoravid movement transformed into a far-reaching empire controlling the trans-Saharan Caravan routes on camelback through the merchant cities of the Sahel; controlled the gold trade of the empire of Ghana in West Africa; and spread from its capital city, Marrakesh, to the Andalusian territories of southern Spain (consolidated under the warrior leader Ibn Tashfin following the battle of Zallaqa in 1086).

In recounting how the Almoravids were overthrown by the wide-spanning Almohad empire less than a century later, Gates visits the Almohad city of Fez, a major network of exchange founded in 789. Here, Islamic scholarship reached new heights at its numerous educational institutions, known in Arabic as Madrassas, and its famous Quaraouiyine mosque. This mosque and university was founded in the ninth century by Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a wealthy merchant who migrated to Fez from the then Tunisian capital city of Qairouan. Thus named after her ancestral home, the Quaraouiyine is arguably the world's oldest institution of higher learning, where the sciences and mathematics were taught, as well as principles of rhetoric, logic and theology. Among the historical scholars of Fez to whom Gates introduces viewers are Ibn Rushd (also known by his Latinised name, Averroes), an Arabic interpreter of Aristotle whose writings were translated into Latin, and Hassan Wazzan (or Leo Africanus), a North African legal scholar who would go on to write a description of West Africa after being enslaved to the Pope.

The film next takes us 1,200 miles south of Fez to Timbuktu, an equivalent capital of learning in the 13th and 14th centuries. Timbuktu's principal educational accomplishments include its famed Sankore Mosque and the local development of some of the world's most precious libraries, as the city housed hundreds of thousands of books, many written by African authors. Timbuktu was one of the principal cities of the Empire of Mali, founded in the 13th century by the legendary warrior king, Sunjata, who grew his provincial kingdom into the largest state that has ever existed in West Africa. While the trans-Saharan trade of salt, slaves and other wares kept North and West Africa connected, the Empire of Mali controlled the Western Sudan through its supply of gold. No single emperor symbolized its dominant economic position more than Mansa Musa, who embarked on a most lavish pilgrimage to the Muslim Holy City of Mecca in 1324 and whose legacy includes the claim that he was the richest man who ever lived.

Gates concludes this hour in modern-day Nigeria, site of another great civilization known as Ife or Ile Ife, which traded with the Empire of Mali. There, he studies the kingdom's sublime sculpture at the National Museum in Lagos and interviews the Nigerian writer and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, who reflects on the Yoruba connections to Ile Ife, which Yoruba people regard as their spiritual capital.

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Episode Four - "Cities"

Hour four shines a light on the powerful, cosmopolitan cities that dotted Africa at a time when Europe was in its Middle Ages. From 1000 to 1600, a golden age evolves in the expansion of commerce, wealth and prosperity across Africa, and, along with this, the building of new cities and the founding of new powerful states.

Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. picks up the story first on East Africa's Swahili coast, where sailors of wooden seagoing ships, or dhows, mastered the seasonal monsoon winds to develop a complex maritime trade spanning the Indian Ocean from the nearby Middle East to India, with indirect trade connections as far afield as China. These interactions facilitated the birth of a distinctive form of Islam in East Africa, one that influenced local society from its religious practices to the formation of the Kiswahili language. Islam would spread with trade and become the religion of the Swahili towns and cities, but with several ways of observing Islam drawn from the Bantu cultural roots of the Swahili.

A focal point of this coastline's thriving civilization was the legendary city-state of Kilwa, an island port off present-day Tanzania, whose authority stretched the length of the Swahili coast and is representative of the flourishing material and cultural world of Swahili civilization during this period. In 1331, Ibn Battuta, a great explorer and chronicler of the Muslim world, describes Kilwa as one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world. In Kilwa, Gates visits the Great Mosque and the sprawling palace of Husuni Kubwa, built in the 14th century to house Sultan Al-Hasan Ibn Sulaiman.

Gates travels next to the ruins of the architectural wonder of Great Zimbabwe, once a major city in southeast Africa whose proximity to some of the ancient world's most extensive gold workings fortified its rise among the Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe, making it the continent's Eldorado. Here, the export of gold and ivory drove trade, and the city's great royal palace, dating back to the 13th century, stood as the largest pre-colonial structure in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. From its height to its unique stone architecture, this palace remains as, per heritage specialist Dr. Edward Matenga, "the pride of all Africans."

Crossing over to Africa's west coast, Gates takes viewers to Nigeria, where Benin City was once the center of a kingdom that controlled more than 20,000 square miles. At Benin City's heart was the Royal Palace of the Oba of Benin, expanded by the 15th century warrior king, Ewuare the Great, who also ordered the engineering of an extraordinary earthworks system to strengthen Benin City as a military centre. Eventually encompassing more than 500 surrounding villages, this earthworks system exceeded the length of the Great Wall of China. But it was the collection of bronze (or brass) heads, treasures of classical Benin art, many of which were commissioned by Ewuare himself, that provide the prelude to a moment ultimately altering the course of African history: the arrival of the Portuguese late in the 15th century.

Back on the Swahili Coast, Gates describes how, in 1505 A.D., a fleet of Portuguese ships under Captain Francisco de Almeida helped to cripple the power and wealth of Kilwa, leaving the Portuguese to exploit and disrupt the region's Indian Ocean trading system. In Ethiopia, a new era of political and Christian religious expansion takes place. A Portuguese mission arrives, seeking an alliance with the Christian stronghold of Ethiopia, and hoping to make contact with Prester John, a mythical ruler who, according to European legends dating back to the 12th century, descended from one of the Magi and possessed the Fountain of Youth. Catholic Portuguese visitors who arrive in Ethiopia in the 16th century see Ethiopia as an ally in their struggles with Muslims over trade in Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they provide a small military contingent to help Ethiopia defeat the neighboring Muslim sultanate of Adal in 1543 A.D.

But there was a catch: the Portuguese wished to displace Ethiopia's home-grown Orthodox Church and bring the kingdom under the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. While this result was seemingly secured through the conversion eighty years later of the Ethiopian emperor, Susenyos, the turn against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tore the kingdom apart. After Susenyos was driven from the throne in 1632 A.D., the task of reunifying Ethiopia fell to his son, Fasilides. The new emperor was quick to re-establish orthodoxy, seeding a cultural renaissance in Ethiopia's new capital city, Gondar. The hour concludes within the walls of Fasil Ghebbi, Gondar's palace complex, and Fasilides' Bath, whose waters remain at the heart of modern Ethiopia's most important religious festival, Timkat.

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Episode Five - "The Atlantic Age"

The series' fifth hour examines the tremendous changes wrought in Africa by the opening of the Atlantic World between the 15th and 18th centuries. For centuries, Eastern Africa, West Africa and Northern Africa had all been tied deeply into long-distance commercial networks linking across the Eastern Hemisphere. However, the encounter between West African kingdoms and, first, Portuguese mariners travelling farther and farther south along Africa's Atlantic coast, and then the European colonization of the New World, transformed those relations. Across the continent kingdoms and empires would rise and fall, with some 12.5 million Africans suffering enslavement in the crosshairs.

Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. begins the story in northern Angola, where the mountain city of Mbanza Kongo was once the capital of the great African kingdom of Kongo. By the beginning of the 17th century European observers listed Kongo among the world's great kingdoms - a tale of increasing religious and economic entanglement with Europe that Gates recounts in the kingdom's ancient ruins. In 1483, Kongo's King Nzinga Nkuwu forges a potent trade relationship with Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao and, triggered by this first encounter, King Nzinga Nkuwu switches the kingdom's official religion to Roman Catholicism in 1491 A.D. It is King Afonso, his son, who then reorders Kongo society based on a distinctly indigenous form of Christianity, which Gates reveals by examining the kingdom's art and visiting one of the most important architectural remains in the history of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Cathedral of So Salvador. These weren't the only changes binding Kongo to Europe. King Afonso makes the fateful decision to sell slaves Kongo had captured, as enemies or captives in war, to the Portuguese for their burgeoning sugar production on the island of So Tom and Prncipe. This was an established trade in Kongo that Afonso tried to, but could not control once opened to the Portuguese, especially after they and other European powers expand their reach to the New World.

The Portuguese would have a far more difficult time with the Kingdom of Ndongo, today part of Angola, where they established a slave port at Luanda. Gates explains how war between the Portuguese and Ndongo broke out in 1579 A.D., lasting nearly a century, and how amid the chaos a vast quantity of slaves were sent to fire up the Brazilian sugar industry. From this conflict emerges one of the most charismatic and enduring characters in all African history, the warrior queen Njinga. In fighting the Portuguese, Njinga would rule over two kingdoms, Ndongo and Matamba, convert to Christianity, and engage in a shifting alliance with Kongo and the Dutch to try to expel the Portuguese from her territories. Though Njinga would outlast 10 Portuguese governors before her death at 81, Gates shows how the combination of avarice, aggression, and warfare between these various powers made the region that is today Angola the single largest source of slaves in the history of the trans-Atlantic trade.

Moving through time to the 18th century, when the slave trade reaches a fever pitch, Gates next introduces the port of Ouidah (in today's Benin), once the busiest slave market in West Africa and the principal commercial centre of the kingdom of Dahomey. While the kingdom of Benin held back from fully participating in the trading of human beings, the kingdom of Dahomey represented the other extreme, a state that built much of its wealth around the slave trade. But Dahomey was also a state with a rich culture, that valued palace architecture, the arts and Vodun, whose religious practices would be transported across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans and transformed into voodoo.

Gates observes how the transatlantic slave trade ultimately robbed the continent of its most valuable resource: its people, especially its young adult male population. This does not mean there was a lack of resistance, as witnessed in Ganvi on Lake Nokou in Benin, where the Tofinu people used the swampy land around their lagoons' shores as a natural defence at a time when wars engulfed the region.

In the West African interior, the 17th and 18th centuries mark a time of revolutionary movements aimed at reforming society and governance. These movements for reform culminate in the advent of the Sokoto Caliphate at the dawn of the 19th century, after the young Muslim cleric, Usman dan Fodio of Hausaland, wages war against the kingdom of Gobir to resist the enslavement of Muslims. The Sokoto Caliphate, Gates explains, arises as one of the most powerful empires in Africa, inspiring the use of African languages in scholarly production. Yet, Gates reflects on a great irony of Sokoto's history--that its armies, too, in spite of the revolutionary spirit of its founder, ended up enslaving millions of non-Muslims.

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Episode Six - "Commerce and the Clash of Civilizations"

In the series' final hour, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brings the story of "Africa's Great Civilizations" into the nineteenth century, when a fierce competition for resources and trade stimulated ingenuity, while also enticing European powers and inciting conflicts that would threaten the stability and wellbeing of the continent. Gates begins his journey along South Africa's eastern coast, where, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the legendary warrior Shaka Zulu transformed a chiefdom into the feared Zulu empire, seizing territory with intensely trained, disciplined regiments of soldiers, amabutho, and deploying those regiments in new, close-combat battlefield formations with a formidable new weapon, a short, stabbing spear. It was an era of tumultuous change on the continent, known as the Mfecane, when African kingdoms felt the squeeze of their rivals, no less encroaching foreign traders, and conflict and environmental challenges disrupted borders and displaced populations.

Moving north to the Swahili Coast, Gates next takes viewers to the island of Zanzibar, the nineteenth century capital of a colonial trading empire established by the Sultanate of Oman. This Arab kingdom for over a century had dominated the East African outlets of the Indian Ocean trade. But from its new base at Stone Town in Zanzibar, it could now better meet the burgeoning international demand for ivory and slaves. One notorious trader from Zanzibar, Tibbu Tip, crisscrossed the African interior leveraging the wealth he accumulated from ivory, guns, and slaves to control a vast territory. He wasn't alone. The slave trade in central Africa spanned the Luba and Lunda empires of present-day Congo as well as the Ovimbundu of Angola. And, for those who associate the international slave trade only with the waters of the Atlantic, Gates makes clear that, in the nineteenth century alone, more than a million slaves were embarked across the Indian Ocean from East Africa, many through Zanzibar, where an Anglican cathedral Gates visits stands atop the former site of a slave market.

Returning to South Africa, Gates next recalls how the discovery of precious mines of diamonds at Kimberley in the late 1860s and gold in Johannesburg in the 1880s captured the attention of English industrialists, including Cecil Rhodes, and spurred a mass immigration that would subdue the Cape under British imperial control. Yet, as Gates explains, there was a cost to this "progress." While the British laid railroad tracks and acquired monopolies over South Africa's gold and diamond mines, they also imposed taxes, instituted pass laws, and built closed mining compounds to uproot blacks from their homes and compel them into dangerous mining jobs.

In West Africa, Gates recounts how African entrepreneurs around the Niger Delta turned the cultivation of oil palms into the "grease" of an industrializing world, a trade facilitated by their English trading partners' introduction of the steam ship in the nineteenth century. One of the most prosperous of West Africa's merchant princes was the Ghanaian William Ocansey.

But, as Gates shows, as the English and other European powers looked to Africa for trade and the extraction of natural resources, they also focused on empire, a development crystalized at the 1884-1885 West Africa Conference of Berlin, where, in a period of intense nationalism, these countries set the terms for carving up the African continent. The "Scramble for Africa" was on, Gates explains, and African art, including sculptures designed to ritually restore balance to the continent, was not all that was destroyed in its wake--a bitter lesson learned in 1896 by the Asante king, Prempeh I, who, refusing Britain's offer to turn his kingdom into a protectorate of the empire, was forced into exile.

The most brutal chapter in the "Scramble," Gates reveals, occurred in the Congo River basin. The abundant supply of rubber in those regions and a surging global demand led King Leopold II of Belgium to establish the Congo Free State in 1885, only to inflict misery on its inhabitants through relentless rubber quotas, which, if unfulfilled, brought the risk of mutilation and death. Whistleblowers included the African American investigative journalist George Washington Williams and the English missionary and photographer Alice Seeley Harris, whose revelations eventually sparked a public backlash that shamed the Belgian king into relinquishing control, but only after millions had perished under his rule.

Gates concludes by traveling to the one kingdom in Africa that successfully held its ground against colonization in the nineteenth century: Ethiopia, where, on the Plains of Adwa in 1896, Emperor Menelik II led his army to a resounding victory over Italian forces to ensure his kingdom's freedom. Throughout the African Diaspora, Ethiopia acquired mythic status, Gates explains, inspiring generations until the next wave of independence swept the continent after World War II.
