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Many West African families have private library collections dated back to the 8th Century A.D. This is Indigenous African Literature 600 to 900 years old containing information that is of a much older era in Africa's history. There are 11,000 books in private collections in Niger Republic. Meanwhile in Timbuktu, Mali, there are about 700,000 surviving books. Also the Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written mediaeval books and 6,000 books surviving in the other city of Walata.
Most scholars of Timbuktu during this era were far ahead of their counterparts in Europe. In 15th century Timbuktu the mathematicians were writing about the oribits and rotation of the planets, and the details of the eclipse. These are things which we had to wait for almost 150-200 years to know in Europe before Galileo and Copernicus came up with these same calculations and were given a very hard time for it by the Europeans of that time.
The literature in these ancient African books is flipping the Colonial Historical Narrative on its head and only a fraction of it has been revealed because the writings have been kept in hiding for many generations to protect them from colonizers (The French and etc.) who burned an estimated first half of them. You can imagine having to duplicate information manually before printers and hard drives! Timbuctu was the Book Copying Center during the 8th to 1400s so the information is actually much much older. This continued until about the 1500s when Slavery, Invasions and Depopulation began the chaotic disruption of the West African region and many of these scientists found themselves marched to the coast and sold to Arabs and Europeans.
Big thanks to Dean for allowing Its Braap to share his work with us.
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Jaz McKenzie~ The Word Magician
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