The Midieval Cities of Africa

I have been reading Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle. I quote at length from page 53:

Recent excavations have shown just how much the outside world has underestimated Ife; it was a commonplace of even recent historical writing to assume that equatorial Africa never developed cities or major monuments of any kind. This has now proved to be spectacularly wrong. For example, one site is Igbo Ukwa, a royal burial place in which massive quantities of manufactured goods have been found, including many that came from the Mediterranean and even from India via Gao-Kukiya. Ife-Ife itself, the capital city, was surrounded by a ring wall forty feet high and twenty-five models in circuit, and that wasn't the only one or even the biggest: Africa's largest single monument is a sixty-five-foot high wall with a moat sixteen to twenty-three feet wide that surrounded the city of Ijebu, the wall measuring an astounding one hundred miles in circomference.

Comment: I had no idea that such cities existed in Africa in the past. If the authors are right, a lot of history and geography texts should be revised, and soon! JAD

Incidentally, read an article by the same authors about Timbuktu in a recent Natural History magazine.