I intend to cover a lot more African history in the future, so please share and subscribe to help fix that lack of knowledge!

How do you expect anyone to know what statement you're talking about

Why would it be?

All the maps of Aksum shown in the video are questionable, notice how much they differ from each other; unfortunately I don't know of any fully reliable maps of Aksum. The precise location of Azania is not known, and you're correct that it may have been located in or included Southern Somalia, however, the way Medieval and 19th Century Europeans used the term should not be taken as evidence of this, as they often applied geographic labels outside of their original use (for example, often referring to parts of Africa as "India" during the Middle Ages, and referring to the island of Madagascar by a distorted version of the name "Mogidishu")

@@SomasAcademy thanks and also the cause they said Madagascar as Mogadisho is because Madagascar was actually Mogadishian sultanet colony Jan Huygen van Linschoten who travelled to Madagascar at 1583 and mentioned Mogadishan sultanet presence in Madagascar Direct from book Lawrence......" (Purchas, ii, p. 1464). The east coast of Madagascar was discovered on the 1st of February, 1506, by Fernam Soares. (Major, Prince Henry (1877), p. 265.) Capt. R. F. Burton points out (Lusiads, iv, p. 520), that St. Lawrence was given as a name because J. G. d'Abreu saw the W. coast on August 10 (St. Lawrence's Day) in 1506, and gave it this name. Madagascar "came from Makdishu (Magadoxo) in Continental Zanzi- bar, whose Shaykh invaded it."

Yes, I'm not sure what specific evidence you're referencing but there are Arab accounts mentioning both Christian and Jewish communities in West Africa during the Middle Ages. "King Mansa Musa" is redundant, Mansa is a title meaning "Emperor," his name was Musa.

@@SomasAcademy West African Christians The Living Bra. "I heard the magistrate Fakhr al-Din, Inspector of the victorious army, say: "I asked the king of the Takrur ('äl-takwur): What is the source like where the gold grows among them ?' Then he said: 'It is not in our land which is the property of the Muslims; rather, it is in the land that is the property of the Christians of Takrur ('al-nasary min 'äl-takwur). We send to take from them a collection that is due to us and is required of them. These are special lands that produce gold in this way: they are small pieces of various textures, some are like small rings, some are like carob seeds, and so on.'' The magistrate Fakhr al-Din replied, saying: "Why don't you conquer the land by force?' He said: 'If we conquer them and take it, it does not produce anything. We have done this in various ways, but we have not seen anything in it. But when it returns to them, it produces according to its average. This is a fascinating dynamic, and this is perhaps an increase in the dominance (tugiy'ăn) of the Christians." - Ibn al-Dawadan, Kanz al-durar wa jami "al-ghurar I’d like to know more of your sources if you have any. I’d like to show them with a professor that has been gathering information on this.

I couldn't give you more info off the top of my head, mentions of Christians and Jews during my research piqued my interest but I didn't make specific note of them. The main source I've read for Arabic accounts of West Africa, however, is Levtzion and Hopkins' "Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History."

@@SomasAcademy Awesome, thanks! I’ll plunge right in! Meanwhile, if you come across any more in the future please let me know.

@@dimunche Will do!

You're factually wrong. I provided a convenient list of sources used for this video in the pinned comment and an additional list of book recommendations in the description, simply consult those sources and learn about history instead of making arguments based on incomplete information and guesses.

@@SomasAcademy one thing about historical "facts" is that it's written based on past living standards by someone just like you and i. What happened then is based on lifestyle at that time.. just as we can currently say prior to 2018 temperature was significantly lower and it rained more often then than it does now. If these facts were graded from the 1700s till date, then it'll be pretty believable and relative to present day. But that's not the case as you mentioned dates as far back as 1000bc if I'm not mistaken, where population was just a couple millions at best. No major technological advancements capable of transporting large quantity of goods past a "desert" except ships that required large bodies of water, and not much need for large scale farming. Not trying to be aggressive here, but you should know that historical facts can majorly be misleading or misinterpreted based on whatever time is considered "present", could be 300 years from now or later, as at the end of the day, it's still passed on from human to human. Which is why i tend to focus more on the grouped present and the future instead of the past. What you consider as history could be skewed fact along with imagination, and what you hear could be distorted tales. But i can tell you for certain that the best medium of transportation back then were ships, and even relative to the bible, you can see that people were majorly nomads reflected in dress codes of African, European and Asian early history .

@@collinscollins7777 This is a history video on a history channel, and you made claims about history. If you "like to focus on the present" then don't make claims about the past. Your guesswork is not equally or more valid than historical data because "historical facts can majorly be misleading or misinterpreted." If you don't know what kinds of data are used to make historical claims, then consider checking citations and learning about historical methodology, rather than pretending it's all invalid based on what your gut tells you. There are some things in history that are matters of debate, but those debates are based on analysis of the data, not refusing to engage with it. You have no clue what you're talking about, and have made multiple indisputably false claims, because you have not engaged in a bare minimum level of research, substituting your own uninformed guesses for verifiable information. I don't mean to be aggressive, but speaking with you is as profound a waste of my time as it would be for me to debate a flat earther, and gives me extreme second-hand embarrassment. Don't leave comments arguing about topics you know nothing about, this isn't hard for people who don't embody the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Please don't comment on my channel ever again.

Well that's not true, Europe and Asia are connected and have been trading for as long as they've both had people lol. There was never a point when Europeans didn't know Asia existed since you can literally see Asia from parts of Europe (of course, they wouldn't have always called it a continent, but that's because the concept of a "continent" was only developed more recently, when the Greeks arbitrarily divided the Afro-Eurasian landmass into three).

@@SomasAcademyI’m African, by here I meant Africa. We traded with Asians long before caucasians knew there was a dark continent

@@ideationfay Oh got it, I misread it as "there" lol

Yeah, and it was ironic how much they seemed to draw from Guns, Germs, and Steel in a video where they cited and interviewed Daron Acemoglu, who very firmly rejects the Geographic Determinism of GG&S in the full interview EE did with him. It's like they listened to his criticisms of Geographic Determinism and then completely disregarded them lol You're correct that using specific ethnic groups is ideal, but some alternative blanket terms to "pygmies" are "Central African Foragers" and "Central African Hunter-Gatherers," with the former seemingly being a bit more common!

@@SomasAcademy (I feel like that book gets a completely-undeserved bad rep, but I'm not interested in opening internet worm cans atm. It's still irritating hearing EE regurgitate half-remembered snippets of it. 😑) I'll add that first one to my vocabulary! I admit, it sounds a little generic...but so did "First Nations" for a while before acceptance, and it absolutely fits. Also, thanks for reminding me that "foraging" is a useful synonym for "hunting-gathering." The latter's always bugged me grammatically (two gerunds combined??), and bugged me more once I learned that outside specific areas*, "gathering" is a _much_ bigger proportion of how the lifestyle's food is obtained. * Maybe? Afaik, sealing/whaling groups rely primarily on hunting.

​@@NeutralDrow I've seen some unfair criticism of GG&S - I've actually come to the defense of Diamond's motivations a few times before - but it is unambiguously a very, very poor work of historical writing, wherein the author attempts to explain why certain things were historically the case without first verifying that they were (most of what Diamond says about Africa and the Americas is simply factually wrong, regurgitation of myths about Spanish conquests, stereotypes about African history, and even some baffling mistakes in regards to Geography). It's not entirely bad, but the bad parts are REALLY bad. I have considered doing an in-depth critique of that book, as I feel its popularity has contributed to the perpetuation of a lot of misinformation about history, but that's a big topic that I can't even consider undertaking at this point lol (would probably take at least an hour to discuss, and the longest video I've made so far is less than 30 minutes)

@@SomasAcademy Makes sense. I knew about some of his ideas that have been abrogated by recent research (the confirmation of pre-Clovis Culture comes to mind), but I rarely see the historical and scientific mistakes pointed out. It's usually just incredulity over the East-West Axis hypothesis or definition-less condemnation of "geographical determinism" (though luckily, I've since seen a handful of folks actually define their terms and explain their objection in good faith). All while there's an entire chapter on a hypothetical spectrum of band-tribal-chiefdom-state political organization _right there_ that feels like low-hanging fruit.

..."Digital voice"? Bruh that's just how I sound, this video was uploaded before lifelike AI generated voices were even a thing lol

Wikipedia is not a reliable source, but even your own source doesn't support the claim that the alleged connections between the Akan people and Wagadu had anything to do with the name of modern Ghana, saying "As the Gold Coast colony prepared for independence, the nation's founder Kwame Nkrumah settled on Ghana, aiming to evoke a sense of unity and liberation among the Ghanaian people. The name was a powerful reminder of their shared heritage and the legacy of the ancient empire that once thrived in the wider region." Nothing about the Akan in particular. As far as I can tell this narrative that the Akan in particular descended directly from people who moved south from Wagadu after its collapse (a narrative with minimal evidence supporting it) only developed after Ghana's name was chosen, rather than motivating the name choice. The Wikipedia page on the History of Ghana also does not claim that the Akan originated in Wagadu anywhere else either; it might have in the past since anyone can edit Wikipedia, including nationalists asserting spurious claims, but it doesn't currently. If you can point me to specific work by JB Danquah asserting a connection between the Akan and Wagadu, that would be much better support for such a proposal factoring into the decision to name Ghana after Wagadu than a Wikipedia page which says no such thing.

@@SomasAcademy Wiki has one thing correct - speaking of Nkrumah's choice of name. It says "The name was a powerful reminder of their shared heritage and the legacy of the ancient empire that once thrived in the wider region." Now which shared heritage & legacy would that be? Right - Ancient Ghana. So then the name and legacy of Ancient Ghana WAS indeed a consideration in choosing a name for modern Ghana. But here are your words that I objected to: "As far as I can tell the connection between the Akan kingdoms living in modern Ghana and their connection to Ancient Ghana was NOT a consideration in naming the country". The work you should have touched on in your video is "The Akan Doctrine of God" by JB Danquah (1944). Published long before Gold Coast's independence movement, it proposes a MIGRATION of the Akan from Wagadu. So, no, Akan migration theory did not "only develop after Ghana's name was chosen". In it Danquah lays out the case for connection between Akan and Wagadu. Akan, he writes, was a minority group within the larger polity. I have no beef with you for contextualising the name of modern Ghana so conservatively ("nationalistic assertions", "spurious claims" etc.). I do fault you for completely disregarding the oral and academic tradition of connection (not just Akans) through sheer omission. It's a rather Euro stance.

@@frankscott1708 Nkrumah was a Pan-Africanist, and not all Ghanaians are Akan. "Shared heritage" does not mean "Akan heritage" in this context, that would be baffling. Why would Nkrumah choose a name specifically tied to the Akan to pull the people of Ghana, not all of whom are Akan, together? From the context I could find, I interpreted this choice as one meaning to link Ghana with a shared African heritage going back to the earliest West African kingdom known by name. Thank you for sharing a specific source, as I said that is much more effective support for your point than the Wikipedia page. Checking the book, I see that the author does indeed lay out a narrative of migration of the Akan from Ghana, though he also notably claims that the word "Ghana" is a "corruption by the Arabs of Sudan" of the word "Akane," rather than identifying the Akan as a minority group in Wagadu as you said. He also claims that the Akan were originally from West Asia, so uh... that's certainly an interesting bit of pseudohistory, presumably influence from the colonial Hamitic Hypothesis that many African historians educated during the colonial era unfortunately embraced. Regardless of the accuracy of Danquah's work, however, this source certainly refutes my previous understanding, demonstrating that the hypothesis of Akan migration from Wagadu already existed at the time. However, I still question the idea that this was Nkrumah's motivation for choosing the name Ghana, as favoring individual groups like the Akan would be a strange move in context. It still seems more plausible to me that the choice was made based on the Ghana Empire's place in West African history as a whole, rather than connection to any specific ethnic group, though I accept the possibility of the alternative.

@@SomasAcademy Perhaps your perspective isn't sufficiently Gold Coast. The reality of the Gold Coast on the eve of independence is pretty different from that of Ghana today. Leading up to independence, all of the action took place in the two urbanised territories, which were majority Akan: Gold Coast & Ashanti Protectorate. These two integral territories held political and economic power and contained most of the infrastructure. The other two British possessions being Northern Territories Protectorate and British Togoland, were of little consequence in deciding the fate of the new country, and played a minor role in the struggle, especially rural British Togoland. The Akan kingdom of Ashanti, still a quasi-independent kingdom even under British rule, included elite interests which were able to win concessions from Nkrumah in order to cement their support for his incipient independent nation. They did so by threatening to withdraw support for Nkrumah's nation building project while simultaneously engaging in low intensity terrorism. Nkrumah placated the majority Akan in various ways, including I believe in choosing the name Ghana, a nod to Akan & Dagomba history. The situation in Ghana today is much different from Nkrumah's time. The old British Northern Territories & Togoland are currently extremely influential to electoral outcomes and to national resource assets. Ergo the official line has changed: for four decades now, we have a new more politically hygienic narrative consensus being pushed, which wants us to believe that Nkrumah's choice of "Ghana" was not Akan-centric at all, but rather a general hearkening back to the inspirational grandeur of old Ghana! We are being played. Ghana is masterful at narrative and narrative control.

​@@frankscott1708 You make a compelling argument, I appreciate you sharing that context.

The video didn't state that the Sahara "slowed down trade progress," it stated that it "isolated Sub-Saharan Africa from most of the developments occurring on the trade routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia." It was not a comment on the time at which trade began, but a comment on the amount of contact. This is obvious from the context of the video. Moreover, the fourth century CE isn't "eventually," that's well over 1,000 years of history prior to contact between Sub Saharan Africa and Europe, and is only a few centuries after the start of Silk Road trade, i.e. trade along those routes between "Europe, the Middle East, and Asia" (not to mention the fact that Silk Road trade was repeatedly disrupted for decades at a time, unlike Saharan trade). I also very directly debunk your claim that "southern africa only got exposure through northern africa for a long while, because camels" when I talk about trade over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which you'd know if you'd watched more than 3 minutes of the video (not to mention the other nonsense I corrected from the EE video, like the claim that Sub-Saharan Africa never developed agriculture). Also, "southern Africa" is not synonymous with Sub-Saharan Africa. If you're going to try to be a smart-ass you should at least have a basic idea of the terminology you're using.

...Que?

Yup

Thanks! That's why I pointed out that wheels weren't used in the Americas.

Thank you! Yes, I do still plan on making a follow up! I don't have sources on hand right now, but there is a list of citations at the end of this video, I believe the last one has more information on the Tokyo group, and Peter Zarrow has also written some other good sources on Chinese Anarchism.

Thanks for watching!

This is a popular idea, but Emojis and hieroglyphs work ENTIRELY differently. Hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic, not ideographic like Emojis. Also, "Khemet" is not a name for Egypt. The native name for ancient Egypt was spelled kmt in Hieroglyphs, and since Hieroglyphs don't include vowels, Egyptologist tend to fill in the vowel "E" by default to make tings easier to pronounce out-loud, hence, "Kemet." However, it's unlikely that the word was ever pronounced like this; based on linguistic analysis of the descendants and relatives of the Ancient Egyptian language, it was probably "Kumat" in Old Egyptian, "Kuma" in Middle Egyptian, and "Keme" in Late Egyptian. T's started being dropped off the ends of words in Middle Egyptian but stuck around in spelling, kinda like in French. And while in modern phonetic spellings of the Coptic name for Egypt a small "h" is sometimes included after the K to represent breathiness, the spelling "Kh" is used to represent a throaty sound in Egyptian, and this was never the first sound in the word kmt, so while "Kemet" would be a valid spelling for the Egyptological pronunciation of kmt, "Khemet" would not.

@@SomasAcademy Yes thank you for this info, I'm always fascinated with Egypt etc. Very interesting to know more. 👍❤

Also, don't use a modern wheelbarrow made out lightweight aluminum with a pneumatic rubber tire. Use a wheelbarrow made of heavy wood, with an inflexible wooden wheel.

I prefer Anarcho-Monarchism

@@SomasAcademy That's a meme ideology.

@@Based_Gigachad_001 Wow really? I had no idea, I thought it was a very real not at all self-contradictory ideology like National-Anarchism. Learn something new everyday.

You're talking about a later period, EE was claiming they were isolated prior to contact with European powers, which is what I was refuting in the video. Africa has been poor since the colonial period, not due to post colonial regimes, though post-colonial matters have contributed to ongoing poverty (not socialist dictators in particular, only a few African countries have ever been socialist, and quite a few of their most disastrous dictatorships were actually expressly anti-socialist - dictators like Mobutu, Blaise Compaoré, and Idi Amin overthrew nominally socialist or socialist-leaning regimes, for example, and in the case of Blaise Compaoré the regime he overthrew had actually seen significant improvements in the economy of Burkina Faso, including achieving food self-sufficiency for the first time. Under Compaoré, these gains were reversed, and Burkina Faso fell into debt). When people attribute African poverty to Socialism, they are often oversimplifying or misunderstanding; it's not as simple as one type of economic system causing Africa's issues, both Socialist and Capitalist regimes in Africa have seen occasional successes and more common failures). Africa was at its richest from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization in Europe saw Africa fall behind, and then colonialization prevented many parts of Africa from beginning to industrialize during the late-19th to early-20th centuries as parts of Asia did. The main cause for African poverty is the fact that colonial economies were built around the production of a very small range of raw materials, with all the infrastructure and worker training going into producing these raw materials. Paired with the fact that manufactured goods tend to be more expensive than the raw materials used to make them, African colonies tended to spend more on imports than they made on exports, so there was a drain of capital rather than an accumulation of it. This meant that after colonialism ended, most African countries lacked economic diversification or the tools to improve it. Most African countries have not been able to improve diversification due to a variety of factors, including corrupt regimes (both socialist ones like the DERG in Ethiopia and anti-socialist ones like Mobutu in the DRC) and tribalism like you mentioned, but also heavy foreign debt (some to China, yes, but most to other major debt-holders like France, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. France has maintained a very similar economic relationship to its former colonies that it had during the colonial era through use of the CFA Franc and holding huge amounts of debt from most of said former colonies). I'll probably discuss this in more depth in a future video.

Weirdly I've never heard of anyone in an Anarchist society begging for less Anarchy.

@@SomasAcademy yeah, cause they haven’t GOT a society where they overthrew the government. When you get that state where you have no police, no infrastructure, welfare, public maintenance or surplus of food you’re looking around like “oh…so what the fuck do we do now?”. And then the pillaging, murder and r@ping begins. You go back to what it was like during ancient days. I love it when feminists call themselves “anarchists” because a functioning government and healthy free market are the only things keeping us from going back to the time when women had no real rights and were used as breeding stock. You’d be removing the very boundaries that protect you. A liberal, democratic, capitalist nation like in America, Western Europe and southeastern asian nations like Taiwan and japan are literally the safest places for everyone because they coddle you all with every luxury and amenity that the masses can afford. Anarchists would upend that and whatever the hell they’d replace it with would be unbridled chaos.

Wow so you've just never looked into this subject and are basing your entire perspective on your imagination, huh?

@@SomasAcademy what sense does it make to tear down governments to leave it with nothing but chaos? You have to have SOME form of government. And this is how totalitarian regimes are created. They get rid of the existed power structure and order and then the revolutionaries who know nothing about destruction are like “what do we do now?”. And since they don’t know how to run a government it falls apart and the resulting power vacuum allows the most reprehensible of people to take power. Happened with the French Revolution, the rise of Stalinist russia, the third reich and others. What government was this kaneko chick going to implement once she tore down her country’s governing structure? Probably a worse one

Way to prove my point lol

I will definitely be discussing Fumiko's relationship with Pak Yeol! I've seen Anarchist from Colony, and will probably be using some clips from it for visuals if doing so doesn't trigger copyright detection lol

Yeah, unfortunately more specific dating methods aren't always available to archaeologists so you end up with broad ranges lol

@@SomasAcademy For sure

No, "wheels would have significantly increased productivity but were not adopted due to tyrannical rulers and this stifled economic productivity" and "wheels would not have increased productivity due to environmental factors, and alternative means of transport were used to achieve comparable economic productivity" are not, in fact, the exact same point. Similarly, "Sub-Saharan Africans had no incentive to develop agriculture, so they just hunted and gathered" is not the same point as "almost all Africans engaged in agriculture," and "the Sahara cut Sub-Saharan Africans off from the rest of the Old World" is not the same point as "people regularly crossed or went around the Sahara, making Sub-Saharan Africa a fully integrated part of the Old World." If you think I didn't refute a single point he made, you are the one who is "confused."

"He even describing the sahara as an ocean with seperating isolated communities like you did." I said the opposite. I literally explicitly, directly made the opposite argument. I presented his argument about the Sahara isolating communities, and then explained that it didn't do so. I genuinely have no idea how you could come away with the conclusion that I had described the Sahara as an ocean separating isolated communities. "He mentioned that the wheel wasnt widely used not because there was no knowledge of wheels but that other factors made certain beneficial technologies like the wheel less beneficial and therefore less necessary." He presents knowledge of wheels as first arriving with Europeans, hence my explanation that this was not the case, and he does not state that other factors made the wheel "less beneficial and therefore less necessary," but rather that other factors, specifically institutional factors, prevented Africans from adopting wheels despite the obvious economic benefits that would have come from their use. "He also didnt say that there wasnt any farming done in Africa, just that it was less productive than other agricultural regions in the world" As presented in the video, he claims that there was no incentive for agriculture and that where agriculture "would have been possible" it was easier to hunt and gather. "Would have been possible" suggests that despite the possibility, it was not practiced due to it being "easier to hunt and gather." Elsewhere in the EE video, he compares Sub-Saharan Africa to pre-colonial Australia, which he states was "also" isolated and occupied by hunters and gatherers, i.e. suggesting that Sub-Saharan Africa was occupied by hunter-gatherers like Australia. So, yeah, he does suggest that there was no farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. His point about lower efficiency in modern African agriculture is presented as an explanation for why Africa never developed agriculture itself, which as explained in the video, it actually did. "This seemed more like you wanted to showcase what you learned about Africa without trying to do what Economics explained was doing which was answer the question why is Africa behind the rest of the world economically, technologically, and politically now since the industrial, political, and economical revolutions are now penetrating every corner of the world faster than ever." The purpose of this video was to correct historical misconceptions presented in EE's video. Answering the question of why Africa is relatively poor in modern times fell outside of the scope of this video, as it is subject to debate and a matter of evaluating the relative weight of a variety of potential contributing factors. I intend to make an additional video actually tackling that question, but the purpose of this video was to correct misconceptions, not to present an argument.