Africans Lived In Huts
The empires, cities, and stonework the textbooks skipped past — a look at what was actually standing before anyone arrived to "discover" it.
One of the most repeated myths about Africa is that, before Europeans arrived, people lived only in simple huts. It is a picture that still turns up in films, cartoons and classrooms. The historical record says something very different.
Great Zimbabwe, built between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries, has granite walls around ten metres high fitted together without mortar. Benin City was surrounded by walls and moats larger than the walls that later enclosed London. Kano in northern Nigeria had city walls running for kilometres.
On the east coast, Kilwa and the Swahili city-states built mosques and palaces in coral stone. In Ethiopia, Aksum raised giant granite stelae, and later the churches of Lalibela were carved straight down into solid rock. In the Sahel, Timbuktu and Djenné grew into cities of trade and scholarship, with mosques built in monumental earthen architecture.
Many Africans did live in homes built from earth, wood and thatch, and those buildings were often well suited to the climate. The myth is not that such homes existed. It is the claim that nothing else did. This episode puts the cities back into the picture.
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