₦airaland Forum

The examples Op listed were obtained from the 19th/early 20th century. However the script is indeed from the first millennia AD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsibidi

kleek:
Show me an IQ above 100, and then we will talk.

So basically the West after the 1970s.

pleep:
This is whats so funny about low IQ people, you think you know so much when you know so little.

The reality is your mind is not the kind of mind that was ever designed for knowledge, you are too biased, too emotional. like 99.99% of people you are caught up in the hivemind of your culture and era.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was an afrocentric once but unlike you I didn't come to it too fill a void in my self-esteem. I started searching for the truth about black people, and to understand why we are where we are. I researched the Moors, black Hebrew Israelites, the black Eyptians, I know about Seti, used to love Farrakhan etc. Even in the black Moors theory which is mainly nonsense, there is a grain of truth, same with all the rest.

On the more intellectual side I've read Guns Germs and Steel, a book which lays out ideas that are actually the foundation of my understanding of world history. The foundation of my historical understanding is actually the strongest anti-racist argument ever written. I've also researched West African history extensively. I know about the IMF, the World Bank and all that other shit that you people think I am unaware of. I don't care if i sound arrogant, but i have a gift for this stuff. I read pages in seconds and hardly forget anything. Trust me, I know it all. There is literally nothing someone like you can teach me because you have the type of mind that can only see one side of the picture.

Unlike you, when i learned everything I could from the Afrocentrics I took a trip to the other side of the isle with my mind just as open. I researched heredity, IQ, HBD Theory, even phrenology. I looked at the twin studies, testosterone studies, adrenaline studies and read most of the books on race and genetics.

You think that contradiction is bad, but its actually the only place where one finds the truth.

Read Hegel if you want to actually understand history, instead of just parroting off facts and biased opinions you heard someone else say.

The fact of the matter is, that even though the Flynn effect exists, and phenotypic intelligence increases with development, even though most of Africa's historical lack of development was due to environmental factors/climatic zone not race, even though the IMF, World Bank and Neo-Liberals have purposely impeded Africa's development, even though white people probably created AIDS....

Despite aaaaaall this, there is still overwhelming evidence that there are significant mental differences between the races, and these differences manifest themselves in negative behavior in blacks. Where you see a contradiction I see the truth. Your mind is simple and wasn't equipped to truly understand the complexities of reality. As for the solution, my ideas have advanced a little since originally making this thread:

https://www.nairaland.com/2772412/africas-political-situation-caused-low

If this doesn't work, i'm just going to make a non-profit sperm back for high IQ black men, or perhaps just forget about black issues completely.

TL; just skimmed. It's all just theatrics anyway.

Congrats, you read a few basic books that every soul whom has possessed an ounce of interest in human cultures has read. The truly dedicated ones however go beyond that and actually seek to learn the history & culture to understand how a group of people got to where they are today. Without preconceived bs.

You "researched" Africa's history but only mention a handful of post-colonial events and a few controversial but mildly relevant events outside of Africa by blacks. You are unable to even pretend you have more than superficial knowledge on the thousand-year history of the second largest continent on earth, you're just here to drum up attention with these click-bait topics. Thankfully others here have exposed your fraudulence early on.

As for the last part. If I haven't mentioned on here before, I will do once more. There is no such thing as race in the way you are describing. Define race? What are the parameters of where a race begins and ends? Geneticists looked at it and didn't find any "black" or "white" genes; They did find Igbo genes, however. Can't use skeletal forensics either, because each tribe is identifiable from their remains, like how they traced a 30,000 year old skeleton in Germany to the Khoisan. Not to mention forensics specialists classify "African" skeletal forms as Tropical because of the fact that native Australians and South Americans shared similar forms.

Smh. Some of the biggest actors I've seen on the internet have come from NL. Must be that failed education system mixed with abrahamic religion.

oglalasioux:
You've got a point concerning America. But is it not time we educated and built institutions for ourselves? Like harnessing the knowledge Africa has about nature instead of leaving them in the hands of a group of dirty native doctors and village shrines? Will you believe we know nature and it's laws more than the Whiteman? First let's admit we are lost in the labyrinth, retrace our steps and start building for the future.

Everything sounds about right except for the bolded.
Native doctors & shrines are our educators(unless you're probably a devout Christian/Muslim). We should be elevating them with recognition and learning their ways.
We should also harness knowledge from those herds of dirty western doctors and churches too, right?

pleep:
I have double your IQ son, you cant teach me anything.

I was an afro-centric once, then I woke up.

Tone down the theatrics, professor.

pleep:
The south African government is literally controlled by blacks. You mean to tell me that even when you put all these black people in positions of power they still cant even lift their people out of poverty?

So is the US government.

pleep:
Yet the jews manage to control america's foreign policy without even needing to hold office? listen to yourself you have no standard for black people

Lol.

So what's your "solution" then? How do you, a nobody living in whiteman's land, intend to solve all of black people's problems today when you lack the capacity to even accept the facts & variables necessary to diagnose the problem in the first place? Thank god you are not a doctor or a parliament member or anything. Your solution is to apply dictatorial blanket solutions devised by your own imagination supported by a history timeline you invented, to try and fix problems with the incorrect procedures. It's like trying to cure schizophrenia with electric shocks. You're so stuck in your ways that you cannot listen to those who have moved ahead of you in knowledge of a given subject.

Since you know the events that led to today's woes better than the people who spent their lives researching. I would you would do well you to link your ideas to Tumblr, Youtube, University online discussions, news sites and any places where black people in 2015 with greater influence reside and let them know your thoughts. Noone outside NL is going to see this thread or it's solutions so why not voice them in a more exposed venue? I'm sure they will take your senile ramblings seriously.

.

pleep:
I didnt say Europeans built that building, i said that building is not impressive.

Its a nice thatched roof house form the late 1800's or early 1900's, a time when the west already had steamships, machine guns and telegram wires. Is that how low your standards are? Really brother, black people can do better than this. Abandon the false pride, stop thinking about white people for a second and turn inwards. The black race has failed, we were defeated because we were backwards.

Does a thatched roof house really compare to:

First one is made of marble, the second and third one are just made of wood, nothing special. The house you live in is likely made of wood and mud bricks as these are the most common materials used in the west nowadays.
Ironic how you insist you aren't impressed and yet thw Europeans you worship lamented their own architecture in their books when they saw African's.

oglalasioux:
You said the moral biting pseudo-history the whiteman force-fed me is keeping my interest in seeking the truth low. Please kindly educate me on what truth is. Virtually your life is governed by the whiteman's inventions yet your afro centrism will not allow you admit it. We in black Africa only excel in the ideas the Whiteman taught us even if he is shouting to the point of coarse that he's not too sure about it anymore. Where else in the world do you have more churches? 90% of the churches in America are run and attended by blacks. That is the only thing we learnt from the Whiteman that we are vigorously practicing. Why? Because it doesn't need a lot of mental and physical effort. Just scare a group of people about hell and promise them castles in the air if they come to church and they'll bring in tithes and offering.

This part I can agree with as it applies to modern day blacks.

oglalasioux:
Look at South Africa, is that the level they should be in 21 years of black rule? All the problems in South Africa today are perpetrated by blacks. Look at our infrastructures and institutions. They are the best in the world yet it was the Whiteman that built them for us. How long before they become decrepit? We don't even have maintenance culture. It's only in black Africa that solid waste management is still a challenge. Yet government spend billions annually for that. But the average pedestrian cannot have the wisdom to properly dispose an empty sachet of pure water The evidence of the incapability of the black man to properly govern himself is staring us in the face. I don't need any pseudo history to teach me that. Before I wait for your response let me remind you that we depend on the Whiteman for virtually everything; medicines, food production, building of infrastructures, mining of minerals even recreation. Give me the statistics that prove otherwise. Don't tell me it's bad leadership because that's exactly my point; we are incapable of managing ourselves. Waiting for your response.

You think blacks have power in SA? I bet you think blacks have power in America just because Obama is president. The literacy chart posted in this thread is very telling. Whites took over the place and are running the institutions meant to help the public and yet so much of the population is poor and uneducated. Blacks aren't even given a proper chance to enter these institutions and turn things around for their community. The country is stuck in the shackles of apartide in the form of economic ghettos. No wonder Botswana has a higher standard of living than they do. It's a better run country.

pleep:
I know all about African history, probably more than you.

I've seen those pictures dozens of times and they never impress me. Its a basic house with a thatch roof buddy. And none of these cultures had a writing system except for nsibidi. Most of these states were also slave trading states.

African history ended with the battle of Tondibi, a couple hundred years before Europeans came. Everything afterwards is just shame

Lol, if these are basic, then what were the Europeans building? Must be tents.

It's also clear you didn't look at any of the links if you didn't see the scripts they created. Either that or you have your head jammed deep in the ground because your fraudulent thread is being turned into a joke.

pleep:
That village is in Nigeria. The places where Europeans didn't conquer are more backwards than the places they did conquer.

This is a fact, we cant blame our failures on others. Its time for the black race to grow up and abandon this false pride.

Europeans built the art and architecture in the pictures? So They came to Africa and started building architecture that they couldn't back in Europe and completely forgot how to build said architecture when they returned to Europe?

Quit embarrassing yourself. The links posted pretty much shut down the premise of this thread.

pleep:
Why don't you tell me? because that is certainly what it seems like. How could blacks have created a civilization when blacks cant even run a functional society with vast oil wealth.

Impossible isn't it? But the pictures don't lie.
[img]http://2.bp..com/-i2jLZKd7IU4/Tzki7ffWR1I/AAAAAAAAJ2k/SUwd8moGfGc/s640/Kumasi+house.png[/img]
[img]http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/files/aic/Plaque_Palace_Interior.jpg[/img]

pleep:
Its funny that there are no photographs of these great African civilizations, or even writing. You would think that if they were so smart they would have at least been literate, but no. If these civilizations were so great Europeans would not have been able to just take over them and enslave the people like cattle.


The Europeans clearly never reached this part of africa, where is there great civilization?

No pictures or writing? It sounds like you don't frequent these forums much. And when you do, you just post rather than learn from others here. There are whole threads dedicated to the subject that are still being updated to this day. https://www.nairaland.com/1249503/interesting-images-precolonial-early-colonial
https://www.nairaland.com/189030/african-script

Btw, which random village from way out in the boondocks did you get that picture from?

pleep:
I am really pained by our gross underachievement as a race. Instead of regarding bitter truths expressed by the likes of Watson as a wake-up call for us to engage in sober reflection, we take to the expression of woolly sentiment and scapegoating our problems on the actions of others (colonization) . For me, this type of reaction is a further evidence of our unintelligence.

Persecution complex: "The central belief of every slowpoke is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true desserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy."

- H.L Mencken

So can you expalin how we went from this
https://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/s417/KingMichael777/precolonialghana50_zps00ed3513.png

To This
https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/4/15/1271352224681/WELCOME-TO-LAGOS-001.jpg

Around the time the whiteman took over? Did the blackman just magically forget how to be civilized as soon as white people took over the top spots of his society?

All this talk and yet the IQ of the UK in the 1900s was 80. In Egypt and Greece it was likely lower.

Enough of this IQ nonsense, lets focus on returning Africa back to stability:
https://www.recoveredhistories.org/images/africa-01.jpg

oglalasioux:
Wrong. You misunderstood the post. We are incapable and we refuse to admit it. Colonialism was supposed to do us good like it has done in South Africa (apologies for the apartheid). But we chased the white man who came to teach us away and today we cannot even manage something as archaic as polio. It's pathetic.

This is my answer to this uneducated post...

muafrika:
If the white man had not touched our beautiful continent. The most important thing African nations would still have is simple human dignity. We would not be cramped in cold cities slave driving the engines of the white mans industry which is taking out our land, a good portion of our lifetime, and Peace.

My village, like many post independent African village, would be producing more food and gold for trade. The colonial masters shifted my entire tribe to a reserve so they could take our mineral rich, fertile land. We are all still in that reserve, in fact, the word "reserve" is widely used in my country to refer to our villages. Because we never got back our ancestral lands. And our current portions in the reserves are so closely subdivided to accommodate everybody that they are not enough for even a little subsistence farming. So our young men, most of whom have limited education, because they have limited resources and you need western education to get employment, and education costs money, are in the city doing mineal jobs and living in slums the only dwellings they can afford in the city.

If you are asking what life would be without cramped, cold cities and the senseless chase after time. My answer is: BEAUTIFUL. That is the life I was made for.

But some Africans loved and lived in cities before
colonialism. For people who believe life would be terrible if not presented European style.

@oglalasioux It is indeed as if you don't have history in your curriculum. Must be all that morale biting pseudo-history the whiteman forced-fed you with to keep your interest in seeking the truth low.

Such is largely the result of colonialism. Taking Africa from high level autonomy, civilization, wealth and advancement to a resource mine for greedy western powers. And we gladly let them continue with this exploitation.

Is it no wonder the west has left this religion behind?

Geez. Nigerians are letting Indians of enslave them with religion now?

musicwriter:
Are we dumber than our forefathers?.

Yup.

PhysicsQED:
^

Another image of Benin City, from the same source, H. Ling Roth's book Great Benin (1903):

https://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo184/fgwi0a59/Capture%20-%20Image%20made%20by%20H.%20Seppings%20Wright_zpsgplnhozi.jpg

This illustration was published in the Illustrated London News on March 27th, 1897 (after the Punitive Expedition and the destruction of Benin City) and it was made by one H.C. Seppings Wright.

There are more important pictures (actual photographs) of 1890s Benin that I have come across recently, that I will post in the Benin art/architecture thread later. I may post some of them in this thread later as well.

I know this is an old thread and all but looking at this picture and thinking about the destruction of these forest kingdoms, I can't help but wonder.

Why are most of the ancient and medieval savannah towns still standing today in 2015 while the towns of the forest regions are completely uprooted and gone as if they never existed?

Did the Europeans have trouble burning and looting the muslim kingdoms when they took them over? Did the locals of Benin, Oyo, etc tear down the remainder of their own settlements when they coverted to Christianity? Maybe environment played a factor? Tropical regions don't preserve negleted mud/wiod structures as well as savannah environments?

Compare the current state of the city of Edo to Kano in northern Nigeria. Even lesser powers like Bamoun's architecture that remained untouched into the 20th century doesn't seem to be standing anymore while the Dogon villages are still around. Almost all photographed forest region architecture in this thread and the benin one are either ild black & white photos or drawings while Kano, Timbuktu, Dogon and Gao can still be photographed today.

RandomAfricanAm:
@kingston277 Glad to see you have gotten some use out of that Angola picture, there is a second wheeled vehicle picture in either Angola or the Congo I just can't remember where I saw it.

I suppose you're referring to the scene overlooking the city of Kongo, there were a few wheeled vehicles in that too. But if there does happen to be yet another picture example, I'd be very grateful if you shared it.

RandomAfricanAm:
That said, sorry to leave the heavy lifting to you but I have little patience with pleep. Most people probably don't remember be he had this same topic going back before the big data wipe where him and @physicsPHD where going back and forth about Jews and IQ but it was essentially the same topic as this and other similar topics pleeps been throwing around for the past 2-3 years. Personally I marked him "lost cause" when he started espousing that "human biodiversity" talk.

...Below is a little ammo/provision pack for the cause.(I trust you to give a decent analysis)

Thanks again for the impressive research. But I usually tend not to engage deeply in discussions such as this that assume a biological reality of "black, white, asian" as fixed genetic bins referred to as "races".

The problem stems from the lack of precise parameters that conclusively define the differences of one race from another in a way that is not susceptible to concerns of logic leaps, blatant assumptions and contradictions of known observations in the real world, therefore making it difficult to conduct discussions such as this one in an objectively fact based manner the first place. Not to mention a tendency for propenents of these topics to ignore relative diversity within, between human populations and human vs other animal species, as well as fail to research the full story of the out-of-Africa migrations theory which stresses rather loud and clear that homo sapiens migrated in waves over long stretches of time rather than all at once, but that these migrations were back and forth, in and out of Africa. The latter point would suggest that Afro-eurasion populations are more linked than prevously thought and that human populations, especially before the age of agriculture, were not static and certainly did not travel in one direction as the migration charts would have laymen believe.

Further research needs to be invested in migrations and genetic relationships between populations.

sexybaby22:
The Regents are expected to dress and act like a male because though they are women they are occupying seats meant for men and so from their dressing to their actions they are men.

Were they planning to dress in short skirts or something?
And how is this different from politicians dess code/composure?

iamrealdeji:
So,all these oro whatever still exists in this 21st century? Only God knows who'll be the victim they'll sacrifice to their gods.  Damn, Ife is still a village living in 18th century,many of these kings are Pagans disguising under islam and christianity

Or rather the other way around.

bezimo:
Google the "correlation between Native American tribes and backwardness, poverty, lack" .

So you intend to foreword your point across by citing a biased, ethnocentric source written presumably by some whiteman with skin deep knowledge on the culture he/she is writing about? Does ancient native American tradition include the casino? Are you honestly one of those imperialist-blind shmucks who believes everything is optimal and there is no more racism/inequality? Because that's usually the logic shared by the privileged folks who devise those writeups.

macof:
China, Japan, Singapore, India traditional and they operate high standards such that you envy. ..so stop blaming traditions. ..traditions have nothing to do with the economic state of a people

I think countries like Oman and Saudi Arabia should be noted as extreme but good examples. SA won't even let their women drive, so why are they home to the 21st centuries greastest engineering feat? Why does tradition-bound Oman make westernized, Christianized Nigeria look like a ransacked jungle?

PhysicsQED:
No, literature was not democratized. It was for the elite. But that's not what I'm getting at, since writing was only for the elite in most places until the 18th and 19th centuries. I was saying that other parts of the continent would have had writing far earlier than they eventually did. And of course that would have affected the rate of technological advancement, and the spread of ideas from different parts of the continent to other parts. Basically, it would have accelerated technological development to have writing earlier. It would reduce cultural diversity, but it would boost scientific progress considerably.

But writing didn't alter the cultures much when they finally got around to develping scripts. And they were still generally ahead of Egypt.

Pleep, I hope you know Americans in the 1900s had an iq that by today's standards would be equal to 80. Also, explain how people with low iqs can build this?
[img]http://2.bp..com/-i2jLZKd7IU4/Tzki7ffWR1I/AAAAAAAAJ2k/SUwd8moGfGc/s640/Kumasi+house.png[/img]
www.nairaland.com/attachments/1718676_angolawheels_jpeg5c2198a9a78c672380280ca87fd608b6

PhysicsQED:
If Egypt and Nubia had colonized the rest of Africa, we would be inundated daily with even more claims that black Africans were unable to create civilizations without help from so-called "Hamitic" colonizers spreading it to us. There would also be less cultural diversity, or at least each culture would be so heavily Egyptianized and Nubianized that they would be less unique. But on the positive side, there would have been far more literature and writing in general than there was, and that would have had other positive effects.

Was literature even democratized in Egypt? If not, they were honestly no more literate than SS Africans.

EVarn:
The liberation of the Hebrews{later known as jews} from slavery has little impact on the advent of civilization to africa.The Hebrews broke loose and sank an entire horde of the egyptian army in the Red sea,leaving the flank open for the assyrians to exploit,after plaguing egypt with faminine and pestilence,contaminating the nile and setting egypt to civil unrest.
We all know the story,but what has that got to do with egypt conquering africa?..lol,how would we remain 'slaves' of egypt in the 21th century,hmm?
I believe that africa would have been a better place today if egypt had conquered the continent.

Africa would've been more civilized today it it had just been left alone.
How did this...
[img]http://2.bp..com/-i2jLZKd7IU4/Tzki7ffWR1I/AAAAAAAAJ2k/SUwd8moGfGc/s640/Kumasi+house.png[/img]
www.nairaland.com/attachments/1718676_angolawheels_jpeg5c2198a9a78c672380280ca87fd608b6
Turn into this...
[img]http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20120213&t=2&i=570081303&w=644&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&r=CDEE81C0RPB00[/img]

...in the the span of one era of colonialism by whites.

LOIUSXIV:
remember that for a long time,. today's CAUCASIAN 'SUper' race was once called barbarians.the Europeans learnt algebra from the arabs and superseded the Arabs themselves.the JAPAN SUCCESS STORY is well known.the 'Black problem' or African problem is self-created.or maybe we should ask God why the black race finds it frustrating to crack the Technology curse and measure up to the Asians&WHITES.Ask Malaysia-colonisation is not an excuse for backwardness.

Why is colonialism not the excuse? Explain why we went from building mega structures and clean, bustling cities like Sungbo eredo, Ife, Asante and Great Zimbabwe to rusting red roof huts? Why did we go from stable, selfless governments to corruption conveniently at the same time as colonialism? Why are our militaries now a joke when the Whites used to collaborate with our armies in their colonization attempts in southeast Asia? Why are people today dieing from diseases our ancestors just prior to colonialism had cures/treatments for? Why is there so much poverty today when wealth used to be more evenly distributed in the 19th century and prior? Maybe the real question the black race should ask is why we keep worshipping and trying to measure up to the ones who sent us backwards in the first place.

Why do trolls always feel the need to make the same threads over and over again to get clicks? I thought this board was suppose to be a gathering of people the world over to get to know each others history and culture as well as dispel myths and Eurocentrism. But it seems people come here with preconceived ideas and preach fantasy about age old Egypt somehow gaining the technology to conquer more advanced peoples in the rest of Africa.

African practices? These are fringe traditions. Most Africans did not follow these, so what?
The oh holy oyinbo has worse.

Some more info in the probability of writing existing in Edo/Benin.
[quote author=user Ighayere on Historum]These are some symbols that were written in chalk by a Benin priest in front of a grove around 1906 (a few years after the conquest of Benin) and recorded in the book At the Back of the Black Man's Mind by R.E. Dennett:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/mind/img/21-001.jpg

There are also some other references to Benin making use of symbols in the past. In the article 'Ludewig Ferdinand Römer's "Nachrichten von der Küste Guinea" (Mid-18th Century) as a Source on the Benin Kingdom History and Culture' (2001), the authors note that Ludwig Romer was told in the 18th century that the people of Benin were

". . .somehow learned. Their learning is derived from many hieroglyphic figures and stone portraits and with their help [assistance] they are able to tell [relate] their own history, as well as the history of their whole country."

Though the authors disagree with the idea that the Benin/Edo people had real literacy. In the same article they note that another researcher in recent (20th century) times had obtained information about how some records were kept in the past:

"P.A. Igbafe provides information, on how the Ughoron preserved historical events as follows: “By using clay model figures of the various Ogisos and marking on them symbols of the activities of their reigns, a fairly comprehensive record was kept.”

Ughoron were hereditary court chroniclers and the Ogisos were the first dynasty of Benin kings.

This article is available online:

Ludewig Ferdinand Römer's "Nachrichten von der Küste Guinea" (Mid-18th Century) as a Source on the Benin Kingdom History and Culture | Dmitri Bondarenko - Academia.edu[/quote]http://historum.com/middle-eastern-african-history/90116-blacks-had-no-history-before-slavery-16.html (page 16)

hahn:
All the "achievements" by our ancestors mean absolutely nothing if the modern day Africa still wallows in abject poverty, lack of electricity, diseases(ebola, which in this case the cure was created by the "whites" whome you detest so much), hunger, tribal wars and every anti-development situation you can think of.

And who do you think is The cause of all this backwards? Have you not heard of colonialism or do you think our ancestors suddenly forgot how to govern a country and regressed into what it is today? Use your brain.

hahn:
And you really can't compare that building in the pic with jaja's crib man. What's wrong with you? The Arabs you talk about see the negro as a totally inferior race. Why would you even bother comparing yourself to them?

That building in the pic is one example of widespread traditional architecture used all over England and Europe. And you still didn't negate my point about the Arab architecture.

hahn:
Yes, white ladies walk around halfnude but even you, no matter how deluded you are, can't ignore how Africans condemn such actions NOW. Right now in Africa, a lady can't get molested and raped in broad daylight for putting on a see through dress. Not in all cases but it has happened. Africans criticize nudity even more than the whites.

You only have your gullible forefathers to blame.

hahn:
Take your head out of the butt of THEN and smell the fart of NOW. Africa is a shadow of its past glory and its very annoying to have to waste my precious battery life, since there is no fuel to power my gen, to chat with a low self-esteemed afro american(or whatever you like to be called these days) over what is going on PRESENTLY in Africa as opposed to what you've read in your history books.

This argument has been going on for so long, it seems you have forgotten the original point. Pre-colonial Africa was advanced back then. If our forefathers were able to achieve what they could, what's stopping us from doing the same level? If they could run stable governments with a entails for their people and live under accountability, what stopping us?
Why are the likes of you condemning you ancestors for "semi-primitiveness" and praising a foreign people that are rife with cultural corruption of their own thanks to centuries of European born superstition and backwardness? Stop with the inferiority complex and learn to learn from people who have been through similar trials you are currently in.