African Thinkers

In the cradle of humanity, Africa, thought was creatively practiced in a natural environment of bountifulness and human diversity. Languages, artistic works, inscriptions, cave paintings, and architectural constructs of huge irrigation schemes and other colossal monuments testify to the intellectual abilities of the African peoples who thought about them, and then designed and erected them. In the deeply rooted African spirituality, the African thought was expressed in a great many deities, rituals, ethical stands, and religious teachings.

Since ancient times, African thinkers used thousands of languages that have been grouped in the large families of the Saharan, Sudanic,Kordofanian, and others. Some of these languages were written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Nubian Meroitic, Ethiopian Geez, or Arabic. Perhaps one of the oldest inscriptions in Africa is the Stale of Piankhi, the Nubian king who invaded Egypt and founded the 25th Dynasty (ca. 734), which reads “I am a king, the image of God, the good divine one, beloved of the divine ones.” Another stale by Ethiopian King Ezana of Aksum (325 CE) carried with it a story of invasion. The African thinkers were also some of the earliest to establish cosmological doctrines on theology and monotheism. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten called for the veneration of the one almighty Lord, instead of the polytheist deities of his time.

African thinkers have contributed distinguished achievements to the arts and sciences, for example, the knowledgeable architect Imhotep, builder of the first pyramid, who was equally a prime minister, philosopher-teacher, and father of medicine. The continent witnessed prolific leaders of thought in the medieval times. In the 15th century, among the Mali and the Songhay, Timbuktu and Jenne began their long careers, with ideas from their schools of theology and law spreading far into Muslim Asia. ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun of Tunisia (1332–1406) was a researcher on education and psychology, a political activist and a statesman, a jurist and judge who innovated autobiography as well as a scientific methodology for the science of history and founded a science of sociology in the course of his rigorous research to correct the reported events of history.

Endowed with intensive knowledge about the holy Koran, the Hadith (the Prophet's sayings and deeds), monotheism, jurisprudence, linguistics, poetry, metaphysics, natural science, mathematics, arts and foreign languages,Ibn Khaldun spent about 8 years authoring his magnanimous masterpieceMuqaddimat Ibn Khaldun (the Ibn Khaldun Introduction), which is one of the seven volumes, Kitab al-'Ibar wa Diwan al-Mubtada wa al-Khabar (The Book on Events on the Days of the Arabs, the non-Arabs, the Berber, and Contemporary Relatives of the Superior Sultan). Excluding some historical events as “impossible” judged by “the nature of things,” the methods of scientific research and the rules of investigating [Page 30]historical events as “codes of society,” the Muqaddimat dealt with the study of “the ‘Umran [societal life or sociological activity], social phenomena, ownership, authority, acquisitions, craftsmanship, sciences, and the factors and the causes underlying them.” Ibn Khaldun's history of the Berber is perhaps the strongest, richest, and most genuine historical research. The French historian Dozy described his accurate writing on Spain as “outstanding: nothing of the sort is found or comparable in the accounts of the medieval Christian westerners of whom no one successfully documented what Ibn Khaldun clearly wrote.”

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