For 31 years, I taught world history/world cultures in a suburban high school. My responsibility therefore was to the African end of African-American history. During the Civil Rights Movement, new materials came out on the African past and I read myself silly, correcting the misunderstandings that I had previously learned. I created an African History unit for my high school, writing the materials myself when nothing was available at the high school level.
It pains me that after a half century, Americans are still unaware of rich African kingdoms like the medieval empire of Mali, the second-largest in the world after the Mongol holdings and by far the richest. Or the city of Benin in Nigeria, where 200 years before the Renaissance realistic busts and statues were cast in bronze and gold in the difficult “lost wax” process used by the ancient Greeks but only rediscovered in Europe in the 1500s.
Roy Johnson
Kirkwood