Bryan’s blog

Link to homework: http://ssmeetsit.edublogs.org/2006/11/30/homework-for-block-e-and-h-thursday-30-november/

What I learned about the different African kingdoms.

Iron Technology’s Impact on
West Africa

Through out the presentations, I learned lots of things, like how the African kingdoms involved. Before I learned more about Africa, whenever I heard the name, I always thought about poor people( from the movies) but I now know that they invented and had quite a bit of things for those days.To start off with, I am going to talk about what I learned about iron. Iron was one of the very valuable things to the West Africans in those days. Before they had Iron, they used bones and rocks for weapons to gather food. These tools weren’t useful because bones broke easily and stones weren’t always sharp. You also couldn’t carve the stone into the shape you want it to be like how you can with iron: smashed it to small pieces, melt it and then use hammers to make it into shape. So rocks and bones weren’t effective and as a result, they weren’t given the opportunity to eat lots of meat but more fruit and vegetables.

But after the discovery of iron to the West Africans, the food supply was better because iron could be used to hunt things down and so more meat was available. Also farming was easier because there were shovels and sticks that could be used.

What I learned from this topic, is that they actually used rock and bones before the invention of iron because I thought it was just iron.

Ghana (a place) had a very strong economy because of their taxes and iron. Other facts include their good location and military. Everyone was taxed for trading. Either with money or food. If you didn’t have money, you could pay with your goods. So those are a few of the major reason why the country grew to be quite strong.

Ghana was also a very strong place in other areas. The people of Ghana worshiped their ancestors but mainly one “top of the hill” god. They also thought if they give and sacrifice things to the gods, it would prevent natural disasters. Also,
Ghana was a safe place due to its great military. The king wasn’t like those kings who only care about himself, but a genours king who thought that everybody should be treated equally.

The kingdom of Mali Under Mansa Musa

 Mali:

Mali was powerful for about 200 years. Its empire was twice as big as Ghana’s. Mansa Musa was generous in gold, he gave 60,500 slaves bars of gold. And because of the gold that was given to everybody, value in things went up. Lots of places started to learn to read and write arabic and Europeans started to included Mali on their maps because of high levels of wealth!!

The fight: 

There was a battle of 2 empires. The fight was so bad that only one house remained. Legends are to say that both leaders used magic at the battle. 

How the Songhai Empire Grew to Greatness

Mali had ruled Songhai for many years but Songhai was able to struggle out and gain independence in 1435. Sunni Ali Ber help them gain independence but however the people were against his policy and rules, therefore the leader then became Askia Muhammad. The rise of the empire began in 1490.

Askia wanted to promote unity and increase his empire so he conquered some places. But the major reason they became larger is because of uion of his empire and another. Songhai’s empire soon grew bigger than Mali and
Ghana’s empires together!!

What I found Interesting

What I found interesting about the presentations is the interesting facts that I heard. For example, the Morocco took out half of Songhai’s army even when
Songhai had a great empire and so they would probably have a huge army! The other fact I found cool was how Ghana slowly turned from Ghana to Mali then
Songhai! All of these things shook me! I kept thinking to myself that this really how things were in those days?! WOW!

 Through out the study of Africa in our class we got to act it out how one tribe would travel along way just to trade and have to pay taxes the warriors of Ghana as they said that they will keep the goods safe. This wasn’t really included in the presentations, but I would like to add it here because I enjoyed acting a scene out and it gave me a visual understanding of what happened, how they traded along time ago.

 And to end my paragraph, I must say that I am very glad to learn about all these awesome facts about
Africa’s history for it opened a beautiful window in my mind about African history.