EP31 Kushite Conversations
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It's hardcore history. So I've been looking for someone to talk with me about the ancient kingdom of Kush for years. The good news is I finally found the perfect person to do that, and I'm having them on the show today. The bad news is this person has actually written a brand new book that encompasses the entire history of Africa, basically, from the beginning to recent times, from top to bottom, side to side.

and I'm going to monopolize the conversation to talk about this one region and this one era. So I apologize for all the stuff you're not going to get today that's in the book that we could have touched upon, but I've been trying for years to get somebody on this show to talk about this little pet issue of mine. So I'm going to monopolize the conversation

So I'm afraid not only do I monopolize the conversation on the subject, but I dive right into it and don't give any background. So let me do a little of that real quickly so that we know what we're discussing. The kingdom of Cush is a kingdom that's located, well, it starts in ancient Egyptian times. It's a contemporary, it's really the next door neighbor of the ancient Egyptians. Back to prehistoric times, their relationship is as close as close can be.

You can see carvings of the troops of some of these pharaohs from the Old Kingdom that are buried with them. And, you know, Old Kingdom pharaohs, you're talking 2300, 2400 BCE, 2200 BCE, really old stuff. Old Kingdom, right? But in their tombs, you can see Kushite soldiers in their armies already and already famous soldiers.

for the weapon that they are known for. This is the land, the Kushites, or Kush, where they're from, is often called the land of the bow. And in the old kingdom pharaoh tombs, there they are, armed with their bows.

Thousands of years later, Herodotus describing the great king of Persia's army and trying to emphasize the exoticness and the far-flung nature of his empire and all the troops that he could call upon. He talks about a contingent from a place he calls Ethiopia, which is what the Greeks called the region that's now sort of Sudan and that encompasses the Kushite people. And he describes their soldiers similarly here.

says that they are black skinned, that they paint their body in war paint from top to bottom. I think it was one half red and one half white and that they are carrying their bows that are as long as a man. They had a reputation for shooting at the eyes of their opponent. And one can imagine that that must have been something that earned you a lot of kudos with your

you know, fellow warriors. I mean, oh my God, he got the eye, right? He shot at the guy's eye and he got it. I mean, that's what you're aiming for. And the arrows are supposedly poisonous. That's quite a reputation to have from thousands of years ago. Now, I discovered the Kushites because a person who war-gamed at the shop where I war-gamed had an army that attracted all of our attention. It was a fascinating army that on the surface looked like a standard biblical Egyptian army.

So chariots of Pharaoh, the soldiers in those traditional ancient Egyptian, you know, outfits and carrying sickle swords and all that kind of stuff. I mean, very sort of an iconic army of Ramses or Thutmose or Amenhotep, Nefertiti, King Tut, the whole thing. But this guy had painted most of the soldiers in the army, painted his miniature figurines with black skin.

as though they were from Sudan, right? Not looking like Mediterranean coastal figures at all. I thought Trayvon at the time was trying to make a political statement. I was 14, 15, whatever I was at the time. And it was normal for people to have some sort of an opinion on the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. And there were people that were claiming, listen, this is an African society. These are black folks.

And I thought that's what Trayvon was doing, but that's not what he was doing. He explained to me that this army represented the army of Egypt's 25th dynasty. The 25th dynasty is the black pharaoh, black African queen dynasty of Egypt, and it goes on for several pharaohs.

I've never understood the arguments we'll have over Cleopatra's ethnicity or, you know, Napoleon shooting the nose off the Sphinx because he doesn't want us to know that, you know, that there's an African, a sub-Saharan African history connection to Egypt. And I've never understood trying to reach for it in those kinds of situations when it's right there in front of us, staring us right in the face.

And there should be a movie made about it. The 25th dynasty of Egypt's fascinating, and that's why I've been into it for so long. It's a hard subject for an American to study, or at least it has been throughout most of the time I've been interested in it. I'll give you an example of what I mean. I've probably been interested in the subject since 1981, 1982 in there. In 1996, I bought a book, and remember, this is the time period where you kind of have to have

the book Be In The Bookstore When You're There by archaeologist Eric A. Welsby. And the book was called The Kingdom of Cush. And to give you an idea, and by the way, Welsby's gone on to add tons of knowledge to what we know about the Cushite people since this time period. But when this book came out, on the back cover, it says this.

The Kingdom of Kush, this book, illuminates all that is known about this fascinating people and their history, end quote. Let the record show that when you take out the color plates, the bibliography, the notes, and the index, it's about 180 pages of text. All that is known. And that's 28 years ago. Well, a lot more is known than was known then, um,

Professor Willsby's contributed to that, but so have a lot of other people. Now, what I like about the author that we're going to talk about this stuff with today is that she goes to these places on the ground and gets information from the people there. That is an integral part of the story that has been missing from the international narrative. I'm sure it hasn't been missing from these countries specifically, but

But she gets their part of the story. And I know I've used this metaphor before, but a lot of people, yours truly included, sort of see history as a kind of a mosaic. And it's the individual tiles that get added to it that make what you're looking at more and more clear.

and give more dimensions to it, right? More perspective, a 360 degree view of things. And what this author does by going to these areas, talking to the local historians, the local curators of the museums, the oral storytellers,

is that she's adding these other tiles that have been missing to a mosaic that's already been missing a lot of tiles for a long time. I mean, when Wellesley's writing that book in 1996, he can cover the whole thing in 180 pages.

So not only are we getting a lot more tiles that people like archaeologists are adding, we're getting these tiles that authors like Zainab Badawi is adding, where she's talking to the people from these places and getting, you know, their perspective. Zainab Badawi, if you've not seen her work on the BBC, go to YouTube or somewhere like that and see it. It's fantastic.

She is a wonderful transmitter of this information and this knowledge and this perspective from the region that just adds critical pieces to this story. Her new book is called An African History of Africa from the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. It is already a number one international bestseller. It is released, I think it's January 14th, 2025. So right around the time this is probably going to be released.

Her credentials are as long as my arm, but besides being an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, broadcaster, she is the president of the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. She is the previous chair of the Royal African Society. She's the recipient of the President's Medal of the British Academy. I mean, it just goes on and on.

And her new book covers the history of Africa from the beginning to just recently, top to bottom, side to side. And I'm going to monopolize, as I said, her to talk about this kingdom of Kush that so interests me. But listen, Ms. Badawi was born in Sudan. This is her history from her ancient time period and the very roots of the people that were first making history in the land of her birth. So who better to talk to about the ancient Kushites than

than the great and talented Zainab Badawi. Let me start off by asking the most obvious, silly question in the whole world. You have a successful career doing other things, and all of a sudden you decide to write this book, An African History of Africa. What prompted you to sort of shift gears and say, I really want to get this book out?

Well, Dan, in a way, the book found me. And that is because having enjoyed a long career in broadcasting and making documentary films, I embarked on a project to make 20, 45-minute documentary films about the history of Africa. And I traveled to more than 30 countries in Africa over a period of about seven years.

And I interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and so on. And I made the films, put them out. They're now available on BBC YouTube, free of charge. And I was very troubled by the fact that so much of what these marvelous African scholars had told me had, metaphorically speaking, hit the cutting room floor.

So I thought, you know what, I really want to do justice to what they told me. I want to ventilate their scholarship. And so I thought the only way I could do that was by writing a book because I wanted to accord them the respect of bringing their vision, their perspectives, their scholarship, their research

to the telling of the history of their own continent. And so that's why I've written the book. And it's a passion, a mission for me. And I see myself as a kind of conduit, a facilitator for these African voices. I thought, let me use my...

you know, my international stage, as it were, to put them center stage and say at last, let us hear Africans telling their own story rather than having it being related by outsiders. I thought it was fascinating that some of the people you were able to hear from specifically too. And

And you get the real sense of what you're missing in sort of the international debate on this, to have those voices not a part of the discussion. And a lot of it's connected to, you know, you point out, which of course DNA and all the historians and the anthropologists have pointed out forever, that humankind all began on that continent. Is there a sense amongst the people that you spoke to about this who are keeping alive, you know, what starts off when you go far enough back in history into oral conversations, right, and oral remembrances of

Are they sort of cognizant? Are they able to sort of meld the modern day understanding that all humanity comes from that continent and somehow fuse it with their understanding of the early oral histories of the beginnings as they understand them?

Undoubtedly, everybody in Africa knows that there is nobody on Earth today who cannot say that Africa is not their mother continent. The science is settled. It's accepted all over the world. I mean, there are obviously some people who perhaps find it rather unpalatable that all humans originated from Africa. But there we go.

And Africans, I think, do actually derive a great deal of pride from the fact that the story of humankind begins in Africa. If you're not living in Africa today or of African descent, you're an African export. Whether you've got blonde hair, blue eyes, there's no escaping that. How far it marries back with oral tradition, that may be a bit of a stretch, Dan, because, I mean, just a quick, you know,

snapshot of how we evolved. Modern humans, that's Homo sapiens sapiens, we were fully formed about 100,000 years ago. By about 90,000 years ago, we had populated the whole continent of Africa.

sometime around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, those first hardy pioneers left the continent, first went across to the Arabian Peninsula and Asia and Europe. And there they encountered other hominins like Denisovans or the Neanderthals, and they bred with them until these other species were bred into extinction.

So to say that Africans today remember that history about 60,000 years ago when they migrated from the continent would be a bit of a stretch. But what is certainly true is that if you are trying to piece together early African history, and by that I really mean pre-colonial history before the Europeans arrived and started writing about Africa's history,

Oral tradition is very, very important. And this is what African historians do and which Western historians often overlook. They look at their own written records.

They perhaps don't put enough attention on written records which have been given to us by the Arabs, for instance. The Arabs were in Africa much, much earlier than the Europeans from about the 7th century. And they had their chronicles, their travellers and so on. You've got other non-Western languages, Persian, Gujarati. So African scholars tend to look at these other sources, but they also rely on oral tradition.

a great deal to piece together the early history. And that's often supported by archeological evidence. If you say that, oh, Africans didn't always write and record their history, therefore they had no history, that in my opinion is very short-sighted. And that has often been the case.

And that is why I think Africa's history before the Europeans arrived has been denigrated because they say, oh, you know, they didn't write. They don't have any history. Of course, documentary evidence is important, but it doesn't mean to say that just because Africans didn't always write that they didn't record their history. You just have to get at it in different ways. And that's what I liked about the African historians that I encountered. They

do you know that they are aware of how accounts of great deeds and actions and words of great leaders throughout history have been handed down through the generations.

Because, you know, knowledge in Africa is held communally. Knowledge in the West is held by an individual. But in Africa, you know, knowledge is communal. It's, you know, your great grandmother may be the custodian of certain tables about your people's history. And that's mirrored in countless communities, you know, across regions. And so that's a very important point to make.

And what the African historians are saying is we're not supplanting what the Western historians have done. We're merely supplementing it and saying, if you only look at African history through a Western prism, you will miss something because history

If you just look at Africa through Western values system, you won't understand the African mindset. You will miss something. So in a sense, this diversification of looking at Africa's history, in my opinion, brings you a better, more rounded, more authentic understanding of Africans history.

Well, and you bring up the writing part. So let's talk about that for a minute because there is a writing part. And this is the ulterior motive where I've had you on this program. I've wanted to talk about the Kushites forever. I'm intensely interested in them. But because of the writing, I have the same problem with ancient Egypt. If you're trying to dramatize a story, you really need sort of narratives from individuals on the ground.

And the farther back in history you go, the less of that stuff you have. But the Kushites had a written language. One of the most exciting things in your book, I thought, was you were pointing out that the archaeology in the region has only scratched the surface of what's out there compared to, say, what we know about ancient Egypt. But there's a lot of reasons for that, including war-torn regions, lack of attention, governmental problems, funding problems. And yet...

Some of that's been overcome and they're starting to find out more about things like the Kushites. And the Kushites had a written language. And I was surprised to find out that that still hasn't been deciphered. But what that means is it's out there to be deciphered. What do you expect? You know, I was just thinking of somebody had mentioned artificial intelligence as a wonderful translation tool. I mean, do you think we're going to get to sort of get the Rosetta Stone for that at some point? You don't think it's shaking your head. You don't think so?

Well, I mean, the Rosetta Stone, of course, for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was very significant, but it wasn't the only code cracker, as it were. There were other sources, but we haven't found something akin to the Rosetta Stone or other information which has allowed us to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The Sudanese, the Kushite, began writing in their own language from the second century. Up until then, they used the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And we can sound them partly because of the great work of a British academic called Francis Llewellyn Griffiths.

who managed to kind of tell us what the sounds of the Meroitic script, as it's known, the Kushites used from the second century onwards. But we don't know what the words mean, unfortunately. And it's a work in progress. We hope that all the archaeologists who are working in northern Sudan, of course, sadly, that's had to stop because of the conflict.

we'll somehow find a stone that's got ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, and the Kushite language alongside that will help us decipher the hieroglyphics that the Kushites used.

But until that happens, it's all a bit of a mystery, sadly. But we know a great deal about the Kushites because they did write in, as I said, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But we know the most about the Kushites from about the 7th and 8th centuries BCE. That's before Common Era, or some people prefer to say BC, before Christ.

And that is because that is when the kings of Kush reached the zenith of their power and conquered Egypt and governed it for the best part of a century. And so the ancient Egyptians were busy writing about, you know, these kings, these pharaohs who formed their 25th dynasty, who'd come from further south.

And that's why we know about the kings of Kush from that era, you know, with names like Pianki, Taharqo, Shabitku, Shabaka. And there are these marvellous black granite statues of these kings. And so it's a very evocative period of ancient African history.

And they were not only a great African civilization, they were actually a regional superpower because they were protectors of King Hezekiah of Judah, who appealed to them to protect him against the marauding Assyrians, who were really ferocious, warlike people in that period of the ancient world. The princes of Byblos and Phoenicia in modern-day Lebanon also looked to the kings of Cush to protect them.

They were really skilled archers and very skilled equestrians. You know, they'd ride their horses and they'd have their bow and arrow with the tips that were

you know, dipped in poison. And they had a very, you know, amazing way of actually firing their arrow right into the eye of their enemies. So that was obviously a great way of seeing your enemies off. And, you know, the Kushites built a thousand pyramids. About 250 of them today preserve some part of their superstructure. And just by way of reference, there are a hundred pyramids in Egypt.

So a thousand in Sudan, much smaller than the ones in Egypt, but nevertheless extremely impressive. You know, they built temples. They have exquisite pottery and ceramics. In fact, some people credit the Kushites for being the first people to enamel pottery, fine jewelry, dyed material. You know, they really were.

an extraordinary civilization, which in its earliest iteration, about 2500 BCE, far predates ancient Greece and Rome. You know, Rome was just a backwater in southern Europe at the time. So it is extraordinary for me that that's the part of the world from which my ancestors hail from northern Sudan. And everybody knows about ancient Egypt, yet nobody knows

about the ancient northern Sudanese, you know, the kings and queens of Cush. But I think, as the great Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet said, there will come a time when Sudanology will be as famous as Egyptology because it's a story that's just been

unearthed. But the harsh climate, the instability in the country, the lack of resources means that, you know, we haven't really excavated the exciting history that just lies under the sand dunes and elsewhere in northern Sudan. But it's...

It's an amazing history and it's one which really touched me of all the countries I visited. Of course, I would say that because it's the land of my ancestors, but I really think that it's a part of world history which should be better known.

And, you know, forgive me for going on about this, Dan, but what I also like about the story of the Kingdom of Kut is it shows you how kingdoms rise and fall. That today, you know, Sudan may be one of the less developed parts of the world, but in times gone by, it had this, you know, it was a superpower today.

And also the story of ancient Kut tells you how history is not something that can just be consigned to the past. Of course, history explains our past, but it also informs our present and helps shape our future. And I just give you one very small illustration. The people of ancient northern Sudan of Kut,

considered it an abomination to eat fish. They had all this fish in the River Nile, you know, an amazing source of protein, yet they just wouldn't eat it. And to this day, the consumption of fish in northern Sudan is...

far lower than many other places in the world. It is on average one kilogram per person per year. Compare it to Egypt, another land of the Nile, where the average consumption is 25 kilograms per person per year. And it just shows you how history just continues. And I saw that in so many ways when I was exploring the culture of the Kushites. And I also love the fact that the

queens of Coutt also had such a powerful role to play in society. They could govern alongside their husbands and their sons as co-regents, and there were some like Amani Renance,

who would actually lead their men into battle. She was known as the one-eyed queen because she lost an eye fighting the Romans in 30 BCE. And in fact, they were forced to, in the end, sign a peace treaty with her in 22 BCE. So it's just, you know, I can understand why you're fascinated by it because

It really is, you know, the stuff of Hollywood where fact is stranger than fiction. And I do wish that somebody would, you know, try and popularize this amazing chapter in African history. Let me suggest, you brought up Hollywood, let me suggest that the interest is there, but it's misplaced. If you go on social media and you see the debates that people have over the ethnicity of Cleopatra,

right? The, the, uh, Macedonian descendant, right? So a woman of Greek descent, and we'll have these arguments over what her skin color should be. And it seems almost a grasping attempt to seize a black Egyptian heritage. When I always try to tell people it's there, you're just looking in the wrong direction. It's the 25th dynasty. It's not Cleopatra. It's,

It's these wonderful kings that restored the Egyptian religion that threw out the Libyan dynasty. I mean, there's a wonderful black pharaoh history. You don't have to make it up or try to find it hidden. It's right there in front of you. We're just not looking in the right direction. Let me back up a minute because we didn't really set it up.

You have ancient Egypt, which emerges from the mists of history, like ancient Mesopotamia, like China did, like India did, where the early history is just sort of hidden. And then there they are. And the Kushites are there from the very beginning. And we used to call and your book, uh, uh,

talked me out of this is a better way to put it. We used to talk about an area between Cush or Cush, as you call it, and Egypt. And we used to call that Nubia. And you point out that that's the wrong word for it. You label, you know, where the divisions are based on the cataracts, the rocky areas of the Nile. But

but the Nubian slash Kush area is there from the very beginning. The, you know, prehistory, the Egyptians are already dealing with you. What would you say the relationship between the Egypt that everyone knows and the, the, the Kushite peoples, you know, what did Herodotus call them? Ethiopians, which is the wrong term also. What would you say their relationship is from the very beginning? So, I mean, you know, the Kushites emerged from a part of the world, which was never part of Egypt and,

And the word Nubia is not something that came into use until much, much later around the first, second century Common Era. So there is a tendency to try to talk about the Kushites as Nubians. Of course, there were Nubians who you could refer to them as Nubians, but much later in their history. But a lot of people refer to them as Nubians because there are Nubians today who live in northern Sudan, but also who live in southern Egypt.

And by calling them Nubians, it kind of, in a way, allows people perhaps in Egypt to say, ah, that's when we were governed by our 25th dynasty, who were Nubians, to try to imply perhaps that these were people who territorially came from what?

is known as Southern Egypt. So it kind of puts Northern Sudan into the shadow. Do you see what I mean? So that's one reason why I don't like them being referred to Nubians, because these are people who territorially only ever came from a part of the world that is part of Sudan and was never part of Egypt proper.

They did have similarities with the people of southern Egypt, as they do to this day. We have in my family very strong connections with southern Egypt. Ethnically, you can't really tell the difference between the northern Sudanese and the southern Egyptians. You know, very similar kind of accent when it comes to speaking Arabic and so on.

And historically speaking, the relationship between the Kushites and the ancient Egyptians was one that ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the ancient Egyptians would clobber the Kushites. At other times they had a fairly good relationship. The two cultures learned from one another. The ancient Sudanese and the ancient Egyptians worshiped the same deities. Amun-Ra was the principal god.

both of them. The ancient Sudanese, the Kushites, added another one, Apedimak, the lion god. But interestingly enough, Amun-Ra was believed to reside in Jebel Barkal, which is this mountain which is in northern Sudan territorially and always was. And both the ancient Sudanese and ancient Egyptians believed he resided there.

And when you think about the religious heart of ancient Egypt, Karnak, you know, the temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, where the pharaohs were buried, you know, from the New Kingdom onwards.

This is very far southern Egypt, a thousand miles away from the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. This is much more African Egypt. It is not Cairo. It is not Alexandria, you know, on the Mediterranean coast.

which makes you realize that actually the heart, the beating heart, the religious center of ancient Egypt was fairly far south in Upper Egypt, going towards the border with northern Sudan. Abu Simbel was practically, you know, where Ramesses the Great had his statue of himself and his wife, was practically on the border with northern Sudan.

So when it comes to the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, I think it's actually wrong to say ancient Egypt isn't part of Africa. Ancient Egypt is an African civilization, just as the Kushites are an African civilization.

Depending on which era you look at, depending on which pharaoh you look at in ancient Egypt, their ethnicity, as it were, may vary. The first king of ancient Egypt of the archaic period, the old dynasty, Nama,

you know, would look what you might broadly say is more southern Egyptian because that's where he came from. Later on, you might have pharaohs who perhaps hailed from more of the Mediterranean coast. And right from the start, you know, Egypt had a Mediterranean coast where people would mix with with

with Southern Europe, with Western Asia. And so there was a mixture of people. So the ethnicities of the pharaohs would vary over the centuries. So I wouldn't say that people need to look

to Sudan only, northern Sudan, to get an idea of what an African dynasty looked like. I think we need to redefine what we mean by African. What does an African look like? There isn't a standard look of an African. So we need to redefine that. There isn't a kind of, you know,

standard identikit, take it off the shelf and this is what an African looks like, like every other continent in the world. There's a huge variety in appearances. Where it gets difficult with Cleopatra is that the Ptolemies, who were the pharaohs who succeeded Alexander the Great,

who was from Macedonia and the Ptolemies were Macedonian and the last of the Ptolemies was Cleopatra who died in 30 BCE when she killed herself and the Romans conquered Egypt.

She was of Macedonian ethnicity. They would have spoken ancient Greek amongst themselves. And that's where it gets a little bit difficult. And that's where people might start getting annoyed when you have a woman of colour like Adele James depicted as Cleopatra. And some Egyptians and others get a bit hot under the collar and say, no, Cleopatra was Macedonian. She was not white. But that does not mean that other pharaohs and other queens

in ancient Egypt were similarly white. Hatshepsut is depicted, you know, with a terracotta colour

in all the reliefs we have of her and statues and busts and so on. It's just the Cleopatra complicates matters. And also the Afro-centricity of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Oh, yes, yes, yes. African-Americans, you know, started saying, well, look, we, you know, want to look to our African roots here.

in order to bolster our identity and so on. And so they look to ancient Egypt to do that. And that, again, is something which annoys some Egyptians, as we've seen from the social media kind of exchanges. And that is for the reasons I've explained. But it is also because in 641 Common Era, the Arabs conquered Egypt.

and settled there and obviously mixed with the Egyptians. And the Egyptians assumed the Arabic language and they also assumed Arab ideology, which made them feel that perhaps they were a bit separate from the rest of Africa because they became part of the Arabized north of Africa. So that's another reason why that sometimes there's a bit of a distance between

between Egyptians today and the rest of the continent. But I firmly believe that the Arabized north of Africa is as much part of the continent's history and is as much part of Africa as any other part of the continent.

That's something I really got from your book. It was a reminder. You know, you'd mentioned the sort of interesting ethnicity of Egyptian pharaohs, but you see that over and over. You see it with the Roman emperors too, right? I mean, by the time you get to the empire, they're coming from all over the place, right? It's a cosmopolitan sort of a deal. And you reminded me something that, again, if you just look at a map, you should know, but it escapes you sometimes.

how narrow the Red Sea is and how close the Eastern African coast is from a place like Arabia. And you were pointing out in your book, and again, this was history I did not, I was unaware of, but should have known better, that there would have been cross-Red Sea contact between Eastern Africa and Arabia going back to prehistoric times.

Can you talk a little bit about I mean, that that's you know, we think about outsiders coming into Africa and influencing Africa. We forget that that's going to be a two way street and that traders always have stuff that people want from far flung distances. Talk to me a little about maybe pre Islamic contacts between Eastern Africa and what we would call Western Asia.

Absolutely. So, you know, at its closest point, the Arabian Peninsula is only about 17, less than 20 kilometers from the East African Red Sea coast. And that's in modern day Eritrea today.

So right from the get-go, you had an exchange of people between the two. And in around 600 BCE, you had people called the Sabaeans who came from what would be modern-day Yemen, and they crossed the Red Sea, and they settled in what we would call Ethiopia and Eritrea today.

And, you know, there was an exchange of ideas and belief and, you know, between the two peoples in terms of how they farmed, how they, you know, executed their animal husbandry, their religion. They worshipped the moon god, Maka, and also the Sabaean language influence.

the, what we would call the Gez language, which is a kind of forerunner, as it were, of the modern day Amharic and Tigrinya that is spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. And the alphabet looks quite similar. So, you know, yes, there were traders, some would come, some would go back, but then there were also these settlers. And so, you know,

You see that from the get-go and you see it now in the appearance of the people there. There are some who look quite Arabized in Eritrea and Ethiopia. And those links have just existed throughout the centuries. And to this day, you'll see trade going between the two. You'll see that Arabic is very widely spoken along that Red Sea coast coastline.

of East Africa in Eritrea. And, you know, well, Ethiopia doesn't have a Red Sea coast because Ethiopia is landlocked. But Eritrea and Ethiopia, of course, historically, the Kingdom of Aksum and so on, it was all just one region. But certainly along the Red Sea coast of Eritrea, Djibouti and so on, you know, Arabic is spoken very, very extensively.

And that's the point, you know, people always migrated. We tend to think of migration as a kind of more modern phenomenon and people, you know, saying, oh, we don't want these irregular migrants, you know, be it people from, you know, coming from Mexico into the United States or from the Middle East and Africa into Europe and so on. But migration is also, you know, is as long as history. People have always migrated and it's led to a kind of melange.

Let's talk about some of the glamorous stuff from a standpoint of the great oral stories where you've got kings and queens and battles and all the romantic stuff. There are some fantastic kings and queens of ancient Kush. And people who, you know, when I was growing up and got interested in it, they talked about these crusading armies of the ancient Kushites who were so religiously

that they responded negatively to the sort of ways of the Libyan-Egyptian dynasty where the Kushites may have seen them as somewhat corrupt and not religious enough. Talk to me, give me some of the romance of these great early Kushite kings and queens and what they did. So there's King Pianky. Who's the famous one, right? The great conqueror. Sometimes known as Piye, P-I-Y-E, or Pianky.

and he was in the early 700s BCE.

And he, because the ancient Egyptians and ancient Sudanese worshipped the same deities, and so they were aware that the Libyans who didn't really respect ancient Egyptian religion for the most part, and they saw that, you know, the center of Karnak, Thebes, the religious heart, Thebes of ancient Egypt, was kind of going to rack and ruin and that the Libyan pharaohs

were not really maintaining the great traditions of ancient Egypt. And so Piankhi really considered this an absolutely awful thing that had happened. And he was a real kind of very brave

He had gone in with his father Kashta earlier. It was King Kashta who first of all went into a foray into ancient Egypt, but it was Piankhi who carried his father's deed a little bit further.

Pianky sort of strikes you as a little bit of a kind of... He was a bit pious, but not a megalomaniac, but he had a great sense of himself. You know, we know a lot about him because of the Pianky Stealer, which records, you know, how he...

You know, there's a touch of the megalomaniac. You know, he would say, you know, let the chiefs of the Northlands taste the taste of my fingers. And he went into Egypt and his men, you know, would go into the temple and temple and wash things.

themselves and prey and so on on their bellies and then they'd go in and fight very skilled archers they had a particular way it was called the mongolian release of actually firing their bow and arrow with their thumb rather than the mediterranean release which was with the index finger and um

Pianky made sure that he really finished off the princes, the Egyptian princes of the delta, because there were various sort of princes in local areas who

kind of paid allegiance to the central pharaoh but they had their own fiefdoms and there was one particular one called Tefnacht who was proving a little bit obdurate and was still managing to avoid defeat by Pianki's men but Pianki finally got the better of him and

These men threw themselves, Prince Tefnac, on their stomachs and said, OK, we give up. We accept that you are the pharaoh and that you are the powerful one. They opened their mouths.

treasures in their rooms for him. They said to him, take our women if you like as your concubines and so on. But Bianchi, because he was quite pious, was like, no, I don't want your women. Keep them, let them maintain their modesty. He took the treasure. But then he said, show me the stables.

And when he saw that the stable was full of horses that had become so emaciated because of the siege of Hermopolis, because the Kushite soldiers had encircled Hermopolis. And so the people inside, obviously, you know, starving and obviously the horses were practically dying.

And it's said that on the Stele that Pianki became enraged like a panther and said, "Nothing that you've done has angered me as much as allowing these horses to practically starve to death because the Kushites adored their horses." And Pianki especially, you know, really just valued his horses to the extent that when he died, he was buried with his four horses

the horses would have been buried alive with him and they were dressed you know with their tails all beautifully brushed and wearing you know silver plumes and decorated um so you know Pianchi I think is a very very fascinating character because um after he conquered Egypt and so on he just um

took all his beauty back with him and went back to Cush and never returned to Egypt. So, you know, they are just very, very colourful characters. Tahadkar also was also a very colourful character. He's actually mentioned in the Bible.

as Tiharka of Ethiopia. Ethiopia just means the land of the blacks in ancient Greek. So if ever you see a reference to Ethiopia in the Bible or in ancient Greek writings, it doesn't refer to Ethiopia, the country today. It really refers to the Kushites, the kingdom of Kush.

That's how they were referred to. And Taharqa was, again, you know, an amazing soldier king. And he fought the Egyptians. He fought the Assyrians and really had a great deal of success in his encounters with them, but was ultimately defeated by them. So I just think that they are such...

colourful characters and they are, you know, my most famous, my most popular characters.

figures in ancient African history, although there are many more colorful. There are other colorful characters also. Oh, your book is filled with them. I feel like I'm cheating you a little bit by focusing on what I want to focus on. When your book is really a catalog from the beginning almost to the end, from the north of the continent to the south to the east, you cover the whole thing, which is amazing, and you do so in such an accessible way.

Talk to me a little bit about, I mean, when I think about these Kushite kings, you think about them sort of taking over Egypt's normal geopolitical role. I mean, they're involved, they're based at Gaza, they're involved in the Levant. And as you said, they begin their connections, although, you know, the ancient Egyptians before that even had connections elsewhere.

to Judaism, to the Bible, which will then... I mean, I was looking at one point in Eastern Africa, you have Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all sort of in a melange in that area. Can you talk to me about it? I mean, it's an interesting role when you think about the biblical connection. You know, we talked about the connection between the ancient Egyptian religion and the Kushites, but then we just morph right into monotheism and the Abrahamic religions. Talk to me a little bit about that connection because there's a Solomon connection there

that goes all the way to the mid-1970s between the people in that region and what was an ancient, you know, Israel and Judah, right? Going back to the ancient biblical times. Can you talk to me a little about that connection?

Sure. And just before I start that, you're absolutely right that, you know, Africa is a place where the three monotheistic religions actually, you know, really, really thrived and from a very early stage. And there are those who actually say Akhenaten, who was the father of Tutankhamen.

who's probably the best known of the pharaohs. The great heretic, right? Yeah, although, yes, exactly. Or Tutankhamen himself was very insignificant. Everybody knows about him because of all the fabulous treasures that were found in his tomb. But Akhenaten was the great heretic because he...

he actually rejected the multiple deities of ancient Egyptian religion and worship and said, actually, we ought to have just one. And so some people credit him as being the first monotheist. When he died, there was much relief at the royal court in Egypt because they thought, now we can go back to how we used to worship. And so they were delighted that Tutankhamen was this boy king, only nine years of age,

who didn't know any better, and so let them just go back to their old ways. And that probably is the only significance of Tutankhamen, who died very young in his late teens.

But the religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all have strong roots in Africa. So Christianity in particular, a lot of people think Christianity was brought to Africa with the missionaries operating in the 1800s, mostly from countries like Britain. You know, we all know about Dr. David Livingstone and so on.

They know about the Portuguese Jesuit priests who also went and tried to convert people. But actually, Christianity has far older roots in Africa. And that's best exemplified by King Ezana of Aksum, who lived in the 300s Common Era.

And by about 330 Common Era, or AD, as some people say, Ezana had made Christianity his kingdom's official religion. He was a pagan before that. And after Armenia...

Aksum was the second kingdom in the world to assume Christianity as its official religion. And Aksum, of course, is in northern Ethiopia, also incorporated parts of Eritrea today. And that was the case, that Christianity was the official religion of Ethiopia and Eritrea until 1975, when the Emperor Haile Selassie was removed from power. The

The Ethiopians all believe in their history, beginning with the story of King Solomon and the fact that King Solomon had an affair which gave rise to Menelik.

with the Queen of Sheba. Sorry, I'll say that again, that King Solomon had an affair with the Queen of Sheba. She had a son, and the Queen of Sheba, the Ethiopians believe, is from Ethiopia. She had a son, Menelik I, who became the first emperor, the Solomoned.

dynasty. And that continued with some interruptions right until 1975. And so this is all recorded in the books called the Kebre Nagast, which were written in the 14th century by probably several authors. And it means the glory of the kings in the Amharic language. And, you know, that's the story of...

of how Ethiopia came into being for most Ethiopians today.

There's some question as to whether the Queen of Sheba could actually have coincided with Solomon, because that would have made her living around the 10th century BCE, hypothetically speaking. And if you go to Ethiopia, outside Aksum, in a place called Dongur, there's this amazing, the ruins of an amazing castle with remnants of a huge kitchen and bedrooms and

and so on, it would have been a very fine palace and people will say to you locally that is the home of the Queen of Sheba. Archaeologists would say that it dates to a much, much later era and probably was the home of a nobleman. But it just shows you how myths sometimes can, you know, encounter inconvenient truths. But we mustn't detract from the fact that people want some kind of, you know, legends to help

build their identities and to, you know, create their own histories. And we must respect that. It's also romantic and exciting and colorful. I mean, you talk about that wonderful idea that it's possible that there's a tradition that the Ark of the Covenant is in that area. In other words, taken for safekeeping and they take it to Africa and away from the Holy Land because the Assyrians are coming amongst other people, right? It's

It's a geopolitical nightmare in that area. It's a crossroads. You want to get things like the Ark of the Covenant to a nice, safe place. Absolutely. You talked about, because speaking of color, you were talking about one Axum king,

who went into war, I wrote it down, quote, in a costume of linen and gold adorned with jewels and beads riding on a golden chariot pulled by four elephants and then sainted. I love that story. Can you just tell us a little about that? And I realize that's a later period than what we've been dealing with, but I get taken over by the romance and the color. Yeah, that was King Caleb who was...

He was a very devout Christian king and he went into southern Yemen in order to help his fellow Christians because it was said at the time that they were being persecuted by peoples who followed the Jewish religion.

So he went in, dressed exactly as you just described, and he was a sort of great Christian king. He had support from the Portuguese,

And he went in and he managed to save the Christians of southern Yemen from the Jews. It was the leader of the Jewish people was Nuwa Iwas. You'd have to just check that one, the spelling, the pronunciation. I'm very, very sympathetic. Yeah.

And then after he had corrected this injustice to the Christians, he then went back to his capital in what would be modern day Ethiopia. And some accounts say that he just carried on in his reign. He was a very kind of magnanimous man. And other accounts say that actually he retreated and died.

became a monk and just spent the rest of his years, the next 15 years of his life before he died in a monastery. So, you know, that is a very, very interesting story. I have to find you the dates of King Caleb.

But it is a bit later, as you say, than Isana. I won't let you go without dealing with one of the sort of hidden parts of history that don't get enough attention, which is this whole subject, really. But I mean, in your book, you point out several times the importance of women, well, in all societies, right, 50% of the population, but

But I mean, I remember reading about the Kushite women and how the discussion was that they tended to be portrayed as rather heavyset because it was a sign of the wealth and the ability of that empire to support people who could be fat and happy, as we used to say. And yet in your book, you talk about the importance of queens and all these. Talk to me a little about the African female experience here over the eras.

Yeah. You know, this idea that African women are kind of downtrodden wretches is really not supported either by history or the present day. If you go to any African country, you know, you'll go to the market and you'll see how it's dominated by these African women.

who grow their own food because most food is produced by small farmers in Africa. And most small farmers are the women. And so any surplus they have, they'll go to the market and they'll sell it. And that's going to be, you know, good money to bring up their children and for themselves. And actually what their husbands are doing is almost by the way. And that's always been...

case that, you know, African women are very strong. I mean, in some cases, the line of succession was matrilineal, as you saw with the Asante people. You know, in the case of the Kushites, queens, Kushite women had a very powerful role to play in society. They could rule equally as co-regents with their husbands or their sons. They could be warrior queens.

African history is littered with examples of strong female leadership, such as Queen Njinga of the Ndongo Kingdom, which was a vassal state of the Kingdom of Congo. So she was born in 1563 and died in 1663. She was a remarkable woman who fought the Portuguese. I like her story because it shows how once the Europeans started encroaching on African land, they didn't just take it lying down, they resisted.

queen in Jenga. After her brother died and killed himself, she maneuvered herself into position of becoming the ruling queen. She was always marked out for greatness by her father, the king at the time, who thought she was the most able of his children and he would take her to councils with him. She was also very effective at wielding the fighting axe. When her brother, the king, became king, he asked her to go to

meet the governor of Luanda, which is, of course, the modern-day capital of Angola. And their kingdom was about 250 miles away. And he said, go and tell the governor of Luanda, who was Portuguese, to stop taking our people as slaves. And so she went dressed in her finery and went with this huge entourage. And when she arrived, the governor Luanda, sitting on this beautiful chair covered in velvet, embossed in gold, told her to sit on

on a rug on the floor to show her subordinate status. She refused and chose her tallest female attendant, told her to go on all fours and sat on her to negotiate with the governor of Luanda. You know, a marvellous story. She outwitted the Portuguese, you know, at every turn for the best part of a

quarter of a century and died, you know, in her 80s with her crown on her head. She died peacefully. You know, Yaa Asantewaa, who died in 1921, who fought the British in Asanteyland, what would be modern day Ghana. You know, there are many examples of strong female leadership, because I think in history, we take that HIS in history a bit too seriously. His story is her story. And the Queen's

Of Cush, I go back to them because they were known as Candicas. And in fact, the ancient Greeks mistook that name for the name of a woman, Candica. They didn't realize it was the title for the queen. And that's where we get the modern day women's name Candice from. But the Candicas, the queens of Cush,

When the young women of Sudan rose against Omar al-Bashir, you know, who'd ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years, when he was brought down in 2019 and women were in the vanguard of those protests, they styled themselves as the Kandikars. That's what they called themselves, reaching back.

into their history with these strong female role models to assert themselves today on the domestic, political, social, cultural agenda of Sudan.

So I think it is very, very important. And also ancient Egypt, you know, women had property, enjoyed property rights at a time, you know, when women in Europe enjoyed those rights at a much, much later stage. Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled in the 1450s in BCE in ancient Egypt, was one of the most effective rulers of the New Kingdom.

And, you know, she really swelled the royal coffers. She embarked on a really prolific building programme. And perhaps in deference to male iconographic traditions, she was often depicted in busts and statues sporting a beard and in a kind of male guise. But, you know, it is, as a woman myself, it's wonderful to know that in history, as well as in the modern era, we do have these strong traditions.

women leaders to reach back to. But I will, if I may, and I don't know if you want to ask me about this, is perhaps to say that I focused in my book very much on characters because I think history is best understood if it's seared into the imagination. And that is best done by relating these great moments in Africa's history through the personalities.

It does mean that sometimes the actions of ordinary people can be overlooked. And I do try to include those where I can to tell how society is formed and how, you know, ordinary people lived by, you know, how they planted their crops, what they ate and so on. But it's just when you rely on oral tradition, it is inevitably the deeds and the actions of the great leaders which become extolled.

But I wanted to, you know, bust myths about Africa with this book, which is why every chapter is prefaced with something to do with the modern era. So if I talk about the transatlantic slave trade, I'll talk about the issue of reparations. If I talk about the Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, I'll talk about the, you know, restitution, whether African artifacts should be returned or not, to try and engage the reader to say, look,

This is why this matters, you know, and to say, look, you know, this idea that there are those who make history and those who stand on the sidelines of history with the Africans very much being relegated to the sidelines is not supported by the evidence. You have to break down prejudice, not with fairy tales, but with facts. And

You know, if you could indulge me by, I'll just give you one example of that. If you look at King Mansa Musa I, Mansa is the title of the king, and Musa was his name, Musa I, of the Empire of Mali in West Africa, a broad part of, you know, the Sahel, which covers West Africa today. There was this massive empire. Mansa Musa was born in 1218, died in 1332. So he lived a very long time ago.

And, you know, he embarked on a pilgrimage in 1324 to Mecca. And he went with a massive entourage because the Mali Empire was such a wealthy empire. You know, at a time when Europe was beginning to enter, a few decades later after his death, the Black Death, when it's, you know, the plague which decimated populations in Europe. Here was this empire flourishing, you know, with gold and,

you know, he had gold literally coming out of his ears and he embarked on this pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 personal servants, 12,000 members of his household, 600 personal attendants, a hundred camels bearing between 10 to 15 tons of gold,

He stopped in Cairo on the way to Mecca and on the way back, and he spent so much gold and gave away so much gold that the global price of gold plunged by 25% and did not recover for more than a decade. And by some accounts, he is the richest individual to have ever lived in the world, worth about 435 billion US dollars. What the story of Mansa Musa tells you is that the actions of this medieval African king

were such that they had an impact on the international economy, on the price of gold, which of course was the main trading currency as it were then. So the idea that Africa was somehow dislocated from the rest of the world is not borne out by just the illustration of this one story.

And a Catalan cartographer in 1375, several decades after the death of Mansa Musa, when he drew four panels of the world, Mansa Musa was there as the third panel. Such was his significance, you know, wearing a golden crown, clad in silk, holding a golden staff and a golden orb in the other hand. And that just shows you that African history is not something that is just

interest to the connoisseur or somebody might be interested in Africa. It is part of our global story and it is something which anybody who wants to say that they're educated should know about and it

It's not history that starts with the transatlantic slave trade. There is an extraordinary history that far predates that. They were always there, right? You took a lot of time to talk with us today. I appreciate it. Congratulations on the book. And we will do a lead-in

where we don't just introduce you, but we'll go into a little, because I started right in the middle of this story, sort of. So we'll do a little overview where I kind of sort of give a framework for what we're talking about here. The only thing I want to ask you before I let you go, although I think your last question sort of answers this, is there anything that we left out that you would want to make sure that we got in here?

So I would say that this book is for everyone, as I say. And I wanted to narrate Africa's history. It's revelatory because I'm staggered by the level of ignorance about Africa's history, particularly its pre-colonial history, even on the continent itself.

But this is a kind of global phenomenon. I want to combat that ignorance by simply narrating the history. But more than that, I also want to give a history of hope.

because I want it to be a celebration of African history. There's enough about the cannibalism, the human sacrifices. Go somewhere else if you want to read about that. For one book like mine, there are hundreds out there that you can read about that kind of stuff. I want to redress the balance. So to the non-African reader, I want to say, yes, Africa is where it all started, where you started. Hey, aren't you interested in how the continent of your birth developed

But to those people of African descent who have a closer connection to the continent, who may live in Africa or of African descent like the African Americans, I want to say to them, you have a history that is history, institutions, a culture and tradition and beliefs that are worthy of study, that are worthy of respect.

And as the wonderful Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize said, "You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that understands itself, that values itself." And I think that the telling of history by Africans themselves

And I hope in my book, in a relatively accessible way, goes some way to saying to people of African descent, you have got something through which you can hold your head up high and let nobody tell you that you have a history that just begins and ends with enslavement and racism and so on. There's so much more to your heritage and I wish you to embrace it. And if this book

in any small way, can contribute to that mission, then I'll be a very happy writer and a very happy person. And more being discovered and uncovered all the time. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's a wonderful book, and we'll make sure at least our audience knows about it. Thank you so much indeed, Dan. I've really enjoyed talking to you, and thank you for your very thoughtful questions, and thank you for so clearly having read the book and digested it.

My thanks to Zainab Badawi for coming on the program today, indulging me, focusing on the pet issue I was interested in here. You'll want to get the rest of the book, though. There's a ton of great stories there. And her approach is, well, a little hardcore history-ish in the way she goes about things. Good stories about interesting figures and a sort of a zoom lens that gives you a sense of the length, breadth, and depth of

of the history of the African continent. It's an African history of Africa from the dawn of humanity to independence already available in the UK. The American edition, I believe it is, comes out in mid-January 2025. Now, I don't want to make a big production about the whole thing, but I do want to mention that in June of this year,

uh 2025 this will be 20 years uh since we started podcasting which is um still impossible for me to get my mind around it's strange to me that this is what i've done now for the longest time in terms of a career in my life it's nothing i could have trained for or known about and um you know we're

obviously in our normal traditional fashion, not taking the kind of advantage one in a business should probably take advantage of an anniversary like that for promotion and all these kinds of things. But the one thing that occurs to me as I think about it is, um, you, I mean, there's no ad in this show, is there? I don't think we have an ad running. We didn't have an ad in the last hard question. We really don't, we make our living from you and, uh, we have a deal. I do these things and, and you support us for this. Um,

It's just me in terms of the content. So it takes some time. There may or may not be a mythical producer involved, but this is it. And this operation is funded by the listenership. And to be able to do this for 20 years with you folks buying the old shows and contributing in the several ways that are out there for you to support us, it's amazing.

It's nothing that anyone ever thought would work. That's a good way to phrase it. We talked to a lot of experts about the business model over the years and nobody sees this working. Just want to say that because the people that defied all the odds and all the experts are you and to be doing this for 20 years, I never forget why I'm able to do this.

And so the main thing that comes into my head when I just meditate on my life and where it is here because of this thing that everyone used to roll their eyes at me when I said what I did for a living back in 2005. And we started the same month, and it wasn't a coincidence, that Apple started supporting podcasts on iTunes, June slash early July 2005. Um...

When I think about all the shows that were around back then that are gone and you think about all of the shows now and how much the big corporations and I got nothing against big corporations, but how much of a of a giant professional endeavor this all is now compared to how it used to be in here.

You know, we still have this little operation. It's still running the way it used to run for all of the downside that that also entails. But I mean, we're still here and there's only one reason for that. And that's you. And that's all I can think about with this milestone that's approaching. And so I just wanted to say to all of you, thank you.