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SCIENCE AND AFRICA CHAPMAN in Africa. In this system 16 is read 10 + 5 + 1, and so on to 19. Thereafter and to 99 the number twenty is in evidence, 30 being 20 + 10, 40 being 2 X 20, 50 being 2 X 20 + 10, 70 being 3 X 20 + 10, and 99 being 4 X 20 + 10 + 5 + 4." The Africans like people everywhere carried their number systems as far as their social needs demanded. The quinary system was sufficient to the social needs of the Hottentots. On the other hand the Massai, who are cattle owners, can count to a hundred or more if necessary. And long before the beginning of European civilization Nubians and Abyssinians (Cushites) counted to a million or more: the Egyptians, which were a composite of all these peoples, as we shall see later, were among the first people to develop mathematics into anything like science. science in early civilizations Dr. Du Bois in his bold and enlightening thesis, The World and Africa, which is also a revelation of the propaganda of history, writes truthfully and courageously: But it was in the valley of the Nile that the most significant continuous human culture arose, significant not necessarily because it was absolutely the oldest or the best, but because it led to that European civilization of which the world boasts today and regards in many ways as the greatest and last word in human culture. Despite this, it is one of the astonishing results of the written history of Africa, that most unanimously in the nineteenth century Egypt was not regarded as part of Africa. Its history and culture were separated from that of the other inhabitants of Africa; it was even asserted that Egypt was in reality Asiatic, and indeed Arnold Toynbee's Study Of History definitely regarded Egyptian civilization as "white," or European! The Egyptians, however, regarded themselves as African. The Greeks looked upon Egypt as part of Africa not only geographically but culturally, and every fact of history and anthropology proves that the Egyptians were an African people varying no more from other African peoples than groups like the Scandinavians vary from other Europeans, or groups like the Japanese from other Asiatics. There can be but one adequate explanation of this vagary of nineteenth-century --- * David E. Smith, History of Mathematics (1923), pp. 12-13.
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 12:29:08