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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.

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 12:29:08