In any given society, intellectuals are the result of the level of development of the

society. Intellectuals are specialized in solving problems that confront society in the process of
producing and reproducing real life. People develop skills and organizations to overcome
contradictions presented to them by nature. To fulfill the needs of the people in the society,
most people get involved in manual labor, as fishermen, peasants, house builders and net
makers, as metalworkers making knives, hoes, axes and spears, as clothes makers, etc. Another
set of skilled people like mathematicians, philosophers, artists, priests and healers, who are not
directly involved in the process of production of material life, emerge later as a result of the
development of material production in society. The latter type of people depends on the
former type of people. Intellectual activities arise in the process of producing life, in the process
of solving problems that oppose the development of forces of production. Gradually, a small
number of people may be asked to observe, study and analyze further a particular
phenomenon in order to advance the material production in society. For example, a society
that does not produce yams cannot directly acquire yam planting knowledge; a society that
does not directly make stone pyramids cannot directly acquire the art and science of building
pyramids.
Ancient Egyptians invented and developed geometry because they were involved in
work to control the flooding of the Nile River. This was necessary to guarantee agricultural
production and land delimitation upon which the whole country depended. Production under
imperialism has given rise to nations, institutions and relationships necessary to maintain and
reproduce imperialist order: primarily the oppression and exploitation of oppressed nations by
oppressor nations; secondarily the reproduction of the African petty bourgeoisie in Africa, as
the enforcer of the imperialist order that keeps us, the oppressed people, chained to the
oppressors from Europe and North America. The institutions of learning in capitalist society are
created to train and form cadres who will manage and secure the reproduction of that capitalist
society.
Africans' Contribution to Science: A Culture of Excellence
Those piles of ruins which you see in the narrow valley watered by the Nile are the
remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia [here the whole of
Africa, not the present day country of Ethiopia]. There a people, now forgotten, discovered
while others were yet barbarians the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now
rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of
nature those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe. --Count Volney (1793,
reprinted 1991, pp 14-15)

Scientific discovery and the application of technology to the natural environment have
been essential to the history of Africa and in the development of the African diaspora
throughout the world, and especially in the Americas. When Africans migrated, whether under
conditions of slavery or as voluntary travelers, they took with them knowledge of agricultural
techniques and skills in exploiting the nature environment that were necessary for
development. As people have done elsewhere in the world as well, Africans depended for their
survival upon the ability to adapt successfully to specific ecological settings and to apply
acquired knowledge in a manner that increased production and otherwise enhanced the quality
of life.* The African contribution to science and technology can be appreciated with respect to
the impact on the development of the Americas, which suffered severe population destruction
through disease and European conquest after 1492. Spain, Portugal and then other western
European countries took advantage of military superiority and the demographic catastrophe in
the Americas to confiscate vast tracts of land, which only needed labor and transferred
technology for its development. Europeans empires and the generation of enormous wealth
depended upon the combination of these ingredients – virtually free and very fertile land, labor
and technology, largely from Africa, and the ability to garner huge profits through the reliance
on slavery, in which workers were not paid for their labor or their technology. It is crucial to
note that none of the major plantation crops in the Americas and only a few of the foodstuffs
consumed by people in the Americas came from western Europe, while virtually all of the newly
introduced crops originally came from Africa or were grown there before their introduction to
the Americas. Sugar cane was first grown in the Mediterranean and in southern Morocco
before spreading to other offshore islands and then to the Americas. Cotton was grown and
made into textiles in the western Sudan and in the interior of the Bight of Benin for centuries
before being
Introduced to the Americas, along with weaving, indigo dyeing, and the decorative arts
associated with textiles. Rice, indigenous to West Africa, was introduced into the sea islands of
South Carolina and Georgia, as well as the Mississippi valley, Maranhão in northeastern Brazil,
and elsewhere, while numerous foodstuffs and stimulants were transferred from Africa as well.
As Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff have established that Africans established
“botanical gardens of the dispossessed,” in which they cultivated many familiar foods, including
millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example, all of which
were native to Africa. Archaeological records, oral histories, and even documentary evidence of
European slave owners and merchants demonstrate that Africans in diaspora planted many of
the same crops that were grown in Africa for their own subsistence, and in the course of doing
so African farms and gardens became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and
Africanized the ways of nourishing the plantation societies of the Americas.
source:UNESCO.org
The episteme of the african intellectual Hountondji affirms four main ideas concerning
the definition and role of philosophy, all of which are intended to establish the domain in which
an African philosophy might be articulated, while excluding ‘ethnophilosophy’ as an impostor (if
not as a contradiction in terms). First, in his book African Philosophy, Hountondji defines African
philosophy as a ‘set of texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans and described as
philosophical by their authors themselves.’ [6] Though the definition at first sight comes across
as disarmingly straightforward, it in fact rests on a number of assumptions diametrically
opposed to the school of thought that Hountondji dismissed as ‘ethnophilosophy’. Like other
critics, Hountondji traces the origins of ethnophilosophy to the work of the Belgian missionary
Placide Tempels (1906–1977). In his book Bantu Philosophy (1945) Tempels argues that
‘Africans’ conceive of reality as a hierarchy of interacting forces. According to Tempels, this
view of reality is held by all Africans and is attributable to the natural disposition of the African
mind. The Rwandese philosopher Alexis Kagame (1912–1981) attempted to extend and refine
Tempels’s theory, notably in his books La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (1956) and La
Philosophie bantu comparée (1976). Kagame, unlike Tempels, argued that African philosophy
emerged from a shared cultural essence, rather than an African ‘nature’. This shared culture
consisted in African traditions, customs and language. It is these notions that Hountondji’s
definition of philosophy as a ‘set of texts’ seeks to challenge. The emergence of philosophy,
Hountondji holds, is dependent on a dialectical or critical method which can only take place
with literacy and written or ‘archival’ transmission. According to Hountondji, oral tradition
favours the consolidation of known into dogmatic, intangible systems, whereas archival
transmission promotes better the possibility of a critique of knowledge between individuals and
from one generation to another. Oral tradition is dominated by the fear of forgetting, of lapses
of memory, since memory is here left to its own resources, bereft of external or material
support.… Written tradition, on the contrary, providing a material support, liberates the
memory, and permits it to forget its acquisitions, provisionally to reject or question them
because it knows that it can at any moment recapture them if need be. [7] Philosophy existed
in the West, Hountondji asserts, because ‘the history of the West is not directly cumulative but
critical: it moves forward not through a mere plurality of knowledge, … but through the
periodical questioning of established knowledge, each questioning being a crisis.’ [8]
Ethnophilosophy, Hountondji contends, errs in naming as philosophy forms of thinking that are
merely implicit and unwritten. For Hountondji, genuine philosophy renders legible and
meaningful bits of knowledge into a text of knowledge.

Source: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-african-intellectual
African Intellectual Revolution: Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced European
imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and
colonization. At the same time, African societies put up various forms of resistance against the
attempt to colonize their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth
century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European
powers. The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors,
economic, political, and social. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of
the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the
European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization—
including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets
and profitable investment outlets—spurred the European scramble and the partition and
eventual conquest of AfricaThis situation was compounded by commercial conflicts between
Europeans and Africans. During the early phase of the rise of primary commodity commerce
(erroneously referred to in the literature as "Legitimate Trade or Commerce"), Europeans got
their supplies of trade goods like palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, and groundnut from
African intermediaries, but as the scramble intensified, they wanted to bypass the African
intermediaries and trade directly with sources of the trade goods. Naturally Africans resisted
and insisted on the maintenance of a system of commercial interaction with foreigners which
expressed their sovereignties as autonomous political and economic entities and actors. For
their part, the European merchants and trading companies called on their home governments
to intervene and impose "free trade," by force if necessary. It was these political, diplomatic,
and commercial factors and contentions that led to the military conflicts and organized African
resistance to European imperialism.

Source: Faith lol

Africa has the world's oldest record of human technological achievement: the oldest
stone tools in the world have been found in eastern Africa, and later evidence for tool
production by our hominin ancestors has been found across Sub-Saharan Africa. The history of
science and technology in Africa since then has, however, received relatively little attention
compared to other regions of the world, despite notable African developments
in mathematics, metallurgy, architecture, and other fields.

Education:
Nile Valley
In 295 BC, the Library of Alexandria was founded in Egypt. It was considered the largest library
in the classical world.
Al-Azhar University, founded in 970~972 as a madrasa, is the chief centre of Arabic literature
and Sunni Islamic learning in the world. The oldest degree-granting university in Egypt after
the Cairo University, its establishment date may be considered 1961 when non-religious
subjects were added to its curriculum.
The Sahel
Three philosophical schools in Mali existed during the country's "golden age" from the 12th to
the 16th centuries: University of Sankore, Sidi Yahya University, and Djinguereber University
The Sankoré University was capable of housing 25,000 students and had one of the largest
libraries in the world with between 400,000 and 700,000 manuscripts.
Timbuktu was a major center of book copying, religious groups, the sciences, and arts

Astronomy:
Three types of calendars can be found in Africa: lunar, solar, and stellar. Most African
calendars are a combination of the three. African calendars include the Akan calendar, Egyptian
calendar, Berber calendar, Ethiopian calendar, Igbo calendar, Yoruba calendar, Shona
calendar, Swahili calendar, Xhosa calendar, Borana calendar, and Luba calendar

Western desert of Egypt

A stone circle located in the Nabta Playa basin may be one of the world's oldest
known archeoastronomical devices. Built by the ancient Nubians about 4800 BCE, the device
may have approximately marked the summer solstice

Nile Valley
Since the first modern measurements of the precise cardinal orientations of the Egyptian
pyramids were taken by Flinders Petrie, various astronomical methods have been proposed as
to how these orientations were originally established. Ancient Egyptians may have observed,
for example, the positions of two stars in the Plough / Big Dipper which was known to Egyptians
as the thigh. It is thought that a vertical alignment between these two stars checked with a
plumb bob was used to ascertain where North lay. The deviations from true North using this
model reflect the accepted dates of construction of the pyramids.
Egyptians were the first to develop a 365-day, 12 month calendar. It was a stellar calendar,
created by observing the stars.
During the 12th century, the astrolabic quadrant was invented in Egypt.
South Africa

Today, South Africa has cultivated a burgeoning astronomy community. It hosts the Southern African

Large Telescope, the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. South Africa is currently
building the Karoo Array Telescope as a pathfinder for the $20 billion Square Kilometer
Array project. South Africa is a finalist, with Australia, to be the host of the SKA.

Mathematics:

Central and Southern Africa

The Ishango bone is a bone tool from the Democratic Republic of Congo dated to the Upper
Paleolithic era, about 18,000 to 20,000 BCE. It is also a baboon's fibula, with a sharp piece of
quartz affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving or writing. It was first thought to be a tally
stick, as it has a series of tally marks carved in three columns running the length of the tool, but
some scientists have suggested that the groupings of notches indicate a mathematical
understanding that goes beyond counting. Various functions for the bone have been proposed:
it may have been a tool for multiplication, division, and simple mathematical calculation, a six-
month lunar calendar, or it may have been made by a woman keeping track of her menstrual
cycle.
Nile Valley
By the predynastic Naqada period in Egypt, people had fully developed a numeral system. The
importance of mathematics to an educated Egyptian is suggested by a New Kingdom fictional
letter in which the writer proposes a scholarly competition between himself and another scribe
regarding everyday calculation tasks such as accounting of land, labor and grain. Texts such as
the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus show that the ancient
Egyptians could perform the four basic mathematical operations—addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division—use fractions, knew the formula to compute the volume of a
frustum, and calculate the surface areas of triangles, circles and even hemispheres. They
understood basic concepts of algebra and geometry, and could solve simple sets
of simultaneous equations.

Other African traditions

One of the major achievements found in Africa was the advance knowledge of fractal geometry
and mathematics. The knowledge of fractal geometry can be found in a wide aspect of African
life from art, social design structures, architecture, to games, trade, and divination systems

Metallurgy:
West Africa
Besides being masters in iron, Africans were masters in brass and bronze. Ife produced lifelike
statues in brass, an artistic tradition beginning in the 13th century. Benin mastered bronze
during the 16th century, produced portraiture and reliefs in the metal using the lost wax
process. Benin also was a manufacturer of glass and glass beads.
Brass barrel blunderbuss are said to have been produced in some states of the Gold Coast in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Various accounts indicate that Asante blacksmiths
were not only able to repair firearms, but that barrels, locks and stocks were on occasion
remade.
Nile Valley
Nubia was a major source of gold in the ancient world. Gold was a major source of Kushitic
wealth and power. Gold was mined East of the Nile in Wadi Allaqi and Wadi Cabgaba.
Around 500 BCE, Nubia, during the Meroitic phase, became a major manufacturer and exporter
of iron. This was after being expelled from Egypt by Assyrians, who used iron weapons.

Medicine:
West Africa
The knowledge of inoculating oneself against smallpox seems to have been known to West
Africans, more specifically the Akan. A slave named Onesimus explained the inoculation
procedure to Cotton Mather during the 18th century; he reported to have gotten the
knowledge from Africa.
The Sahel
In Djenné the mosquito was identified to be the cause of malaria, and the removal of cataracts
was a common surgical procedurE (as in many other parts of Africa). The dangers of tobacco
smoking were known to African Muslim scholars, based on Timbuktu manuscripts.
South Africa
A South African, Max Theiler, developed a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937. Allan McLeod
Cormack developed the theoretical underpinnings of CT scanning and co-invented the CT-
scanner.
The first human-to-human heart transplant was performed by South African cardiac
surgeon Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in December 1967. See also Hamilton
Naki.
During the 1960s, South African Aaron Klug developed crystallographic electron microscopy
techniques, in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different
angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target.

Agriculture:
Ethiopia
Ethiopians, particularly the Oromo people, were the first to have discovered and recognized the
energizing effect of the coffee bean plant.
Teff is believed to have originated in Ethiopia between 4000 and 1000 BCE. Genetic evidence
points to E. pilosa as the most likely wild ancestor. Noog (Guizotia abyssinica) and ensete (E.
ventricosum) are two other plants domesticated in Ethiopia.
Ethiopians used terraced hillside cultivation for erosion prevention and irrigation. A 19th
century European described Yeha:
The Sahel and West Africa
The earliest evidence for the domestication of plants for agricultural purposes in Africa
occurred in the Sahel region c. 5000 BCE, when sorghum and African rice (Oryza glaberrima)
began to be cultivated. Around this time, and in the same region, the small  guineafowl was
domesticated. Other African domesticated plants were oil palm, raffia palm, black-eyed
peas, groundnuts, and kola nuts.
East Africa
Engaruka is an Iron Age archaeological site in northern Tanzania known for the ruins of a
complex irrigation system. Stone channels were used to dike, dam, and level surrounding river
waters.

Maritime Technology:
In 1987 the third oldest canoe in the world and the oldest in Africa, the Dufuna canoe, was
discovered in Nigeria by Fulani herdsmen near the Yobe river and the village of Dufuna. It dates
to approximately 8000 years ago, and was made from African mahogany.

Architecture:
North Africa and the Sahel
Around 1000 AD, cob (tabya) first appears in the Maghreb and al-Andalus.
Tichit is the oldest surviving archaeological settlements in the Sahel and is the oldest all-stone
settlement south of the Sahara. It is thought to have been built by Soninke people and is
thought to be the precursor of the Ghana empire.
The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud brick or adobe building in the world and is
considered by many architects to be the greatest achievement of the Sudano-Sahelian
architectural style, albeit with definite Islamic influences.
Nile Valley
The Egyptian step pyramid built at Saqqara is the oldest major stone building in the world.
The Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years.
The earliest style of Nubian architecture included the speos, structures carved out of solid rock,
an A-Group (3700–3250 BCE) achievement. Egyptians made extensive use of the process
at Speos Artemidos and Abu Simbel.
Sudan, site of ancient Nubia, has more pyramids than anywhere in the world, even more
than Egypt, a total of 223 pyramids exist.

Communication system
Africa's first writing system and the beginning of the alphabet was Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Sahel
With the arrival of Islam, came the Arabic alphabet in the Sahel. Arabic writing is widespread in
the Sahel. The Arabic script was also used to write native African languages.

Warfare
Most of tropical Africa did not have a cavalry. Horses would be wiped out by tse-tse fly.
The zebra was never domesticated. The army of tropical Africa consisted of mainly infantry.
Weapons included bows and arrows with low bow strength that compensated with poison
tipped arrows. Throwing knives were made use of in central Africa, spears that could double as
thrusting cutting weapons, and swords were also in use. Heavy clubs when thrown could break
bones, battle axe, and shields of various sizes were in widespread use. Later guns, muskets such
as flintlock, wheelock, and matchlock. Contrary to popular perception, guns were also in
widespread use in Africa. They typically were of poor quality, a policy of European nations to
provide poor quality merchandise. One reason the slave trade was so successful was the
widespread use of guns in Africa.
Fortification was a major part of defense, integral to warfare. Massive earthworks were built
around cities and settlements in West Africa, typically defended by soldiers with bow and
poison tipped arrows. The earthworks are some of the largest man made structures in Africa
and the world such as the wall of Benin and Sungbo's Eredo. In Central Africa, the Angola
region, one find preference for ditches, which were more successful for defense against wars
with Europeans.
African infantry did not just include men. The state of Dahomey included all-female units, the
so-called Dahomey Am azons, who were personal body guards of the king. The Queen Mother
of Benin had her own personal army, 'Queens Own.'

Commerce
Numerous metal objects and other items were used as currency in Africa. They are as
follows: cowrie shells, salt, gold (dust or solid), copper, ingots, iron chains, tips of iron spears,
iron knives, cloth in various shapes (square, rolled, etc.). Copper was as valuable as gold in
Africa. Copper was not as widespread and more difficult to acquire, except in Central Africa,
than gold. Other valuable metals included lead and tin. Salt was also as valuable as gold.
Because of its scarcity, it was used as currency.