The idea that Africans have contributed little to world civilization is one which many in the West have for a long time assumed and taken for granted. Thanks in part to depictions of Africa which rarely extend past civil wars, famine and the primitive; information about Africa’s past advances and accomplishments have continued to remain obscure and little known. Since first contact between Europe and Africa the history of Africa has been fundamentally dominated by the way Europeans have portrayed themselves in relationship to that continent. So that most of what we read and see about Africa tends to say -- either directly or indirectly -- more about the history of European colonialism and its biases toward Africa than it does about the real Africa and its people (see Ahmad, 1987).

The majority of people today of all backgrounds, including those of African ancestry, tend to know little about Africa and its history outside of the transatlantic slave trade and perhaps colonialism. While even in these instances knowledge about these events can be at times, limited. The African continent is too often conceived of as one with no legitimate history before contact with Europeans. Formal anthropological research is now showing that this notion could not be further from the truth.

In the bible Ham's sons are believed to have fathered the peoples of Africa. Of Ham's four sons, Canaan, fathered the Canaanites, while Mizraim fathered the Egyptians, Cush the Cushites and Phut the "Libyans". Nimrod, the Grandson of Ham and son Cush, is written to have been the father the Mesopotamian/Babylonian Empire: “And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before Jehovah. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land he went forth into Assyria, and builded Nineveh, and