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I specifically restricted my theory to sub Saharan Africa. Egypt and North Africa do indeed have history of technology and innovation. In sub Saharan African I

I specifically restricted my theory to sub Saharan Africa. Egypt and North Africa do indeed have history of technology and innovation. In sub Saharan African I don't even think the wheel was a thing before the colonisers arrived. I could be wrong but from all the history I have read and from speaking to old people we did have some iron works to make spears and arrows. No wheels, no bridges and no roads.

kragen 5y ago
No wheels, except on the East Coast, but West Africa had, for example, drum telegraphs and (probably independently invented) iron smelting for 4500 years. Heliocentrism was mainstream in Mali centuries before Galileo. The Americans probably learned inoculation from Ghana. Coffee, irrigation systems, dams, aqueducts, terraced farming, megalithic astronomy, etc. Except in telecommunications, surgery, and metallurgy, subsaharan Africa wasn't ahead of Europe, China, and India even before the early modern ramp-up in the slave trade, but it wasn't nearly as far off as you'd extrapolate from looking at the ruins after 500 years of enslavement and colonialism.