---
title: "History of science and technology in Africa"
chunk: 9/21
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:31.520269+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Since communications and markets were relatively poorly developed, the farmer had to sow a great variety of crops with a great variety of characteristics, in order to survive no matter what the climatic variations, so that he would not be, in effect, wiped out. By taking a single ecological zone, understanding its complexity with a thoroughness incomprehensible to even a Westerner, developing a rich and subtle language with a profusion of terms for the understanding of local ecology, planting dozens of crops to which the environment was peculiarly suited, the farmer sought to defeat famine, to cheat death.
within the African Great Lakes advanced agriculture practices were employed such as "hydraulic practices 
in the mountains, man-made watering places, river diversions, hollowed-out tree-trunk pipes, irrigation on cultivated slopes, mounding in drained marshes, and irrigation of banana and palm tree gardens" as well as extensive use of terraces and the practice of double and triple cropping. The agrarian success of the Great Lakes civilization accounts for its exceptionally high levels of human density. Many foreign experts were impressed by the sophistication of the areas traditional methods of intensive farming. The agriculture of the great lakes was described below:

The "beautiful irrigated fields", the steep terraced slopes of the thousand hills, where every patch of ground is put to use, the "well-fed cattle with colossal horns" were "wonderful discoveries" to the Europeans. But even greater surprises awaited them.
The earliest Europeans to visit Rwanda observed intense pride in cultivating skills. A mother would give a crying baby a toy hoe to play with and a range of techniques often superior to those of eastern European peasants, notably the use of manure, terracing, and artificial irrigation.
The Chaga people have long practiced an advanced form of agriculture which allowed them to maintain a high population density involving the control and distribution of water. Europeans wrote of their admirably constructed irrigation works and the care they witnessed in the maintenance of them and their powerfully centralized social organization. Sir Harry Johnston, writing in 1894, echoed this praise of Chagga industry and skill:

They mostly excel in their husbandry, the skill with which they irrigate their terraced hillsides with tiny runnels of eater shows considerable advancement in agriculture. Their time is constantly spent in tilling the soil, manuring it with ashes, raking it and hoeing it with wooden hoes

=== West Africa and the Sahel ===
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, African yam, black-eyed peas, Bambara groundnut, Cowpea, Fonio, Pearl millet, and kola nuts.
Investigations in the Upper Guinea forest region by found connections between palm oil processing, "sacred agroforests", and anthropogenic soil, or "dark earths". They identified "palm oil production pits" as central loci for the formation of dark earths, where charred palm kernels and other organic materials enriched soils for use in fields of vegetables and trees. Once left fallow those fields gradually morphed into biodiverse groves of palms and other forest species. These anthropogenic landscapes, patches of AfDES (African dark earths) and anthropogenic vegetation are permeated with symbolic significance because they are the ongoing outcome of inhabitation trajectories begun by ancestors, continuing to the present day. They are not simply areas of improved soils and anthropogenic agroforests, but the relics of old towns, villages, kitchens, graveyards, and initiation society areas, many of which were inhabited by direct ancestors of current inhabitants.
African oil palms were most abundant as part of the oil palm-yam complex beginning just south and east of the rice belt running from Lower Guinea across the derived savannas of the Dahomey Gap and through the Niger Delta. From there oil palm cultivation extended deep into the Central African rainforests where swidden farmers spared and managed palms within their plots of yams, cocoyams, plantains, legumes, and other crops, and where dense rainforest alternated with emergent oil palm groves. Long disparaged by some Western scientists and environmentalists as "slash-and-burn", ecological research since the mid-twentieth century has demonstrated the efficacy of such ancestral systems, linking traditional swidden-fallow landscapes with enhanced floral and faunal biodiversity, higher returns on labor investment, food security, nutritional balance, and overall resilience and reliability, especially when compared to monocultures. Throughout western Africa, oil palm agroforests helped to nourish human communities by contributing to food security and balanced diets, complementing carbohydrate-rich
tubers and grains with fats, provitamin A carotenoids (mainly a-and B-carotenes), and vitamin E. The source of fats is particularly important within the broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa where the voracious tsetse fly and the trypanosomiasis pathogens it carries make livestock husbandry virtually impossible.
African methods of cultivating rice, introduced by enslaved Africans, may have been used in North Carolina. This may have been a factor in the prosperity of the North Carolina colony. Portuguese observers between the half of the 15th century and the 16th century witnessed the cultivation of rice in the Upper Guinea Coast, and admired the local rice-growing technology, as it involved intensive agricultural practices such as diking and transplanting.
Yams were domesticated 8000 BCE in West Africa. Between 7000 and 5000 BCE, pearl millet, gourds, watermelons, and beans also spread westward across the southern Sahara.
Between 6500 and 3500 BCE knowledge of domesticated sorghum, castor beans, and two species of gourd spread from Africa to Asia. Pearl millet, black-eyed peas, watermelon, and okra later spread to the rest of the world.
In the lack of more detailed historical and archaeological studies on the chronology of terracing, intensive terrace farming is believed to have been practiced before the early 15th century CE in West Africa. Terraces were used by many groups, notably the Mafa, Ngas, Gwoza, and the Dogon.