Great ancient empires like Axum or the Nubians (which I believe was part of north Africa) have very little about them. I attributed that to the lack of written sources but it seems we know as much if not more about Mesoamerican civilizations despite their remoteness compared to the old world and lack of written records as well. Whenever I look up great African civilizations outside of Egypt or north Africa, there’s almost nothing. Even relatively modern ones like the kingdom of Kongo or Ethiopia (which if I’m not mistaken has perhaps the most information about it). My question mostly concerns the civilizations during classical antiquity.
Thank you.
This is a great question, there are multiple reasons for this.
First of all this is because modern historical education is very area focused, meaning that if you are American, you will mostly learn American history, if you are German mostly German history. Also implying that if you live in the "western" world you will be thaught "western" history.
However what is a more important reason is the historiography of the continent. First of all I would like to say that Egypt is part of North Africa, but often seen apart from it. From the renaissance onwards we, as in people who live in the "western" world, have seen the Roman and Greek ancient world as the establishment of "civilization". As they did not really spread further than past the Sahara northern Africa has always been of interest of "western" historians. Then from development of the age of sails and exploration onwards Euopreans were the ones exploring and thereby creating an idea of superioriy, which led to them colonizing continents. around them. The best indicator of this is the trade of enslaved people, which were mostly taken from Africa, but there are a lot of displaced people from Asia and South America as well. The enslaved people were seen as second rank humans and could therefore be traded. This European Idea of superiority also leaked through the ideas of historians and archaeologists of the time.
These "western" academics of that time developed ideas like the, out of egypt theory (I forget the actual name of this theory), where African civilizations all come from Egypt. As Egypt was seen as the birth of civilization, and that people south of the Sahara were not capable of having such a rich history, eventhough they built gigantic structures like Mapungubwe, great Zimbabwe, Mafia Island and much much more.
From the imperialistic time onwards this idea grew only stronger, and it was a way of justifying why Europeans were there and ruling of the local population.
Through this time, up until very recently, Africa past the Sahara was seen as prehistoric, or without history, as they had no written sources (which was not correct, but it fitted with imperialistc thought). Because of this historians, and archaeologists to some extend, always overlooked African history. This way of looking at African history is therefore heavily involved with imperialistic, and therefore superiority thinking.
From around the 60's onwards this started to change. With the independance of African countries, African people started to look at their own history, instead of that of their colonizers, and strarted to write about this. Leading to the pan-africanist approach to history (Africa of Africans). Nowadays it is slightly different, but there finally is some interest in the history of the African continent, besides north Africa. But this does not mean that it is completely without bias yet. There is still imperialistic thinnking within African historical writing.
For your question, there is now a lot of information about south east Africa too. I don;t really understand what you see under classical antiquity, as this is of course quite different between classical mediterranean world and anywhere else around the world. But if this helps, let me know, I can send you more papers on African history if you want that.
TL;DR
Two main reasons
- modern education
- imperialistic thinking
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