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They were many. Not just rulers, but households, elders, children—lives lived inside systems of memory, labor, belief, and power that did not require a single name. So, to say “Africa is a country” is not a cartographic error. It is the residue of training—what remains after empire leaves but its grammar stays.

Africa moved as many worlds. It still does.

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#history #blackmastodon

Image: Map of the ethnic diversity of Africa, overlaid with country borders. Source: National Geographic.

A satellite-style map of Africa overlaid with modern national borders and filled with hundreds of irregular, multicolored regions. The dense patchwork of colors subdivides the continent far beyond state boundaries, suggesting ethnic, linguistic, or cultural groupings rather than countries. Surrounding oceans are dark blue, emphasizing the contrast between Africa’s political borders and its complex internal diversity. From National Geographic.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Long before Europe’s maps, Africa governed itself in plural. Nile states taxed grain and time. Nubia ruled Egypt. Ethiopia traded with Rome and India. Mali controlled gold routes; Timbuktu kept archives. Power moved through institutions, not absence.

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Image: al-Idrīsī's 1154 map of the northern part of the continent —rivered, city-dense, sophisticated trade routes---a connected space, not container. No modern nation-states. No colonial color blocks. Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

A circular medieval-style world map drawn on aged parchment. Blue oceans surround pale landmasses outlined in gold, with Africa, Europe, and Asia stylized and distorted in scale. Rivers, mountains, and regions are labeled in handwritten script, with red lines suggesting routes or divisions. A small ship appears near the lower left, and the entire map is enclosed by a thick blue border, emphasizing a symbolic, cosmological view of the world rather than a realistic geographic one. This is Muhammad Sharif al- al-Idrīsī's 1154 map of the northern part of the African continent.

File:Al-Idrisi's world map Rotated 180 degrees.JPG - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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The singular came through administration. Borders were drawn. Kingdoms split. Maps flattened complexity into paperwork. Knowledge followed power: history gave way to classification. Africa became “manageable” once it could be spoken of as one place.

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Image: Map showing the colonization of Africa by European countries in the early 1900s. Source: britannica.com/topic/Timeline-…

A color-coded political map of Africa titled “Colonization of Africa by Europeans,” showing territorial control from the late 19th to early 20th century. Different colors indicate European powers—British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, German, Italian, and Spanish—with borders dividing colonies across the continent. Labels identify colonial names like French West Africa, Belgian Congo, British East Africa, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, along with dates of control. A legend explains colonial possession periods, and surrounding oceans and seas frame the continent.

Timeline of European Colonization of Africa | History, Key Dates, Maps, Images, & Facts

The colonization of Africa by European powers is explored in this timeline, beginning with early Portuguese explorations in the 15th century and ending with the United Nations trusteeships established after World War II.
Amy McKenna (Encyclopedia Britannica)
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Others receive detail. Africa receives blur. Russia is parsed. Asia subdivides. The Americas fracture easily. Only Africa remains whole—in speech and thought. 54 nations characterized not by nature, but by habit. A grammar learned under empire, kept after it left.

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Image; "Rider” by Pierre Cloete (Khoi).

A stylized, textured painting called "Rider” by Artist, Pierre Cloete (Khoi)), depicting a human figure merged with animal forms. The figure appears mounted on or fused with an antelope-like creature rendered in earthy reds and browns, while the human face is gray and stone-like, crowned with circular halo-like shapes. The head of the animal is lowered as if it is grazing. The background is blue, patterned with concentric circles, giving the scene a dreamlike, symbolic, and mythic quality.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Intellectual Map

youtu.be/0MMifQvuN08?si=0D7T8v…
Video: Bill Gates referring to Africa as a country. Source: Financial Times.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Bill Gates on Africa's population boom and the risk of the US turning inwards

With Africa's population set to double by 2050, Bill Gates has warned that progress in cutting poverty is at risk. The Microsoft co-founder speaks to the FT'...
YouTube
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Intellectual Map 2

Manning, Patrick. Africa in World History. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.

UNESCO. General History of Africa. 8 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press; Paris: UNESCO, 1981–1993.

Africa No Filter. Africa No Filter. Accessed December 24, 2025. africanofilter.org.

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Africa No Filter | Words matter. Stories matter. Narrative matters.

africanofilter.org
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Intellectual Map 3

Wainaina, Binyavanga. “How to Write About Africa.” Granta 92 (2005): 92–95.

Meredith, Martin. The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

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WesDym
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WesDym
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I watched it, though I didn't catch every word. (He's not a trained speaker, so he doesn't speak as clearly as he could -- kind of sad, given his resources, but it's not like he gets paid to speak, either.) Amongst thousands of words in over 6-1/2 minutes, I failed to catch it. Can you point me to the approximate time-point where he says that, so that I can study it?
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@wesdym Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is that throughout the video—starting around the 43-second mark—Bill Gates repeatedly refers to “Africa” as a single unit, a kind of homogenous mass. When he talks about poverty and population growth, he doesn’t specify countries, regions, or communities; it’s just “Africa” as a problem space.
@WesDym
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@wesdym That move flattens the continent’s enormous political, economic, cultural, and demographic diversity into one abstract condition, in a way we would never accept if someone spoke about “Europe” or “North America” the same way. I don’t doubt that he believes he’s doing good work, but the framing itself reinforces the problem the post is naming.
@WesDym
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@wesdym Africa gets treated as a singular case, uniquely burdened, uniquely pathological, rather than as a continent of distinct nations and societies facing very different histories and challenges. That habitual abstraction is doing real intellectual damage, even when the intentions are seemingly benign.
@WesDym
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Gala, thé des sphères
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Gala, thé des sphères
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@wesdym This is quite interesting. I worked for a research project funded by the Gates Foundation, the RTB Foods project. And it did not have this "Africa as a country" approach at all.
It focused only on specific countries and we worked with scientific institutes from those countries, but the specificities of each population were key as we wanted to understand what makes a crop a good food and for what use.
@WesDym
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Radical Anthropology
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Radical Anthropology
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the Alt text here is inaccurate. This is not 'a horse like' body. This is a great game antelope, eland (or gemsbok perhaps), which is central to ancient cosmology of southern African click-speaking peoples.
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Radical Anthropology
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Radical Anthropology
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thanks for the thread! An amazing, a beautiful picture, this one, very resonant.
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Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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the Great Zimbabwe was built...
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@Thebratdragon Yes, and magnificently so. Indeed, Great Zimbabwe is a very good example of how this erasure works. For a long time, Europeans literally refused to believe Africans could have built it, inventing fantasies about Phoenicians or Arabs because acknowledging African statecraft, engineering, and political organization contradicted the story they wanted to tell.
@Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@Thebratdragon In reality, Great Zimbabwe was the center of a sophisticated polity, tied into Indian Ocean trade networks, with complex social hierarchies and architectural knowledge developed locally over centuries. That history wasn’t forgotten by accident; it was actively denied, sidelined, or reclassified as archaeology without philosophy, engineering without political thought.
@Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
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you get the same thing now with Pharonic Egypt, the number of 'white' people who do not believe an ancient people could have built Karnak or the pyramids, must have been aliens you see bandied about.

I am loath to call that era of Egypt African, nor because it isn't geographically, but because they and the Nubian societies were so different to everybody that they are their own thing.

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Mark R. Stoneman
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Mark R. Stoneman
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I can't remember most of it now, but I am so glad I took a precolonial African history survey as an undergraduate some 38 years ago.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Thank you. Same experience with me, Mark. I was only able to begin to de-colonize my mind in graduate school when I took courses in postcolonial theory and history and read the works of scholars like Said, Fanon, Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, etc, and writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, etc. Until then, like many Americans at least, Africa mostly appeared as context or silence, not as a producer of theory, philosophy, or political thought.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@markstoneman Once you are exposed to that body of work, you realize how deliberately the educational curriculum was structured to center Europe as the source of all worthy knowledge and ideas, with the goal of pushing everything else to the margins. The absence you describe is real and it has been costly in so many ways. It isn’t personal ignorance. It’s by institutional design, and, for me, recognizing that is often the first real break in the Eurocentric spell. I’m still learning.
@Mark R. Stoneman
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Dilman Dila
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Dilman Dila
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Thanks for this thread, and this map! It would however be nice, when talking of nations, to see that most of the continent was decentralized, but they don't get attention like Ethiopia, Egypt, Mali, Zimbabwe, because we love stories of empires and powerful kings, not those varying forms of direct democracy and communal governance; systems that the colonialist dismissed as anarchic and evidence of primitivity for they equated civilisation with authoritarian rule. And they still do!
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila You’re exactly right, and it’s a point that doesn’t get made often enough. Our historical minds are trained to look for states that resemble Europe—kings, capitals, armies, monuments. So, centralized polities like Ethiopia or Mali get spotlighted, while decentralized societies are treated as non-consequential. But many African societies were deliberately non-centralized, organized around councils, age grades, kin networks, rotating authority, & communal land systems.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila These were forms of governments that worked precisely because they resisted permanent concentration of power. Colonial administrators saw those systems through their own biases and called them “anarchic” or “primitive,.” This was not because they lacked order, but because they didn’t look authoritarian enough to count as “civilization.” And you’re right to say this logic hasn’t disappeared.
@Dilman Dila
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila We still privilege domination over deliberation, hierarchy over horizontality, empire over community. What gets lost is that Africa didn’t just have different nations; it had different political philosophies about what power was for and where it should live.
@Dilman Dila
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila Interestingly, we can observe similar inclinations in the legibility of American Indian societies: in the European mind, groups like the Apache, Comanche, Lakota, and Cheyenne become historically “visible” because they fit a colonial narrative of recognizable leadership, warfare, mobility, and confrontation with empire.
@Dilman Dila
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila Meanwhile, many others slip into the background—like the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek, whose political life centered on councils, towns, and federated authority rather than kings; or the Houma around what became New Orleans; or California nations whose governance was local, seasonal, and deeply ecological.
@Dilman Dila
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@dilmandila As with African societies, European observers equated civilization with hierarchy, fixed borders, and coercive power, so these decentralized or consensus-based systems were dismissed as weak, anarchic, or not political at all. What’ was erased were forms of governance that distributed authority, constrained domination, and refused the state model empire expected to see.
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Michael Graaf
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Michael Graaf
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Much as colonial boundaries need to be discredited, even the colour zones here implicitly reinforce the idea of ethnic/linguistic territories, when peoples have often lived more closely intermingled,
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@michaelgraaf That’s a fair point. Maps like this are blunt tools. They’re trying to show linguistic or cultural patterns, not lived reality. Historically, people across Africa have been far more mixed, mobile, and interconnected than any color-coded map suggests—through trade, migration, intermarriage, multilingualism, and shifting political ties.
@Michael Graaf
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@michaelgraaf As you know, what colonial rule did was freeze fluid identities into fixed “tribes” and tie them to territory for administrative convenience, and a lot of these maps still echo that logic. So while the image helps push back against the idea that Africa is one place with one people, it can also replace that mistake with another—neat blocks where real life was overlapping, entangled, and constantly changing.
@Michael Graaf
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Pinky
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Pinky
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That reminds me of the Aboriginal map of Australia - what it was like before colonialism
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WesDym
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WesDym
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@pinky There are similar maps of other places. Many of these groups are still around, too, such as Native American peoples either no longer recognized, or marginalized so much as to no longer 'matter' to most modern people.
@Pinky
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MyView
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MyView
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Also Australia ... before the invasion by the colonising British ... the land they labelled Terra Nullius ...
Map of Australia showing how it was inhabited by Indigenous peoples

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Christopher Michaels
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Christopher Michaels
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@Deglassco, vital knowledge to share. Filling in some details on my even sketchier knowledge. The references are excellent
@Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Eugene Parnell
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Eugene Parnell
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That's a beautiful map, it reveals so much with such simplicity. Thanks for sharing it
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Captain Superlative
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Captain Superlative
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Once, in an undergrad intro philosophy class a young Black student asked me if we'd be studying any African philosophy. Our textbook didn't have anything under that category. So I wanted delve into this at that time on my own. Except the category itself became suspect to me. Suspect but also indicative. Where is the Nigerian, for example, philosophy section? I am ignorant of it. And I feel the absence.
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@CptSuperlative Thank you for this. Your experience gets right at the problem. “African philosophy” appears as a single, catch-all category precisely because the intellectual traditions of the continent were never granted the same specificity or legitimacy as European ones. We don’t ask where the “European philosophy” section is. We expect Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hume, etc. to each be rooted in a particular place, language, and historical problem.
@Captain Superlative
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@CptSuperlative The continent of Africa, by contrast, is treated as an undifferentiated elsewhere, so its thought is either collapsed into one box or excluded altogether. The absence you’re naming isn’t accidental. It’s produced by how disciplines were built, which traditions were archived, translated, and taught—-valued—-and which were treated as philosophy rather than folklore, anthropology, or “culture.”
@Captain Superlative
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
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@CptSuperlative That sense of lack is real. And historically revealing. It tells us less about the African continent‘s intellectual life than about the limits of the categories we inherited.
@Captain Superlative
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Chuks Awa
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Chuks Awa
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I believe the real story here is being overlooked. Africa is by far the most diverse continent on the face of the earth. Asia is a fairly distant 2nd. Its not easy to be diverse, but even with our immense diversity, we have been relatively peaceful with each other. If you can chart diversity against freq of violence i think Africa historically will do very well compared to other continents.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicit….

a person's ethnic background

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
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Daniel Gomes
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Daniel Gomes
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Africa is a collection of hundreds of thousands of tribes. In many cases different tribes had their own cultures, their own beliefs their own rules and systems. Africa is definitely not one country not even many countries. But rather it is many tribes.
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WesDym
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WesDym
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It's going to sound silly, I'm sure, but I partly blame the Mercator Projection that's most people's conceptual image of the relative sizes of land bodies. It's misleading, making Africa look much smaller than it is. (And Europe and North America look bigger than they are.)

That's not Mercator's fault. The Projection existed for the convenience of navigators -- which it excels at -- at the known (to them) cost of relative accuracy. It was never meant for what most of us use it for.

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