Many Africa americans wil often say that why should I look back on Africa?? Well,here is soe of the reasons why which very many people don't realize. Eropeans think that Africans before they arrivedwere savage with out any skills at all,which tis is not exactly true,bt t still continues on in the minds of many Americans.

Slaes who came here to America did process skills that were indeed veryvaluabe to pre industrialize3d soceity such as metalurgy,whic African blacksmiths had mastered before Eurepans arrived on te shores o Africa. African bcksmiths in anyguards developed better hoes and farm tools thaneuropeans developed.
Africans in Africa actually woked with better hoes wich was given to them in America,which african blacksmiths also made other thingslike fish hooks,bridle bits for horses and even nails.
Europeans also demanded slaves whoi knew how to cultivate rice,which many europeans did not know how,and even though europeans gt this form asians,Africans had grown rice for eos going back to the settlementsat djenne.

Knowleadge oi rice cltivation bosted up the south carlinaeconomy and heped develop it.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CARBLA.html

Judith Carney, "Rice, Slaves, and Landscapes of Cultural Memory" <http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi/conferences/AFR_43-62_Carney.pdf>
Candice L. Goucher "The Memory of Iron: African Technologies in the Americas" <http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi/conferences/AFR_63-68_Goucher.pdf>
http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi/conferences/conflinks.htm


Also many of the slaves that came re to america had cattle herding skills whic benefited slave masters,and
http://csbs.csusb.edu/history/history144/hist144-11.htm

Most slaves ended up in the plantations and mines of the Americas, while those slaves from West Africa were valued for their skills in herding, metallurgy, & agriculture

. COWBOYS: That's right, cowboys. The cowboy culture didn't come from England or France. Here's what Peter H. Wood has to say: "The annual north- south migratory pattern followed by the cowboy is unlike the cattle-keeping patterns in Europe but analagous to the migratory patterns of the Fulani cattle herders who live scattered from the Senegambia through Nigeria and Niger to the Sudan. " (Black Majority, pp. 29-31)


http://sln.fi.edu/tfi/info/current/bhmanswers.html
some facts about early africna american acoplishments before the civil war

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi820.htm


You see, shotgun houses gave us the southern porch. We didn't previously have porches like that in America. Like the shotgun house itself, southern porches are now all over America.

So the next time you see those rows of small linear houses in poor neighborhoods, consider what you're really seeing. These are the remains of an African technology that reached considerable elegance among people of middle means in the 19th century.


Southern blacksmiths used to make "nigger hoes" that were almost twice as
heavy as the ones they sold to white small farmers who worked their own
land? One of the _very_ few outlets for slaves' rage and resentment was
breaking tools--so heavier and more expensive tools were made for them.
If any of you have ever spent a day (or even an hour) swinging a hoe, you
know that every ounce counts in terms of efficiency of weeding. In fact,
hoes are _the_ traditional farm tool of West Africa, and African native
smiths make hoes that were lighter and better made than the ones their
enslaved cousins ended up using in America.

Small Pox inoculation
Cure for debilitating skin disease yaws
Oldest table of prime numbers.
Banjo musical Instrument
Oldest Astronomical Megalith Alignments
Jazz music

1. Small Pox inoculation
Chronology of Achievements
of African Americans in Medicine
1721
Onesimus, an enslaved African, describes to Cotton Mather the
African method of inoculation against smallpox. The
technique, later used to protect American Revolutionary War
soldiers, is perfected in the 1790's by British doctor
Edward Jenner's use of a less virulent organism.
Source:
Duke University
http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/hot/bhmtime.html

2. Cure for debilitating skin disease yaws
Results
all of the slave doctor's patients were well in two weeks
none of those treated with mercury
Source:
University of Michigan
http://www.umich.edu/~hist392/Jan27.html

3. Oldest table of prime numbers.
Some say that the Ishango Bone is the oldest table of prime numbers.

The most interesting, of a large number of tools discovered in 1960 at
Ishango, is a bone tool handle called the Ishango Bone (now located on
the 19th floor of the Royal Institute for Natural Sciences of Belgium
in Brussels, and can only be seen on special demand). At one end of
the Ishango Bone is a piece of quartz for writing, and the bone has a
series of notches carved in groups (shown below). It was first thought
these notches were some kind of tally marks as found to record counts
all over the world. However, the Ishango bone appears to be much more
than a simple tally. The markings on rows (a) and (b) each add to 60.
Row (b) contains the prime numbers between 10 and 20. Row (a) is quite
consistent with a numeration system based on 10, since the notches are
grouped as 20 + 1, 20 - 1, 10 + 1, and 10 - 1. Finally, row (c) seems
to illustrate for the method of duplication (multiplication by 2) used
more recently in Egyptian multiplication. Recent studies with
microscopes illustrate more markings and it is now understood the bone
is also a lunar phase counter. Who but a woman keeping track of her
cycles would need a lunar calendar? Were women our first
mathematicians?

references:
AMUCHMA-NEWSLETTER-9:
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/AMU/amu_chma_09.html
J. de Heinzelin, Ishango, Scientific American, 206:6 (June 1962)
105--116.
J. Shurkin, Engines of the mind: a history of the computer, W. W.
Norton & Co., 1984., p21
J. Bogoshi, K. Naidoo and J. Webb, The oldest mathematical artifact,
Math. Gazette, 71:458 (1987) 294.
Source:
State University of New York at Buffalo
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/ishango.html

4. Banjo music Instrument
The banjo, now associated primarily with the bluegrass music popular
among white Southerners, was originally an instrument used in African
religious ceremonies. Southern slaves adapted the instrument to suit
secular (nonreligious) musical styles in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The banjo is a plucked string instrument that has a long fretted neck
piercing a circular frame over which a membrane is tightened with
thumb screws, often containing a resonator over the open back. A
descendant of the West African long-necked lute, it came to the
Americas with the slave trade.
The xalam of Senegal, a plucked lute, is thought to be a close
relative of the African-American banjo.
Copyright 1995 by Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. Grolier
Encyclopedia

5. Oldest Astronomical Megalith Alignments of Nubia the possible
antecedent for the Egyptian Pyramids and high culture.
Sources:
University of Colorado
http://www.colorado.edu/PublicRelations/NewsReleases/1998/Oldest_Astronomical_Megalith_A.html
© 1998 by the Archaeological Institute of America
http://www.he.net/~archaeol/online/news/nubia.html
Source:
Archaeological Institute of America
http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/nubia.html
-- Scientific American
http://joshua.zutnet.org:8000/Onderwerpen/StoneCircleNabta/
http://www.angelfire.com/ak/sellassie/antique.html

6. jazz
jazz, the most significant form of musical expression of
African-American culture and arguably the most outstanding
contribution the United States has made to the art of music.
http://webcenter.aol.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0826064.html

Origins of Jazz
http://webcenter.aol.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0859011.html
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/ent/A0859011.html