Smarthistory – uche okeke

Recent discoveries in the southern tip of Africa provide remarkable evidence of the earliest stirrings of human creativity. Rock paintings depicting domesticated animals provide artistic evidence of the existence of agricultural communities that developed in both the Sahara region and southern Africa by around B. As the Sahara began to dry up, sometime before B.

Further south along the Nile, one of the earliest of the Nubian kingdoms was centered at Kerma in present-day Sudan and dominated trade networks linking central Africa to Egypt for almost one thousand years beginning around B. A corpus of sophisticated terracotta sculptures found over a broad geographic area in present-day Nigeria provides the earliest evidence of a settled community with ironworking technology south of the Sahara.

Uche Okeke, the Art Society's second president, drew inspiration for a new visual language from uli, an Igbo female body and wall painting tradition from.

The artistic creations of this culture are referred to as Nok, after the village where the first terracotta was discovered, and date to B. Although Nok terracottas continue to be unearthed, no organized excavations have been undertaken and little is known about the culture that produced these sculptures. Terracotta heads, buried around C.

Head of staff detail , Linguist Staff Okyeame , 19th—early 20th century Akan peoples, Asante, Ghana , gold foil, wood, nails, The 1st millennium C. The strategic location of the Inland Niger Delta, lying in a fertile region between the Bani and Niger rivers, contributed to its emergence as an economic and cultural force in the area.

The city continued to thrive for many centuries, becoming an important crossroads of a trans-Saharan trading network. Terracotta figures and fragments unearthed in the region reveal the rich sculptural heritage of a sophisticated urban culture. By the 9th century, trade across the Sahara had intensified, contributing to the rise of large state societies with diverse cultural traditions along trade routes in the western Sudan as well as introducing Islam into the region.

Initially traversed by camel caravans beginning around the 5th century, established trans-Saharan trade routes ensured the lucrative exchange of gold mined in southern West Africa and salt from the Sahara, as well as other goods. Ghana, one of the earliest known kingdoms in this region, grew powerful by the 8th century through its monopoly over gold mines until its eventual demise in the 12th century see the Linguist Staff.

The present-day nation of Ghana takes its name from this ancient empire, although there is no historical or geographic connection.