why don't we know much about ancient Africa
Answers
Answer:
Because We don't live there yr.
Bear in mind it is a Huge continent. Disparate parts of it have no more to do with each other than for example disparate parts of Europe.
Now the Mediterranean coast of Africa has a written history as old as any in the World. They wrote it themselves. They devised scripts & they wrote in papyrus scrolls or on palm-leaf blades or thin slats of cedar, or on cave or cliff walls, & carved it on stone monuments. Later they used parchment.
I am thinking of Kybeles with the Amazig script, Egyptians with their Heiroglyphic, Heiractic & Demotic, Nubians with the same, Ethiopians with the Amharic, & also the Phoenecians, with their Caananite (Da’ats) script. All these have Mediterranean connections all around the ‘Middle Sea’. Egyptians were as precocious as the Sumerians & their Cuniform of the Fertile Crescent: Old, very old, & in so many cases so comprehensively recorded.
These that I have listed had a script, wrote a history & left a written record, That is what history is. What came before that is pre-history.
Lands South of the Sahara had to wait for the colonial powers, be they Arabic, Portuguese, French, Dutch, German or what-have you, to bring their language, scripts & the written record…. History.
I do not know why, notwithstanding the overarching ages, the wealth of resources in the ground & the fruitful plenty growing of the lands to the South, no native culture rose to linger over the generations, to make, cherish & preserve monuments or written record of themselves, their kings, their gods or their ancestors.
The Bushmen in South Africa did cave paintings, & in other parts cut stone engravings, & I for one bitterly mourn that we displaced them & did not bother to learn from them.
Our Blacks, our Bantu, passed through the same communities on their way south, but the left no paintings & cut no engravings. There are some remains, a thin archaeological record, not much more than a generation’s depth of technoculture, dry-stone building, potsherds, beads & fragments of china, oh so few, showing trade abroad, & small gold-plated artifacts, most likely of local manufacture, between Mapungubwe, Zimbabwe & the regions around, but no surviving continuity reaching back to them. They might not even have been Bantu. They go back no more than 600 years, & their advent may have something to do with Portuguese colonisation of the East African coast driving them inland. Be that as it may, no written record.
We know a LOT about African history. What we do not know a lot about is recent African pre-history.