My college roommate and long time friend (poet in my first book The Seven Laws of Money) Charlie, sent me this fascinating article about the Ibo in the delta area of Nigeria.
Turns out the Ibo have been the tribe at the center of metallurgy for several thousand years.
I was at Berkeley grad school in the early 1960s before the Western World had any idea about African history. One job I had was to record all written material on trade in Africa pre-1900. It became the basis for nearly all the future material on the economic history of Africa.
I was well aware of millennia of trade in copper, gold and iron across the continent before I read this article about the Ibo. The trade was done by the Fulani. They are still the street vendors in NY.
Since the explorers who wrote books and drew maps that were accessible to me in the Berkeley library, couldn't get into the Niger Delta, I didn't know about the Ibo. And archeology hadn't started in that area. The Ibo story is new to me.
When Europeans arrived in Africa, there was no African interest in their iron until well after 1850, when European steel first arrived. Ibo metal, available everywhere, was far superior to European. The same was true of machine made fabric compared to native hand woven varieties.
When you read the article, note the much higher measured IQs of the Ibo compared to the rest of Africa and how they compare to other continents. I will deal with that in a different blog at an other time.