<< Feature Articles >> Astronomer Unearths Evidence of Scientific Tradition in Africa
Submitted by Andy B on Wednesday, 05 April 2006 Page Views: 4021
DiscoveriesCountry: Egypt Physics today asks Thebe Medupe, a rising star in South Africa's astronomy community: How did you get involved in Cosmic Africa? TM: Going back a bit, when I was 15, I started to question why everything was Eurocentric. Textbooks were using European things and so on. So I used to ask myself whether it was because there was nothing Africa can offer. I refused to believe that. It remained a very big question for me for a long time, until I came across a review on African ethnoastronomy.I was very excited. I was thinking of writing a book about that, when, about a year later, I was approached by a filmmaker and a journalist about making a film.
We decided to select remote communities, where contact with the outside world was minimal, but also living communities where you could clearly and graphically show that astronomy was an important part of their lives. That's why we selected the Bushmen, who live on the border of Botswana and Namibia, and the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa. The Dogons still live the way they did 500 years ago. They were dignified, and very hospitable. At the beginning, it was not easy to get information from them—that's how they protect their culture from being eroded. But once we won their trust, it was very pleasant to live among them.
We also read about a stone observatory—stone structures in the Sahara desert in southern Egypt that were erected more than 6000 years ago; that's more than a thousand years before the Pyramids. The stones were erected to mark the directions of north and of the summer solstice sunrise.
I spent a week with the Bushmen, three weeks with the Dogons, and a week in the desert. It was amazing. It was fun, but it was also very harsh—temperatures were 48 °C.
PT: What's an example of how astronomy is important for the Bushmen or the Dogon people?
TM: One evening with the Dogons, I went with two old people to look at the stars. I asked them what was the most important constellation for them. They said the Pleiades, a star cluster, which is very important throughout the whole of Africa, actually. The stars are used for planting and agriculture. I asked this guy [for] positions of the stars, and he gave me the rising times and positions at different times of the year. I checked with my laptop, and he was very much correct. To me that proved he knew what he was talking about.
The Egyptian stones apparently contain alignments similar to those done a thousand or so years later at Stonehenge in Great Britain, but they are smaller in size. The Bushmen made out constellations just like the ancient Greeks and other peoples. To me, it shows the commonality between Africa and the rest of the world.
Full article in Physics Today
Note: A little on stone observatories in Africa
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