Influences did not, of course, come only from the East. As I have men-
tioned, the king and aristocracy of the Kongo kingdom not only converted
to Christianity but sent a number of their younger men to Portugal to study.
When these students returned, others learned from them, so that local
beliefs came to be as interwoven with Catholicism there as they would later
be in the New World. One result of this impact led to an event in some
ways comparable to the story of Joan of Arc.
Africans also were strikingly inventive on their own in the practical
affairs of daily life. In their use of fertilizers, crop rotation, and irrigation,
they were so advanced that some of their techniques, carried to the New
World by slaves, were adopted by eighteenth-century American colonists.
The reverse process was also evident, with New World crops like corn
(maize), millet, and sweet potatoes being introduced in Africa. In industry,
as John Thornton has pointed out, “Africa possessed a manufacturing sec-
tor that supplied the population’s needs for tools and clothing as well as
luxury goods. As with agriculture, African manufacturing was done with
fairly simple tools and techniques, yet the quality of output was as high as
that from any other part of the world.” Africans were expert metalworkers,
turning out iron and copper weapons and tools at least 1,000 years ago;
they had also discovered how to make high-quality steel which, as I will
point out in chapter 14, was beyond the capacity of eighteenth-century
American colonists. The Kongolese “had become a nation of miners with
an aristocracy of smiths and traders in metal goods, which gave them an
economic and political significance which spread far beyond their own eth-
nic homeland.”
In textiles, the Kongolese are thought to have been one of the largest
producers in the world. So esteemed was their cloth that it was exported to
Europe and America. And in at least one field of medicine, the people of
the Gold Coast had made a literally vital breakthrough: at a time when
smallpox was a scourge in Europe and in the American colonies, with as
many as one person in ten or twelve dying of it before age twenty, the Akan
and perhaps other societies were successfully practicing inoculation. We
know this because Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston wrote to the Royal
Society in London in July 1716 to say that he had learned “from a Servant
of my own, an Account of its being practiced in Africa.” Mather’s Akan
92 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA