Oh, I wasn't a monster that may be rather and usually by wishing you all a happy first week anniversary of Brexit.
I apologise, but I could not manage bringing flowers or cake, but as they say, you know, you still got that covered.
So but I'm rather disappointed with the fact that my magic did not work on the on the projector.
Yes. Yes, yes. The reason being that someone told me that power corrupts, but power corrupts absolutely.
I didn't want it to corrupt you, certainly not in the presence of the judge.
And I, it would go back home to Cape Town. Yeah, you know. But now that these formalities are over?
Allow me to get into the subject of my talk.
So why is contemporary Africa poor? That is a question that elicits emotions.
And some of them even very strong.
So if you had asked me, why is contemporary Africa poor?
The honest truth is that I don't know. But nevertheless, there are some thoughts as an archaeologist.
One of the things that fascinates me is that I operate in two worlds.
The first is the world of African archaeology and deep history, which shows this amazing Africa.
And indeed, Africa is very beautiful. It's stunning.
You can use all those adjectives, and indeed, the African past is quite rich in terms of outstanding heritage from Lalibela in Ethiopia.
You know, these contentious objects, you know, which we are perhaps going to return tomorrow or the day after.
And and and it doesn't matter whatever you are in the continent, in the Northeast,
you have these stunning from memory Nubian times and indeed Africa was what was connected.
It was part of the it was part of the of the global world.
But then if we come to the present, the Africa of today is alluded by prosperity.
But few of us recognise that as the world's second largest continent, actually,
Africa is so vast that you can fit all the sizes of these are very big and influential nations into India Africa.
So I guess the reason why we have this slide is that Africa is not a country.
It is a continent that is so, so, so, so, so diverse and and so big.
And with that in mind, I'm also going to be making sure that I contextualise the remarks that I that
I say so I gave you the world of the archaeologist where everything is great.
But the Africa that I live in is characterised by corruption, you know, anti the corruption.
The good thing about that corruption is that it involves Africa's ruling elite and the companies that are based here in the global West,
you know, French company, British companies and so on, which is why.
And this is not to say anything bad about the courts, but no one gets arrested for corruption in Africa or prosecuted for that matter.
And they it and so on. That is the Africa that we that we live in.
It is a laboratory for carers as well as suffering and that poverty trying to text, for example, Africa and indeed.
So the challenge then, is that as an archaeologist who is on the one hand,
you are working with these communities that are long gone, but they left their material remains.
And on the other, you are working in this continent where poverty is everywhere.
So what do you do? Can you use the past to try and understand or contribute to wealth creation?
And the other thing so that is the whole purpose of the research that myself and colleagues have been doing over the past few years.
So in other words, can we use the insights from archaeology to develop problem-solving outcomes, especially at grassroots level?
And can we also leverage that to do policy?
So that's that that is one way.
But, you know, highlighting all these points, what I would do is that I will quickly discuss one case study, which is that of a great Zimbabwe.
And I saw my colleague SIM Guy here who perhaps he has also had this joke, which says that names have got a meaning because I mean,
Zimbabwe is the only country that is named after and ruins from the past, and at the moment, the country is in ruins as well as it were.
So, so so I'm not saying don't remember, you can't leave after archaeological sites takes good statistics.
Don't get me wrong.
But the most important thing about the Great Zimbabwe is that the research that we have been doing is aimed at understanding production,
what are the mechanics of production and also the distribution of resources within and outside Great Zimbabwe?
What is the nature of labour organisation? What is the nature of wealth accumulation and inequality?
And hopefully out of that, distil some lessons that we can say, OK,
if they were doing this during the time of Great Zimbabwe and other social formations, why are they not doing it today?
And perhaps that is the reason why you know, Africa could be put.
Here we go. Right. So one of these strategies that we have adopted is just excavations.
You generate materials as well as dates and also applying different techniques to delineate at the settlement sequence and identify activity areas.
Where are they doing production? And also these days, there are new techniques.
Such is a light scanning. So from remote sensing, from the air, trying to understand the landscape and also to do some terrain modelling.
This is our work which is in progress. But just to give you an idea in terms of where do we get the information that we use to support our hypothesis?
And Amy mentioned fireworks.
So here is an example of how those fireworks work.
So I mentioned the importance of tradition, the importance of technology as well as production.
So great Zimbabwe is a centre that was heavily invested in multiple branches of production.
One of them, which is a medal of production, Great Zimbabwe, is also known as a centre for gold production.
The gold, which was circulated within the wider Indian Ocean region.
So these are crucibles, which are vessels which were used for different stages in the production of up of gold.
So there are quite a load off of these remains.
What we sought to do was to apply our techniques from material science techniques,
from geological sciences to reconstruct the processes that were taking place in these in these vessels.
So when you talk about China, when you talk about India and so on from the Middle Ages and so on,
these remains that you have on the board be they are so fundamental in the sense that that is where the gold was processed.
But as with many stories about Africa, its contribution to the evolution of the world is never told.
So when you cut those pieces and you studied them using various techniques, here we have the scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive mode.
You can identify faces. You can also determine the composition of the of the clays.
So here some of these clays and we are rich in alumina, which is quite heat resistant and refractory.
You could also get an idea in terms of where they were sourcing the clays.
These are quite dramatic or would be from great sources as reflected by those minerals, such as the ghoneim and and eliminate.
So what we can do is we can also find the sources of the clay on the on the landscape.
And the good thing is that all this technology is pointing to a local resource.
So the crucibles they aid the fire inside or fired from from outside.
In terms of performance characteristics, there are advantages and disadvantages of that.
This one was or is in the sister general's cabinet of curiosity in Cape Town, and it was I used for processing brass.
So metal is just one of the branches of production.
There's also cattle production. There's quite a lot of tonnes of cattle born from different areas of good Zimbabwe infrastructure
for cattle keeping and cattle production and use was also embedded in other things,
such as religion. Then there was also subsistence and food production, the cultivation of bombardments,
which is quite a very, very interesting crop, particularly from a DNA point of view.
And there are so many things that you can do with with that crop.
But that's a conversation for another day. There's also finger millet, millet and also some vegetables.
So this is a dried clone, which is a tropical, you know, weed or grass, whatever name you can call it.
But it's also edible in many communities that also are good.
Storage facilities, and there's also information, especially from some Arabic writers, that places such as Great Zimbabwe and so on.
They were exporting food after the Indian Ocean.
So there are those dynamics. You have cattle, you have crops and plants and other food.
A study is going on and there's also amazing science, engineering and craft to be vocabularies or the cosmology is shaping.
This knowledge might be different to the way in which we constitute our engineering knowledge,
attends our office forces, compressive forces and so on.
But if you look at this Amazon we built of these dry stone walls,
blocks of granite placed one on top of the other without any binder sites is mortar, about up to 11 metres high.
In some cases they are, let's say, two metres three metres high.
So if you drive that small car, the smart cars like I do,
you can literally drive it on top of this of this wall just to give you an idea in terms of the.
But if you drive those big American ones, well, that won't work.
I'm one of the things that we are also doing is that within the broader landscape where where the resources are coming from.
So which also then lead us into exploding networks of production, as well as networks of speculation involving gold, iron grain and other things.
And thanks to advances in archaeology in science, we are able to deploy a number of techniques to understand the movement of these things,
which speaks to the vibrant nature of overproduction and so on.
Then there's also the other thing. So then there's also the other issue of imported objects, which are in archaeology.
In most cases, if you see objects which are made in one area, in another area, they are seen as exotics and they are also seen as a prestige goods.
They are also seen as as wealth. But what is coming up here is that you don't have many of these objects,
so less than less than less than 100 over a settlement, which was occupied for around 500 or so years.
So the issue is that perhaps these are gifts that were given to the rulers to ease trade and exchange relations and so on.
And the sites might not have been as symbols of of prestige and so on.
Then there's also the Arab feeling that particularly in the past few years in Africa,
there were these claims that, well, they are, you know, Italian as people.
They are bringing these objects that do not last long and so on.
But the lesson that we get from these places and shifting focus to mapping is that there
is these Chinese Song Dynasty porcelain rituals that government didn't do around A.D. 70.
So if these people could negotiate for these lasting materials, why are we failing today?
And also to say that in the 17th century, Britain used to export raw materials to the Yoruba in Nigeria, and you're about to make these these bronzes.
But now the system is is is reversed. So I hope you get the sense that I'm saying that,
that the mindset that it used to take place back in the in the continent, that's just more of the same.
The other thing is that there was a vibrant trade at networking across across Africa,
which are thanks to the Benin Congress, which divided Africa into these different partitions, is no longer there.
Is an absolute game, it is much easier for me to meet my colleague from Senegal in Paris than for us to meet in Africa,
thanks to the two people in Congress. What is also what this has done is that these these Trump, which is a very dangerous one,
which is that development in Africa is only externally driven.
You need those foreign objects, such as the teapot that I showed you.
And you also need aid for Africa to develop the best use of this dirty from Griggs and Barbary.
They were using and exploiting food and so on.
So would be to cut the long story short, Ben, what is happening is that is Africa is not producing anything,
which is why the research that we are doing are combining village science and looking into issues of food security, traditional medicines.
There are also challenges that, you know, do we have the skills, you know,
does our curriculum and power as to convince you to translate what we learn in the archaeology to come up with that spin offs?
Or we leave that to people in the side of business school or in the Blavatnik and the people in the Blavatnik.
They say, Oh, OK, that's archaeology. That is not investing. Let us do artificial intelligence.
You know, is this those kinds of those kinds of things? These are these are big.
These are big questions. But nevertheless, there is cause there's cause for hope.
So the challenge that I have with you all is that if you think you.
So in conclusion, Ben, I think, would be many reasons why Africa is poor, but the main one is that Africa fails to stick to be to the basics.
I know that there are many, many, many reasons, most of them political and ended and so on.
But if America produces its food.
Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, there are so many things that could happen. There's also need for, you know, good governance and so on.
And there must also be, you know, consequences for everyone.
So I'm sure I bet our courts, we will we will work.
And if I'm caught up to be an I will also, you know, I pay for paper, pay for that.
I was told that my time is is over. So with that, I wish you a happy Friday.