Knowledge about Africa is still constructed under the cloud of colonialism. European colonizers denied the existence of African civilization, history and culture while simultaneously casting the continent and its people as noble and awe-inspiring. Knowledge production about, and in, Africa still is afflicted by confusions over race and geography – the effects of Eurocentric schemas that rest on hierarchical understandings of humanity. While there is a postmodern dispute about what can be known, this chapter makes the case for the possibility of a validated knowledge that will help to dispel the many myths that surround the continent.

From archaeological times to the present, the world has had a long history in which a kind of telos of humankind has made itself evident. Humankind, as a species within the animal kingdom, has been variously described as ‘the rational animal’ or, according to Aristotle, as ‘a political animal’. But on the basis of the empirical history of humankind, one can argue that our species can just as easily be described as ‘the technological animal’. After all, according to standard evolutionary biology, humankind has been in an evolutionary stasis over the last 180,000 years. Thus, the great differences that are observable between human social arrangements, beliefs, and practices are essentially attributable to advances in our understanding of the structures of the natural world, and its practical representation in forms of tool-making, commonly known as technological knowledge.

I argue that it is technological knowledge that serves as the main explanatory variable for the vagaries and paths of human history. It is this variable that explains the migratory movements of peoples over time, the wars and conflicts that arise, and the various aspects of cultural diffusion that accompany these events. Using this lens, one can find rational explanations for the expansion of Western Europe into the four corners of the globe over the last 500 years, including into the vast land mass now known as Africa.

The evident qualitative distinctions between forms of technologies and their accompanying cultures best explain the irruption of the Western European nations into Africa. In the initial stages, the compass, the printing press, long-haul galleons and their cannons afforded maximal technological advantages over the extant technologies of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia.