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6 Episodes 2017 - 2017
Episode 1
Mon, Feb 27, 201752 mins
Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. introduces viewers to the African continent through a series of expansive views and myth-busting revelations. His six-hour exploration of the African past begins at the origins of human existence. Through anthropological and scientific discoveries viewers learn that Africa is the genetic home of all currently living humanity. Only between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago did some of humanity's common ancestors leave the continent to spread across the rest of the world. These great African migrations culminated in the diverse global peoples and societies that viewers know today. Beginning with this great revelation, Gates then traces the roots of agriculture, writing, artistic expression, and iron working to their birthplaces on the continent. Gates first arrives in present-day Ethiopia, where the 1997 discovery of fossil remains near the Omo River was the first discovered connection between modern humanity and the oldest known traces of the species to have walked the earth some 195,000 years ago.
Episode 2
Mon, Feb 27, 201752 mins
The second hour of "Africa's Great Civilizations" charts the emergence of two powerful forces of global change, Islam and Christianity. Viewers will learn how pervasively "the Cross and the Crescent" reshaped the landscape and people of Africa between the first and 12th centuries A.D. - and for centuries to come. Setting the stage, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers to the horn of Africa, the meeting place of the Red and Arabian Seas and a trade corridor between Africa, the Middle East and Europe for thousands of years. A book written in Greek in first century A.D., The Periplus of the Eythrean Sea, speaks of the Red Sea's illustrious port Adulis, the gateway to Aksum. This African kingdom, located in present-day Ethiopia, once stretched into Southern Arabia and was one of the ancient world's most dominant and well-resourced powers, rich with such valuables as frankincense, myrrh, ivory and gold. Gates brings viewers to the excavation of Axum's city center, where he walks among the 100 stelea erected between the third and fourth centuries A.D. to mark the graves of the kingdom's elite.
Episode 3
Wed, Mar 1, 201752 mins
The third hour in the series marks an era of great commercial and manufacturing growth throughout several regions on the continent. It begins with the revolutionary transformation of North and West Africa. On the shores of the Sahara Desert, farmers, traders, warriors and nomads turned this region into the crossroads of some of history's most advanced, and wealthiest, civilizations. Intricate networks of long distance trade would link up productive commercial centers established by rulers of empires and kingdoms. Strolling the streets of the Medina of Marrakesh in present-day Morocco, a walled city within the city, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains how a collection of mud-brick huts became a sophisticated metropolis of trade in the 11th century through the story of Abdallah Ibn Yasin, a Muslim Berber. Ibn Yasin sought to bring the teachings of his faith to the Sanhaja of the Sahara Desert. When faced with resistance, he withdrew and traveled across the Sahara to found the Almoravid ("the people of the frontier fortress") movement.
Episode 4
Wed, Mar 1, 2017
The capitals of the precolonial kingdoms of Kilwa, Zimbabwe, Benin and Ethiopia prospered between the 14th and the 17th century thanks to gold and ivory trade, but Portuguese pirates, mercenaries and zealots brought an end to that.
Episode 5
Thu, Mar 2, 201752 mins
The series' fifth hour examines the tremendous changes wrought in Africa by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, flowing out of the new era of European exploration in the New World that had begun in 1492 and reached a crucial point in the 16th century. For centuries, Eastern Africa, West Africa and Northern Africa had all been tied deeply into long-distance commercial networks linking across the Eastern Hemisphere. However, the European discovery of the Americas, and the passage of Portuguese seamen farther and farther south along Africa's Atlantic coast, reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and then traveling around the Cape and all the way to India in 1497, transformed those relations. Across the continent empires would rise and fall, with some 12.5 million Africans suffering enslavement in the crosshairs. Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. begins the story in northern Angola, where the mountain city of Mbanza Kongo was once the capital of the great African kingdom of Kongo. By the beginning of the 17th century Kongo was listed among the world's great kingdoms - a tale of increasing religious and economic entanglement with Europe that Gates recounts in the kingdom's ancient ruins.
Episode 6
Thu, Mar 2, 201752 mins
Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. introduces viewers to the African continent through a series of expansive views and myth-busting revelations. His six-hour exploration of the African past begins at the origins of human existence. Through anthropological and scientific discoveries viewers learn that Africa is the genetic home of all currently living humanity. Only between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago did some of humanity's common ancestors leave the continent to spread across the rest of the world. These great African migrations culminated in the diverse global peoples and societies that viewers know today. Beginning with this great revelation, Gates then traces the roots of agriculture, writing, artistic expression, and iron working to their birthplaces on the continent. Gates first arrives in present-day Ethiopia, where the 1997 discovery of fossil remains near the Omo River was the first discovered connection between modern humanity and the oldest known traces of the species to have walked the earth some 195,000 years ago.