How come Sub-Saharan Africans never sailed or made boats on their own? They have a huge...

How come Sub-Saharan Africans never sailed or made boats on their own? They have a huge, open and free coastline and could have probably discovered the Americas.

>Sub-Saharan Africans never sailed or made boats on their own
(not true, by the way)

One of the reasons why European 'explored' the world is to find alternative trade routes to bypass the monopoly of the Ottoman spice trade. Maybe there wasn't any ambition or incentive for them to explore, rather than the inability to build any boats.

black people cant swim

Some of the Zambezi Bantu peoples were among the best shipbuilders in the world circa the 15th century. Yes, I know, KANGZ, but you can say KANGZ all you want and every once in a while it will still be true, occasionally good things do come from Africa. It doesn't matter much since they never really did anything with it, since they weren't huge traders and didn't have much reason to go farther afield than Madagascar.

>among the best shipbuilders in the world circa the 15th century
What did their boats even look like?

Yet they failed to discover madagascar

Madagascar was settled by Indonesians

the ruler of Mali made attempts to sail west multiple times, but they never returned

so yes they made boats and yes they sailed
just not very efficiently it would seem

even if they succeed, we dont know if they did, the coast of brazil is less friendly enviroment and not alot of goods are there to warrant further interest (speaking of goods that are used and known at that time)

Malagasy are mixed, Bantus were there as well.

Pretty sure it's a meme Mansa Musa made up to justify his coup.

>According to primary sources, Musa was appointed deputy of Abubakari Keita II, the king before him, who had reportedly embarked on an expedition to explore the limits of the Atlantic Ocean, and never returned. The Arab-Egyptian scholar Al-Umari quotes Mansa Musa as follows:

>"The ruler who preceded me did not believe that it was impossible to reach the extremity of the ocean that encircles the earth (the Atlantic Ocean). He wanted to reach that (end) and was determined to pursue his plan. So he equipped two hundred boats full of men, and many others full of gold, water and provisions sufficient for several years. He ordered the captain not to return until they had reached the other end of the ocean, or until he had exhausted the provisions and water. So they set out on their journey. They were absent for a long period, and, at last just one boat returned. When questioned the captain replied: 'O Prince, we navigated for a long period, until we saw in the midst of the ocean a great river which was flowing massively.. My boat was the last one; others were ahead of me, and they were drowned in the great whirlpool and never came out again. I sailed back to escape this current.' But the Sultan would not believe him. He ordered two thousand boats to be equipped for him and his men, and one thousand more for water and provisions. Then he conferred the regency on me for the term of his absence, and departed with his men, never to return nor to give a sign of life."

I-I-I didn't kill him I s-swear, he just went on a b-boat trip

>How come Sub-Saharan Africans never sailed or made boats on their own?
Could you not have simply googled this assumption to check whether or not it was true before making a thread about it

>so yes they made boats and yes they sailed just not very efficiently it would seem
What the fuck does this even mean. How does not reaching the Americas in a 13th century sewn boat mean that they were inefficient sailors.

What took the arabs so long to get there?

they didnt reach their goals...

Reminder that austronesian people from fucking southeast asia managed to reach madagascar 2000 years ago while mainland africans didnt even know the island existed

The phoenicians also already circumnavigated the african continent by the time of herodotus. Even ventured outside the mediterranean and reached cornwall in england. Those seafaring bastards were fucking based.

>boat in 1890
wow it's fucking nothing

They most certainly did not circumnavigate Africa

Somalis were literally the Polynesians of Africa. They had sea routes across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea since ancient times. They even designed the oldest ships in the Arabian peninsula and their landswas known for their wealth since the Egyptians which attracted the Portuguese in the middle ages. Mogadishu, their capital was the leading city of trade and was known as the "city of Islam".

They did tho. Many ships used in the IOW before the 19th century were produced in East Africa, even those used by Arabs. East Africans are really well known for their seafaring and coastal trade from it. Even the most BASIC fucking study of the IOW will teach you about trade links between East Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Persians.

Why would you learn to build boats for travelling out into the ocean when there's a massive coastline you can just follow and plunder there?

An inability to swim was actually very common amongst sailors during the height of the age of sail.

It still is, particularly among the deck apes.

t. Squid

They had riverboats in west Africa, didn't they? I think it had to do with Africa being fucking huge so there wasn't a real incentive to go drowing a thousand miles from the nearest coast.

>According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Necho II sent out an expedition of Phoenicians, which reputedly, at some point between 610 and before 594 BC, sailed in three years from the Red Sea around Africa to the mouth of the Nile. Some Egyptologists dispute that an Egyptian Pharaoh would authorize such an expedition,[15] except for the reason of trade in the ancient maritime routes.

>The belief in Herodotus' account, handed down to him by oral tradition,[16] is primarily because he stated with disbelief that the Phoenicians "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right - to northward of them" (The Histories 4.42) -- in Herodotus' time it was not generally known that Africa was surrounded by an ocean (with the southern part of Africa being thought connected to Asia[17]). So fantastic an assertion is this of a typical example of some seafarers' story and Herodotus therefore may never have mentioned it, at all, had it not been based on facts and made with the according insistence.

There's no fucking way they made it around the Cape of Good Hope in classical ships.

Some scholars believe it for x reasons, others doubt it for y reasons. Like it says, it's just interesting because it makes assumptions about africa being possible to circumnavigate at a time when greeks knew nothing about anything south of egypt/libya.

They didn't needed boat because white men were giving them free rides to the new world.

They don't have much coastline compared to Europe, but you think they would sail because the interior is so shitty.

The coastline of Africa has few natural harbors and most of it is sheer cliff

Africa is literally made up of two inverted saucers

It's a giant plateau

the coastline of africa is actually 1/4 the size of europe's.

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN SO YOU BE SAYING