Jibo Zhema

 I once read about how Mansa Musa began to revitalize cities in his kingdom immediately after his return from pilgrimage to Mecca.  This trip opened his eyes to see how advanced the outside world was and how backward he and his people were.  With so much wealth that could only be likened to that of the biblical King Solomon, Mansa Musa didn't know it all until he ventured out of his Kingdom, and upon his return, he built one of the best Islamic Universities in the world, at that time, in Timbuktu. Not forgetting the world-class mosques he built that attracted tourists to travel over just to admire.  So did Lee Kwan Yew and Sheikh Al Maktoum, the geniuses behind the success stories of Singapore and UAE respectively.  After the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the Japanese government didn't wait for the dust to finish settling when it sent young students on scholarship to study in the same West that had just bombed them. Today, they are th...

  As a young ardent student of history, my thirst for knowledge sent me to parts of the world where the lands abound with evidence of ancient civilization. I saw where Europeans, Asians, and Egyptians built monuments that outlived them for thousands of years and how their descendants are now proudly maintaining those places for the rest of us to travel across the globe to pay and behold their magnificence. From the Nubian pyramids of Sudan to those in Saqqara in Egypt; one could see the clarity with which their ancestors boldly championed the civilization of their era. While they studied and learned how to write down their plans, carved texts on stone tablets, and built great cities, my forefathers were already farming the fields of the Benue Valley and fishing in the rivers that connected their lands with those that housed some of the world’s greatest monuments. At a time when Kano served as an international commercial center and welcomed merchants from across North, East, and Wes...