Bahaya Invented Steel

"Early sub-Saharan Africans developed metallurgy at a very early stage, possibly even before other peoples.

Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century).

The Iron Age itself came very early to Africa, probably around the sixth century BC, in Ethiopia, the Great Lakes region, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.

Iron technology, however, only spread slowly across Africa; it wasn't until the first century AD that the smelting of iron began to rapidly diffuse throughout the continent."

Source and further information:
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CIVAFRCA/IRONAGE.HTM

Further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Ancient_steel

"Iron technology has a long history in Africa. Steel is an alloy of iron. A high quality carbon steel was produced by the Bahaya people nearly 2000 thousand years ago. The Bahaya people are from the north-west area of what is now Tanzania, in East Africa.
This quality of steel was not found in Europe until about the year 1800. The iron ore used by the Bahaya people had the formula Fe304.This was added to the top of the furnace with charcoal, as the source of carbon. The air entered the furnace through blow-pipes at the bottom. In this way the air was preheated, which improved the yield and quality of the iron. The temperature reached in the furnace was 1800°C."

Source and further information:
http://www.jamiiforums.com/jukwaa-la-elimu-education-forum/10253-bahaya-invented-steel.html

"In Tanzania, Africa was smelting steel at 1850 degrees centigrade in a single process, using less fuel than later comparable Western methods, when this technological innovation was yet unknown in the Western world."

"These years have seen the discovery of African steel-smelting in Tanzania 1500- 2000 years ago, an astronomical observatory in Kenya 300 years before Christ"
Source and further information:

"Re-inventing Africa By Ifi Amadiume"
http://books.google.com/books?id=KeZUhtDhujsC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=steel+invention+tanzania&source=bl&ots=fCkBdh0DV6&sig=NvSuLCoqWX-Gm0vosYy4SEwlZyU&hl=en&ei=1f_MSb7cGMiKsAaS1JGgCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result


"Steel technology was not confined to the Mediterranean and the European North West. India may well have been at the apex of steel technology and China had its own technology centered around cast iron, used not so much for warfare but for civil objects like pots and pans.

And lets not forget the Haya, a people who lived in what is now Tanzania. They had a highly developed Fe technology and used it for beautiful sculptures, too. Their myths and fairy tales contain many stories relating to the making of iron, using a vocabulary that was heartily enriched with expressions relating to the making of humans.

There is even some evidence - collected recently (and, of course, being discussed controversially), that the old Africans had the highest temperatures of all, even reaching the melting point of iron some 2000 years ago (long before everybody else did)"

Source and further information:
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/kap_5/advanced/t5_1_4.html

Further information:
"African Iron Production: A Review of Recent Publications"
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/articles/african_iron/african_iron.html

Read more: Was steel invented by Africans in ancient Tanzania? was it used by the ancient blacks in Tanzania initially?
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1366803#ixzz0uLfHbw88