When Europe began imagining African continent beyond the Sahara, what came to their imaginations were reverie and fantasies, and a world of terrifying and supernatural occurrences.
Ranulph Higden, a Benedictine monk who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads.
A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg, three faces, and the heads of lion.
In 1459, seven years after the fall of Constantinople, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro, declared Africa as the home of Roc, a bird so large that it could carry an elephant through the air.
-An extract from the book OXMEN:the search for immortality by Izu Chigbolumogu
