According to the Maryland Center for History and Culture (MdHS), Benjamin Banneker was a self-taught, free African American tobacco farmer, whose brilliance in astronomy and mathematics garnered the attention of the most powerful white men in the new nation. With the approval of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Ellicott enlisted Banneker to assist in surveying the territory which was to become the District of Columbia. After the survey's completion, Banneker would go on to engage in a correspondence with Jefferson about the equal abilities of men of African descent.
In 1994, historians preparing a National Register of Historic Places registration form for the Pierre L'Enfant plan of the City of Washington wrote that 40 boundary stones laid at one-mile intervals had established the district's boundaries based on Banneker's celestial calculations. Among many recognitions, Banneker has been honored with a commemorative stamp, has had schools and parks named after him, and has been the subject of numerous books.
According to MdHS, which owns copies of the original Banneker almanacs and is in possession of the Banneker's handwritten astronomical journal, Banneker was the grandson of an African slave named Bannaka and an English woman named Molly Welsh. Molly was a former indentured servant who purchased Bannaka and another slave upon her release from servitude, as she needed help working her tobacco farm. A 2002 biography of Benjamin Banneker from Charles A. Cerami explored this ancestry further and reported that Bannaka (Benjamin's grandfather) was a member of the Dogon Tribe, perhaps even royalty.
The Dogon people are an African tribal population of 400,000 to 600,000 native to Mali, most of whom live in the hills and mountains of the Bandiagara escarpment. Beginning in the 1930s French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlin began studying the Dogon people, and their findings prompted further authors to report significant mathematical, scientific and astronomical knowledge dating back hundreds of years – especially surrounding their detailed knowledge of the star system Sirius, which is made up two separate stars: Sirius A and Sirius B. This is notable as it wasn't until 1862 that the American astronomer Alvan Clark deduced the existence of Sirius B using a telescope, among the most advanced for that era. And, it was not until 1970 that there was confirmation of the existence of this star, never mind a photograph of it. Yet the Dogon people apparently knew this information hundreds of years beforehand, calling the Siruis B star by the name of "Po Tolo."
