Kung of southern Africa and the Berbers of northern Africa, nomads in arid areas, or the hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Mbuti of the Congo rain forests. But there were no large towns, even in the few places where there were states.
Sixteenth-century Ethiopia was ruled by a Christian emperor, but a Portuguese visitor in the s found no town of more than 1, households. When states begin, Mr. He has little interest in fabled trade cities like Timbuktu. In sum:. The archaeological evidence in-dicates that while communities throughout Africa maintained strong kinship and trading links over wide areas prior to their contact with external influences, the centralized and coercive regional control so typical of early state-formation elsewhere was not a feature of African social development.
The argument here relies on the same image of Africa as a hard place to live that has governed his account of pre-history: in this harsh world, the surplus population that makes for city civilizations was never available. Those of us familiar with standard accounts of African history are bound to find this all a mite surprising.
Divine kingship, for example, is often said to be an African institution; and if, like me, you went to primary school in Ghana, you know that our state was named after one a millennium earlier.
Reader would have us give up these glorious medieval empires with the oral epics they have left to us for a rather more Fabian view of our ancestors; and yet the only real arguments that he makes against the conventional historiography are less than wholly convincing.
Reader makes much of this fact. All of which suggests that the reigns of kings were aberrant eruptions from the standard pattern of events in Africa, provoked by unusual circumstances such as high levels of food production or external influences. This is not a very good argument. But, second, if kingship is an aberrant eruption, why would succession need to be decided by any means, warlike or not? And why would the sort of rulership he imagines be worth fighting for?
Reader has made his task harder for himself here by his insistence on staying within the bounds of one large narrative, with Africa as its single subject. A more modest argument could begin by distinguishing two Africas, one of Aksum and Ghana, where some form of state-formation really did occur, and really did have as he admits of Aksum roots deep in the African landscape. The other Africa larger, perhaps, and certainly of equal interest and importance remained held together by connections much looser than any that could count as the bonds of a state.
If you are obliged to insist on the importance of the latter in a generalizing account of Africa, you are constrained either to explain the former away, as he does with Ghana, or to treat them as exceptions. Why not say, simply, that relatively large urban communities are rare in pre-colonial Africa, that they arise in special circumstances, often associated with trade, and then move on?
I think the answer has to do with the fact that Mr. Reader really is concerned to make a Case for the Defense: he believes that the low-density, small-settlement cultures that were the norm were also not very warlike.
What kept the population low, in his view, was disease, the vagaries of climate, the depredations of elephants in the grain fields—in short, the rigors of nature, not the murderous habits of the indigenous people. In his view, the violence of warfare, at least as a regular matter, begins with outside contact. Reader would appear to be in the minority here.
The Kingdom of the Kongo was roughly three hundred miles square, comprising territory that today lies in several countries. In …an expedition of awed Portuguese priests and emissaries made this ten-day trek and set up housekeeping as permanent representatives of their country in the court of the Kongo king.
The Kingdom of the Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts, he sat on a throne, in his case made of wood inlaid with ivory…. In the capital, the king dispensed justice, received homage, and reviewed his troops under a fig tree in a large public square…. In Mr. Both these societies developed around cattle, even though they traded gold: so it will not do to see them simply as the result of the external stimulus of trade.
All of which is to say that Mr. Reader identifies the central difficulty of method here. In societies whose weapons are spears and arrows and clubs—all of which can be used for hunting or keeping predators from your flocks and elephants out of your fields—what would archaeological evidence of warfare look like?
The sorts of remains that might provide forensic evidence simply rarely survive outside the arid regions where, for example, the massacre at Wadi Halifa in northern Sudan was found. Dispersal, insufficient manpower, or the lack of anything worth fighting for, certainly would have repressed the human propensity for conflict, but hardship was widespread nonetheless. And hardship, though revealed in the archaeological record only by the implications of climate and potential food shortages, is unmistakable in the documentary record.
But in suggesting this new picture of a continent of low-density settlement living at peace, he is arguing against a picture of traditional social relations that is found in many oral histories and in the accounts of African life suggested by early written sources. Dealing with this morally fraught subject, Mr. Reader sifts cautiously through the evidence, beginning with the obvious fact that slavery was widespread in Africa long before first Arabs and then Portuguese began to export slaves from the continent.
Indeed, in circumstances where the opportunities for converting agricultural surpluses into material wealth were limited, control over people was an alternative option. But there was a problem. Moreover the Pope had forbidden the sale of weapons to unbelievers. Perversely, however, the Portuguese discovered there was an African commodity that the Akan would readily accept in exchange for their gold; furthermore, it was a commodity that was abundantly available to the Portuguese a relatively short distance up to km along the coast: slaves.
The slaves were sold to the Portuguese by Benin and Igbo people on what became known as the Slave Coast. The Akan were already engaged in state-building and expansion, driven in part by trade to the north, from which they were already acquiring slaves.
These slaves were not only pressed into use in the panning and mining of gold; they were used to expand the labor available for agriculture and forest-clearance. In the first third of the sixteenth century from ten to twelve thousand people were shipped from the Slave Coast across the Bight of Benin to the Gold Coast.
Only in the early seventeenth century did the trade across the Atlantic really take off, expanding from a few thousand a year before to nearly 19, a year in the seventeenth century and 60, a year in the eighteenth. Some were captives, taken in war. A second group were kidnapped by slave-raiders. And a third group were people from the same societies that sold them: criminals, dependents, people acquired from their families in exchange for loans—so-called debt pawns.
As societies that lived off the slave trade arose, the distinction between those kidnapped and those taken in warfare is not always easy to make. Between the mid-fifteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, perhaps as many as 13 million people left Africa and were submitted to the appalling conditions of the Atlantic slave trade, with 10 to 20 percent of them dying in the infamous Middle Passage.
The historian Patrick Manning has suggested that as many as 21 million people were captured in West Africa between and , to produce the 9 million or so slaves who left the region in the Atlantic slave trade in that period; millions died, and as many as 7 million never left, remaining as slaves in Africa.
More than this, Africa emerged from the slave trade with a vast internal slave population, produced in large measure by the societies which had grown up around the trade, and whose political economies could not adjust to the collapsing external demand. Societies that had become used to using slaves not only in trade but also in agriculture and mining and in domestic work did not suddenly cease to have a use for their labor. Nor did the end of the slave trade give them any reason to change the slave status.
In the United States, after all, the slave trade was ended officially long before emancipation. As Mr. Reader writes,. The sympathetically disposed may describe the forms of slavery practiced in Africa prior to the advent of the slave trade as benign strategies which offered the needy a refuge from the vagaries of unpredictable ecological circumstances. The slave trade and its aftermath, which left Africa shackled to the developing industrial economies of Europe and America, transformed those marginal features of African society into central institutions upon which the economic viability of entire communities was founded.
If we see slavery as a response to the environment, it was still a response with winners and losers, and there is blame to be placed, in Africa and outside it. These final pages offer the last few centuries in abbreviated vignettes; but the real achievement of the book is to show us how to read between the absences of the early record. The archaeological view, though far more detailed than you might suppose, is still a view from afar. Close up, among the details of the recent past, it is hard to focus on a single Africa: the challenge is to write a unitary biography of a person with a galloping case of multiple personality syndrome.
But even in the recent past, Mr. Reader keeps visible the ecological challenge of life in Africa, especially before the availability of modern drugs.
The result was that the pastoral cultures that had grown into a complex interdependence with their cattle were ill-equipped to resist colonization.
And the disease had other long-term consequences. An interplay of disciplines is required to understand the effects of the rinderpest epidemic—with climate, epidemiology, ecology, economics, and politics all having their part—and Mr.
Even where we have archival evidence, it can usefully be supplemented by a rich appreciation of social and natural science. Where students of the African past have been led willy-nilly, others, even in the world of rich archives, might do well to follow; and Mr. Reader shows how productive it is, once you have learned this lesson, to apply it even to the recent past, where the rising tide of documents could easily divert us.
Still, by the end, we have inevitably come a long way from the evolutionary narrative with which we began. Evolution only explains long-term changes in human life, because genetic adaptation occurs on the scale of many generations.
But, of course, biology can be significant in other ways than genetic ones, and there is no reason to leave our biological spectacles at the dawn of history. So, those who wish to defend Africa can take heart from the fact that, on the major issue, Trevor-Roper is on their side: as Mr. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest.
This evidence includes wonderful artefacts, illuminated manuscripts, and impressive architecture. A discussion will follow the presentation. Approx 10 mins walk from Seven Sisters Station. Free on street parking from 6. Buses 67, , stop nearby. Children under 17 are FREE. In this piece, the researcher makes a study of European colonization of Africa. As a way forward, the researcher proposes that Africa must stop crying over split milk and begin to raise her own cows. She must stop blaming the whites for the evils of the past and begin to face the challenges of the present.
This is a process that must involve the governments and peoples of Africa.
0コメント