History of Africa I

Since 5000 A.C. populated with Humans

For many centuries Africa and its people seemed strange to the rest of the world. Generations of traders came by ship or by caravan, to purchase Africa's wealth in gold, ivory, and human beings, but their reports produced more mysteries than they solved. Where did the Africans come from? Why did they look so different from other men, and have different customs? Eventually the Europeans concluded that the Africans were savages, inferior human beings, and they couldn't help being the way they are.
That answer lasted until the African nations achieved their independence in the middle of the twentieth century. Since that time scholars have re-discovered Africa's history and heritage. The so-called "dark continent," it turns out, is not just a land of endless savagery and chaos. Its people have a history of their own, and have created cultures, nations, and art that often compare favorably to what other cultures have produced.

Africa can also be difficult to understand because it is such a diverse place. The local terrain, climate and ecology vary tremendously from one place to another. For example, near the mouth of the Red Sea is a lowland called the Danakil Depression, a desert of fearsome heat, decorated with volcanoes and strange rock formations; it looks a lot like Mordor, the land of evil in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." However, the Danakil Depression is also part of the Great Rift Valley, the same geological feature that contains Africa's highest mountains and the much-more-pleasant East African lakes. The people of Africa are also more diverse, in race, tribe and culture, than on any other continent. Most likely this happened as a combination of isolation and the need to adapt to widely varying conditions. No place, no culture in Africa can be cited as typical of the whole continent.(1)

Most Africans were, and still are, descendants of Ham, one of Noah's three sons. They all migrated out of the Middle East before 3000 B.C., following more than one path. The families of Mizraim and Phut (two of Ham's sons) took the most direct route, across the Sinai peninsula into Egypt and from there they followed the Mediterranean coast all the way to Morocco. Today they make up the North African peoples, the two largest groups being the Egyptians and the Berbers (the latter include the Tuareg, the nomads of the deep Sahara). The Berbers call themselves Imazighen, meaning noble or free men; the name we use comes from the Latin Barbari, or barbarians. Linguists lump all North African groups together under the name Hamites.

South of the "Hamite" realm a different world existed. The people living here came from another son of Ham, Cush, and they got there by traversing Arabia and crossing the Red Sea to Ethiopia, presumably at the Red Sea's narrowest point, the Bab el Mandeb. Moving both south and west, individual families and tribes got separated from their kinsmen. Isolation caused genetic drift to set in, and the Cushites differentiated into four distinct racial groups: the Bantus, Nilotics, Pygmies and Bushmen.

Of those four groups the Bantus have been by far the most successful. At the beginning of history they lived in the forest and bush country of West Africa, from Cape Verde to the Cameroon mts. They are the Africans most of us are familiar with: tall, black-skinned and broad-nosed. Around 1 A.D. they started to migrate into the rest of sub-Saharan Africa; this is arguably the most important event in African history.

The Nilotics or Nilo-Saharans are also tall and black but thinner in both body and face. At first they only lived in the middle third of the Nile valley (modern Sudan), but later they spread south to the equator and as far west as Lake Chad. Today they are found all along the Sahara's southeastern fringe; modern examples of Nilotics include the Somalis, Nubians, Masai and Tutsi (also called Watusi).

The Pygmies live in the rain forests of the Congo (formerly the Zaire) basin. They really are small, averaging 4' 6" in height; their skin is brown to black, their noses are broad and their hair is scanty. The Bushmen are just a little bit bigger (averaging 5' 2"), with yellow-brown skin and hair that grows in tufts, creating a "peppercorn" look. They speak the world's most unusual languages, using clicking sounds along with vowels and consonants. Like the Pygmies, the Bushmen have been largely displaced from their lands by the Bantu migrations. Today the Bushmen are confined to the Kalahari desert in the southwest, but at one point they had all of eastern and southern Africa to themselves.

Finally mention should be made of two ethnic sub-groups that are special cases. The Hottentots of Namibia are a mixture of Bushmen and some other race, presumably the Bantu. Today's Ethiopians (called Cushites by anthropologists) have a number of Semitic features, such as long noses and wavy hair, because more than one Arab tribe came across the Red Sea in the first millennium B.C. However, they are darker than the Semites or Hamites found elsewhere, no doubt because of interbreeding with their black neighbors.

Though wetter than the Sahara, very little of sub-Saharan Africa is hospitable to man. The grasslands are not lush American-style prairies, but tropical savannas. Baked for six months by the sun, then leached by six months of heavy rains, the topsoil is too poor to grow most crops. No long mountain ranges rise in Africa to wring moisture reliably from passing air masses. The mountains that exist have an enticing green color, but are covered with scrub and thorn instead of grass.

Rivers meander without going in a straight direction anywhere, and because most of Africa is on a plateau, they crash in tremendous waterfalls that interrupt navigation. Only the Nile and the Niger have long, navigable stretches through open (non-forested) countryside, which is why Africa's largest kingdoms have appeared on the banks of those rivers. In some places the plateau and clay soil combine to produce a feature almost never seen elsewhere--inland deltas. Here rivers break up to form several smaller streams, which meander for a while before coming back together into one river. Examples of inland deltas include the upper Niger, between Jenné and Timbuktu in Mali; the Sudd on the White Nile, and the Okavango delta in northern Botswana. A similar environment exists on Lake Chad, where masses of vegetation break off to form floating islands, regularly changing the outline of that lake's shore. Only the delta on the Niger has been fertile enough to feed a civilization (see Chapters 4 & 5). By contrast, the Sudd is a swamp that no one could pass through for most of history, and while the area around the Okavango is fertile, it never had a large enough community to start a civilization.

Heat never goes away, because Africa straddles the equator and is contained between 38o north and south latitude, making it the most centrally located of all continents. Relief only comes in the higher altitudes of the eastern and southern plateaus and on parts of the west coast, where currents transport seawater from cooler regions.

Overall, rainfall patterns reveal extreme contrasts. The jungles are a dense and dank world where the sun rarely shines, deluged with two rainy seasons totaling eight or more feet per year and once described as a "glittering equatorial slum [where] huge trees jostle one another for room to live." The rest of the continent has a single wet season, which may deliver insufficient rainfall to some areas and skip others entirely. Two thirds of Africa loses more water to evaporation than is gained from rain. One of the hardest hit areas in recent years is the Sahel, the belt of grassland immediately south of the Sahara; here the water table is steadily dropping, requiring the digging of deeper wells, and the desert expands further south every year. Often man has contributed to the desertification process, by destroying the vegetation through overgrazing or the burning down of wooded areas.

On top of all that are deadly diseases and parasites, which have killed many men and even more livestock, making herding impossible in some locations. The highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, for example, are cool enough and well-watered enough to allow agriculture and herding, but they are also infested with the tsetse fly, a bloodsucking insect that carries the dreaded sleeping sickness. However, the fly doesn't bother antelopes much, so antelope herds became carriers of the disease, infecting human hunters who pursued them. As a result, the tsetse fly saved Africa's wildlife from being hunted to extinction; on much of the savanna the lion, and not man, remained at the top of the food chain. Other deadly diseases are malaria and yellow fever. Many of the natives are protected from malaria by sickle cell anemia, a hereditary disease that makes red blood cells unappetizing to the malaria parasite; unfortunately sickle cell anemia can also be fatal, if the subject inherits it from both parents.

But the heirs of Cush overcame all these obstacles. They learned how to live in their inhospitable land, how to grow crops(2), and how to raise cattle. In the second millennium B.C. they started forging iron; they might have learned this trick from the Middle East, but they did it so early that it is also possible that they discovered the secrets to smelting ores by themselves. Finally their tribes turned into cities and nations. Their progress took longer than it did on other continents, because the black African found it a constant struggle to stay alive at the same time, but he did progress in the long run.

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