The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800

By Christopher Ehret

Since its initial publication, The Civilizationsof Africa has established itself as the most authoritative text available on early African history. Addressing the glaring lack of works concentrating on earlier African eras, Christopher Ehret’s trailblazing book has been paired with histories of Africa since 1800 to build a full and well-rounded understanding of the roles of Africa’s peoples in human history. Examining inventions and civilizations from 22,000 BCE to 1800 CE, Ehret explores the wide range of social and cultural as well as technological and economic change in Africa, relating all these facets of African history to developments in the rest of the world.

This updated edition incorporates new research, as well as an extensive new selection of color images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813946030

Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many books, including Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (UC Press), An African Classical Age, and, most recently, The Civilizations of Africa.

Book preview

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Introducing Africa and Its History

AFRICA IN A GLOBAL FRAME

Africa lies at the heart of human history. It is the continent from which the distant ancestors of every one of us, no matter who we are today, originally came. Its peoples participated integrally in the great transformations of world history, from the first rise of agricultural ways of life, to the various inventions of metal-working, to the growth and spread of global networks of commerce. Bigger than the United States, China, India, and Australia combined, the African continent presents us with a historical panorama of surpassing richness and diversity.

Yet traditional history books, ironically, have long treated Africa as if it were the exemplar of isolation and difference—all because of a few very recent centuries marked by the terrible events of the slave trade. As key agents of that trade, many Europeans and their offspring in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comforted and absolved themselves by denying the full humanity of Africans, and the histories they wrote so neglected Africa that in time it became accepted wisdom that Africa had no history, or at least no history worth mentioning.

That sad heritage continues to shape the envisioning of Africa today, not just in the West, but all across the non-African world, and sometimes in Africa as well. As we pass the second decade of the third millennium, it is now more than fifty years since the teaching and study of African history, once upon a time a subject preserved only in black colleges in the American South, finally began to gain its rightful place in the university curricula of many parts of the world. Modern-day scholars have built up an immense range of new knowledge of the African past, and the scholarly works of earlier times have been rediscovered. But even now these advances have made hardly a dent in Western folk understandings of Africans and the African past. Even historians themselves, involved these days in crafting courses and writing books on world history, find it profoundly difficult to integrate Africa into their global story because they, too, grew up with those same folk understandings.

The story we tell here confronts exactly those issues. It presents the long history of Africans and their roles, at different times and in different parts of the continent, in agricultural innovation, in the creation and growth of larger and more complex societies and polities, in the development of new kinds of economic and social relations, and in the invention and spread of new ideas, tools, institutions, and modes of artistic and cultural expression. In myriad ways across the millennia, African developments connected and intersected with developments outside the continent, even as they followed their own unique pathways of change, and that part of the historical picture will be traced out here, too.

GETTING THE TERMS OF OUR DISCOURSE STRAIGHT

In learning the story of the African past, students and scholars alike need to be especially sensitive to the problem of loaded terms, words that convey value judgments more than they communicate solid information. Scholars are trained early in their careers to watch out for and avoid such words or to use them with great care. But some loaded terms have so long been with us that they continue to be uncritically applied even by scholars who should know better. Historians in general tend to use in insufficiently examined fashion the word civilization. The student of African history needs particularly to beware of three other loaded terms, tribe, primitive, and race.

Civilization and Civilized

Any book which, like this one, includes civilization in its title must confront the highly problematic nature of the term. Unfortunately, the most common applications of civilization both by historians and by the public are fraught with value judgments. Societies and peoples only too commonly are described as civilized or uncivilized, or as having civilization or lacking it. To speak thus is to rely on mystification in place of substantive description and analysis.

What does it mean to be uncivilized? If it means, as its common colloquial use implies, to behave in a violent, disorderly manner and to act without the restraint of law or custom, then Europeans of the twentieth century, with their recurrent descents into genocide and pogroms, and those southern white folk of the early decades of the century who lynched black folk are among the most uncivilized people of history. But it is foolishness to distinguish societies as a whole by such a criterion. All societies have complex laws and rules of proper social behavior, whether written or oral, to which people are expected to conform, and a range of sanctions to be imposed on those who break the laws and rules. In that sense, all societies throughout humanity’s history have been civilized. Only during periods of breakdown of the social or political order does so-called uncivilized behavior predominate over civilized, and any society anywhere in time or place can potentially face such a breakdown.

Historians of ancient times fall into a related interpretive trap. They classify certain societies as civilizations and the rest as something other than civilizations. So general and uncritical is the acceptance of this practice by both the readers and writers of history that it may astonish the reader to learn just how insubstantial and inadequately grounded such a conceptualization is.

What are we actually dealing with when we apply the appellation of civilization to a particular society? In general terms, the societies that have been called civilizations have stratified social systems and a significant degree of political elaboration and centralization, construct large buildings, tend to have towns or cities, and possibly but not necessarily have writing. The first appearances of societies of this kind were undeniably important developments in the overall course of history. The centralization of political power and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, as reflected in the fact of social stratification, allowed the wealthy to subsidize for the first time new kinds of specialized production. The ruling class in a civilization required servants, and it employed skilled artisans to fashion the outward material trappings of ruling status. The rulers could mobilize large labor forces for public works, and from the tribute they exacted from the common people they could support the efforts of full-time artists to produce great or at least monumental art. The ability of the wealthy to buy exotic goods encouraged the appearance of long-distance trade; the ability of the powerful to call up large military forces brought a new scale of warfare into being. Human beings ever after have had to deal with the repercussions of these two developments.

But when we take the shortcut of using the term civilization for such a society, we put at hazard our ability to gain a concrete grasp of what moved and shaped life in those earlier times. Whether we mean to or not, we convey to others the elements of mystification and uncritical approbation that inhere in the word. Only when we depict people and their lives and work in specific ways using specifically applicable terms can we get beyond exalting, intentionally or not, what was, after all, no more than the special power of certain persons in certain societies to mobilize labor and glorify themselves. If these were societies with an urban component, let us describe them then as early, partially urbanized societies. If they possessed marked social and political stratification, then we should say as much in clear and specific fashion.

Relying on the term civilization unbalances our understanding of history as well. In most textbooks of ancient history and world history, what topics get the principal attention? The short answer is, civilizations. Those societies designated as civilizations are treated as if they were the centers of almost all innovation and of all the really important developments. They tend to be viewed, fallaciously, as culturally more complicated, artistically more accomplished, and technologically more advanced than noncivilizations. The fact that many key technological innovations in human history began, and much great art was produced, in other, less stratified, nonurban societies is glossed over. The fact that every early civilization took shape in a regional historical context of many interacting societies, large and small, is neglected, and so we construct a lopsided understanding of the history of the wider region in which that civilization took shape. We miss the many human accomplishments of lasting importance that originated in other places entirely. How peculiar, anyway, that today, in an era of democratic thinking given to the idea of democracy for all people, we should continue in our history books to esteem so highly societies in which wealth and political power were monopolized by the few.

There is, however, another use of the term civilization that, if applied carefully, does have historical validity, and this is the meaning we will adopt in this work. What is this other meaning? Consider the phrases Western civilization and Islamic civilization. In this context, civilization refers to a grouping of societies and their individual cultures, conjoined by their sharing of deep common historical roots. Despite many individual cultural differences, the societies in question share a range of fundamental social and cultural ideas and often a variety of less fundamental expectations and customs. These ideas and practices form a common historical heritage, stemming either from many centuries of close cultural interaction and the mutual diffusion of ideas or from a still more ancient common historical descent of the societies involved from some much earlier society or grouping of related societies. In our exploration of African history, we will encounter several key civilizations, far-flung groupings of culturally and historically linked societies, such as the Niger-Congo, Afrasian, Sudanic, and Khoesan civilizations. At times we will also use an alternative terminology, describing these historically linked culture groupings as cultural or historical traditions.

Tribes and Tribal

The problems with the words tribe and tribal become overtly clear if we ask a series of questions. Why is it that, during the period of the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s, the more than 10 million Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria were called a tribe in all the newspaper articles dealing with the war, when the 200,000 Ruthenians (who reside in Slovakia, Poland, and Belarus) and the fewer than 400,000 citizens of Malta are called nationalities? Why was the war called a tribal war, anyway, instead of the civil war it actually was? Why, time and again, do we see newspaper articles and news reporters on television add the qualifiers tribe or tribal to their descriptions of people and events in Africa? Why is Shaka, the famous nineteenth-century ruler, called a king of the Zulu tribe when he actually was the king of a centralized and militarily powerful state? Why are Africans in traditional dress said to be engaging in tribal dancing, when Europeans garbed similarly in the clothes of an earlier time are said to be performing folk dances? Why is the work of African artists, done in the styles of previous centuries, called tribal art? Is it not simply art fashioned by Africans? Why is a rural African man of today, who is more attuned to rural culture and less caught up in the modern-day African urban milieu, called a tribesman? Isn’t he just a man, the same as any other?

Clearly tribe is an appellation Europeans have reserved for non-European ethnic groups and nationalities and most especially those of Africa. So pervasive was the use of tribe during the colonial era that even Africans themselves today often unthinkingly use that word or its equivalent when speaking English or other European languages. By tribe they translate words in their home languages that mean simply ethnic group or sometimes clan. But the English word conveys much more than that. For the native speaker of English, it takes only a moment of thought about a phrase such as tribal dancing to realize that we are being presented with a value judgment on the activity and the people involved in it. They are exotic, strange, acting perhaps a little out of control, culturally or technologically backward in comparison to us, and sometimes dangerous to boot.

Primitive

In a word, tribal people are primitive. Once upon a time, this term meant simply primary or original. The members of the Primitive Baptist Church in North America, for example, still use the word in that sense. Through the naming of their church they make the claim that their religious practices faithfully reflect those of the original, or primitive, Christians of the first century AD. Anthropologists in the past have used the word to imply that the society they study is lacking in the kinds of complexity characteristic of modern-day industrial society. But for all the rest of us, primitive conveys an unflattering picture of backwardness and lack of skill and accomplishment. It is a term that has no place in historical discourse (and it ought to be abandoned by anthropologists as well!).

In any case, there is no such thing as a primitive culture. Every culture, society, and people has historical roots reaching thousands and thousands of years back into the past, so that no one can be said to be primitive in the sense of being original. It is difficult as well to describe any preindustrial society as consistently simpler or more backward than any other such society. Every human community has its areas of complex practice and intricate knowledge and expertise; every society has fields of knowledge and experience in which it is weak.

A related point is that there is no such thing as a primitive language. Every language has a vocabulary of many thousands of words, capable of expressing all the ideas and things that its human speakers know and feel and do, and an infinitely flexible grammar, able to convey all the nuances of human expression.

So if we mean to say that a particular technology or a particular set of institutions is less complex in one society than another, then we need to say exactly that. If we see that an early form of an old practice or custom has been preserved by one people, but that the practice or custom has been modified in significant ways by another people, then again we must say simply that. The word primitive has no valid use for us.

Race

It probably will not be as immediately clear to the reader why race should be almost as suspect a term as tribe and primitive. After all, race became in the twentieth century a bedrock element in human social self-conception all over the world. It has become a cultural and social reality. The germ of the modern idea of what constitutes race emerged in the developments of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when Europeans began to distinguish, by means of certain visible outward features of appearance, people subject to enslavement from those who were not.

Nevertheless, the term race did not denote a consistently applied set of ideas until nineteenth-century European thinkers developed it as such. Through most of the rest of human history and in nearly all parts of the globe, the only group distinctions people made were based on cultural and societal differences. People have always tended to be ethnocentric: human beings, in other words, commonly feel that the ideas and customs they grew up with and are familiar and comfortable with are better than the different and unfamiliar ways of societies other than their own. Competition, strife, and even hate between different ethnic groups have often been present in human history. But racism as we understand it today—with its foolish, baseless, and evil claims of inborn and perpetual genetic differences among human beings—did not exist in earlier historical ages, in Africa or anywhere else.

What may surprise the reader most of all is that, for all its social historical salience, race can no longer be considered a valid scientific concept. In the terms of human genetic science, there is no such thing as race. The ancestry of every human being is made up of a unique set of thousands of genes. In any particular locality in the world, unless a great deal of immigration has occurred, the inhabitants will tend, on the whole, to share higher frequencies of the same genes with each other than they will share with people of more distant areas. But there are no hard-and-fast racial boundaries, and few significant differences, other than the mostly superficial elements of outward appearance, exist among the numerous human populations around the world.

So in this book we will encounter ethnic groups, societies, and peoples, but no tribes and no races. Civilizations for us will be historically linked groupings of peoples and societies, identifiable from their common possession of certain basic cultural ideas and social practices of ancient historical origin. We will view in specific ways the contributions and accomplishments of people all across Africa, and we will seek to set these developments into the wider context of contemporary developments elsewhere in the world.

THEMES IN HISTORY: WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN OUR READING

A variety of recurrent themes crop up in the history of the civilizations and peoples of both Africa and other parts of the world. By seeking out such themes, we discover new ways to give connection and salience to the myriad of local and regional histories within Africa, different in their particulars but alike in the commonality of the human drives, aspirations, and abilities they express. Thematic perspectives enable us to identify the several key story lines in the immensely complex history of Africa, and they show us ways to weave the developments of Africa’s past into the wider tapestry of world history.

A Theme Often Neglected: How People Got Their Food

The perhaps most lasting and powerful theme down through all of human history has been the matter of how people obtained their daily sustenance. Down to 10,000 BCE, all people everywhere gathered and hunted to get food. They practiced what we call gathering and hunting, or food-collecting, or foraging, economies.

The economies of those long-ago times were far from static systems. Both before and after 10,000 BCE, people in many different parts of the world brought into being innovative new systems of gathering and hunting. The greater productivity of these systems commonly led to the spread of the cultures associated with them. An example in New World history is the Clovis hunters of bison and other large game animals, who created one such system around 13,000 years ago and spread their activities and culture widely across the central parts of North America. At least two of the early civilizations of Africa, the Afrasian and the Khoesan, spread out initially because of their mastery of effective new systems of gathering and hunting—the Afrasian all across the northeastern portions of Africa and the Khoesan across eastern and southern parts of the continent.

Then sometime around 9500 BCE, peoples in several different parts of the world began slowly to shift to something truly new—the domestication and deliberate raising of animals and plants as sources of food. They became farmers, or what we sometimes call food producers. Sub-Saharan Africans in the southeastern Sahara regions and in West Africa were among both the earliest and the most important participants in the world in this fundamental realignment of human subsistence capabilities.

The shift to cultivation and herding had repercussions for the whole future course of social and political history in Africa and in each other part of the world in which that kind of changeover took place. At the most basic level, food production allowed people, over the long term of history, to produce more and more food from the same amount of land, a process that has continued down to the present. The ability to increase the food supply by such techniques in turn allowed the gradual growth of larger local communities and of denser human populations overall.

Food production also gave to its practitioners a substantial productive as well as demographic advantage over neighboring peoples who remained entirely dependent on food collecting. Soon those who had taken up the new ways of subsistence began to expand their territories more and more widely. As they spread out, they progressively assimilated more and more of the neighboring gatherer-hunter peoples into their societies. In this manner, the cultural traditions and languages of the first farmers and herders often spread across vast new territories. Their societies came to be part of widespread civilizations, consisting of many peoples, differing in individual elements of culture, but holding in common an array of fundamental cultural ideas and practices and usually speaking languages belonging to the same family of languages. In Africa, as we will learn, the historical roots of two of the major early civilizations of the continent, Niger-Congo and Sudanic, trace in large part back to the periods in which agriculture was invented.

Population growth, by creating larger local communities with more diverse individual interests, also pushed people toward new social and political adaptations for maintaining social cohesion and consensus. For a long time, the resulting changes are likely to have remained small in scale and local in scope. Not until 5,000–6,000 years after the first food-producing economies were created did population densities in a few areas of the world, both within Africa and outside of it, finally grow great enough to allow the first states and socially stratified societies to take shape. But without the adoption of cultivation and herding, neither the first states nor the world we live in today would have been possible.

Subsistence change remained a theme of recurrent importance down to the present in most parts of the world and not least in many parts of Africa. The addition of new crops has often increased the productivity of different environments and regions and so set off population growth and social and political change. New developments in agricultural technology repeatedly have had similar consequences. Time and again, as we will discover, new crops, new tools, new techniques, and new productive relations among people have shaped and reshaped the directions of historical change in Africa, just as they have elsewhere in the world. In the context of world history, we will learn, for instance, that Africans domesticated crops and animals, such as sorghum and donkeys, of worldwide importance today, and that these African contributions spread several millennia ago from Africa to other parts of the world.

Themes in Social and Political History

Other thematic areas of recurring importance to our understanding of Africa in history include social structure and social institutions; political ideas and institutions; trade and commerce; towns and cities; technological change and invention; religion and its cultural, social, and political dimensions; art and music; and the diffusion of new ideas and things from society to society.

Among the issues of social history that will concern us are the ways in which different cultures divided up work between women and men and how the roles of women and men changed over time in different African societies. We will learn, for instance, of the ancient historical background of social institutions such as clans and lineages, so widely found in Africa, and about the changing political and social functions of those institutions over the course of history in different regions. Matrilineal descent systems, in which people trace their ancestry, for purposes of inheritance, through the clans or lineages of their mothers, were once very common in Africa. Over the past several thousand years, however, these systems have been superseded in many parts of the continent by patrilineal descent, that is, by the tracing of inheritance only through one’s father.

A great variety of leadership roles characterized the early civilizations of Africa, from clan ritual chiefs in some societies to no hereditary leaders at all among other peoples. When larger polities began to emerge in Africa, kings became the most common kind of institution around which Africans reconstructed the political order. But we will also learn that some Africans developed alternative forms of larger-scale political organization that were more democratic and inclusive in nature than kingdoms. Like governments everywhere, kingdoms in Africa rested on two conceptual pillars. They needed legitimacy—by that we mean a set of accepted ideas and institutions that justified kingship in the eyes of the people. And they needed a material basis, such as tribute or the profits of trade, that could adequately support the governing stratum of society. Yet the institutional and ideological bases of legitimacy could be exceedingly different in different parts of Africa. The material bases of kingly power also varied greatly from region to region, and even within one region or within one polity the economic underpinnings of the political system could change in significant ways over the course of time.

Trade, Commerce, and Towns

Trade and commerce took a wide range of forms across the continent. During the past 3,000 years, growing commercial activity, instigated both from outside and deep within Africa, time and again provided part of the economic engine, along with agricultural innovation, driving the growth and centralization of political power and the rise of towns and cities. The reader will want to pay attention to the variety of products that fostered trade in different parts of the continent, to the methods and routes by which goods were transported, and to the often broadly parallel consequences of trade for social or political history in widely separate parts of the continent.

The earliest towns and cities in Africa developed before 3000 BCE, as early as anywhere in the world. The first cities, located along the Nile River, evolved as governing and ritual centers. Then, from about 1500 BCE onward, commerce grew into an equally and sometimes more important factor in the founding of towns and cities. Slowly urban centers began to emerge here and there across the continent, first in the West African savannas and in the Horn of Africa, and then during the past 2,000 years across progressively wider parts of the continent.

What do we mean by town or city? For our purposes, the word town will refer to a center with a population in the range of 1,000–2,000 up to about 5,000–6,000 people. City will be reserved for larger urban centers, of more than 5,000–6,000 inhabitants. By villages will be meant smaller units of perhaps 100 to 1,000 people; the term hamlet will apply to village-like settlements of typically fewer than 100 residents. Still another important kind of local settlement found in Africa was the neighborhood of scattered homesteads. This type of settlement, common for several thousand years in eastern Africa, had a population range similar to that of a village, but its individual residences, unlike the clustered habitations of a village, were spread out over a number of square kilometers of land.

The defining population sizes of towns and cities seem very small by present-day standards, but they were typical of the great majority of urban centers in the preindustrial eras of history all across the world. Small as such settlements appear to city-dwellers of today, their economic activities and political and social relations had effects on the social order that were qualitatively different from those of village life. The towns and cities were big enough and economically differentiated enough to support social stratification, and they were focal points of economic and political strength, dominant over the smaller settlements of the surrounding areas. In particular, the rise of a wealthy consuming stratum of society in the towns and cities, either as a ruling class or a merchant class or both at the same time, provided a growing local market for the wares of skilled artisans and other specialized occupations. Such wealthy classes tended also to employ household servants, further enhancing class differences.

Africans and Technological Innovation

In the history of technology, as we will discover, Africans south of the Sahara were active innovators and not, as they have often been depicted, the passive receivers of things invented elsewhere.

Africans in at least two different parts of the continent separately discovered how to mine, smelt, and work copper. Even more striking because it so conflicts with widely accepted ideas, Africans living in the heart of the continent appear to have independently invented the smelting and forging of iron. This development took place before 1000 BCE, as early as, or possibly earlier than, the Middle Eastern discovery in what is today Turkey, and more than 3,000 kilometers away from the Middle East.

There is now good evidence as well that Africans separately innovated another major development in world technology, the weaving of cotton, considerably earlier than metallurgy. Its inventors were people who lived south of the Sahara along the middle reaches of the Nile River at around and before 5000 BCE. Another notable, ancient kind of textile making in Africa was the weaving of raffia cloth, a skill that apparently arose as early as 3000 BCE in West Africa.

The reader’s attention will be drawn repeatedly in this book to the importance of technological themes in African history, and not just to developments in toolmaking or cloth manufacture. Changes in such diverse fields of endeavor as boatmaking, agricultural technology, and architecture were key elements in the overall panorama of history. We will learn, among other things, about the unique style of building in coral of the Swahili city-states; the great stone-walled structures of the capital city of the Zimbabwe kingdom, built without mortar yet still standing centuries later; and the wooden palaces of the Mangbetu kings, which rivaled Japanese temples as the largest wooden structures ever built.

Religion in African History

Another thematic area of importance is that of religious history. Among the stimulating new ideas we will encounter is the fact that quite different religious traditions were practiced in ancient times by the peoples of the different early civilizations of Africa. We cannot say that Africans all believed such-and-such a thing, or that one or another ritual practice is typical of all Africa. We will learn that two of the early African religions, those of the Niger-Congo and Sudanic civilizations, were distinctly monotheistic several thousand years before the idea of monotheism ever occurred to Middle Easterners or Europeans. We will discover also that the spread of religions can take place without formal missionary activity, and we will encounter in repeated instances the importance in African cultural history of religious syncretism—the blending together of ideas from different religious traditions.

And, by the way, we find no use for the term animism in this book. The indigenous religions of Africa took a variety of forms—monotheistic, henotheistic, nontheistic, and even polytheistic. But none can properly be characterized as animistic. Animism originated as a term among Francophone scholars of West Africa who sought to apply a less pejorative word than paganism to African systems of belief. But this terminology, besides failing to fit any particular African religion, does violence to historical reality: it lumps in an amorphous mass what are actually immensely different sets of ideas with distinctive consequences for the history of thought and culture in different parts of the continent.

After about 2,000 years ago, religions of the book—that is to say, religions with fixed, written, sacred texts—began to reach parts of Africa. The first religion of this type to spread to the continent was Christianity, which took hold in parts of north and northeastern Africa in the first four centuries CE. After 640, a second religion of the book, Islam, began to spread south into the continent also. As we shall see, the encounter of the indigenous African religions with these introduced religions had a variety of repercussions for social and political history over the succeeding centuries. An interesting feature of these developments was the early importance of trade relations in spreading both religions.

Art and Music

We still have much to learn about yet another theme, the history of the arts in Africa. Nonetheless, we will at least touch upon a variety of important developments in the pages to follow. The ancient wood-sculpting tradition of the Niger-Congo civilization, for example, gave birth to notable flowerings of sculpture in other media during the past 3,000 years. Among the examples we will encounter are the fine works in terracotta of the Nok culture of the first millennium BCE in West Africa and of the fifth-century Lydenburg culture of South Africa. The most splendid accomplishments of this tradition are the brass sculptures of the Yoruba and Benin peoples, belonging to the past 1,000 to 1,500 years of history in West Africa, and the gold artworks of Akan artists, sculpted during the past 500 years.

As for the musical arts, we will learn a little about the development and spread of new kinds of instruments in Africa. But perhaps our most significant discovery will be that the kind of music that people in the West tend to think of as typically African is, in fact, characteristic only of the Niger-Congo civilization. We refer here to polyrhythmic music, strongly based on the use of percussion instruments—in particular, differently tuned drums. It is this style of music, brought to the New World by forced African immigrants between 1500 and 1800, in which lie the roots of gospel music, ragtime, and jazz, as well as rhythm and blues and its offspring, rock and roll, and the fast, active kind of social dancing that has now caught on across the world. The story of how these styles of music and dance took hold outside Africa is not a direct part of our history of Africa up to 1800. But the fact that they are fundamentally African in inspiration should be essential knowledge for any twenty-first-century inhabitant of our world.

Cultural Diffusion in History

Finally and most generally, we shall learn that the dramas of history do not play out on closed stages. The ideas and the cultural and material developments of one region of Africa often spread to other areas—sometimes through the movements of people into new territories; sometimes through the spread of ideas through contacts among neighboring societies; and sometimes, especially during the last 2,000 years, through the long-distance travels of merchants. Societies that blended together in new ways the ideas, cultural practices, and technologies of other peoples frequently then embarked on their own markedly new and powerful directions of historical change. Equally important, African innovations contributed in important ways to technological and economic change in other parts of the globe. Africa’s story has always been part of the common history of us all.

AFRICA AND HUMAN ORIGINS

The First Hominins

Africa’s centrality in the history of humankind, as a matter of fact, goes back to the very beginnings of the human lineage. It was the Eden of our own species and of all the species most closely related to us. Our story and theirs began about 5 million years ago in the forests of central and eastern Africa. In those regions, there lived a particular species of ape, probably about the size of the chimpanzee and looking a bit like the chimpanzee, too. Between 4 and 5 million years ago, the descendants of this species started to follow two distinct lines of evolutionary change. One line of descent remained closely tied to forest environments and gave rise over the long run of time to the modern-day chimpanzees and bonobos of the rainforests of Central Africa. The other line of descent evolved into a new subfamily of the great apes, the Homininae, the subfamily to which our own species, Homo sapiens, belongs.

The hominins became strikingly different in three crucial respects. First, and most crucial, they parted ways from their nearest relatives among the great apes by no longer living in forests, but moving into the wooded savanna and bush country of eastern Africa and, in still later times, occupying as well the open grasslands of the eastern side of the continent. Second, they soon took on an upright posture and began to walk about on their two hind legs. Third, they developed opposable thumbs, giving them an enhanced potential for using and manipulating tools.

A variety of genera and species of hominins mark the fossil record of the periods between then and now. The most common genus of the time between 4 million and 1.5 million years ago was Australopithecus. The Australopithecines inhabited lands from as far north as the Red Sea coasts of the Horn of Africa to as far south as South Africa. They ate, it appears, an eclectic diet that included both plant food and meat. A second notable early genus, called Paranthropus, diverged from the Australopithecus line of descent sometime after 3 million years ago. Paranthropus species had particularly robust skulls and massive chewing dentition, suitable for grinding up tough plant foods and indicating thus a rather different diet from that of the other Australopithecines.

The First Toolmaking

Around 2.6 million years ago, a development fundamental to the future course of hominin history took place—one species began deliberately to fashion tools out of stone. The earlier members of our human subfamily had been little different from the other great apes in their intelligence or skills. No doubt, like our nearest modern-day relatives, the chimpanzees, they picked up sticks and sometimes stones and used them to pry up or strike out at things. To that extent, the earliest hominins were tool users. But they were not toolmakers.

The first toolmakers, of 2.6 million years ago, appear to have belonged to a hominin that, in terms of physical appearance, was just another Australopithecus species. But because the shift to toolmaking was of such momentous importance, scholars use that event to mark the evolution of a new genus, Homo, out of the Australopithecine genus, and so they call the first toolmaking hominin Homo habilis. The tools of H. habilis belong to what we call the Oldowan industry. (Industry as used by archaeologists of early humans refers to the kit of tools and the toolmaking techniques used by a particular human population.) This tool kit was rudimentary; it consisted simply of sharp flakes broken off of stones by striking them with other stones. The sharp flakes, however, could efficiently cut and skin even very thick-skinned animals, and so the making of the Oldowan tools would have greatly facilitated the meat-processing capabilities of their makers.

Fig. 1 Oldowan chopper tool

Oldowan implements were the earliest stone tools made by hominims, approximately 2.6 million years ago in the eastern parts of Africa. The original makers of these tools probably belonged to the species Homo habilis.

Fig. 2 Hand ax

This kind of tool was first made in Africa around 1.6 million years ago, probably by the descendants of Homo ergaster. The fashioning of the hand ax reveals a significant step forward in the evolving brain power of the ancestors of human beings. Its shape shows that its makers had a picture in their minds of how the tool should look and made the tool accordingly. The hand ax shown here comes from South Africa.

From about 1.8 million years ago, a second species of our human genus, Homo ergaster, appears in the fossil record. H. ergaster was markedly different from H. habilis. Whereas the H. habilis species was hardly more than three feet in height, H. ergaster was as tall as modern humans, and its body shape and full upright walking posture were very much like those of modern humans.

H. ergaster at first made tools not significantly different from those of H. habilis. Then, around 1.6 million years ago, another breakthrough took place. The first making of an entirely new type of tool, to which we give the misleading name hand ax, appears in the archaeological record of that time in eastern Africa. The hand ax, actually an all-purpose instrument for scraping, digging, and cutting, was the first hominin tool made to a regular preset pattern that must already have been present in the mind of its maker. Clearly a major transition in mental capacities—the development of the ability to form mental conceptions—had taken place among the African descendants of H. ergaster.

The Diversification of the Genus Homo

Sometime before 1.6 million years ago, another first in hominin history was recorded—for the first time one of the hominin species migrated out of Africa and made itself at home across southern Asia. Until then, all the developments of hominin history had taken place within Africa and within the eastern parts of the continent in particular. The species that spread to Asia was closely related to, but distinct from, H. ergaster. We call this first Asian species Homo erectus. Because H. erectus left Africa before 1.6 million years ago, its descendants continued to make flake tools and never adopted hand axes, as did the descendants of H. ergaster.

Some members of the genus Australopithecus survived for a few hundred thousand years after 1.5 million years ago. But the toolmaking capacities of H. ergaster and its later descendants eventually allowed them to take over completely the ecological niches they had previously shared in Africa with Australopithecus, and so drive the Australopithecines into extinction. H. erectus, of course, moved into Asia, where there had previously been no hominins, and so it did not face the same kind of competition.

Between 1.5 million and 60,000 years ago, it now appears, several different species of the genus Homo evolved in different parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. Most of those species may have descended from H. ergaster; whether some in Asia derived from H. erectus is less clear. Down to 400,000 years ago and perhaps even later, hand axes remained the most common tool of the African members of the genus Homo and also of those members of Homo who expanded into Europe.

Then, around 400,000 to 350,000 years ago, a leap forward in toolmaking skills took place, once again among the evolving Homo species in Africa. There the hand ax gradually dropped out of use, and a new technique of fashioning tools, the Lavellois technique, took hold. With this new technique the toolmaker first preshaped a stone core and then struck off tools of various shapes and uses from that core. A new expansion of Homo species out of Africa accompanied this development, giving rise to the Neanderthals of Europe and the Levant and, later, to the related Denisovan populations farther east in Asia.

There used to be an opposing view, no longer supportable, that—from before one million years ago down to the present—all the varieties of Homo, from the southern tip of Africa to the eastern tip of Asia, somehow, against all odds, continued to interbreed often enough to remain one gradually evolving species, all through that long span. Both the DNA evidence and our growing knowledge of human bone remains from different parts of the world refute this older view. It conflicts as well with everything we know about the patterns of evolution among the other widespread mammal genera, all of which over the same span of time diversified again and again into different species.

Homo Sapiens Enters the Scene

Of several species of the genus Homo that had come into existence before 60,000 years ago, the one that first pops into most people’s minds is Neanderthal man, Homo neanderthalensis. How curious that is—because the most important new species of that era, the one we truly should think of first of all, was our own species, Homo sapiens!

Eurocentric thinking again is surely to blame here. We now know that our particular species, Homo sapiens, evolved entirely in Africa. Yet most early work on human paleontology focused on discoveries in Europe of ancient bones and tools and was slow to accommodate new information from other parts of the globe. This is why Western folk imagination became so deeply imbued with the mystery and romance of the extinct Neanderthal, which was, after all, an almost purely European species of Homo. Then, too, in the works of certain mid-twentieth-century writers who favored the idea of a million-yearlong, multiregional evolution of a single human species all across the Eastern Hemisphere, one can detect, sadly, a more insidious tendency, a difficulty with accepting the idea that all of us might have a common, more recent African origin.

But the fact of the matter is that the species Homo sapiens had come fully into being before 60,000 years ago, and it came into being entirely in Africa. Skulls found in African sites dating from 180,000 to 100,000 years ago were already almost fully modern in appearance, except for some small differences in skull shape and also for not yet possessing a vocal tract of fully modern Homo sapiens dimensions and structure. Although these archaic Homo sapiens did advance into the far southwest corner of Asia, and possibly farther east to China, between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, it was not until around 50,000 years ago that any sites with fully modern human remains and fully modern human toolkits show up outside Africa. Instead, in both Europe and Asia, only more archaic varieties of Homo, such as the Neanderthal, are attested in the paleontological and stone-tool record of the period down to 50,000 years ago.

DNA evidence gives us the same answer. Using both mitochondrial DNA, a kind of genetic material passed from mother to daughter, and Y-chromosome evidence from males, scholars have demonstrated conclusively that the greatest genetic diversity of Homo sapiens lies in Africa. Greater human genetic diversity exists in Africa for the simple reason that fully evolved Homo sapiens have been present on that continent longer than they have been anywhere else.

Fig. 3 Time line of the descent of modern human beings

The stages reached in the development of toolmaking skills are noted at each of the stages in human descent.

The evidence of toolmaking places the common origin of us all in Africa, as well, specifically in the period following 70,000 BCE. Two particular advances in tool technology—the deliberate fashioning of bone implements and the shaping of small backed blades—were the characteristic accomplishments of the earliest fully modern Homo sapiens ancestors of everyone alive in the world today. A backed blade is one in which the back edge of the stone blade has been steeply chipped away. This steep back part provides a suitable surface for attaching the blade to a handle. The appearance of small backed blades in the archaeology marks, in other words, a highly significant transition in human history—to the regular making of efficient, small hafted tools and weapons.

Both of these advances, in keeping with the African origins of us all, appeared first in Africa, around 20,000 years before they occurred in other parts of the globe. Humans living in East Africa began to make finely shaped tools from bone between 68,000 and 60,000 years ago. Others of our common ancestors in East Africa began to fashion small backed blades during the same time span. In the Levant, in contrast, these innovations arrived only around 48,000 years ago, and in Europe not until after 45,000 years ago, brought in by the first fully modern Homo sapiens (the Cro-Magnons) to arrive in that part of the world.

In other words, by 60,000 years ago, the ancestors of all of us had already been fully human for several thousand years, and all those fully human ancestors of ours still lived in Africa. Only from around 48,000 BCE onward did some of those Africans begin to spread out to other parts of our globe, giving rise to the whole rest of the world’s populations and bringing about, both directly and indirectly, the extinction of all other species of the genus Homo, the Neanderthals among them. Exactly what our common African ancestors of those far-off times looked like is a matter for speculation. But what we can say with assurance is that most of the superficial differences in outward appearance that exist among human beings today arose since then. We are all Africans, and it is time to come to terms with that lesson of history.

Fig. 4 Backed blades

This technological advance, a characteristic feature of the toolkits of the first modern humans, appeared earliest of all in the archaeology of Africa, around 65,000 BCE, more than 15,000 years before it turned up anywhere else in the world. This drawing shows three ways in which backed blades could be hafted, or attached to a handle, to make a variety of cutting, chopping, and scraping tools. The backed portions of the blades are depicted here in cross-section, showing how the blade was inserted into the wooden haft. Various kinds of mastic would have been used to attach the blade more securely to the wood.

NOTES FOR READERS

Chapter 1 covers a number of topics that stimulate the rethinking of received ideas. Discussions of the meaning and use of value-laden terms such as civilized, tribe, and primitive can be particularly enlightening and enlivening. Further issues for discussion include:

•What other loaded terms get applied to the history or culture of peoples in other parts of the world?

•Are there loaded terms with a positive slant that we use when talking about our own history?

Confronting the idea that race has a social and historical reality, but lacks definable biological reality in human beings, is especially intellectually challenging. It requires one to think closely about just what the social meanings and uses of the idea of race really are. It requires one as well to come to grips with the usually unexamined and often strongly held, but quite untenable presumption that culture and biological ancestry always go hand in hand.

•What social purposes does the idea of race serve?

•In what kinds of specific historical circumstances does the idea of race take on meaning?

The discovery that the ancestors of all of us evolved into fully modern human beings entirely in Africa—that we were fully human before the ancestors of any of us left the continent—is another topic that can stimulate readers to take stock of the presumptions they bring to their reading. The scientific evidence in favor of this explanation is overwhelming. The development of new scientific dating methods in the past fifty years allowed scholars working with early human remains and toolkits in Africa to show that modern human skulls and tools typical of Homo sapiens occurred thousands of years earlier in Africa than anywhere else. Then, over the past two decades, new developments in genetic analysis repeatedly confirmed the paleontological evidence that our direct human ancestors all lived in Africa as recently as 50,000 years ago.

Into the 1990s there continued to be a body of scholars who held to the hypothesis of a multiregional origin for human beings. They believed that there was a single human species everywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere of the world for the past 1.8 million years and that over that whole long period, despite repeated ice ages and great geographical barriers, there somehow was enough interbreeding all across the 15,000 kilometers from the south tip of Africa to the Pacific coast of Asia to keep those widely scattered populations a single species. Each human population, in this view, evolved in the particular part of the world in which they now live. Despite the fact that every other widespread group of mammals diverged many times into different species over the past 1.8 million years, against all odds the ancestors of human beings, these scholars believed, did not do so. Readers might wish to consider these ideas in the light of the following questions:

•What kind of idea of race informs the multiregional view of human origins?

•What might make the idea of