World Class Education - Kean Universityhist3000/Downloads/AfricanHistory/PRAXIS AFRICA.pdfAfricana Studies,” the study of Africa by African people at home and in the diaspora is

World Class Educationwww.kean.edu

Jay Spaulding

[email protected]

The script for this presentation is available for

consultation and review at:

http://www.kean.edu/~jspauldi/jlspraxisafrica.html

“Africana Studies,” the study of Africa by African people at home and in the diaspora is old

“African History,” as an academic discipline, is new

In 1960 in Britain the Journal of African History began

I am a second-generation African historian, trained in the United States

The field is empirically complex

There are many moving parts

Many names and concepts are derived from

languages unfamiliar to non-Africans

Scholars have not established a basic

framework for understanding

No standard periodization

Africa is not exotic

Basic concepts and themes are more important

than the details

Human Origins and Prehistory (10,000,000 to

5,000 years ago)

Africans build their own history (5,000 years

ago to 1885)

Waves of foreign influence to 1600

Slave trade era (1600 to 1800)

Nineteenth Century

Colonial era (1885 to 1991)

Independence and after (1950 to the present)

First ancestor (10,000,000 years ago)

Early fossil remains (Toumai, Millennium Man)

Australopithecines

Homo erectus

“Eve” (about 200,000 years ago)

Time: 200,000 to 5,000 years ago

Haven in South Africa (200,000 to 85,000 years

ago)

Colonization of world begins (85,000 years

ago)

Mount Tubo (71,000 years ago)

Colonization of world continues

Kinship

Speech

Everybody has one native language

A community may be defined by language

Many community names used by Africanists

refer to the speakers of a single language

Languages change over time

Languages, like people, come in families

Khoisan

Nilo-Saharan

Afrasan

Congo-Kordofanian

Malagasy (came from Asia)

History of Africa similar to elsewhere

Sequence of societies invented

Each larger in scale than predecessor

Greater degrees of social inequality

Greater ecological impacts

Change driven by population increase

Not necessarily a story of “progress”

Band society

Lineage society

Chiefdoms

Early states

Empires (old agrarian)

City states

Nation states

Agriculture (about 15,000 BCE)

The state (began about 5,000 BCE)

Universal before agriculture

Gradually marginalized and suppressed by

success of agriculture over the centuries

Extinct after World War II

30-50 people

Band exogamy

Bilateral descent

Informal government

Hunting and gathering

Economy of reciprocity

Permissive child rearing

2-3 hour work day

Good health revealed in large stature

Began with agriculture

Larger groups

Unilineal kinship replaces bilateral

Patrilineal kinship (numerous livestock)

Matrilineal kinship (few or no livestock)

Few lineage societies survived intact

But lineage principles formed the basis of all subsequent societies

Seniority: gerontocracy in politics, ancestor veneration after death

Harsh child rearing, genital mutilation

Reciprocity dominates economics

Never peace, but rarely war: armed balance among factions.

No government, but very elaborate codes of rules to live by.

Ancestors enforce rules by imposing sickness, misfortune upon the deviant

Scarcity created competition and hierarchy in

many lineage societies

Political balance and economic reciprocity gave

way to centralized, one-man control over

redistribution of the community’s surplus wealth

Hereditary, titled elites appear

Markets and trade become common

Acquisitive organized warfare

Domestic slavery, especially of women and

children

Competitive labor-organizing “big men”

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe can take you on a visit to precolonial Igbo society, which exemplifies the chiefdom.

The character of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apartpersonifies the entrepreneurial “big man.” (Achebe translates the actual Igbo term as “strong man” in his subtitle.)

The character of Ezeulu in The Arrow of Godpersonifies the hereditary, titled elite.

State society was born in chiefdoms

A chief became a king by ceasing to redistribute the community’s surplus wealth

What a king gathered he kept as taxes

With tax revenue he supported a new repressive apparatus of soldiers, bureaucrats and police

Many historians LIKE state society, or even equate it with “civilization”

You may or may not agree

But the PRAXIS exam will probably favor the state over other types of society

Pharaonic Egypt (c. 3000 BCE)

Nile Valley Sudan, Ethiopia (c.1000 BCE)

Sudanic Region, Zimbabwe (medieval)

Western and Equatorial Africa (early modern)

Southern Africa (1700s)

Learn to recognize the names of some African

kingdoms

Keep them on passive recall

Here are a number, arranged by region and

period of origin

PRAXIS may spell the names differently, so be

flexible

Egypt (Kemet)

Sudanese Nile Valley:

Kerma (c. 1700 BCE)

Kush (700-300 BCE)

Meroe (300 BCE – 300 CE)

Medieval Nubia (300-1400 CE):

Nobatia

Makuria (or Muqurra)

Alodia (or `Alwa)

Sinnar (1500-1821)

Old kingdoms (1000 – 500 BCE)

Axum (500 BCE – 700 CE)

Zagwe dynasty (700 – 1270 CE)

Solomonic dynasty (1270 – 1974 CE)

Sudanic:

Ghana

Mali

Songhai

Kanem

Borno

Takrur

Wadai

Baghirmi

Dar Fur

Not Sudanic:

Zimbabwe

Oyo

Benin

Asante

Dahomey

Kongo

Tio

Luango

Luba

Lunda

Zulu

Each kingdom had a capital where the king and

court resided

Sometimes the capital was mobile

Often it was a permanent city

A company town, restricted to government and

its servants

Early states based on one ethnic group

Kings had to be culturally comprehensible to subjects

Spoke same language, worshiped same gods

Some states expanded to incorporate numerous ethnic groups, forming old agrarian empires

Ethnic diversity freed the emperors from traditional customary constraints on early kings

Emperors simplified and rationalized codes of law

Often created new religions, or adopted appealing alien ones such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam

When did an early state become an empire?

Often it is debatable

Solomonic Ethiopia, Mali and Songhai were

unquestionably empires

Feel free to add to the list if you wish

A person who makes his or her living through

trade is a merchant

Merchants prefer a different type of society

In olden days, they often created independent

self-governing city states

There are two basic ways of making a living through trade.

They are the traveling trade and the hoarding trade

Most early merchants depended upon the traveling trade

Profit derived from buying something from a place where it was cheap and moving it to sell in another place where it was expensive

Trade typically involved luxury items of small bulk and high value

In the hoarding trade one buys at a time when something is cheap and resells it later when the price rises

Hoarding trade typically involved food grains.

City states usually lacked control over an exploitable hinterland

In Africa, the merchant vocation was always

initially foreign

In time, however, many African people adopted

the initially-foreign lifestyle

Other African societies often found merchants

controversial, regardless of the traders’

ethnicity

A chain of city-states developed along the East

African coast during Hellenistic times and the

medieval period

A second group, largely medieval in origin,

arose at oases in the Sahara

During the slave trade period some city states

appeared on the West African coast

Sijilmasa

Awdaghost

Tadmekka

Takedda

Walata

Ghat

Murzuq

Awjila

Kufra

Agadez

Bilma

Jalo

Siwa

Jaghbub

(There are others)

Aydhab

Sawakin

Mitsawa

Adulis

Zayla

Berbera

Mogadishu

Barawa

Pate

Lamu

Manda

Malindi

Mombasa

Kilwa

Sofala

(There are others)

Dakar

Rufisque

Goree

Freetown

Cape Coast

Elmina

Lagos

Brass

Bonny

Kalabari

Douala

Luanda

Modern nation states arose when merchant principles took over whole countries

The hoarding trade joined traveling trade

Older ethnicities were gradually suppressed

New national identities were gradually forged

Nation states arose first in Europe and North Africa

As the modern era advanced nationalism spread widely in Africa and elsewhere

The transition into the nation state was often very violent

Morocco (1500s)

Tunisia (precolonial)

Egypt (precolonial)

Madagascar (1700s)

Swaziland (anti-colonial)

Lesotho (anti-colonial)

Botswana (anti-colonial)

Eritrea (1990s)

Most other modern African nations are recent products of European colonialism

Tripoli constitution by John Locke

Mankessim Constitution

Malagasy (iMerina) codes of law

Such was the history created by African people

for themselves, when left to their own devices

African history resembles everybody else’s

history

But, Africa was not always left to itself

New historical patterns appear if we consider

outside influences

Outside influences came in waves

Here is the story up to about 1600

Hellenistic (300 BCE to 600 CE)

Islamic (600 to 1800)

Early Modern European (1400 to 1600)

Place: North Africa from Mauretania and Morocco to Egypt and Sudan; Ethiopia; East African coast no farther than Tanzania

Language: Greek

Religion: Christianity (Orthodox and Monophysite)

Modern Relevance: Christian Ethiopia, Coptic Egypt

Place: All of First Wave zone except Ethiopia; the Sahara and Sudanic region; East Africa to include Mozambique

Language: Arabic

Religion: Islam

Modern Relevance: Islamic North, West and East Africa

Place: West coast south of Morocco; East coast as far north as northern Kenya; Madagascar

Languages: Portuguese, Dutch

Religion: Christianity (Catholic and Protestant)

Modern Relevance: Afro-Portuguese communities of Angola, Mozambique, West Africa; Afrikaners of South Africa

Slave trade dominated the period from 1600 to

1800

Slavery and the slave trade were not new to

the continent at that time

But a new form of trade that began in about

1600 changed older systems

Many African societies held slaves (Some did

not)

A trade in slaves within, into and out of Africa

was very old

Conspicuous was the importation of European

slaves throughout the Middle Ages and on into

the early nineteenth century

Before 1600 the slave trade did not dominate

any society or trading system

The reason for the importance of the slave trade from 1600 to 1800 lay in the demand for slaves in the plantation colonies of the New World

Conspicuously the sugar islands of the Caribbean

Where millions upon millions of Africans were worked to death.

Estimates of the number of African people exported range from 10 to 100 million; 15 or 20 million seems a good guess at present

Distributed across centuries in a large and

populous continent, the loss of population was

very small, and had little direct effect.

The slave trade is very important in

AMERICAN history, but of secondary or tertiary

significance in AFRICAN history.

Brutalized African life

Created new elites

New kingdoms based on slave trade (Asante, Dahomey)

New diasporas of African slave merchants

Whites rarely allowed to leave coast; Africans themselves monopolized procurement and delivery of slaves

Elites committed to trade, not industry

See Walter Rodney, How Europe

Underdeveloped Africa

Islamic trade to Middle East, India

Indian Ocean trade to Mauritius, other islands

Morocco (Songhai)

Portugal (Zimbabwe)

Ottoman Empire (Ethiopia)

Target: Gold-Producing Empires of Interior

Result: Destruction of Empires

Result: End of Gold Trade

Result: Rise of Independent Merchants

Result: Spread of Trade in Arms and Slaves

An unhappy era in African history

Effects of “legitimate” trade

Crisis in political legitimacy

Islamic imperialism

End of slave trades abroad

Commercial boom in peanuts, copra, palm oil,

gum Arabic, ivory, other tropical products

Slavery comes home to roost

Upstart slavelord regimes

Continual warfare

“Islamic reform” and jihad

Two 19th-century Islamic powers annexed large

parts of Africa

Spread slavery, violence, Islam

Egypt

Oman

1820 conquests begin

By 1900, empire reaches south to Kenya,

Uganda, Congo

West to Benghazi, Dar Fur

Ethiopia successfully resists

Slaves in army, on plantations, in middle-class

households

1830s Sultan moves capital to Zanzibar

Conquers coast from Somalia to the Zambeizi

Expands westward halfway across continent

Rules modern Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, parts of Mozambique, Zambia, much of Congo-Kinshasa

Rwanda, Burundi successfully resist

Over the eastern third of the continent

Islamic imperialism reduced people’s ability to

resist

A new wave of imperialism was on the way at

century’s end

Colonization by European powers

Much of Africa was colonized by Europe

During the century from 1885 to 1995

Consequences were profound

Let us look in some detail

1885 to World War I: The “Scramble for Africa”

World War I through World War II: Mature

Colonial Systems

1945 to 1995: “Winds of Change”

Independence to the Present: Postcolonial

Challenges

Era called the “Scramble” (British) or

“Steeplechase” (French) for Africa

What were the preconditions that made

conquest possible?

Some were European

Others were African

Capitalism

Competition

Technology:

The Machine Gun

Tropical Medicine

Steam Transport

Four Centuries of Intimate Contact with Europe

African elites Committed to Trade

African “Infant Industries” Crushed by Imports

Many Regimes Deemed Illegitimate by their Subjects: Little Patriotism

(There were exceptions, e.g. Ethiopia, Lesotho)

1884-1885

Major capitalist powers convene

Set guidelines for seizure and division of Africa

Without provoking war among European rivals

From 1885 to 1914 they did just that

Then fought W W I anyway

Division of Africa into strange political units

Learn their names, then and now

Learn their cities, then and now

(Map study single best PRAXIS review tactic)

Creation of “tribes”

Creation of “chiefs”

Questionable legitimacy of many colonial

groups

Each colony must be self-supporting

Africans pay for everything (including own

conquest)

“Pay” means labor

Sometimes direct

Sometimes indirectly via cash crops

Between the World Wars, African colonies set

onto several different paths

In many cases, modern lands continue to

follow these paths

Prestige and strategic advantage

Little else

Impoverished and unviable as nations

Avoided atrocity

Survival of precolonial culture

Cash crops on family farms

Coffee, cotton, peanuts, cocoa

New wealth widely distributed

Successful modern communities form

Agrobusiness rules

Rubber, sisal, bananas, sometimes cotton and

peanuts

Social melting pot, death of cultures

Colonial language dominates

Spectacular tyrannies and atrocities

Precious metals always had priority

Demand for cheap labor in gigantic quantities

Obliteration of all other modes of livelihood

Obliteration of culture

Mines, plantations, demand abundant labor

Over wide areas colonial policy obliterates all

other modes of livelihood, forcing people to

work in mines or on plantations

Pro-natalist (American: “Right-To-Life”) policies

accelerate population growth

Ultimate in modern poverty

White farms

“Native reserves”

Coercive apparatus (police, “pass books”)

Racist ideology

Big, complicated colonies

Fit more than one model

South Africa, Nigeria, Congo-Kinshasa

1950 to 1995

Wars of liberation

Peaceful transition

Libya

Algeria

Kenya

Guinea-Bissau

Angola

Mozambique

Zimbabwe

Namibia

South Africa

Neocolonial political elites in power

Continuity in economy

Continuity in society

Close relations with former colonial power

Economic specialization

Increase production

Problem: “Supply and demand”

Problem: debt

1981 turning point

International Monetary Fund

“Conditionalities”

Coups

The military in power

Corruption

Incompetence

Unpopularity of authoritarian regimes

“Non-Governmental Organizations”

Dependency on foreign patrons

Ethnic strife (Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra

Leone)

“Failed states” (Somalia, Chad)

AIDS

Islamic fundamentalism (Nigeria, Sudan,

Somalia, Algeria, Morocco, the Sahara)

I am happy to discuss any issue, and will try to

help answer questions

I am best reached via email at:

[email protected]

THANK YOU!