Overview of African Prehistory
Posted: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
by Waniss A. Otman
Department of Economics, University of Aberdeen
In 1963 Professor Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of history at, Oxford University, stated: “Nowadays, undergraduates demand that they should be taught African History. Perhaps in the future there will be some African History to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, and darkness is not a subject of history.....The history of the world, for the last five centuries, is so far as it has significance, has been European History. The study of History must therefore be Europe-centric. We can not, thus, afford to amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”
Trevor-Roper was in fact repeating a strain of European scholarship and ideas relating to Africa which became institutionalized in European thinking after the publication in 1837 of the German philosopher Hegel’s “History of Philosophy” which he stated “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”
Fortunately in the last fifty years much research and scholarship, as well as scientific advances such as DNA and Carbon-14 dating, have changed this euro-centric view of African history. The evidence of the fossil record shows that some 5 million years ago, a common human ancestry evolved from the emergence of a humanlike species in eastern Africa, where proto-humans discovered how to fracture stone and create sharp-edged tools. With this initial technological discovery, a trail of the litter and refuse of human ancestry began to accumulate on the ancient African landscape. Archaeologists have been able to study these stone tools and other traces of past human behaviour in Africa which is the only continent holding a complete record of Stone Age materials from the very beginnings of stone technology.
The fossil record shows that modern humans and modern human behaviours arose first in Africa (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). The earliest true human being in Africa, Homo sapiens, dates from more than 200,000 years ago.A hunter-gatherer capable of making crude stone tools, Homo sapiens banded together with others to form nomadic groups. Eventually the nomadic San peoples spread throughout the African continent, with subsequent widespread expansion of the species across Asia and Europe.
Within Africa the River People emerged in 6000-4000 BCE, along the Nile, Niger, and Congo Rivers (West-Central Africa). In the same period the Isonghee of Zaire (Republic of Congo) introduce mathematical abacus, and the Cyclopian stone tombs were built in Central African Republic area. The spread of agriculture south of the Sahara Desert supported a growing population, which mastered animal domestication and agriculture, and forced the San groups into less hospitable areas
According to the Washington State University, World Civilisations, around 5000 BCE the ancient Egyptians begin using burial texts to accompany their dead, which are the first known written documents of mankind. The Ancient Egyptians, who called their land Kemet (Land of the Blacks) and Ta-Meri (Beloved Land), were primarily agriculturists who, with the practice of irrigation and animal husbandry, transformed the Nile Valley into a vibrant food-producing economy by 5000 B.C. Their settled lifestyle allowed them to develop skills in glass making, pottery, metallurgy, weaving, woodworking, leather work, and masonry. In this latter craft, ancient Egyptian practitioners excelled in architecture, as the pyramids attest.
Ancient Egyptians traced their origins to the Mount Rwenzori range in East Africa although some accounts trace these to "Ethiopia," a term variously designating land south of Egypt (the Upper Nile Valley), or the entire African continent. Thus, Nubia, Egypt’s southern neighbour with its own civilization, probably preceded the ancient Egyptian (Kemet) civilization.
In the years 4000 to 1000 BCE the Ancient African civilizations of the Nile Valley were established & flourished. Molefi Kete Asanteand Abu S. Abarry are Africanist scholars who maintain that African “civilization as expressed from the ancient cultures of the Nile Valley (e.g. Egypt/Kemet, Nubia/Kush), have tied together the diverse peoples of the African continent in ways that distinguish Africans from Europeans or Asians”. These scholars claim that in “the practical experiences of African peoples" across the continent today they can trace the continuation of "ancient myths and beliefs in resurrection and life, reincarnation, matrilineality, burial of the dead, the value of children, the ultimate goodness of the earth”, as well as reverence for the ancestors believed part of the living human community, a worldview integrating past and future into the present.
The first African civilization after Egypt was built by an Egyptianized people who lived between the Nile River's first and third cataracts and spoke Nilo-Saharan languages. This region around the first cataract, called Nubia, had been conquered and colonized by Egypt in the fourth millenium BC. Because of this, Egyptian civilization diffused southward and a new African kingdom was built up in the floodplain around the Nile's third cataract: the Kush. Their capital city was Kerma and it served as the major trading center for goods travelling north from the southern regions of Africa.
Kush attained its greatest power and cultural energy between 1700 and 1500 BC during the Third Intermediate period in Egypt. The domination of Egypt by the Hyksos allowed Kush to come out from under the hegemony of Egypt and flower as a culture; this period ended, however, when the New Kingdom kings, having thrown the Hyksos out of Egypt, reconquered Kush and brought it under Egyptian colonial rule. However, when the New Kingdom collapsed in 1000 BC, Kush again arose as a major power by conquering all of Nubia. The conquest of upper Nubia, which had been in the hands of the Egyptians since the fourth millenium, gave to Kush wealthy gold mines.
Following the reassertion of Kushite independence in 1000 BC, the Kushites moved their capital city farther up the Nile to Napata. The Kushites by and large considered themselves to be Egyptians and the proper inheritors of the pharoanic titles and tradition. They organized their society along Egyptian lines, assumed all the Egyptian royal titles, and their architecture and art was based on Egyptian architectural and artistic models. Their pyramids were smaller and steeper and they introduced other innovations as well, but the Napatan culture does not on the surface appear much different than Egyptian culture.
The Kushites even invaded and conquered Egypt in a magnificent irony of history. The Napatan kings formed the twenty-fifth pharaonic dyansty in the eighth century; this dynasty came to an end with the Assyrian invasion of Egypt in the seventh century BC. The Assyrians, and later the Persians, forced the Kushites to retreat farther south. This retreat south eventually closed off much of the contact that the Kushites had with Egypt, the Middle East, and Europe. When Napata was conquered in 591, the Kushites moved their capital to Meroe right in the heart of the Kushite kingdom. Because of their relative isolation from the Egyptian world, the Meroitic empire turned its attention to the sub-Saharan world. For most of its prosperous life, the Meroitic empire served as the middle term in the trade of African goods to northern Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. While it still continued the cultural traditions of pharoanic Egypt, the Meroites developed newer forms of culture and art because of their isolation from the northern kingdoms.
Many of these innovations occurred in the realm of government. Unlike pharoanic Egypt, the king ruled through a customary law that was established and interpreted by priests. The king was also elected, but he was elected from the royal family. As in Egypt, descent was reckoned through the mother's line. Eventually, however, this descent model produced a series of monarchs who were women, an innovation not seen in any other major civilization.
The Kushite religion closely resembled Egyptian religion. It was polytheistic and contained all the major Egyptian gods. Amon was the principal god, but as in Egyptian religion, Meroitic religion involved regional gods which were served as principal gods in their region. There are some non-Egyptian gods, such as a lion warrior god, which the Meroites probably derived from southern African cultures, but these gods were few.
The Meroitic Empire thrived throughout the last half of the first millenium BC. After three centuries of decline, it was finally defeated by the Nuba people. It's commercial importance was repalced by Aksum to the east.
In the years ca. 1000 – 800 BCE the Bantu ("the people") migration spreads through sub-Saharan Africa (Africa south of the Sahara Desert), over a period of some 2,000 years.Bantu, a linguistically related group of about 60 million people living in equatorial and southern Africa, probably originated in West Africa, migrating downward gradually into southern Africa. The Bantu migration was one of the largest in human history. The cause of this movement is uncertain, but is believed related to population increase, a result of the introduction of new crops, such as the banana (native to south Asia), allowing more efficient food production. Societies typically depended on subsistence agriculture or, in the savannas, pastoral pursuits. Political organization was normally local, although large kingdoms would later develop in western and central Africa
Early in their history, the Bantu split into two major linguistic branches-the Eastern and Western Bantu. The Eastern Bantu migrated through present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique, down to South Africa. The Western Bantu moved into what is now Angola, Namibia, and north-western Botswana. Today, among the Bantu language groups, the most widely spoken Bantu-derived language is Arab-influenced Swahili, which is used as a lingua franca by up to 50 million speakers on the eastern coast of Africa. Ethnic groups descended from the Bantu include the Shona, the Xhosa, the Kikuyu, and the Zulu, of the Eastern Bantu language branch; and the Herero and Tonga peoples, of the Western Bantu language branch
These Bantu immigrants would eventually found the civilization of the Mwenumatapa, or "Great Zimbabwe" civilization. Not only did the Bantu spread iron-smelting techniques across Africa, they encouraged agriculture, high-yield crops such as yams, bananas, and plantains. The spread of agriculture led to the explosive growth of village life all throughout Africa. As Africa’s peoples established themselves and diversified in response to local conditions, they developed distinctive cultures, oral traditions and oral art forms. Africa’s hundreds of different ethnic groups are often defined by the language they speak, according to contemporary (especially Western) scholarly practice. Spoken African languages indigenous to the continent are variously estimated to number from 700 to 3000.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Thanks for the history. It's difficult to get it into the 2500 words of a SearchWarp article. You could probably expand each paragraph into an essay. The emergence of the Sahara coupled with the central African jungle in pre-historic times separated the two ends of the continent. The isolation of the south limited its memory in the northern world.
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