World Class Education www.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)  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 Apart personifies the entrepreneurial “big man.” (Achebe translates the actual Igbo term as “strong man” in his subtitle.)  The character of Ezeulu in The Arrow of God personifies 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 (c. 3000 BCE)  Valley , (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 (300-1400 CE):  (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   Wadai  Baghirmi  Dar Fur

 Not Sudanic:

 Zimbabwe  Oyo  Benin  Asante  Dahomey  Kongo  Tio  Luango  Luba  Lunda  Zulu  Each kingdom had a 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 , or  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  Awjila  Awdaghost  Kufra  Tadmekka  Agadez  Takedda  Bilma  Walata  Jalo  Ghat  Siwa  Murzuq  Jaghbub  (There are others)  Aydhab  Pate  Sawakin  Lamu  Mitsawa  Manda  Adulis  Malindi  Zayla  Mombasa  Berbera  Kilwa  Mogadishu  Sofala  Barawa  (There are others)  Dakar  Lagos  Rufisque  Brass  Goree  Bonny  Freetown  Kalabari  Cape Coast  Douala  Elmina  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)  (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; to include Mozambique  Language:  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 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 ,  Indian Ocean trade to Mauritius, other islands  Morocco (Songhai)  Portugal (Zimbabwe)  Ottoman Empire (Ethiopia)  Target: -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  Mozambique  Algeria  Zimbabwe  Kenya  Namibia  Guinea-Bissau  South Africa  Angola  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!