Africa Ringmar, Erik

Africa Ringmar, Erik Published in: History of International Relations 2016 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Ringmar, E. (2016). Africa. Manuscript submitted for publication. In History of International Relations Open Book Publishers. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Lund, Sweden, March 18, 2016. Dear reader, This is a first draft of the chapter on Africa for the textbook on the history of international relations that I'm working on. I have never been and will never be an expert on Africa and I very much need your help. Could you please let me know 1) what I'm getting wrong; 2) what I should have mentioned. Remember that this is meant as a very general overview and that the book deals with world history before the Europeans arrived — colonialism is consequently not discussed in this chapter. I'm very grateful for any contribution to the Academia.edu session you might have, and I will thank all contributors individually in the preface to the book. Or just email me: [email protected] The book will be published by Open Book Publishers in Cambridge, hopefully next year. It will be freely downloadable as a pdf but you will also be able to buy it as a regular book. All the material I have written so far is available at http://irhistor y .info/ yours, Erik Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 1 Africa All human beings are Africans. It was in today's Ethiopia, some 200,000 years ago, that the first settlements of homo sapiens were established and from this origin we gradually came to migrate to every corner on the planet. Africa is an enormous continent, occupying a fifth of the world's landmass, and it includes a number of radically different climates and environments: from dense jungles to extensive grasslands, and it includes the Sahara too, a desert the size of Europe. Africa is actually larger than we think since the Mercator projection used for most world maps underrepresents the true size of territories around the equator — and Africa straddles the equator. In addition, Africa has at least a thousand languages and many more ethnic groups. In order to talk sensibly about this all diversity, we have to divide the continent into regions. The most commonly made distinction is between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Saharan desert dividing the two. North Africa has a coastline along the Mediterranean Sea and from the very beginning people here have interacted with people in the Middle East and Europe. Pharaonic Egypt, one of the world's oldest civilizations, dating back to 3,000 BCE, is located in North Africa and so is Carthage which for hundreds of years was Rome's main adversary. [Box: Black Athena] Northern Africa was also an early center of Christianity and the kings of today's Ethiopia converted to Christianity already in the fourth century CE. The Berber were the original inhabitants of North Africa and they were either farming along the Mediterranean coast or eking out a living on the edge of the desert. In the eighth-century North Africa was overrun by the expanding Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 2 Umayyad caliphate and the Berbers converted to Islam, although they often maintained their language and much of their pre-Islamic culture. South of the Sahara — in “Sub-Saharan” or “Black” Africa — Bantu speaking people predominated. [Box: Oral and literate societies] The Bantu speakers originated in western and central parts of the continent but started moving east- and southward already in the first millennium BCE, spreading their language and cultural practices together with agricultural techniques and crafts such as iron-making. The political organization of Sub-Saharan Africa has been strongly influenced by nature and by the climate. Human beings can make themselves more or less independent of the climate – nature is not fate after all – but as long as the economic resources are limited this is difficult to do. In North Africa the boundary between desert and pasture often moved and desertification would lay waste to large cities; and in Sub-Saharan Africa there was a great difference between the kinds of societies that could be established in the rainforest and on the savanna. [Box: The Kingdom of Nubia] Along much of the coast of Sub-Saharan African there were rainforests that could stretch up to 300 kilometers inland, and in addition there was jungle in a continuous band around the equator — in what today is Congo. In the rainforest the climate was hot and humid, vegetation was dense and light was often blocked by trees that could grow to be up to fifty meters tall. The jungle was a generous environment in many ways, despite the presence of scourges such as the tsetse fly, and there were plenty of animals that could be hunted and plants that could be gathered. And that is exactly what people did — they were hunters and gatherers. But the communities were not very large, certainly not larger than a thousand people, and they had little by means of political institutions. [Box: “Stateless societies”] Instead the communities were structured around family and kin and held together by social ties rather than by political coercion. Since the people living in the Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 3 jungle moved around in response to the seasonal variation in game and plants, they were not tied to any particular territory. Occasionally they would come into conflict with other groups over access to economic resources such hunting grounds, but these conflicts are better described as raids than as wars. Away from the coastal regions and the jungles around the equator, there was savanna, less dense woodlands and in eastern Africa also high mountains. The savanna with its grass was an ideal environment in which to raise animals and throughout much of Africa cattle herding has been a chief occupation. On the savanna it was also a lot easier to grow things and people would often settle down to become farmers. As a result, far larger societies could be established, comprising many tens of thousands of people who were not united by ties of kinship. These societies had a far more elaborate division of labor, meaning that people could take up specialized tasks and professions. Services and goods which they could not provide for themselves, they could buy from others. Trade flourished both within each state and along trade routes that often extended across the length and breath of the entire continent. In addition the savanna-states had far more elaborate political institutions. Indeed, savanna-states that grew rich from trade and manufacturing were able to tax the people subject to them and they built flourishing capitals administered by public bureaucracies and ruled by laws. The savanna-states had kings with courts which became centers of learning and the arts. In many cases, the savanna-states expanded their power over their neighbors, either by outright occupation or by tying them together in networks of allies and tribute- bearers. Here regular wars were fought involving large armies. In this way a number of empires were created — including Nubia in today's Sudan; Benin, Mali and Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 4 the Asante in West Africa; Ethiopia, Bunyoro and Buganda in east Africa; and Zimbabwe in the south. North Africa In the seventh-century, North Africa was overrun by the armies of the expanding Umayyad caliphate. [Read more: The Arab expansion] In 640 CE the Arabs conquered Egypt and continued westward. The North African terrain was easy to move across since the population was sparse and there were few proper towns. Much of it was desert of course, but many of the Arabs were Bedouins and they and their camels were used to the environment. The people the Arabs ran into in North Africa were in many respects similar to themselves. A majority were Berbers, and many of them were nomads too, including the Tuaregs of the Saharan desert which is a Berber tribe. Instead of putting up a fight, however, the nomads simply moved away from the path of the invaders, and the Berbers who lived along the Mediterranean coast were assimilated into the new elite. To this day we tend to think of the people of North Africa as Arabs but many of them would prefer to be known as Berbers and at least some still regard the Arabs as invaders and dream of establishing an independent country. [Box: Independence for Azawad] Yet the Berbers would soon reassert themselves. In the early eighth century, when the Arab armies continued their expansion into the Iberian peninsula, many Berbers went with them, and together they established a capital in Córdoba in the province they were to call Al-Andalus.

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