Inventing Africa

Inventing Africa Derricourt T02256 00 pre 1 18/01/2011 08:49 Derricourt T02256 00 pre 2 18/01/2011 08:49 INVENTING AFRICA History, Archaeology and Ideas Robin Derricourt Derricourt T02256 00 pre 3 18/01/2011 08:49 First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Robin Derricourt 2011 The right of Robin Derricourt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3106 5 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3105 8 Paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the USA Derricourt T02256 00 pre 4 18/01/2011 08:49 Contents Preface: The construction of African pasts vi 1. The changing shape and perception of ‘Africa’ 1 2. Mythic and mystic Africa 21 3. Looking both ways: the enigma of Raymond Dart 48 4. Egos and fossils 69 5. Stirring the gene pool: human ancestors from Africa to the wider world 85 6. Ancient Egypt and African sources of civilisation 103 7. Old states good, new states bad 120 8. The present of the past 137 Notes 151 Index 177 Derricourt T02256 00 pre 5 18/01/2011 08:49 Preface: The construction of African pasts This book explores narratives of Africa’s past, especially of its deep past, and how they have been created, used and misused. All such narratives are products of place and time, limited by context and intent as much as by available knowledge. In presenting a critical account of such narratives, I note the dangers of oversimplifying the history of a vast and diverse continent, for perceptions and images of the past influence perceptions of the present and expectations for the future. While there are influences and connections between the examples presented in this book, the chapters can be read in the order of the reader’s choice. The African continent, with a billion people today in over 50 states (and some dependent territories), covers over 30 million square kilometres across environmental zones from extreme desert to dense tropical rain forest, supporting every kind of economic activity, religious belief, cultural sensibility and political structure. Yet ‘Africa’ has been the victim of generalising statements, simplifying histories and prehistories, stereotyping and imaginings from ancient times until today. The yearning to describe all or parts of the vast continent in simplified terms may be strongest in outsiders to the continent, but those living within Africa have also contributed. Africa has its own equivalents of Orientalism, which was defined by Edward Said as ‘a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western Experience’. As with the better-known debates about Orientalism, generalising images of something described as ‘Africa’ or ‘Africans’ have dangers and implications that have run through history and continue today. It is easy to categorise as racist the views we see in the ancient world, or in the world of the Atlantic slave trade, or in the colonial era, or in societies receiving a major African diaspora. But the same issues of the danger of generalised frameworks apply today, both within and outside the African continent. They may be negative images of a still-dependent Africa whose social and economic challenges require outside intervention and aid. Or they may be images of a continent with a romantic wilderness of landscape, flora, fauna and vi Derricourt T02256 00 pre 6 18/01/2011 08:49 PREFACE vii still-traditional societies. All simplified models and images have their impacts, and understanding the range of ‘Africanisms’ can warn us about these. The area described as ‘Africa’ has changed through time. The zones occupied by humans have grown, as described in our first introductory chapter, expanding from our hominid ancestors in the savannah regions to the settlement only recently of some offshore islands. There has always been an Africa of ‘the Other’. Since the worlds of earlier civilisations, those parts of the continent that lay beyond immediate neighbours or influence were lumped into an Africa – under different names like Punt, Aithiopia, Bilad al-Sudan – that was characterised by images either negative, or mythical, or both. Islamic influence across and south of the Sahara limited European contact and trade, but a fascination with the legendary Prester John and the kingdom of Ethiopia built the idea of a new Christian ally for Europe. With the expansion of European coastal trade to West Africa, Africans were seen as trading partners, but when slave trading came to overtake the trade in precious metals and produce, a new attitude to African people took hold in Europe. The end of the slave trade saw the emergence of paternalism then colonialism, followed by new kinds of dependency in the relations between Africa and the west, which are surveyed in the introductory chapter. The remainder of the book looks at some of the narratives of Africa and its past that emerged during and after the colonial era. In Chapter 2 we present some of the ideas of an ancient and lost mythic and mystic Africa that fascinated readers, mainly Europeans outside and within Africa, from the mid-nineteenth century. The literary inventions of Rider Haggard, crediting ancient Mediterranean and Arabian civilisations with the stone ruins of southern Africa, started with rumours and travellers’ stories but came to influence the actual historical interpretation of those ruins, with implications that continued into modern politics. The search for a ‘Lost City’ in the Kalahari Desert was an echo of such a narrative. And Zulu writer Credo Mutwa would create for the second half of the twentieth century believable myths about the African past that survived the transitions of power, to be taken up afresh by New Age adherents. The twentieth century saw the replacement of imagined and fallacious constructions of the African past by scientific research, which started to give Africa its full place in human history and history its fuller place in African identity. But Chapter 3 shows this transition was not straightforward. The most important contribution Derricourt T02256 00 pre 7 18/01/2011 08:49 viiiâNVENTING AFRICA to Africa’s prehistory, the 1925 announcement by Raymond Dart of the Taung fossil as the earliest African ancestor of humankind, was from a writer and researcher whose writing was equally dedicated to extending the ‘mystic Africa’ stories of alien races invading and building and mining. The enigma of Raymond Dart is of a scientist whose work straddled the old imaginings of the African past and the new discoveries. In Chapter 4 we describe some of the other pioneers of the study of early human ancestors. The role played in the nineteenth century by European explorers of Africa, inspired by commerce or missionary zeal or fame or nationalism, was paralleled by the fossil-hunting explorers of the twentieth century. Powerful egos, rival nationalisms, variable fortunes played their role in this story, one of the few scientific endeavours where ‘discovery’ meant just that, with the human story changed by the blow of a pick-axe. Interpretations of finds, including naming rights to the new fossil hominids, reflected the importance acquired by the adventurer- scientist. Aspects of the lives of Robert Broom, Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey, and Donald Johanson illustrate these themes. If arguments about the name and nature of early human ancestors dominated the last decades of the twentieth century, new debates and arguments have emerged over the African origins of anatomically modern humans and of modern human behaviour, and these are discussed in Chapter 5. Grand sweep narratives were created to account for the emergence of societies that could be recognised both physically and mentally as of modern human type, with preferences reflecting different disciplinary backgrounds. The geography might suggest one story, with another from the distribution of archaeo- logical remains of stone tool-making, and the distribution of early skeletal material had to be tied to this. Then geneticists’ studies of mitochondrial DNA came to challenge earlier assumptions and clarify a story of biological spread, but whose chronology had to fit the accounts derived from other sources. These debates are still very active, and this chapter reviews some of the diverse views in the debate. We discuss in Chapter 6 another strand of the accounts and interpretations of the African past: that of the influence of Ancient Egypt. Writers have tended to think of pharaonic Egypt either as part of the ancient Mediterranean, or of the ancient Near East, or of the African continent, and battles over its identity have continued. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith in the early twentieth century developed his ‘hyperdiffusionist’ model under which Egypt was credited for Derricourt T02256 00 pre 8 18/01/2011 08:49 PREFACE ix the unique invention of numerous skills and inventions that spread elsewhere in the world, though mainly out of, rather than into, the African continent.

Load more