africa
Africa
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A
frica lies south of Europe and southwest of Asia. Geographically it is about three times the size of the United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. At its northeast corner is Egypt, which is connected to the Sinai Peninsula—and hence to the
Asian continent by a very narrow strip of land. This is the only spot where Africa touches another continent; otherwise, it is surrounded by water. The Mediterranean Sea separates it from
Europe in the north; the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden lie between it and the Arabian Peninsula to the east. Two vast bodies of water—the Indian Ocean on the eastern side, and the even larger Atlantic on the west—surround the remainder of Africa.
Why Africa is important
One of the greatest civilizations of all time, Egypt, was in
Africa. Perhaps the only ancient civilizations that can be compared with it are those of Greece and Rome, which were influenced by it. Egypt, of course, has had its own chapter in this series; and Carthage, in North Africa, is also covered elsewhere.
The focus of this chapter is entirely on Africa south of the Sahara
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Desert—that is, sub-Saharan Africa—as well as on the desert itself. That desert would have an impact on African history right up to the modern day; so, too, would the African civilizations of ancient times. There was the kingdom of Kush, which developed its own form of writing and briefly ruled Egypt; the kingdom of
Aksum, an important trading center; and the Bantu peoples, who developed ironworking and spread it, along with their languages, throughout the southern part of the African continent.
Map of Africa.
XNR Productions.
The Gale Group.
The origins of humankind
Though there is much dispute regarding how humankind began, paleoanthropologists (pay-lee-oh-an-throhPAHL-uh-jistz; scientists who study human origins) generally agree that humanity originated in Africa millions of years ago.
The Paleolithic Age (pay-lee-oh-LITH-ik), or Old Stone Age, probably began there about 2 million years ago. Eventually human ancestors moved out of Africa to other continents.
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Words to Know: Africa
Afrocentrism: A belief that people of African descent should interpret the world from an African perspective.
Apartheid: A system of enforced racial segregation and white supremacy that existed in South Africa from 1948 to the early
1990s.
Cold War: Not really a “war” but an ongoing conflict between the United States and
Soviet Union from the end of World War
II to the fall of Communism in the early
1990s.
Colonnade: A long series of columns on either side of a walkway. Often, but not always, there is a roof over the columns.
Interdependence: A situation in which people rely upon each other.
Neolithic Age: The New Stone Age, c.
10,000–c. 4000 B.C., which began with a dramatic increase in technology and agriculture. Obelisk: A tall, freestanding column of stone.
Oral tradition: A body of stories and sayings and other cultural information passed down by word of mouth.
Paleoanthropology: The study of human origins. Paleolithic Age: The Old Stone Age, c.
2,000,000–c. 10,000 B.C.
Compound (n.): A number of separate dwellings surrounded by a protective wall. Racism: The belief that race is the primary factor determining peoples’ abilities, and that one race is superior to others.
Condescend: To treat somebody as though they are inferior.
Regime: Government; usually used as a negative term.
Deify: To turn someone or something into a god. Savanna: Grassland.
Depose: To remove from power.
Staple: A commodity with widespread or constant appeal.
Eurocentrism: The idea that European culture provides the standard by which all others should be judged.
Stellae: Plural of stela, a large stone pillar, usually inscribed with a message commemorating a specific event.
Figurine: A small sculpture, usually a depiction of a person or animal.
Values: Beliefs about what is good and bad, important and unimportant.
About 10,000 B.C., as the last ice age was ending, the world entered the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Age (Nee-ohLITH-ik). This was a period of dramatic progress in agriculture, toolmaking, and other areas that created the framework for the development of civilization in about 4000 B.C.
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The Sahara
A continent of extraordinary physical contrasts, Africa has mountains, deserts, tropical rainforests, and, savanna (grasslands). Yet except for the savanna and a few other areas, the majority of the African continent offers its inhabitants a meager living at best. This is particularly true of North
Africa, which except for a fertile strip along the Mediterranean coast and
Nile River, is covered by the Sahara
(suh-HAIR-uh) and other deserts.
Single spreading tree on the golden African savanna.
Corbis. Reproduced by permission. The Sahara is one of the central facts of life in Africa. It divides the continent as virtually no other physical feature in the world does, and it provides the reason for the great differences between North African and subSaharan cultures. Quite simply,
Egyptian civilization had little influence on areas from which it was separated by the Sahara. Thus Egypt had much effect on Kush and Aksum in
East Africa, but little at all on the Bantu peoples and other groups in southern and western Africa.
By far the world’s largest desert, the Sahara today covers some 3.5 million square miles (9.07 thousand square kilometers), an area larger than the continental United States; yet only 780 acres (316 hectares) of it, a little more than one square mile (2.6 square kilometers), is fertile. The rest is mostly stone and dry earth with scattered shrubs. Contrary to the way it is usually presented in movies, only a very small portion of the Sahara consists of sand dunes.
The ancient Saharan cultures
(c. 6000–c. 1500 B.C.)
Though the Sahara today is virtually uninhabitable,
8,000 years ago, it was a lush region of rivers and valleys. For thousands of years, it was home to many cultures, some of
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them quite advanced, to judge from their artwork. Who these peoples were—it appears there were many groups—remains a mystery, though they left behind an extraordinary record in the form of their rock-art paintings and carvings [see sidebar,
“The Brilliant Legacy of Saharan Rock Art”].
The rock art, which varies greatly in its representation of human and animal figures, is divided into four historical groups. First is the Hunter period, from about 6000 to about
4000 B.C., depicting a Paleolithic people who survived by hunting the many wild animals then available in the region.
Next was the Herder period, from about 4000 to 1500
B.C. As their name suggests, these people maintained herds of animals and also practiced basic agriculture. Much more civilized than the Hunter people, they produced the most sophisticated Saharan rock art, much of it portraying their herds. In fact, their ability to portray perspective and the movement of the human form was much greater than that of the Egyptians.
As the Sahara began to become drier and drier, however, there were no more herds. Egyptians began bringing in domesticated horses to cross the desert: hence the name of the
Horse period (c. 1500–c. 600 B.C.) By about 600 B.C., however, not even horses could survive in the forbidding climate. There was only one creature that could: the hardy, seemingly inexhaustible camel. Thus began the Camel era, which continues to the present day.
Kush (c. 2000 B.C.–c. A.D. 400)
In the southern part of Egypt, and the northern section of the modern nation of Sudan, is the region of Nubia (NOObee-uh). Much of it is covered by the Nubian Desert, but as with Egypt, the Nile River provided a fertile strip of land on which a civilization developed. This was the kingdom of Kush
(KÜSH), which existed in various forms for nearly 2,400 years.
The Kushites’ language was related to the Semitic tongues of southwest Asia. Yet, from Egyptian tomb paintings, it is clear that they were what modern Americans would call
“black”—or, to use a more accurate term, sub-Saharan African.
It appears that Semitic peoples migrated across the narrow Red
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The Brilliant Legacy of Saharan Rock Art
In about 6000 B.C., what is now the Sahara Desert was a land of fertile green fields, lush valleys alive with all manner of plants and animals, and flowing rivers filled with fish. It was also the home to a series of highly advanced societies whose identity is unknown to historians. In fact, most of what modern people do know about these ancient
Saharans comes from the artwork they painted and carved on stone surfaces throughout the desert.
These paintings provide evidence of extensive wildlife in the region, including giraffe, elephants, and cattle.
Later scenes show camels. Other pieces illustrate the cultural and political life of the ancient Sahara, including dances, rituals, battles, and the workings of justice.
One particularly complex piece portrays judges, police, jailers, and officials, with a man at the center who was apparently found guilty of a crime. Only a highly
advanced civilization could have such a formal justice system.
Another painting, obviously from the Herder period, looks as if it were painted in the A.D.1800s—but it is more likely a product of the 1800s B . C . The women in the picture are clearly wealthy and relatively pampered, with complex hairdos. These details indicate that the people of the ancient Sahara had mastered their environment and were well past the point of merely surviving.
After 2000 B.C., the Sahara began to dry up, and the human population almost completely disappeared. If the paintings had been in a tropical rainforest environment, they might have been ruined; as it was, the dry desert air preserved them. Nor did they suffer the fate of Egyptian or Chinese treasures stolen by graverobbers. The Saharan rock art was hard to get to, protected by nests of
Sea to the “Horn of Africa” and intermarried with the peoples living there. Thus even today, the peoples of the Horn, particularly in modern Ethiopia and Somalia (soh-MAHL-ee-uh), have physical features which distinguish them from the peoples living further south.
Regarding the name “Ethiopia,” it should be noted that as with Armenia and Macedonia, it refers both to a modern nation and to an ancient region, yet these are not exactly the same. The term Ethiopian is derived from a Greek expression meaning “burned skin”—suggesting a dark complexion.
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poisonous snakes and miles of forbidding sand dunes.
The world owes a great debt to
French explorer Henri Lhote (ahn-REE
LAWT), who in 1956 discovered a great collection of rock art at Tassili n’Ajjer (tahSEEL-ee nah-ZHAYR) deep in the desert.
Lhote and his team of artists made it possible for everyone to see the great treasures of the Sahara without going there. Photographing the artwork would not do, especially because many pieces were in dark caves and their colors had faded; therefore he and the others painstakingly copied some 800 works of art, restoring original colors. This was a particularly difficult task given the nature of the environment. Not only was it hard to get to Tassili and other sites, but, in copying the art, members of the team often had to stand on tiptoe or lie on their backs while they worked.
The treasures of the Sahara are more valuable than diamonds. During the late twentieth century, people more interested in money than history (the modern counterparts of the ancient grave robbers) began looting artwork from sites in Morocco. Using crowbars, they removed pictures to sell them in Europe. In response to these and other abuses, the
Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs and groups such as the Trust for African Rock
Art began working to preserve the treasures of the Sahara.
David Coulson, cofounder of the
Trust for African Rock Art, published an article called “Ancient Art of the Sahara,” in the June 1999 National Geographic. The group also works to preserve prehistoric artwork in other parts of the continent, including South Africa, where the Bushmen left a rich legacy of rock art before they were displaced by the Bantu peoples.
In ancient times, the entire region south of Egypt was often described as “Ethiopia;” indeed, that name was often used to describe all of Africa below Egypt.
Later, the Greek historian Herodotus, describing the multinational force with which the Persians invaded Greek in
480 B.C., noted the presence of both straight-haired “eastern
Ethiopians,” and curly-haired “western Ethiopians”—the latter dressed in lion skins—among the Persian army. These terms must have referred to Aksumites and Kushites respectively: though neither nation had been conquered by the Persian
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Empire, it is possible the Persians recruited “Ethiopian” warriors for their forces.
Early period (c. 2000–716 B.C.)
Whatever their origins, the Kushites were closely linked with Egypt. It appears that contact with the latter began in about 2000 B.C., around the time Kush came into existence.
In that first phase of Kushite civilization, its capital was first at
Karmah (KAHR-muh), and later at Napata (NAH-puh-tah), a city on the Nile just south of Egypt. The Kushites traded extensively with the Egyptians, but relations were not always friendly. In the 1800s B.C., the pharaoh Senusret III built fortresses to protect against invasion by the Kushites. In the
1500s B.C., an invasion came—only it was Egypt that invaded
Kush, not the other way around.
Kush remained an Egyptian colony for hundreds of years, but Egypt began to decline after the end of the New
Kingdom in the 1000s B.C. Kush, in turn, was on the rise, particularly under the reign of King Piankhi (pee-AHNG-kee; c.
769–716 B.C.) Piankhi was a fervent believer in the Egyptian god Amon. He may have marched his armies into Egypt and conquered the land, but he seems to have had no interest in staying and building an empire. That job would fall to his brother Shabaka (SHAH-buh-kuh; r. 716 B.C.–695 B.C.)
The Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of Egypt (712–667 B.C.)
In 712 B.C., Shabaka’s troops swept into Egypt, and he ordered the execution of the reigning pharaoh. This ended years of Libyan control over Egypt and began the Late Period in ancient Egyptian history. Shabaka established the TwentyFifth Dynasty, which lasted for half a century. Like Piankhi,
Shabaka embraced the religion of Amon. He assigned his sister
Amunirdis I (ah-moo-NEER-dis) an important position as
“god’s wife of Amon” in the temple at Thebes.
In 698 B.C., Shabaka’s nephew Shebitku (SHEH-bit-koo) assumed the Egyptian throne while his brother Taharqa (tuhHAHR-kuh) apparently ruled over Thebes. If this was indeed the case, it was an arrangement similar to the one between
Ashurbanipal of Assyria and his brother Shamash-shum-ukin a
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few years later. This would be particularly ironic, given the role Ashurbanipal would play in the lives of Shebitku and Taharqa.
The two Kushite brothers appear to have gotten along much better than their Assyrian counterparts.
Shebitku favored resistance against the
Assyrians, who were on the move in
Palestine with an eye toward Egypt.
Apparently at his urging, Taharqa’s
Kushite army aided the Israelites against Assyrian troops under Sennacherib. Also, there seems to have been no struggle for succession: when
Shebitku died in 690 B.C., Taharqa took his place. Among the achievements of
Taharqa’s long reign, which lasted from 690 to 664 B.C., was the building of a colonnade (KAHL-uh-nayd), a long hallway of columns, in the temple of
Amun at Karnak.
But Taharqa was destined to be the last Kushite pharaoh. After 15 years of peace, his troops fought and defeated an Assyrian army under Esarhaddon in 675 B.C. Four years later, however, the
Assyrians returned and overwhelmed Taharqa’s forces. He regained control in Egypt for a little longer, but in 667 Ashurbanipal’s troops scored a major victory against the Kushites.
Taharqa fled to Napata, where he died in 664 B.C.
Sculpture of King Taharqa.
Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.
Meröe period (600s B.C.–c. 400 A.D.)
Some time after they were driven out of Egypt, the
Kushites abandoned their capital at Napata and moved hundreds of miles upriver—-that is, southward—to the city of
Meröe (MEHR-oh-wee). Meröe became the Kushite capital some time in the 600s B.C. Thereafter its name was closely associated with that of the Kushite civilization in general.
The written language of the Kushites, which developed only after the migration southward, is referred to as Merotic
(mehr-AH-tik). Oddly, though the script has been deciAfrica
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Ancient Africa: The Debate Rages On
For many centuries, white
Europeans (including their descendants in the United States) ignored the achievements of sub-Saharan Africans. This attitude was Eurocentrism, the idea that
European culture provides the standard by which all others should be judged.
Combined with racism, Eurocentrism helped justify the slave trade, but even long after slavery ended, many whites continued to take a condescending attitude toward Africa.
Obviously, these were ignorant attitudes, and eventually a variety of movements developed in reaction to them. Among these was Afrocentrism which, in contrast to Eurocentrism, sought to interpret the world from an African perspective. Afrocentrists placed a great emphasis on the study of African cultures and past civilizations. They pointed out the obvious fact that Egypt was an African
civilization, and called attention to its links with Nubia, or Kush.
These were positive and muchneeded changes in the character of historical study; but many Afrocentrists went much further. In 1954, for instance,
George G. M. James published Stolen
Legacy, in which he claimed that the ancient Greeks “stole” their civilization from secret societies in Egypt. His “proof” for this extraordinary claim rested primarily on a tradition among the Masons, a group which developed in Europe in the A . D .
1700s. The Masons held that many Greek philosophers such as Aristotle had been influenced by so-called “mystery religions” of Egypt, though the best example of this alleged influence was the fact that Aristotle had written about the concept of the soul— hardly an idea unique to the Egyptians.
Nor was this much of a substantial basis on which to write a history; but in
phered—chiefly by comparing it with hieroglyphic records recording the same events—the language itself has never been translated.
Prior to their development of the Merotic script in about 300 B.C., the Kushites had written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian influences were evident in the building of pyramids, which were smaller and much steeper than the pyramids of Egypt. Like the pyramids of Egypt, and unlike those of Mesoamerica, the pyramids of Meröe were built as tombs for kings and queens.
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fact James’s book was not so much history as it was conspiracy theory—the idea that the world is controlled by a few shadowy figures who pull all the strings. It is difficult to change the minds of people who subscribe to a conspiracy theory, because they interpret every piece of evidence that contradicts them as part of a massive cover-up, and thus as further proof of their position. Afrocentrists in subsequent years made claims that increasingly went against the record of historical scholarship, and instead of conducting research, they simply looked for “evidence” that agreed with their beliefs. True historical study is scientific in nature: it seeks to discover all possible facts, and from these facts develops a theory about history. It is hard work. Politically or racially motivated
“historians”—an extreme example would be the Nazis, with their false explanation
of the Indo-European past—have a much easier job. They know in advance what conclusion they intend to reach, and then look for any “facts” (no matter how questionable) to back them up. Anyone who presents other evidence is treated not as a fellow scholar but as an enemy.
Certainly the Egyptians influenced
Greece, but to claim that the Greeks “stole” their civilization from anywhere reflects a basic misunderstanding of how civilizations affect one another. In any case, the very idea of viewing cultures in racial terms goes against serious historians’ most basic beliefs about how they should study history. Today no one but an absolute quack or racist would claim, for instance, that the achievements of Greece or Rome show the superiority of white people. The glories of the ancient world are human achievements, not racial achievements, and they belong to all people regardless of ethnicity.
The quality of Merotic pottery was outstanding and reflects a standard of craftsmanship equal to that of any ancient civilization. Trade also flourished during the Merotic phase of Kushite history. Not only did the people of Kush trade with the Egyptians along the Nile, they used Red Sea ports to conduct trade with southwest Asian lands. Through Egypt, goods from Kush—including elephants, ostrich feathers, ivory, and various animal hides—reached Greece and Rome; and
Greek and Roman products such as jewelry and pottery made their way to Kush.
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Mountains of Ethiopia.
Photograph by Cory Langley.
Reproduced by permission.
The Kushite civilization reached its peak in the four centuries from 250 B.C. to A.D. 150. By then it had become more and more separate from Egypt, which was conquered in turn by the Greeks and the Romans. Kush began to decline after A.D. 150, however, in part due to the rise of a new Red Sea trading kingdom at Aksum.
Aksum (500 B.C.–A.D. 600)
To a much greater extent than the Kushites, the people of Aksum (sometimes spelled “Axum”) were both racially and culturally related to the Semitic peoples who came from the
Arabian Peninsula on the other side of the Red Sea. According to tradition, they were associated with the biblical Queen of
Sheba, who probably came from southwest Arabia [see sidebar,
“Ancient Africa and the Bible”]. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that Aksum had a strong Arabian influence.
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Ancient Africa and the Bible
According to tradition, the people of Aksum were associated with the biblical
Queen of Sheba and King Solomon of
Israel. The Bible suggests that there was a great love affair between the two. Indeed, the biblical Song of Solomon refers to a woman with dark skin.
Another tradition holds that a descendant of Sheba and King Solomon brought the Ark of the Covenant to
Aksum. The Ark was a holy relic of the
Israelite people, said to contain the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments as given to Moses; and as anyone who has ever seen the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981) knows, it was also supposed to possess great spiritual power.
According to a January 27, 1998, report in the New York Times, a number of people believe that the Ark, or at least part of it, is in Ethiopia. Reporter James C.
McKinley, Jr. wrote that when he asked an
Ethiopian deacon where the Ark was, the man “just smiled at what he saw as an absurd question. Everyone in this
windswept and dusty land knows that the ark is in a square stone temple beside [an] ancient church, he said.”
Regardless
of the Ark’s whereabouts, it is certain that there has been a strong relationship between Africa and the Bible. Aside from Egypt, which figures prominently in the Israelites’ story, the Old Testament frequently mentions
Kush (or Cush) as well as the overall region, which writers referred to as
Ethiopia.
Judaism took hold in East Africa at an early date, and the New Testament tells a story of an Ethiopian who went to worship in Jerusalem (Acts 8:26-40). The apostle Philip met him and led him to convert to Christianity. Two centuries after these events, King Ezana of Aksum also converted. Thereafter Ethiopia would remain Christian. During the Middle Ages, in fact, a myth spread in Europe concerning a great Ethiopian king named
Prester John, who reportedly led a vast
Christian empire.
The center of Aksum’s cultures was in the Red Sea port of Adulis (ah-DOO-lis), through which it came in contact with, and was influenced by, the Greek culture of Ptolemaic Egypt after the 300s B.C. By the first century A.D., Aksum was on the rise and became an important center for trade with places as far away as China, from which it imported silk, and India. The latter was a source of spices, a particularly important part of life in the time before refrigerators because they slowed down the spoiling of meat.
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Moses being blinded by the
Ark of the Covenant.
Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
Aksum also had a line of strong kings, who also served a religious function. In fact, the kings were considered sacred to the point that the queen mother (i.e., the king’s mother) often took over the day-to-day administrative duties. The queen mother went by the title of Candace (KAN-des), which is often mistaken for a proper name. It was more like the equivalent of the Roman Caesar.
A particularly notable Aksumite monarch was Ezana
(AY-zah-nah). In A.D. 325, he went to war against Kush and destroyed its fading capital at Meröe. But around the same time, he came in contact with two young Syrians shipwrecked at Adulis. Through their influence, he converted to Christianity, which became the religion of Ethiopia from then on. Before
Ezana, the Aksumites had worshiped a variety of deities not unlike those of the Egyptians. They built obelisks (AH-buhliskz)—tall, freestanding columns of stone—in honor of gods associated with the Moon, warfare, and other aspects of life.
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Aksum’s power and wealth grew in succeeding centuries, till much of the region came under the control of its empire.
During the A.D. 500s, its authority extended across the Red Sea, to control the so-called “incense states” of western Arabia. These were lush areas on the coast of the Arabian Peninsula—quite different from the desert interior—known for growing spices such as frankincense (FRANK-in-sints) and myrrh (MUHR).
The Bantu peoples (c.1200 B.C.–c. 500 A.D.)
Around the area of modern-day Nigeria, the Bantu
(BAHN-too) peoples had their origins. In some regards, the
Bantu do not qualify as a full-fledged civilization the way the
Kushites do. They had no written language, nor did they build cities or even stay in one spot. Theirs was a history characterized by migration, as they moved out of their homeland in about 1200 B.C. to spread throughout southern Africa.
In fact, the Bantu were not even a nation or a unified group of people in the way that the Egyptians, Kushites, or
Aksumites were. They were simply a group of more or less related peoples, all sub-Saharan African (i.e., “black”) in origin.
However, as in many other instances, the important distinction is one of language, not race. It was language that gave the
Bantu peoples their distinctive character, which has influenced the culture of southern Africa up to the present day.
Though they spoke a variety of tongues, they all used the same word for “people”: bantu.
Whether or not they qualified as a true civilization, the
Bantu had a strongly developed culture based on family ties.
Families became grouped into clans, and clans into tribes. Loyalty to the extended family—including one’s ancestors—was the most important bond in Bantu society. As in China, the ancestors played an important role in Bantu religion, which also deified the forces of nature. Though they had a variety of gods, the Bantu also believed in a supreme being above all.
The world of the Bantu peoples was a tightly knit one, in which everyone had a place and everyone belonged. In modernday southern Africa, where the Bantu peoples settled, this is symbolized by the carefully organized layout of family compounds, or enclosed areas with a number of buildings. In the compound,
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there are specific areas for each family member, as well as areas for the animals and for cooking and other facets of daily life.
No one, it seems, lacked a place in Bantu society. To further strengthen the bonds among people, the Bantu were organized by age and gender groups, for instance, older men often belonged to secret societies. This is not unlike the idea of the Masonic lodge in modern America. For the Bantu, however, the strength of the ties between people meant much more than such ties do to Americans. Whereas Americans are defined partly by their independence, interdependence was and is a defining characteristic of Bantu society.
Each society has a certain way that it transmits its values: that is, the things that are important to it. In modern America, values are transmitted primarily through the media: TV, movies, radio, magazines, and newspapers. The Bantu, lacking a written language, had a strong oral tradition. In other words, they transmitted their values, and indeed much of their cultural heritage, primarily through stories committed to memory by elders.
Music was also an important part of the Bantu oral tradition. At musical performances, everyone present participated. Participation was easy, because every member of the tribe knew the songs—which concerned aspects of daily life as well as the stories of legendary heroes—from early childhood.
Greek culture in Homer’s time was likewise centered around oral traditions, stories memorized by wandering poets who sang them to listeners, often over a period of days.
Ironworking and agriculture
Another notable quality of the Bantu was their technological advancement in the area of ironworking, a remarkable achievement for a people who had no written language.
The Olmec of Mesoamerica, by contrast, did have a written language, yet they never progressed beyond the Bronze Age— and then only in about A.D. 1200. Since the Sahara Desert provided a virtually impenetrable barrier between the Bantu peoples and the Egyptians, it is apparent that they developed their iron-smelting technology entirely on their own.
The same is true of Bantu agriculture: studies by archaeologists and linguists suggest that domestication of plants occurred more or less simultaneously—and indepen298
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dently—in several parts of Africa before the Sahara became a desert. By about 1600 B.C., the Bantu peoples had a set of staple crops that included rice, yams, and various grains.
Bushman hunting with bow and arrow.
Corbis/Anthony Barrister.
Reproduced by permission.
As for iron-working, it flourished as early as 1000 B.C. among the Nok (NAWK) people, a Bantu group in what is now
Nigeria. The Nok also excelled in textile-weaving, sculpture, and jewelry-making. Based on the large number of high-quality figurines (FIG-yoo-reenz), or small sculptures, found at Nok archaeological sites, they must have been wealthy. As with the ancient Saharan culture at its high point, only people well past the point of mere survival could afford to spend so much energy on creating beauty.
The spread of Bantu culture
In their migration southward and eastward into the savanna, which contains the continent’s best land, the Bantu displaced a number of native peoples in southern Africa. These
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Bantu Languages
Because there are so many different groups of people in Africa, a person needs a lingua franca to get around. In northern Africa, Arabic is the common language, whereas in nations that were once colonies of Britain or
France, English or French provides a lingua franca. But in much of southern
Africa, the common language is native to the African continent.
This common language is Swahili
(swah-HEEL-ee), spoken by 49 million people in Kenya, Tanzania, the Congo, and Uganda. Such large numbers for any
African language are rare; the average language in Africa has only half a million speakers. But the Bantu language of
Swahili provides a common tongue for the mostly Bantu peoples of southern
Africa. There are some fifteen other
Bantu languages spoken in parts of southern Africa.
included the Pygmies, a group whose average height was under five feet, who were forced into the less desirable rain forest. There were also the Khoisan (koySAHN) peoples, speakers of the so-called
“click language”—one can hear it spoken in the 1980 movie The Gods Must Be
Crazy, which humorously contrasts
Bushman and Western societies. The
Bantu peoples drove the Khoisan-speaking tribes into the much less favorable
Kalahari (kahl-ah-HAHR-ee) Desert.
It is doubtful that the Bantu waged war against the native peoples of these areas; they probably did not have to, since they were the more technologically sophisticated group. By about A.D. 500, the ethnic map of southern Africa was more or less complete. The Bantu controlled the best areas. They would continue to do so until the Europeans arrived more than
1,000 years later.
Africa to the end of the
Middle Ages
Historians know about several other important ancient African cultures because of their contact with the
Phoenicians or the Egyptians. Among the Africans with whom the Phoenicians traded were people living in what is probably now the nation of Senegal (SEHN-uh-gahl) in West Africa.
The western portion of the continent would become the site for a number of important African kingdoms during the period of the Middle Ages in Europe. Among these were
Ghana (GAHN-nah), Mali (MAHL-ee), and the Songhai
(sawng-HIE) kingdom. Deep in the Sahara arose the kingdom of Kanem-Bornu (KAH-nehm BOHR-noo), which lasted for a thousand years from about A.D. 800 to about A.D. 1800. Notable civilizations in Bantu-speaking lands included the one that
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developed around the southern African fortress of Zimbabwe
(zim-BAHB-way), which flourished from about 1000 to about
1400 A.D.
As with the Americas, African civilization truly came into its own at a time when European civilizations were at a low point. The same was true of the Arab world; in the 600s,
Arab armies conquered much of northern Africa, including the area where the Kushite civilization had once been located, in what became the nation of Sudan. In the 1400s, when European civilization experienced a resurgence and Europeans began exploring the rest of the world, the Africans and Native
Americans would suffer as a result.
Slavery
Like the Native Americans, the Africans were not united, and this helped make slavery possible. Members of rival tribes would capture and sell their “enemies” to the Europeans, a move that was as foolish as it was greedy. The Europeans did not care about the tribal differences: they would just as soon enslave one African as another. Often those who had sold others into slavery would later be captured and sold themselves.
The slave trade prevailed between the late 1400s and the early 1800s, when Europeans finally woke up to the great crime of slavery. In 1807, England became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade, and soon afterward it abolished slavery itself. In the southern United States, however, slavery lasted longer because of the agricultural economy of the South. The dependence on agriculture made the American
South much less economically advanced than the industrial
North, as proved by the victory of the Union in the Civil War
(1861–1865).
Colonization
In the 1800s, just as they were protesting the evils of
American slavery, the nations of Europe began dividing the continent of Africa into various colonies. By the turn of the century, the only independent nations in Africa were Liberia in the west, founded by freed American slaves; and Ethiopia, site of Aksum and other great civilizations of later times. In
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1890, Italy colonized Eritrea (air-iTREE-uh), the coastal region where
Aksum had been located, though the
Ethiopians reclaimed it after defeating the Italians in an 1896 battle.
King Hail Selassie appeared in front of the League of
Nations and spoke of
Italy’s attempts to reconquer Ethiopia.
The Library of Congress.
Colonies changed hands in
World War I (1914–1918), but still much of Africa remained under European control. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (beh-NEE-toh moo-sohLEE-nee; 1883–1945) attempted to reconquer Ethiopia and add it to Italian possessions in eastern Africa. The
Italians waged a cruel war against the
Ethiopians in the 1930s, sending modern fighter planes against soldiers armed with nineteenth-century flintlock rifles. Again, it was a case of superior technology winning over less advanced versions, but the moral high ground belonged to the Ethiopians.
King Haile Selassie (HIGH-lee seh-LAHsee; 1892–1975) made a compelling speech before the League of Nations, an organization formed after World War I in order to prevent future wars. Its failure to help Ethiopia provided clear evidence of the League’s weaknesses and paved the way for World
War II (1939–1945).
Independence
After the war, African nations rapidly became independent. Ethiopia was recognized as a leader among nations and became a founding member of the Organization of African
Unity (OAU). Ironically, what brought down Haile Selassie was not the Italian invasion but enemies from within: he was deposed and executed by Communist rebels who took over the country in the 1970s.
Ethiopia’s problems were just one example of the turmoil that rocked the continent in the decades following independence. There were literally hundreds of civil wars throughout Africa, and the continent was subjected to numerous
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dictatorships. One of the worst was in the nation of Uganda (oo-GAHN-dah): settled by the Bantu in ancient times and later colonized by Britain, Uganda in the 1970s was ruled by Idi Amin (EEdee ah-MEEN; c. 1925–), a military officer with the heart of a serial killer.
Much of the planet remained largely ignorant of these problems. As far as most white Europeans and Americans were concerned, Africa’s importance had ended as soon as whites left.
Though black Africans were still being sold as slaves by the Arab rulers of the
Sudan in the 1990s, this excited little moral outrage in the West; in fact, the only African problems that attracted much attention, in fact, were “blackwhite” conflicts, most notably the controversy over apartheid (uh-PAHR-tide) in South Africa.
Under apartheid, a system of dividing people by race, nonwhite
South Africans became a permanent underclass. Not only were they forced into lower economic positions than whites, but they could not move around the country freely or use any of the same facilities—for instance, bathrooms—as whites. It was worse than segregation, which prevailed in the American South prior to the 1960s. It compared with aspects of the Indian caste system. Ironically, many
Indians in South Africa became victims of apartheid as well.
Lowest of all were black South Africans, the descendants of the
Bantu people who had once claimed the land from the original inhabitants.
Under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, the black majority gained control of
South Africa in the 1990s.
Reuters/Corbis-Bettmann.
Reproduced by permission.
Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela (mahn-DEHlah; 1918–), apartheid was overthrown and the black majority gained control of the country in the early 1990s. Other positive events happened around the same time: with the downfall of the Soviet Union, Communism came to an end in Ethiopia and other African nations as well. Ethnic tension, however, remained high. Unlike the black-white problems in South
Africa, these were not conflicts that outsiders could readily
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A Note on Some of the “For More Information” Sources
Because of the controversies associated with Afrocentrism, the study of
African history is more difficult than the study of some other ancient civilizations. In selecting further reading on Africa, care has been taken to avoid works that are clearly not based on historical fact. Still, questionable claims are made in some of the books or Web sites listed below, but these sources are included because they offer valuable information as well.
In researching history, it is always wise to use several sources, including one or two acknowledged authorities on a subject. If one book offers an account of
events that differs noticeably from the others, there is a chance its author used unconventional research methods in compiling his or her information. On the other hand, it should be cautioned that just because something differs from the mainstream does not mean it is wrong; it is entirely a question of why it differs. Is the work the result of unique research that has yielded new information, as in the case of
Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy?
Or is the writer simply presenting supposition—something that might be true, or something that he or she wishes were true—as fact?
understand. Few could tell the difference between the Hutu
(HOO-too) and Tutsi (TOOT-see), two Bantu-speaking groups in Rwanda (ruh-WAHN-duh); but this did not stop the Hutu from massacring half a million Tutsi in 1994.
The Hutu-Tutsi conflict resembled the ethnic problems in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s; the United States, however, took considerably more interest in the Yugoslav conflict. Sadly, once Africa was no longer a valuable chess piece in the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, it had little political value. With the wreck that dictatorships had made of African economies, there was little business interest in the continent either. But Mandela’s leadership as the first president of the “new” South Africa offered hope for the future. On the ruins of one of the worst European political systems in Africa, many hoped, Mandela and those who followed him might create a model for black Africa in the twenty-first century. 304
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For More Information
Books
Ayo, Yvonne. Africa. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Davidson, Basil and the Editors of Time-Life Books. African Kingdoms.
Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1978.
Dijkstra, Henk. History of the Ancient & Medieval World, Volume 3: Ancient
Cultures. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 403-14.
Dijkstra, Henk, ed. History of the Ancient & Medieval World, Volume 11:
Empires of the Ancient World. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 1543-54.
Dué, Andrea, ed. The Atlas of Human History: Cradles of Civilization: Ancient
Egypt and Early Middle Eastern Civilizations. Text by Renzo Rossi. New
York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996, pp. 56-59.
Dué, Andrea, ed. The Atlas of Human History: Civilizations of Asia: India,
China and the Peoples of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Text by
Renzo Rossi and Martina Veutro. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996, pp. 52-55.
Haskins, James and Kathleen Benson. African Beginnings. Paintings by
Floyd Cooper. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1998.
Martell, Hazel Mary. The Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World. New York:
Kingfisher, 1995, pp. 114-23.
Motley, Mary Penick. Africa: Its Empires, Nations and People. With illustrations by Arthur Roland, Jr. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,
1969.
Vlahos, Olivia. African Beginnings. Illustrated by George Ford. New York:
Viking Press, 1967.
Web Sites
“Africa in 1000 B.C.E.-600 C.E.” http://loki.stockton.edu/~gilmorew/ consorti/1cafric.htm (June 8, 1999).
“Africa Timeline.” http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/worldciv/reference/afritime.htm (June 8, 1999).
Ancient Nubia. http://library.advanced.org/22845/ (June 8, 1999).
K-12 Africa Guide. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Home_Page/
AFR_GIDE.html (June 8, 1999).
“Mr. Dorish’s Ancient Africa Page.” http://www.flinet.com/~rms/sixth/ dorish/ 609ancafr.html (June 8, 1999).
Piccione, Peter A. “Excursis IV: Nubia: The Land Upriver.” http:// www.library.nwu.edu/class/history/B94/B94nubia.html (June 8, 1999).
“Saharan Rock Art.” http://www.paleologos.com/saharaan.htm (June 8,
1999).
“Sahara Tassili Frescoes.” http://www.paleologos.com/sahang.htm (June
8, 1999).
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10
A
frica lies south of Europe and southwest of Asia. Geographically it is about three times the size of the United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. At its northeast corner is Egypt, which is connected to the Sinai Peninsula—and hence to the
Asian continent by a very narrow strip of land. This is the only spot where Africa touches another continent; otherwise, it is surrounded by water. The Mediterranean Sea separates it from
Europe in the north; the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden lie between it and the Arabian Peninsula to the east. Two vast bodies of water—the Indian Ocean on the eastern side, and the even larger Atlantic on the west—surround the remainder of Africa.
Why Africa is important
One of the greatest civilizations of all time, Egypt, was in
Africa. Perhaps the only ancient civilizations that can be compared with it are those of Greece and Rome, which were influenced by it. Egypt, of course, has had its own chapter in this series; and Carthage, in North Africa, is also covered elsewhere.
The focus of this chapter is entirely on Africa south of the Sahara
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Desert—that is, sub-Saharan Africa—as well as on the desert itself. That desert would have an impact on African history right up to the modern day; so, too, would the African civilizations of ancient times. There was the kingdom of Kush, which developed its own form of writing and briefly ruled Egypt; the kingdom of
Aksum, an important trading center; and the Bantu peoples, who developed ironworking and spread it, along with their languages, throughout the southern part of the African continent.
Map of Africa.
XNR Productions.
The Gale Group.
The origins of humankind
Though there is much dispute regarding how humankind began, paleoanthropologists (pay-lee-oh-an-throhPAHL-uh-jistz; scientists who study human origins) generally agree that humanity originated in Africa millions of years ago.
The Paleolithic Age (pay-lee-oh-LITH-ik), or Old Stone Age, probably began there about 2 million years ago. Eventually human ancestors moved out of Africa to other continents.
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Words to Know: Africa
Afrocentrism: A belief that people of African descent should interpret the world from an African perspective.
Apartheid: A system of enforced racial segregation and white supremacy that existed in South Africa from 1948 to the early
1990s.
Cold War: Not really a “war” but an ongoing conflict between the United States and
Soviet Union from the end of World War
II to the fall of Communism in the early
1990s.
Colonnade: A long series of columns on either side of a walkway. Often, but not always, there is a roof over the columns.
Interdependence: A situation in which people rely upon each other.
Neolithic Age: The New Stone Age, c.
10,000–c. 4000 B.C., which began with a dramatic increase in technology and agriculture. Obelisk: A tall, freestanding column of stone.
Oral tradition: A body of stories and sayings and other cultural information passed down by word of mouth.
Paleoanthropology: The study of human origins. Paleolithic Age: The Old Stone Age, c.
2,000,000–c. 10,000 B.C.
Compound (n.): A number of separate dwellings surrounded by a protective wall. Racism: The belief that race is the primary factor determining peoples’ abilities, and that one race is superior to others.
Condescend: To treat somebody as though they are inferior.
Regime: Government; usually used as a negative term.
Deify: To turn someone or something into a god. Savanna: Grassland.
Depose: To remove from power.
Staple: A commodity with widespread or constant appeal.
Eurocentrism: The idea that European culture provides the standard by which all others should be judged.
Stellae: Plural of stela, a large stone pillar, usually inscribed with a message commemorating a specific event.
Figurine: A small sculpture, usually a depiction of a person or animal.
Values: Beliefs about what is good and bad, important and unimportant.
About 10,000 B.C., as the last ice age was ending, the world entered the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Age (Nee-ohLITH-ik). This was a period of dramatic progress in agriculture, toolmaking, and other areas that created the framework for the development of civilization in about 4000 B.C.
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The Sahara
A continent of extraordinary physical contrasts, Africa has mountains, deserts, tropical rainforests, and, savanna (grasslands). Yet except for the savanna and a few other areas, the majority of the African continent offers its inhabitants a meager living at best. This is particularly true of North
Africa, which except for a fertile strip along the Mediterranean coast and
Nile River, is covered by the Sahara
(suh-HAIR-uh) and other deserts.
Single spreading tree on the golden African savanna.
Corbis. Reproduced by permission. The Sahara is one of the central facts of life in Africa. It divides the continent as virtually no other physical feature in the world does, and it provides the reason for the great differences between North African and subSaharan cultures. Quite simply,
Egyptian civilization had little influence on areas from which it was separated by the Sahara. Thus Egypt had much effect on Kush and Aksum in
East Africa, but little at all on the Bantu peoples and other groups in southern and western Africa.
By far the world’s largest desert, the Sahara today covers some 3.5 million square miles (9.07 thousand square kilometers), an area larger than the continental United States; yet only 780 acres (316 hectares) of it, a little more than one square mile (2.6 square kilometers), is fertile. The rest is mostly stone and dry earth with scattered shrubs. Contrary to the way it is usually presented in movies, only a very small portion of the Sahara consists of sand dunes.
The ancient Saharan cultures
(c. 6000–c. 1500 B.C.)
Though the Sahara today is virtually uninhabitable,
8,000 years ago, it was a lush region of rivers and valleys. For thousands of years, it was home to many cultures, some of
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them quite advanced, to judge from their artwork. Who these peoples were—it appears there were many groups—remains a mystery, though they left behind an extraordinary record in the form of their rock-art paintings and carvings [see sidebar,
“The Brilliant Legacy of Saharan Rock Art”].
The rock art, which varies greatly in its representation of human and animal figures, is divided into four historical groups. First is the Hunter period, from about 6000 to about
4000 B.C., depicting a Paleolithic people who survived by hunting the many wild animals then available in the region.
Next was the Herder period, from about 4000 to 1500
B.C. As their name suggests, these people maintained herds of animals and also practiced basic agriculture. Much more civilized than the Hunter people, they produced the most sophisticated Saharan rock art, much of it portraying their herds. In fact, their ability to portray perspective and the movement of the human form was much greater than that of the Egyptians.
As the Sahara began to become drier and drier, however, there were no more herds. Egyptians began bringing in domesticated horses to cross the desert: hence the name of the
Horse period (c. 1500–c. 600 B.C.) By about 600 B.C., however, not even horses could survive in the forbidding climate. There was only one creature that could: the hardy, seemingly inexhaustible camel. Thus began the Camel era, which continues to the present day.
Kush (c. 2000 B.C.–c. A.D. 400)
In the southern part of Egypt, and the northern section of the modern nation of Sudan, is the region of Nubia (NOObee-uh). Much of it is covered by the Nubian Desert, but as with Egypt, the Nile River provided a fertile strip of land on which a civilization developed. This was the kingdom of Kush
(KÜSH), which existed in various forms for nearly 2,400 years.
The Kushites’ language was related to the Semitic tongues of southwest Asia. Yet, from Egyptian tomb paintings, it is clear that they were what modern Americans would call
“black”—or, to use a more accurate term, sub-Saharan African.
It appears that Semitic peoples migrated across the narrow Red
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The Brilliant Legacy of Saharan Rock Art
In about 6000 B.C., what is now the Sahara Desert was a land of fertile green fields, lush valleys alive with all manner of plants and animals, and flowing rivers filled with fish. It was also the home to a series of highly advanced societies whose identity is unknown to historians. In fact, most of what modern people do know about these ancient
Saharans comes from the artwork they painted and carved on stone surfaces throughout the desert.
These paintings provide evidence of extensive wildlife in the region, including giraffe, elephants, and cattle.
Later scenes show camels. Other pieces illustrate the cultural and political life of the ancient Sahara, including dances, rituals, battles, and the workings of justice.
One particularly complex piece portrays judges, police, jailers, and officials, with a man at the center who was apparently found guilty of a crime. Only a highly
advanced civilization could have such a formal justice system.
Another painting, obviously from the Herder period, looks as if it were painted in the A.D.1800s—but it is more likely a product of the 1800s B . C . The women in the picture are clearly wealthy and relatively pampered, with complex hairdos. These details indicate that the people of the ancient Sahara had mastered their environment and were well past the point of merely surviving.
After 2000 B.C., the Sahara began to dry up, and the human population almost completely disappeared. If the paintings had been in a tropical rainforest environment, they might have been ruined; as it was, the dry desert air preserved them. Nor did they suffer the fate of Egyptian or Chinese treasures stolen by graverobbers. The Saharan rock art was hard to get to, protected by nests of
Sea to the “Horn of Africa” and intermarried with the peoples living there. Thus even today, the peoples of the Horn, particularly in modern Ethiopia and Somalia (soh-MAHL-ee-uh), have physical features which distinguish them from the peoples living further south.
Regarding the name “Ethiopia,” it should be noted that as with Armenia and Macedonia, it refers both to a modern nation and to an ancient region, yet these are not exactly the same. The term Ethiopian is derived from a Greek expression meaning “burned skin”—suggesting a dark complexion.
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poisonous snakes and miles of forbidding sand dunes.
The world owes a great debt to
French explorer Henri Lhote (ahn-REE
LAWT), who in 1956 discovered a great collection of rock art at Tassili n’Ajjer (tahSEEL-ee nah-ZHAYR) deep in the desert.
Lhote and his team of artists made it possible for everyone to see the great treasures of the Sahara without going there. Photographing the artwork would not do, especially because many pieces were in dark caves and their colors had faded; therefore he and the others painstakingly copied some 800 works of art, restoring original colors. This was a particularly difficult task given the nature of the environment. Not only was it hard to get to Tassili and other sites, but, in copying the art, members of the team often had to stand on tiptoe or lie on their backs while they worked.
The treasures of the Sahara are more valuable than diamonds. During the late twentieth century, people more interested in money than history (the modern counterparts of the ancient grave robbers) began looting artwork from sites in Morocco. Using crowbars, they removed pictures to sell them in Europe. In response to these and other abuses, the
Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs and groups such as the Trust for African Rock
Art began working to preserve the treasures of the Sahara.
David Coulson, cofounder of the
Trust for African Rock Art, published an article called “Ancient Art of the Sahara,” in the June 1999 National Geographic. The group also works to preserve prehistoric artwork in other parts of the continent, including South Africa, where the Bushmen left a rich legacy of rock art before they were displaced by the Bantu peoples.
In ancient times, the entire region south of Egypt was often described as “Ethiopia;” indeed, that name was often used to describe all of Africa below Egypt.
Later, the Greek historian Herodotus, describing the multinational force with which the Persians invaded Greek in
480 B.C., noted the presence of both straight-haired “eastern
Ethiopians,” and curly-haired “western Ethiopians”—the latter dressed in lion skins—among the Persian army. These terms must have referred to Aksumites and Kushites respectively: though neither nation had been conquered by the Persian
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Empire, it is possible the Persians recruited “Ethiopian” warriors for their forces.
Early period (c. 2000–716 B.C.)
Whatever their origins, the Kushites were closely linked with Egypt. It appears that contact with the latter began in about 2000 B.C., around the time Kush came into existence.
In that first phase of Kushite civilization, its capital was first at
Karmah (KAHR-muh), and later at Napata (NAH-puh-tah), a city on the Nile just south of Egypt. The Kushites traded extensively with the Egyptians, but relations were not always friendly. In the 1800s B.C., the pharaoh Senusret III built fortresses to protect against invasion by the Kushites. In the
1500s B.C., an invasion came—only it was Egypt that invaded
Kush, not the other way around.
Kush remained an Egyptian colony for hundreds of years, but Egypt began to decline after the end of the New
Kingdom in the 1000s B.C. Kush, in turn, was on the rise, particularly under the reign of King Piankhi (pee-AHNG-kee; c.
769–716 B.C.) Piankhi was a fervent believer in the Egyptian god Amon. He may have marched his armies into Egypt and conquered the land, but he seems to have had no interest in staying and building an empire. That job would fall to his brother Shabaka (SHAH-buh-kuh; r. 716 B.C.–695 B.C.)
The Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of Egypt (712–667 B.C.)
In 712 B.C., Shabaka’s troops swept into Egypt, and he ordered the execution of the reigning pharaoh. This ended years of Libyan control over Egypt and began the Late Period in ancient Egyptian history. Shabaka established the TwentyFifth Dynasty, which lasted for half a century. Like Piankhi,
Shabaka embraced the religion of Amon. He assigned his sister
Amunirdis I (ah-moo-NEER-dis) an important position as
“god’s wife of Amon” in the temple at Thebes.
In 698 B.C., Shabaka’s nephew Shebitku (SHEH-bit-koo) assumed the Egyptian throne while his brother Taharqa (tuhHAHR-kuh) apparently ruled over Thebes. If this was indeed the case, it was an arrangement similar to the one between
Ashurbanipal of Assyria and his brother Shamash-shum-ukin a
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few years later. This would be particularly ironic, given the role Ashurbanipal would play in the lives of Shebitku and Taharqa.
The two Kushite brothers appear to have gotten along much better than their Assyrian counterparts.
Shebitku favored resistance against the
Assyrians, who were on the move in
Palestine with an eye toward Egypt.
Apparently at his urging, Taharqa’s
Kushite army aided the Israelites against Assyrian troops under Sennacherib. Also, there seems to have been no struggle for succession: when
Shebitku died in 690 B.C., Taharqa took his place. Among the achievements of
Taharqa’s long reign, which lasted from 690 to 664 B.C., was the building of a colonnade (KAHL-uh-nayd), a long hallway of columns, in the temple of
Amun at Karnak.
But Taharqa was destined to be the last Kushite pharaoh. After 15 years of peace, his troops fought and defeated an Assyrian army under Esarhaddon in 675 B.C. Four years later, however, the
Assyrians returned and overwhelmed Taharqa’s forces. He regained control in Egypt for a little longer, but in 667 Ashurbanipal’s troops scored a major victory against the Kushites.
Taharqa fled to Napata, where he died in 664 B.C.
Sculpture of King Taharqa.
Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.
Meröe period (600s B.C.–c. 400 A.D.)
Some time after they were driven out of Egypt, the
Kushites abandoned their capital at Napata and moved hundreds of miles upriver—-that is, southward—to the city of
Meröe (MEHR-oh-wee). Meröe became the Kushite capital some time in the 600s B.C. Thereafter its name was closely associated with that of the Kushite civilization in general.
The written language of the Kushites, which developed only after the migration southward, is referred to as Merotic
(mehr-AH-tik). Oddly, though the script has been deciAfrica
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Ancient Africa: The Debate Rages On
For many centuries, white
Europeans (including their descendants in the United States) ignored the achievements of sub-Saharan Africans. This attitude was Eurocentrism, the idea that
European culture provides the standard by which all others should be judged.
Combined with racism, Eurocentrism helped justify the slave trade, but even long after slavery ended, many whites continued to take a condescending attitude toward Africa.
Obviously, these were ignorant attitudes, and eventually a variety of movements developed in reaction to them. Among these was Afrocentrism which, in contrast to Eurocentrism, sought to interpret the world from an African perspective. Afrocentrists placed a great emphasis on the study of African cultures and past civilizations. They pointed out the obvious fact that Egypt was an African
civilization, and called attention to its links with Nubia, or Kush.
These were positive and muchneeded changes in the character of historical study; but many Afrocentrists went much further. In 1954, for instance,
George G. M. James published Stolen
Legacy, in which he claimed that the ancient Greeks “stole” their civilization from secret societies in Egypt. His “proof” for this extraordinary claim rested primarily on a tradition among the Masons, a group which developed in Europe in the A . D .
1700s. The Masons held that many Greek philosophers such as Aristotle had been influenced by so-called “mystery religions” of Egypt, though the best example of this alleged influence was the fact that Aristotle had written about the concept of the soul— hardly an idea unique to the Egyptians.
Nor was this much of a substantial basis on which to write a history; but in
phered—chiefly by comparing it with hieroglyphic records recording the same events—the language itself has never been translated.
Prior to their development of the Merotic script in about 300 B.C., the Kushites had written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian influences were evident in the building of pyramids, which were smaller and much steeper than the pyramids of Egypt. Like the pyramids of Egypt, and unlike those of Mesoamerica, the pyramids of Meröe were built as tombs for kings and queens.
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fact James’s book was not so much history as it was conspiracy theory—the idea that the world is controlled by a few shadowy figures who pull all the strings. It is difficult to change the minds of people who subscribe to a conspiracy theory, because they interpret every piece of evidence that contradicts them as part of a massive cover-up, and thus as further proof of their position. Afrocentrists in subsequent years made claims that increasingly went against the record of historical scholarship, and instead of conducting research, they simply looked for “evidence” that agreed with their beliefs. True historical study is scientific in nature: it seeks to discover all possible facts, and from these facts develops a theory about history. It is hard work. Politically or racially motivated
“historians”—an extreme example would be the Nazis, with their false explanation
of the Indo-European past—have a much easier job. They know in advance what conclusion they intend to reach, and then look for any “facts” (no matter how questionable) to back them up. Anyone who presents other evidence is treated not as a fellow scholar but as an enemy.
Certainly the Egyptians influenced
Greece, but to claim that the Greeks “stole” their civilization from anywhere reflects a basic misunderstanding of how civilizations affect one another. In any case, the very idea of viewing cultures in racial terms goes against serious historians’ most basic beliefs about how they should study history. Today no one but an absolute quack or racist would claim, for instance, that the achievements of Greece or Rome show the superiority of white people. The glories of the ancient world are human achievements, not racial achievements, and they belong to all people regardless of ethnicity.
The quality of Merotic pottery was outstanding and reflects a standard of craftsmanship equal to that of any ancient civilization. Trade also flourished during the Merotic phase of Kushite history. Not only did the people of Kush trade with the Egyptians along the Nile, they used Red Sea ports to conduct trade with southwest Asian lands. Through Egypt, goods from Kush—including elephants, ostrich feathers, ivory, and various animal hides—reached Greece and Rome; and
Greek and Roman products such as jewelry and pottery made their way to Kush.
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Mountains of Ethiopia.
Photograph by Cory Langley.
Reproduced by permission.
The Kushite civilization reached its peak in the four centuries from 250 B.C. to A.D. 150. By then it had become more and more separate from Egypt, which was conquered in turn by the Greeks and the Romans. Kush began to decline after A.D. 150, however, in part due to the rise of a new Red Sea trading kingdom at Aksum.
Aksum (500 B.C.–A.D. 600)
To a much greater extent than the Kushites, the people of Aksum (sometimes spelled “Axum”) were both racially and culturally related to the Semitic peoples who came from the
Arabian Peninsula on the other side of the Red Sea. According to tradition, they were associated with the biblical Queen of
Sheba, who probably came from southwest Arabia [see sidebar,
“Ancient Africa and the Bible”]. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that Aksum had a strong Arabian influence.
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Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
Ancient Africa and the Bible
According to tradition, the people of Aksum were associated with the biblical
Queen of Sheba and King Solomon of
Israel. The Bible suggests that there was a great love affair between the two. Indeed, the biblical Song of Solomon refers to a woman with dark skin.
Another tradition holds that a descendant of Sheba and King Solomon brought the Ark of the Covenant to
Aksum. The Ark was a holy relic of the
Israelite people, said to contain the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments as given to Moses; and as anyone who has ever seen the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981) knows, it was also supposed to possess great spiritual power.
According to a January 27, 1998, report in the New York Times, a number of people believe that the Ark, or at least part of it, is in Ethiopia. Reporter James C.
McKinley, Jr. wrote that when he asked an
Ethiopian deacon where the Ark was, the man “just smiled at what he saw as an absurd question. Everyone in this
windswept and dusty land knows that the ark is in a square stone temple beside [an] ancient church, he said.”
Regardless
of the Ark’s whereabouts, it is certain that there has been a strong relationship between Africa and the Bible. Aside from Egypt, which figures prominently in the Israelites’ story, the Old Testament frequently mentions
Kush (or Cush) as well as the overall region, which writers referred to as
Ethiopia.
Judaism took hold in East Africa at an early date, and the New Testament tells a story of an Ethiopian who went to worship in Jerusalem (Acts 8:26-40). The apostle Philip met him and led him to convert to Christianity. Two centuries after these events, King Ezana of Aksum also converted. Thereafter Ethiopia would remain Christian. During the Middle Ages, in fact, a myth spread in Europe concerning a great Ethiopian king named
Prester John, who reportedly led a vast
Christian empire.
The center of Aksum’s cultures was in the Red Sea port of Adulis (ah-DOO-lis), through which it came in contact with, and was influenced by, the Greek culture of Ptolemaic Egypt after the 300s B.C. By the first century A.D., Aksum was on the rise and became an important center for trade with places as far away as China, from which it imported silk, and India. The latter was a source of spices, a particularly important part of life in the time before refrigerators because they slowed down the spoiling of meat.
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295
Moses being blinded by the
Ark of the Covenant.
Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
Aksum also had a line of strong kings, who also served a religious function. In fact, the kings were considered sacred to the point that the queen mother (i.e., the king’s mother) often took over the day-to-day administrative duties. The queen mother went by the title of Candace (KAN-des), which is often mistaken for a proper name. It was more like the equivalent of the Roman Caesar.
A particularly notable Aksumite monarch was Ezana
(AY-zah-nah). In A.D. 325, he went to war against Kush and destroyed its fading capital at Meröe. But around the same time, he came in contact with two young Syrians shipwrecked at Adulis. Through their influence, he converted to Christianity, which became the religion of Ethiopia from then on. Before
Ezana, the Aksumites had worshiped a variety of deities not unlike those of the Egyptians. They built obelisks (AH-buhliskz)—tall, freestanding columns of stone—in honor of gods associated with the Moon, warfare, and other aspects of life.
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Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
Aksum’s power and wealth grew in succeeding centuries, till much of the region came under the control of its empire.
During the A.D. 500s, its authority extended across the Red Sea, to control the so-called “incense states” of western Arabia. These were lush areas on the coast of the Arabian Peninsula—quite different from the desert interior—known for growing spices such as frankincense (FRANK-in-sints) and myrrh (MUHR).
The Bantu peoples (c.1200 B.C.–c. 500 A.D.)
Around the area of modern-day Nigeria, the Bantu
(BAHN-too) peoples had their origins. In some regards, the
Bantu do not qualify as a full-fledged civilization the way the
Kushites do. They had no written language, nor did they build cities or even stay in one spot. Theirs was a history characterized by migration, as they moved out of their homeland in about 1200 B.C. to spread throughout southern Africa.
In fact, the Bantu were not even a nation or a unified group of people in the way that the Egyptians, Kushites, or
Aksumites were. They were simply a group of more or less related peoples, all sub-Saharan African (i.e., “black”) in origin.
However, as in many other instances, the important distinction is one of language, not race. It was language that gave the
Bantu peoples their distinctive character, which has influenced the culture of southern Africa up to the present day.
Though they spoke a variety of tongues, they all used the same word for “people”: bantu.
Whether or not they qualified as a true civilization, the
Bantu had a strongly developed culture based on family ties.
Families became grouped into clans, and clans into tribes. Loyalty to the extended family—including one’s ancestors—was the most important bond in Bantu society. As in China, the ancestors played an important role in Bantu religion, which also deified the forces of nature. Though they had a variety of gods, the Bantu also believed in a supreme being above all.
The world of the Bantu peoples was a tightly knit one, in which everyone had a place and everyone belonged. In modernday southern Africa, where the Bantu peoples settled, this is symbolized by the carefully organized layout of family compounds, or enclosed areas with a number of buildings. In the compound,
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297
there are specific areas for each family member, as well as areas for the animals and for cooking and other facets of daily life.
No one, it seems, lacked a place in Bantu society. To further strengthen the bonds among people, the Bantu were organized by age and gender groups, for instance, older men often belonged to secret societies. This is not unlike the idea of the Masonic lodge in modern America. For the Bantu, however, the strength of the ties between people meant much more than such ties do to Americans. Whereas Americans are defined partly by their independence, interdependence was and is a defining characteristic of Bantu society.
Each society has a certain way that it transmits its values: that is, the things that are important to it. In modern America, values are transmitted primarily through the media: TV, movies, radio, magazines, and newspapers. The Bantu, lacking a written language, had a strong oral tradition. In other words, they transmitted their values, and indeed much of their cultural heritage, primarily through stories committed to memory by elders.
Music was also an important part of the Bantu oral tradition. At musical performances, everyone present participated. Participation was easy, because every member of the tribe knew the songs—which concerned aspects of daily life as well as the stories of legendary heroes—from early childhood.
Greek culture in Homer’s time was likewise centered around oral traditions, stories memorized by wandering poets who sang them to listeners, often over a period of days.
Ironworking and agriculture
Another notable quality of the Bantu was their technological advancement in the area of ironworking, a remarkable achievement for a people who had no written language.
The Olmec of Mesoamerica, by contrast, did have a written language, yet they never progressed beyond the Bronze Age— and then only in about A.D. 1200. Since the Sahara Desert provided a virtually impenetrable barrier between the Bantu peoples and the Egyptians, it is apparent that they developed their iron-smelting technology entirely on their own.
The same is true of Bantu agriculture: studies by archaeologists and linguists suggest that domestication of plants occurred more or less simultaneously—and indepen298
Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
dently—in several parts of Africa before the Sahara became a desert. By about 1600 B.C., the Bantu peoples had a set of staple crops that included rice, yams, and various grains.
Bushman hunting with bow and arrow.
Corbis/Anthony Barrister.
Reproduced by permission.
As for iron-working, it flourished as early as 1000 B.C. among the Nok (NAWK) people, a Bantu group in what is now
Nigeria. The Nok also excelled in textile-weaving, sculpture, and jewelry-making. Based on the large number of high-quality figurines (FIG-yoo-reenz), or small sculptures, found at Nok archaeological sites, they must have been wealthy. As with the ancient Saharan culture at its high point, only people well past the point of mere survival could afford to spend so much energy on creating beauty.
The spread of Bantu culture
In their migration southward and eastward into the savanna, which contains the continent’s best land, the Bantu displaced a number of native peoples in southern Africa. These
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Bantu Languages
Because there are so many different groups of people in Africa, a person needs a lingua franca to get around. In northern Africa, Arabic is the common language, whereas in nations that were once colonies of Britain or
France, English or French provides a lingua franca. But in much of southern
Africa, the common language is native to the African continent.
This common language is Swahili
(swah-HEEL-ee), spoken by 49 million people in Kenya, Tanzania, the Congo, and Uganda. Such large numbers for any
African language are rare; the average language in Africa has only half a million speakers. But the Bantu language of
Swahili provides a common tongue for the mostly Bantu peoples of southern
Africa. There are some fifteen other
Bantu languages spoken in parts of southern Africa.
included the Pygmies, a group whose average height was under five feet, who were forced into the less desirable rain forest. There were also the Khoisan (koySAHN) peoples, speakers of the so-called
“click language”—one can hear it spoken in the 1980 movie The Gods Must Be
Crazy, which humorously contrasts
Bushman and Western societies. The
Bantu peoples drove the Khoisan-speaking tribes into the much less favorable
Kalahari (kahl-ah-HAHR-ee) Desert.
It is doubtful that the Bantu waged war against the native peoples of these areas; they probably did not have to, since they were the more technologically sophisticated group. By about A.D. 500, the ethnic map of southern Africa was more or less complete. The Bantu controlled the best areas. They would continue to do so until the Europeans arrived more than
1,000 years later.
Africa to the end of the
Middle Ages
Historians know about several other important ancient African cultures because of their contact with the
Phoenicians or the Egyptians. Among the Africans with whom the Phoenicians traded were people living in what is probably now the nation of Senegal (SEHN-uh-gahl) in West Africa.
The western portion of the continent would become the site for a number of important African kingdoms during the period of the Middle Ages in Europe. Among these were
Ghana (GAHN-nah), Mali (MAHL-ee), and the Songhai
(sawng-HIE) kingdom. Deep in the Sahara arose the kingdom of Kanem-Bornu (KAH-nehm BOHR-noo), which lasted for a thousand years from about A.D. 800 to about A.D. 1800. Notable civilizations in Bantu-speaking lands included the one that
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Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
developed around the southern African fortress of Zimbabwe
(zim-BAHB-way), which flourished from about 1000 to about
1400 A.D.
As with the Americas, African civilization truly came into its own at a time when European civilizations were at a low point. The same was true of the Arab world; in the 600s,
Arab armies conquered much of northern Africa, including the area where the Kushite civilization had once been located, in what became the nation of Sudan. In the 1400s, when European civilization experienced a resurgence and Europeans began exploring the rest of the world, the Africans and Native
Americans would suffer as a result.
Slavery
Like the Native Americans, the Africans were not united, and this helped make slavery possible. Members of rival tribes would capture and sell their “enemies” to the Europeans, a move that was as foolish as it was greedy. The Europeans did not care about the tribal differences: they would just as soon enslave one African as another. Often those who had sold others into slavery would later be captured and sold themselves.
The slave trade prevailed between the late 1400s and the early 1800s, when Europeans finally woke up to the great crime of slavery. In 1807, England became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade, and soon afterward it abolished slavery itself. In the southern United States, however, slavery lasted longer because of the agricultural economy of the South. The dependence on agriculture made the American
South much less economically advanced than the industrial
North, as proved by the victory of the Union in the Civil War
(1861–1865).
Colonization
In the 1800s, just as they were protesting the evils of
American slavery, the nations of Europe began dividing the continent of Africa into various colonies. By the turn of the century, the only independent nations in Africa were Liberia in the west, founded by freed American slaves; and Ethiopia, site of Aksum and other great civilizations of later times. In
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301
1890, Italy colonized Eritrea (air-iTREE-uh), the coastal region where
Aksum had been located, though the
Ethiopians reclaimed it after defeating the Italians in an 1896 battle.
King Hail Selassie appeared in front of the League of
Nations and spoke of
Italy’s attempts to reconquer Ethiopia.
The Library of Congress.
Colonies changed hands in
World War I (1914–1918), but still much of Africa remained under European control. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (beh-NEE-toh moo-sohLEE-nee; 1883–1945) attempted to reconquer Ethiopia and add it to Italian possessions in eastern Africa. The
Italians waged a cruel war against the
Ethiopians in the 1930s, sending modern fighter planes against soldiers armed with nineteenth-century flintlock rifles. Again, it was a case of superior technology winning over less advanced versions, but the moral high ground belonged to the Ethiopians.
King Haile Selassie (HIGH-lee seh-LAHsee; 1892–1975) made a compelling speech before the League of Nations, an organization formed after World War I in order to prevent future wars. Its failure to help Ethiopia provided clear evidence of the League’s weaknesses and paved the way for World
War II (1939–1945).
Independence
After the war, African nations rapidly became independent. Ethiopia was recognized as a leader among nations and became a founding member of the Organization of African
Unity (OAU). Ironically, what brought down Haile Selassie was not the Italian invasion but enemies from within: he was deposed and executed by Communist rebels who took over the country in the 1970s.
Ethiopia’s problems were just one example of the turmoil that rocked the continent in the decades following independence. There were literally hundreds of civil wars throughout Africa, and the continent was subjected to numerous
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Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
dictatorships. One of the worst was in the nation of Uganda (oo-GAHN-dah): settled by the Bantu in ancient times and later colonized by Britain, Uganda in the 1970s was ruled by Idi Amin (EEdee ah-MEEN; c. 1925–), a military officer with the heart of a serial killer.
Much of the planet remained largely ignorant of these problems. As far as most white Europeans and Americans were concerned, Africa’s importance had ended as soon as whites left.
Though black Africans were still being sold as slaves by the Arab rulers of the
Sudan in the 1990s, this excited little moral outrage in the West; in fact, the only African problems that attracted much attention, in fact, were “blackwhite” conflicts, most notably the controversy over apartheid (uh-PAHR-tide) in South Africa.
Under apartheid, a system of dividing people by race, nonwhite
South Africans became a permanent underclass. Not only were they forced into lower economic positions than whites, but they could not move around the country freely or use any of the same facilities—for instance, bathrooms—as whites. It was worse than segregation, which prevailed in the American South prior to the 1960s. It compared with aspects of the Indian caste system. Ironically, many
Indians in South Africa became victims of apartheid as well.
Lowest of all were black South Africans, the descendants of the
Bantu people who had once claimed the land from the original inhabitants.
Under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, the black majority gained control of
South Africa in the 1990s.
Reuters/Corbis-Bettmann.
Reproduced by permission.
Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela (mahn-DEHlah; 1918–), apartheid was overthrown and the black majority gained control of the country in the early 1990s. Other positive events happened around the same time: with the downfall of the Soviet Union, Communism came to an end in Ethiopia and other African nations as well. Ethnic tension, however, remained high. Unlike the black-white problems in South
Africa, these were not conflicts that outsiders could readily
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A Note on Some of the “For More Information” Sources
Because of the controversies associated with Afrocentrism, the study of
African history is more difficult than the study of some other ancient civilizations. In selecting further reading on Africa, care has been taken to avoid works that are clearly not based on historical fact. Still, questionable claims are made in some of the books or Web sites listed below, but these sources are included because they offer valuable information as well.
In researching history, it is always wise to use several sources, including one or two acknowledged authorities on a subject. If one book offers an account of
events that differs noticeably from the others, there is a chance its author used unconventional research methods in compiling his or her information. On the other hand, it should be cautioned that just because something differs from the mainstream does not mean it is wrong; it is entirely a question of why it differs. Is the work the result of unique research that has yielded new information, as in the case of
Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy?
Or is the writer simply presenting supposition—something that might be true, or something that he or she wishes were true—as fact?
understand. Few could tell the difference between the Hutu
(HOO-too) and Tutsi (TOOT-see), two Bantu-speaking groups in Rwanda (ruh-WAHN-duh); but this did not stop the Hutu from massacring half a million Tutsi in 1994.
The Hutu-Tutsi conflict resembled the ethnic problems in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s; the United States, however, took considerably more interest in the Yugoslav conflict. Sadly, once Africa was no longer a valuable chess piece in the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, it had little political value. With the wreck that dictatorships had made of African economies, there was little business interest in the continent either. But Mandela’s leadership as the first president of the “new” South Africa offered hope for the future. On the ruins of one of the worst European political systems in Africa, many hoped, Mandela and those who followed him might create a model for black Africa in the twenty-first century. 304
Ancient Civilizations: Almanac
For More Information
Books
Ayo, Yvonne. Africa. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Davidson, Basil and the Editors of Time-Life Books. African Kingdoms.
Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1978.
Dijkstra, Henk. History of the Ancient & Medieval World, Volume 3: Ancient
Cultures. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 403-14.
Dijkstra, Henk, ed. History of the Ancient & Medieval World, Volume 11:
Empires of the Ancient World. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 1543-54.
Dué, Andrea, ed. The Atlas of Human History: Cradles of Civilization: Ancient
Egypt and Early Middle Eastern Civilizations. Text by Renzo Rossi. New
York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996, pp. 56-59.
Dué, Andrea, ed. The Atlas of Human History: Civilizations of Asia: India,
China and the Peoples of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Text by
Renzo Rossi and Martina Veutro. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996, pp. 52-55.
Haskins, James and Kathleen Benson. African Beginnings. Paintings by
Floyd Cooper. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1998.
Martell, Hazel Mary. The Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World. New York:
Kingfisher, 1995, pp. 114-23.
Motley, Mary Penick. Africa: Its Empires, Nations and People. With illustrations by Arthur Roland, Jr. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,
1969.
Vlahos, Olivia. African Beginnings. Illustrated by George Ford. New York:
Viking Press, 1967.
Web Sites
“Africa in 1000 B.C.E.-600 C.E.” http://loki.stockton.edu/~gilmorew/ consorti/1cafric.htm (June 8, 1999).
“Africa Timeline.” http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/worldciv/reference/afritime.htm (June 8, 1999).
Ancient Nubia. http://library.advanced.org/22845/ (June 8, 1999).
K-12 Africa Guide. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Home_Page/
AFR_GIDE.html (June 8, 1999).
“Mr. Dorish’s Ancient Africa Page.” http://www.flinet.com/~rms/sixth/ dorish/ 609ancafr.html (June 8, 1999).
Piccione, Peter A. “Excursis IV: Nubia: The Land Upriver.” http:// www.library.nwu.edu/class/history/B94/B94nubia.html (June 8, 1999).
“Saharan Rock Art.” http://www.paleologos.com/saharaan.htm (June 8,
1999).
“Sahara Tassili Frescoes.” http://www.paleologos.com/sahang.htm (June
8, 1999).
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