|
* produced in 1971 - Please research for current data.
THE STORY OF MAN IN AFRICA has had many tellers: Archeologists point to the continent as man's original home and give us glimpses of his first hesitant steps. Linguists compare related languages and reconstruct early movements of peoples. Greeks, and even Chinese, make early mention of the continent, but written history really began only when the Arabs had consolidated their hold on North Africa. Kings, rich beyond measure, fascinated the Arab chroniclers. “He is the king who is the most powerful, the richest, the most ortunate, the most feared by his enemes ....” wrote al-Omari of Mansa Musa, the 14th century lord of Mali. The Portuguese told Europe of the power of eastern African realms such as Monomotapa “where there is the greatest quantity of gold ...” In the south the Zulu monarch Shaka was described by an Englishman as being “surrounded by about two hundred people, a servant ... holding a shield over him ...” Thus, slowly, the history of Africa began to unfold–not the story of a “dark continent,” but an epic of complexity and fascination to rival that of Europe or Asia.
TRADITIONAL SCULPTURE OF AFRICA
Working in wood, metal, ivory, and other media, African artists created images of great directness and vigor. Figures and masks often symbolize spirits, ancestors, or mythological beings, reflecting the religious concerns of the people. Carvings were rarely executed as absolute likenesses; rather, the artists attempted to portray the idea of the subject or to accent important characteristics. Such efforts resulted in the almost geometric planes and abstract interpretations that influenced Picasso, Braque, and other Western artists in the early 1900s.
The sculptures of Ife and Benin represent one the world's great art styles. Life-size portrait heads from Ife–religious center of the Yoruba people–date from the 12th century A.D. The technique of brass casting was introduced from Ife to Benin about 1400, and was used to make sculptures for the palace altars. In 1897 the British, avenging the killing of a party of traders, burned Benin City and carried away much of its treasure.
AFRICA'S MUSICAL HERITAGE
Long dismissed as primitive, African music is actually extremely complex. Drums and bells, flutes, and stringed instruments play from five to as many as twelve different rhythms simultaneously. Western classical music seldom employs more than two. African dance corresponds to the same pattern: Movements of various parts of the body follow separate rhythms in an apparent freedom of expression that, in fact, requires great precision and control. Slaves brought their music with them across the Atlantic; African influences can be heard in the rumba of Cuba, the calypso of Trinidad, and the samba of the Caribbean and South America, as well as in North American jazz.
THE IRON AGE IN AFRICA
Evidence for the dawn of ironworking in Africa is incomplete. The metal was introduced to the lower Nile Valley by Assyrian invaders, and to the Mediterranean coast by Phoenician traders around 700 B.C. it was being manufactured in Meroe on the midde Nile some two centuries later. The earliest known iron in West Arica, at Nok, has been dated at about 440 B.C. Iron-using cultures are known in East and Central Africa from as early as A.D. 200.
NORTH AFRICA
The Sahara stretches more than three thousand miles from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The thousand-mile-wide band of windswept and stony desert is sporadically interrupted by sere highlands and expanses of shifting sand. The moist, more temperate conditions of the Mediterranean nurture the evergreens of the Atlas Mountains and the narrow fertile coastal fringe eastward toward the Nile Delta. Phoenicians established Carthage and other ports along the western reaches of this shore and gradually drew the Berber peoples into the commerce of the Mediterranean world. After the fall of Carthage and the demise of Greek trading colonies to the east, North Africa became a lush bread-basket of the Roman Empire. The coast fell to Vandal invaders from Europe in the fifth century A.D., then for 100 years was under the rule of Byzantine Christians. Uneasy coexistence between Berbers and rulers of the coast ended during the seventh century, when adherents of Islam boiled westward from Arabia, proclaiming the name of Allah and the universal brotherhood preached by Mohammed.
NILE VALLEY CIVILIZATION
One of Earth's frst great civiliations crystallied around 3500 B.C., when political unity–paced by developments in metallurgy, art, and writing–welded prosperous farming villages into separate kingdoms along the fertile, narrow Nile Valley. Unification by the legendary first pharaoh, Menes, around 3000 B.C. began a 2,000-year epic that saw three great periods of prosperity–the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms–eclipse intermediate periods of instability and invasion. Despite continual shifting of capitals and fluctuating frontiers, the Egypt of the pharaohs attained immortality through its pyramids, temples, and royal tombs, its distinctive art styles, and the recorded exploits of its god-kings. Decline began after 1085 B.C. with successive invasions by Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. Ancient Egypt finally died with Cleopatra in 30 B.C. The gods of Rome gave way to Christianity, which fell in turn to Islam and the Arabs in A.D. 640.
NORTHEAST AFRICA
The arid plateaus of the Somali Peninsula, the fertile Ethiopian Highlands, and the deserts along the verdant Nile Valley bespeak northeast Africa's variety. By the sixth century A. D., Nubia's gods yielded to Christianity, and three kingdoms emerged: Nobatia, Mukurra, and Alodia–the last of which resisted Islam until the 16th century. In the Ethiopian Highlands, powerful Axum became Christianized in the fourth century; the faith still prevails in modern Ethiopia. Rock-cut churches at Lalibala remain in use after eight centuries.
EAST AFRICA
East of the long lakes that race the deep western slash of the Great Fift Valley lies the plateau of East Africa. Its fertile volcanic soil supports grasslands and evergreen forests. The coastal lowland, fringed by islands and mangrove swamps, stretches from the Limpopo River to the Equator. By the 11th century Arabs had established a series of ports through which ivory, gold, and slaves flowe. A blend of African and Arabian cultrues along the coast resulted in Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. Within ten years of Vasco da Gama's visit in 1498, the Portuguese had conquered much of the coast. Foreign powers controlled East Africa until the 1960s, when Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda became independent.
MADAGASCAR
Unique flora and fauna bespeak the long geographical isolation of the world's fourth largest island. Settled sometime before A.D. 1000, Madagascar still reflects its basic Southeast Asian heritage in language and culture, with a strong African admixture and later Arab and European influences.
AFRICA AND THE ANCESTRY OF MAN
Fossil remains indicate that man developed in Africa. The australopithecines, tool-using hominids somewhere between extinct apes and modern man, lived in eastern and southern Africa as long ago as 3.5 million years. Other finds include tool-making Homo habilis and bigger-brained Homo erectus. Authorities differ on their age and role in the development of Home sapiens–modern man–who may have appeared on the continent 100,00 years ago. As new dating methods evolve and additional remains are found, man may be able to fill the gaps in his complex family tree.
EUROPEAN EXPLORATION OF AFRICA
Before the 18th century the Europeans who plied the African coast south of Cape Verde rarely ventured beyond the beaches. Beginning in 1796 Mungo Park plunged inland to determine the course of the Niger River. In 1841 missionary David Livingstone began 32 years of humanitarian and scientific labor in Africa. Richard Burton and John H. Speke reached Lake Tanganyika in 1858; Speke continued alone to Lake Victoria. After Henry Stanley's spectacular 1871 search to find Livingstone, who had been exploring the interior for some five years, the American journalist became the first explorer to follow the Congo from its headwaters. Information collected by such men revealed the geography of a continent whose history is only now becoming familar to the rest of the world.
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Bleak desert, high grasslands, fertile coasts–southern Africa is a region of contrasts and conflicts. Indigenous Bushmen and Hottentots began to give way to more powerful Bantu peoples by A.D. 1000 European settlers, spreading out from the Cape of Good Hope, came face to face with Bantu groups across the Great Fish River in the late 1700s. After the turn of the century, the military genius Shaka, who had consolidated other Bantu tribes with his Zulus, struck out at his neighbors. Group attacked group and–like billiard balls–caromed in all directions. Some Bantu moved as far north as Lake Tanganyika, while others–such as the Sotho–formed enclaves along the Drakensberg escarpment. Soon, land-hungry whites entered Zulu territory. The Zulus, first under King Dingane, then Cetshwayo, held their own until they succumbed to the British in 1879.
THE BANTU MIGRATION
The Bantu peoples speak closely related languages that belong to the Congo-Dordofanian family. Linguistic evidence suggest that the Niger area may have been the original homeland of the Bantu, who later moved into the region south of the equatorial forest. From here they expanded over the most of the southern half of Africa. Bantu skills in farming and ironmaking helped them prosper in areas where previously only hunters and food gatherers had lived. Bantu groups crossed the Limpopo River into what is now South Africa before A.D. 1000, ending the greatest population movement in Africa's history.
CENTRAL AFRICA
South of the Sudan the landscape give way to the dense equatorial rain forest of the Congo Basin. Then it lifts again to the broad plateau once ruled by the Luba and Lunda Kingdoms. Portuguese explorers reached the mouth of the Congo in the 1480s. Subsequent relations with the powerful Bantu kingdom of Kongo–cordial at first–disintegrated in the wake of the slave trade. By the 1600s the Portuguese had subdued the coast of present-day Angola; from there they shipped as many as 10,000 slaves annually to the plantations of Brazil.
WEST AFRICA
Between the Sahara and Gulf of Guinea lie two distinct belts–the Sudan, a vast grassy plain punctuated by deciduous woodlands, and southward, tropical rain forest. Herding and cultivation had largely replaced the hunting-and-gathering way of life in the grasslands by about 3000 B.C. Iron-working developed by about 440 B.C. Around the ninth century A.D. Arab influence and Islamic traditions first came to the Sudan. Trade empires such as Mali and Songhai flourished under the unifying religion, and their wealth and pomp astonished contemporary Arab historians. Nearby rose the Hausa and Mossi states, whose fortunes shifted as the strength of their neighbors waxed or waned. Exploration of West African shores by 15th century Portuguese opened the way for European trade and rivalry–in both goods and slaves–and eventual colonization.
STATES OF THE WEST AFRICAN COAST
Beginning in the late 15th century, European accounts report numerous and powerful states between the Senegal and the lower Niger Rivers. Wolof rulers held sway in the coastal region of modern Senegal, while the Akan states of the Gold Coast culminated in Ashanti domination of much of what is now Ghana. Eastward rose the power of Dahomey and the kingdoms of Oyo and Benin in present-day Nigeria. The slave trade and European foot holds along the coast accelerated rivalries and disruptions that set the stage for colonization in the 19th century.
THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
In the early 1500s the labor needs of New World plantations and the quest for profit fostered an ever-increasing demand for slaves that focused on West and Central Africa. Slavers exchanged guns and gunpowder, cloth, tobacco, and liquor for captives procured from the interior by coastal chieftians. The number of men, women, and children taken to the West Indies, South, Central and North America will never be known. Conservative estimates run as high as ten million. About 15 percent died from disease or neglect on the overcrowded “middle passage”–the brutal Atlantic voyage of six to 12 weeks. The trade finally ceased in the 1800s, ending one of the largest forced migrations of all human history.
|
