by Kevin Reilly
The World of Inner Africa
“Outer” Africa—the Nile, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean ports, North Africa along the Mediterranean, and the kingdoms of West Africa—was an intrinsic part of the Afro-Eurasian world of the first millennium CE. The Nile valley was a creator of that world. The Red Sea and Mediterranean were early participants. By 1000 CE, a single zone of communication extended across the western Sahara as well, to the border of tropical rain forests just north of the equator.
Inner Africa was the interior African world that was not swept up into the Afro-Eurasian network before 1450. It constituted a large part of the African continent below the Sahara Desert. It includes all of Africa south of the equator, all of the equatorial rain forests, and the dry lands and savanna that pushed into the Sahara in central Africa.
Geography, Race, and Language
Inner Africa had not been integrated into the Afro-Eurasian network because it was remote from the rest of Eurasia. In addition to the almost 1,000-mile width of the Sahara Desert, the rivers of Africa made contact difficult. The rivers of West Africa like the Niger and Congo flowed from uplands across cataracts and waterfalls to the Atlantic Ocean, making it difficult for outsiders to enter. In addition, the maritime path from the northern Atlantic was blocked by prevailing currents that inhibited easy access. From Asia, East Africa was easier to reach across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Contacts between the Arab world and the Swahili cities of the East African coast were extensive as far south as modern Mozambique.
Inner Africa was the larger part of a huge continent. The perpendicular grid of popular Mercator world maps, which magnify polar areas and reduce areas near the equator, makes it look as if Africa is about the size of Greenland. In fact, Africa is 15 times larger: 12 million square miles, compared to Greenland’s total area of 840,000 square miles. By comparison, all of Eurasia amounts to 21 million square miles. Africa is larger than China, India, the continental United States, and the entire continent of Australia combined.
Africa is also far more diverse than most people imagine. Geographically, Africa contains some of the wettest and driest places on earth, snowcapped mountains, dense rain forests, and open fields as well as deserts. Biologically, Africans are more diverse than the people of any other continent. This physical diversity (measured by DNA) stems from the long period of human development in Africa before mankind populated the rest of the planet. When Europeans began classifying humans into “races,” they failed to recognize this diversity. In the interest of seeing the African as dark skinned or black, they failed to recognize that they were creating a particular stereotype—based mainly on people who came from West Africa. Consequently, they missed the differences in appearance of not only the Berbers and Arabs of North Africa but also the taller people of the Nile valley, the shorter people of the Congo rain forest, and the lighter-complexioned people of the southern African desert. Europeans also failed to recognize the social and cultural diversity of Africans. They failed to recognize that even inner Africa contained empires, various kinds of states, village-based societies (without states), cities, and pastoral and agricultural societies as well as hunter-gatherers.
Today, biologists and anthropologists are not inclined to use the word race in classifying peoples, in part because of the tortured history of the term but also because of its lack of precision in a world shaped more by culture than biology and by intermixing more than isolation. Rather, we might see the mixtures of African peoples coming from regions of relative separation, speaking different languages, and practicing different cultures. By that measure, we might distinguish five major groups of African language and culture systems. These would be the Afro-Asian peoples of the north (including ancient Egyptians, Berbers, and, more recently, Arabs), the Nilotic-Sudanic peoples (mainly herders, often tall and thin in stature) from the Nile valley, the Niger-Congo peoples of West Africa (including speakers of the Bantu languages), the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa, and the Khoisan people in the Kalahari Desert.
The World’s Three
Transformations in Africa
Humans, Farmers, and States . In the beginning, of course, we were all Africans. The first transformation began when some of our ancestors started moving out of Africa about a million years ago. The next transformation occurred with the development of agriculture, but since Africans were among the first to plant and domesticate crops, the only divergence between Africa and the rest of Afro-Eurasia was in the particular crops that were domesticated. The third global transformation centered on the revolution in social organization that led to cities and states. The North African Egyptian state was one of the leaders in that revolution. Here, too, African Egyptians developed their own civilization, one that they shared with neighbors to the south.
The Nile Connection . During the Egyptian period, contact between northern and central Africa continued as state societies were created up the Nile in Kush, Meroe, and Nubia (in what is today Sudan). About 750 BCE, a Kushite king conquered Egypt and established a dynasty that ruled the two kingdoms for 100 years. From about 590 BCE to 350 CE, the successor state of Meroe remained independent of Egypt and its various occupiers (Persian, Greek, and Roman), and cultivated a way of life that included a centralized state, pyramids, irrigation, hieroglyphic writing, and iron smelting. They were finally conquered not by the Romans but by the Christian Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia. After Meroe, Nubian kings ruled the upper Nile. They converted to the Coptic Christianity of Egypt, reestablishing close contact with Egypt between 350 and 700 CE. The patriarch in Alexandria appointed bishops and trained clergy, and Nubians studied the Coptic rite, developed an alphabetical script based on Coptic Greek and old Meroitic, and traveled back and forth frequently. Nubian inscriptions indicate knowledge of Greek as late as the twelfth century.
The flow between northern and central Africa that had continued for millennia was interrupted by two factors, one ephemeral and the other climatic. The ephemeral interruption was the Arab conquest of Egypt around 700. Sudan broke into the Arabic and Muslim north and a largely Christian south. But the Nile remained the main link between northern and central Africa because a more fundamental barrier had arisen between the Mediterranean and central Africa since the time of the first pharaohs: the Sahara Desert.
The Saharan Separation . The Sahara Desert is a formidable barrier today. A modern jet takes several hours to fly the more than 1,000 miles from north to south, and all you can see is sand. On the ground, the shifting hills of sand and rock outcroppings are both more treacherous and more interesting. Nothing, however, is more striking to the modern archaeologist than the appearance, hundreds of miles from the nearest water hole, of vivid and colorful rock paintings of flowers, birds, herds of antelope, cattle grazing, and humans farming and hunting. These paintings are evidence that the Sahara was at one time a garden of life, a lush environment crowded with animals and people. On the ground, geologists can see evidence that almost 10,000 years ago Lake Chad, on the southwestern border of the Sahara, was 25 times its current size.
We now realize that the Sahara has gone through alternating wet and dry stages over hundreds of thousands of years. The most recent wet period was at the end of the last glacial period and lasted from about 11,000 years ago until 5,000 years ago. The current desert dates from about 3000 BCE, the beginning of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Egyptian culture may be descended from these Neolithic rock painters of the Sahara in some ways: there is evidence, for instance, of mummification and cattle burial in the Sahara. But the larger point about the history of Africa is that a huge barrier appeared between the Mediterranean and the rest of Africa, just at the moment that the world was embarking on the great Bronze Age transformation. Thus, while only Africans participated in the first transformation into humans and many Africans, north and south, participated in the second transformation into plant and animal domestication, an enormous barrier separated the participants in the third transformation from the rest of Africa.
The history of
Sudan shows that the separation was by no means complete. But the Nile River was the only route that ran from the north to the African interior. When the Arabs conquered Egypt, that connection was interrupted. Initially, the Arabs directed their attention and trade north to Syria and Iraq rather than west across the Red Sea, but eventually Arab, Indian, and even Chinese ships added the Swahili ports of East Africa to their itineraries. Still, these contacts were limited to the coast. Africans controlled the internal trade. Similarly, in West Africa, trans-Saharan trade routes integrated the cities of the Kingdom of Mali into the Dar al-Islam, but much of the hugeness of Africa was invisible to the travelers, sheiks, and salt sellers, exhausted after weeks on a camel in driving sand, having finally reached their destination near the Niger at Jenne or Timbuktu.
The Bantu Migrations
There is a simple principle for figuring where something came from. The original site of something always has the greatest variety. Thus, Africa has the greatest variety of humans; Morocco has a greater variety of Arabs than Jenne or Timbuktu. In the same way, Niger-Congo languages and specifically the subgroup of Bantu languages are spoken over much of Africa, but they are densely concentrated in the high grasslands of Cameroon. You can travel today in Cameroon a few miles from one village to the next and hear people speaking a different Bantu language. There are, in fact, more than 200 languages spoken in the Cameroon grasslands, an area smaller than the state of New Jersey. This fact shows us that the Bantu languages spoken throughout Africa south of the Sahara originated there.
Words, Seeds, and Iron . About 3,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking people from this area began a series of migrations that spread their descendants into East Africa and south through much of the rest of the continent by about 1000 CE. With their language, they brought their culture and tools. They brought agriculture—their knack for raising yams and palm oil trees, guinea hens, and goats. From people in central Africa, they picked up the ability to smelt iron in a furnace with bellows. From the Nilotic-Sudanic people, they borrowed the ability to raise sheep, pigs, and cattle that had been bred to survive the tsetse fly of the tropics. Their diet also expanded as they picked up the cultivation of African grains like millet and sorghum. On the east coast of Africa, they added bananas and chickens brought from Indonesia. Some of their descendants became the Swahili merchants of East African cities. Others moved into the rain forests and grasslands of southern Africa. In the mountains and tropical rain forests of central Africa, they met the Batwa (or Twa) people (sometimes called pygmies because of their small stature), who were hunter-gatherers. They exchanged their agricultural products and tools (first polished stone and then iron) for the forest products of the Batwa, especially honey, ivory, and wild animal skins. Farther south, in what is today the Kalahari Desert, they encountered the Khoisan people, who were herders and hunter-gatherers; these lighter-complexioned people spoke a “click language,” so called because of its use of different dental sounds.
As Bantu speakers encountered hunting-gathering peoples in places like the Congo rain forest and the Kalahari, different things happened. In some cases, the agricultural Bantu took over the best lands, pushing the hunting-gathering people into more remote areas. The original crops of the grasslands did not grow in the rain forest, but bananas turned out to be extravagantly successful in the rain forest (as was the brewing of banana beer). In some cases, the two groups mixed together, although usually at the cost of the traditions and culture of the hunter-gatherers, who ultimately adopted the Bantu language and culture. Still, in some cases, the forest dwellers were able to use their commercial importance to achieve a certain degree of leverage in trading with the Bantu while keeping to their traditional ways.
A Common Culture? The spread of Bantu peoples provided a broadly common cultural background for much of inner Africa. In addition to the Bantu language family, this common culture included a set of domesticated crops and animals, iron metallurgy, and a tendency to figure inheritance from the mother but give maternally connected men important roles in councils of elders and kingship. Bantu religious beliefs generally accepted a supreme being, but most religious practices were devoted to ancestors and nature spirits. Masks were used in religious rituals, and drumming and dance were central in festive and solemn rituals.
It would be a mistake, however, to see Bantu culture as changeless. As new generations and branches of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated east and south, they adopted and added new cultural characteristics, such as a variety of round conical and rectangular housing, descent through the male as well as the female line, and a wide range of political and social institutions.
Empires, States, and Stateless Societies
Inner Africa contained states as well as village or lineage-based societies, but clearly states were larger and more pronounced in the areas of outer Africa that were part of the Afro-Eurasian network. Why, then, were cities, states, and empires concentrated in some areas, like the Nile, and not in others areas, like central and southern Africa?
Politics, Population, and Climate . The long-term drying of the climate may contain part of the answer. Recent studies of ice cores from the top of Africa’s largest mountain, Kilimanjaro, confirm that the cycle of drying that began about 5,300 years ago and created the Sahara extended throughout the continent (and probably into the Middle East and western Asia).1
Reductions in rainfall may have had opposite effects in northern and central Africa, increasing population centers in the north and reducing density in the south. In the north, the drying of the Sahara pushed agriculturalists and herders into the Nile valley (as well as north and south), forcing more people to contend with scarce resources. Population concentration likely resulted in state formation. Those who already enjoyed status increased their dominance in chiefdoms, kingdoms, and state societies. Kings and leading social classes formed states and systems of law to ensure their political dominance and economic expropriation.
Lots of Land . The impact of climatic drying in central tropical Africa was to reduce the rain forests and increase the grasslands. This was the background of the expansion of Bantu agriculturalists. Climate desiccation opened sparsely populated forests areas into new arable grasslands, attracting just the sorts of people who were looking to expand their agricultural way of life. Bantu farmers and herders “had so much more country into which they could expand,” the historian Christopher Ehret points out. As West African peoples spread out
across the immense reaches of East and southeast Africa, their settlement densities would have been very low indeed, much lower than in the western Great Lakes region from which their expansions stemmed. . . . Not until later centuries, by which time their population densities would have considerably increased, did larger chiefdoms and eventually, [after 1000] kingdoms evolve in such places.2
West Africa
Virtually every political structure that emerged in inner Africa could be found in the areas of West Africa that grew in the wake of the great drying up of the Sahara after 3000 BCE. From about 300 CE to 1000 CE, West Africa enjoyed substantial rainfall, and the population grew considerably. The densest area was probably the high grasslands of Cameroon, which provided an especially healthy climate since it was above the altitude at which mosquitoes carrying malaria could flourish.
Stateless Societies . Nevertheless, even in these highly populated areas, West Africans (Bantu speakers and others) favored small communities without states or hierarchies. Typically, a group of 5 to 15 villages formed a kafu, a sort of confederation with a big man or chief. This preference for autonomy and the great availability of unoccupied lands contributed to make the Bantu and other West Africans such great migrants and colonists. A tradition whereby the eldest son inherited the family land also encouraged other sons to clear their own land from the nearby woodlands or forest. In addition, the West African custom of polygyny created families in which the men with the most land had the most wives and the most sons, all of whom had to fend for themselves.
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nbsp; Sometimes, a particularly ambitious chief would combine a cluster of kafus and create a state, declaring himself king. The great West African state of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Mali, was founded this way, according to the great epic of Sundiata Keita. “From being village chiefs, the Keitas have become tribal chiefs and then kings,” the poet of Sundiata recalled.3 The epic also underlines the link between agricultural colonization and kingship: “Cut the trees, turn the forests into fields, for then only will you become a true king.”
Kingdoms for Horses . We have noticed in previous chapters the close connection between state formation and horses. What role did horses play in West African state formation? We know through Saharan paintings that small horses were in North Africa before the camel was domesticated about the fourth century CE. They likely came south as well as north before the first millennium. The Epic of Sundiata tells us that Sundiata forged a kingdom in the 1230s with an army of free archers and cavalry forces. But the cavalries of the thirteenth century rode ponies without saddles or stirrups. By the 1330s, the time of Mansa Musa, Mali employed the heavy cavalry of Mamluk Egypt and the Islamic world. Horses were difficult to breed near the equator, and their life expectancies were shortened by tropical diseases, but these new large imported horses changed the balance between stateless peoples and states.
