Week 1: Africa in World History
E. Gilbert & J. Reynolds, Chapter 1: “Physical Context of African History: Geography and Environment
Prior to 1500, African history is characterised by diversity. Very different things were occurring in
different parts of the continent at different times and with different outcomes. Rather than speak of
a single ‘African history’ during the period prior to 1500, perhaps it is more logical to speak of many
shifting African histories. In recognizing the diversity of early African history, it is important to keep in
mind what different parts of Africa, nonetheless, maintained in common.
History and geography are inextricably intertwined. African history unfolds in the context of a
physical setting that constrains and shapes the decisions and options faced by the human actors who
make history. Africa’s past has been profoundly shaped by geography and environment and so has
Africa’s relationship to the non-African world (for example, coastal East Africa enjoyed the benefits of
long distance trade while other parts of Africa were isolated from the outside).
Africa was most certainly the home of the first modern humans and part of the evolutionary process
that created the first humans was a response to a changing environment. Sometimes humans help
trigger environmental changes and other times they are forced to react to a changing environment.
The best starting point for the account of the ever-changing African environment would be the Upper
Palaeolithic (the later part of the stone age), a time when human culture began to change rapidly.
The most prominent feature of the African continent is its size. Because the continent is large, its
terrain and climate are widely variable. There is no such thing as an ‘African environment;. The
continent is much too varied to lend itself to broad generalisations about terrain and environment
and about human nature.
The northern edge of the continent is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the coastal strip from
Morocco to Algeria enjoys a Mediterranean climate. Libya and Egypt have dryer coastal climates.
South of this coastal strip lies the Sahara. South of the Sahara is a vast savannah. The environment is
sub-Saharan. This environment has the most common terrain type of the continent and it is also the
most human-friendly and so it has been the site of much of the continents human history. The
savannah stretches out from the Sahara’s edge in the north to the edge of two other deserts – the
Kalahari and the Namib. The closer one is to the equator, the wetter and more forested it is, the
farther from the equator, drier and grassier it is. Enfolded in the vast savannah is an equatorial forest
zone. Rain forests covered much of the West African coast. The forest zone has proven a difficult
environment for humans to exploit, but people had colonised more and more of the forest. Today,
much of the western part of the forest is gone, having been logged of cleared for farmland. The
rainforests of West Africa have gone through several cycles of expansion and contraction and it also
seems that humans may have played a role in creating some of the rainforest environments. At the
very southern tip of the continent, south of the Kalahari and the Namib deserts, is a pocket of
Mediterranean climate. Because the continent straddles the equator, the climatic zones are arranged
more or less symmetrically around the equator. From north to south one finds in order:
Mediterranean-desert-savannah-rain forest-savannah-desert-Mediterranean.
Despite all the myths about the fertility of tropical soils, most African soils are actually rather poor.
Thus, the productivity of land is lower than one would find in a more geologically active and cooler
place and farmers are forced to go to great, labour-intensive lengths to add nutrients and organic
matter to the soil. There are, however, many areas of the continent that defy this broader pattern.
There areas are noteworthy in that they tend to have high population densities and so are often loci
for state formation, empire building and other examples of human ambition.
Another limitation on agricultural productivity is rainfall. Rainfall is both adequate in most of the
,continent, and cyclical. In some places where average rainfall amounts are reasonably high, the fact
that all the rain comes in a certain amount of time limits the agricultural utility of the rain. The
reason for this cyclical rain pattern has to do with the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the
boundary between the dry continental air over the desert and the wet air that comes from the sea
which moves north and south each year as wind patterns change. Because the ITCZ’s movements are
variable, the timing of the rains each year is variable. Farming in areas with a cyclical rainfall pattern
requires that farmers carefully time their planting to coincide with the rains and that they be
prepared for the rains to fail completely every now and then.
The final challenge that the African environment poses is that of disease. In the long run, the disease
environment protected sub-Saharan Africans from invasion, since outsiders fared poorly in the
tropical parts of the continent, whereas people who had grown up there fared much better. Two
diseases were primarily responsible for this situation: malaria and yellow fever. Historically important
effects of malaria are that malaria exacts a tremendous human toll in Africa and that it served to limit
the movement of outsiders into tropical Africa. It is worth noting that diseases that primarily affect
animals can exert an effect on human history. Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, is the best
example of such a disease. Some forms of the disease affect humans, but its effect on livestock is
much larger and historically more important. Infected animals usually die, which prevents people
from keeping cattle, which means an economic loss and the loss of meat, milk, blood, hides and
manure. The disease also has an deadly effect on horses. Horses are military useful and they carry
loads and pull carts, so the loss of horses is a great one.
For every desert there is a cool and fertile highland zone and for every thicket buzzing with tsetse
flies (spreading disease) there is a prosperous farmstead.
The challenges posed by the African environment vary by region and reflect the scale and diversity of
the continent. Perhaps the world region most similar to Africa in its tropical diversity is Australasia.
Despite their similarities, the historical development of Australasia are quite different, so, climate
itself does not dictate how history unfolds, though it does shape and constrain history.
There is a common perception that the African environment is uniquely wild, pristine and Edenic in
the sense of being untouched by humans. This is not the case. Because humans have lived in Africa
longer than anywhere else in the world, its environment is probably as affected by humans as any
other continent.
,E. Gilbert & J. Reynolds, Chapter 4: “Settled Life’’
By 10.000 B.P humans had occupied the entire African continent. In various part of the continent,
language and cultural groups pursued different foraging strategies to prize a living from the
environments in which they found themselves. During the next ten millennia, Africans would invent
fundamentally new ways of producing food, making metals, creating social institutions etc. These
new developments occurred unevenly. Some Africans learned to farm and herd, and others did not.
In some cases this resulted in farmers moving into territories of foragers in processes called
migrations or expansions.
Humans never have a passive relationship with the physical world. The environment shapes human
societies and they shape it back. For example, foragers burned land to improve hunting. Foragers
also manipulate the environment in subtler ways that are often referred to as tending (nurturing
individual plants that produce food). Foraging changed into farming. This did not require a huge leap
in technology or in knowledge, since foragers already had most of the tools they needed to farm and
had much of the knowledge about plants to manage their reproduction that would eventually allow
them to farm.
There are two basic schools of thought about why foragers started to produce food. One school
suggests that climate change may have compelled foragers to find new ways of supporting
themselves. Another school contends that the transition was triggered by social demand. According
to this theory, emerging elites in foraging societies engaged in food production because they wanted
to use the food for feasting (feasts enhanced social status). However, the synchronised timing of the
inventions of food production around Africa and the rest of the world suggests that some
environmental force was at work in addition to whatever social forces had a hand in this transition.
Although it is almost certain that the first food producers lived in the Middle East, Africa may have
played a leading, or at least participatory role in creating the conditions that led to the transition to
food production in the Middle East. The first food crops were domesticated descendants of wild
grasses whose range extends from the Middle East into North Africa, into the Sahara. The area in
which people practiced the intensive gathering of these crops corresponds with the area in which
people speak languages of the Afro-Asiatic family, which originated in Northeast Africa and spread
from there into North Africa and the Middle East. It appears that the foraging style that led to the
development of food production and the spread of Afro-Asiatic languages in the Middle East, and the
first urban civilisations, has its roots in Africa. By 5000 B.P farming communities were established in
the Nile Valley and other parts of North Africa. Agriculture soon emerged in other parts of the
continent. It is not clear whether farming in the rest of the continent derived from the North African
farming tradition or not. One possibility is that farming in other regions of the continent is the result
of contact diffusion. Contact diffusion occurs when people learn of the existence of a new things and
then try to devise their own version of it. If this were the case, techniques that worked in the climate
in the north would be ill suited for the climate in the south. Furthermore, the crops and techniques
used to grow them were so different that most scholars believe that they probably developed
independently of North African farming.
The fundamentals of crop domestication stayed the same in different areas. Africa had many areas of
agricultural innovation. Because of the continents geography and lack of plants that made good
candidates for domestication in the south, agriculture spread at a more deliberate pace.
There are at least 3 different loci of crop domestication in sub-Saharan Africa. One is in the West
Africa Sahel where sorghum and pearl millet were domesticated. Another is Ethiopia, where such
crops as t’eff, noog, qat, millet, ensete and coffee were domesticated. The final major centre of
domestication is in the West African forest belt where yams and oil palm were grown. It is also
, possible that in both Ethiopia and the Sahel there were actually two centres of domestication, giving
us a total of five centres of domestication in sub-Saharan Africa.
For the most part, Africa’s first famers used locally domesticated crops. Over time, some of the crops
they domesticated spread to other areas of the globe, and they in turn acquired new crops from Asia
and the Americas. Only one animal was without a doubt domesticated in Africa, the guinea fowl. All
of the essential domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goats, camels, chickens) were introduced from
outside. Why did the Africans not domesticate any of the many large animal species that roamed the
continent? The answer is that none of the large animals in Africa seems to be temperamentally
suited to domestication. Africans did not domesticate any of the large animals, but they did make
early and extensive use of sheep, cattle and goats. In many instances it appears that herding
preceded farming in Africa. In most of the world, the pattern is opposite: agriculture nearly always
preceded herding. By 6000 B.C.E domestic cattle were found throughout North Africa. These were
probably introduced from Southwest Asia.
The change to food production involved changing plants and animals to suit human needs. It also
required changes in human behaviour. Although it is fairly certain that sedentary living preceded the
origins of agriculture, agriculture allowed for settled groups to become significantly bigger and
allowed the creation of social hierarchies, the accumulation of wealth and the creation of
government. Agriculture also required more disciplined work, different ways of perceiving the
passage of time, more long-range planning and the capacity to ration the harvested crop so that it
would last through the year. Perhaps the most important change was that food production
supported much denser human populations. The implications of this are many. First, it means that
any conflict between a group of farmers or foragers was likely to be decided in the farmer’s favour.
The force of numbers alone would be sufficient to give them an advantage. Numbers, however, were
not their only advantage. Farming communities were large enough that despite disasters like disease,
there were enough survivors of epidemics for communities to survive and over time for the diseases
to become childhood diseases. Thus, farming communities became breeding grounds for diseases
and humans who were immune to those diseases. Contact between such communities and small
foraging communities could have lethal results for the foragers.
The traits of high population density and the accompanying diseases give farming communities
‘farmer power’. Farmer power is responsible for the steady replacement of foragers by famers.
As farming became established in Africa, several different styles of food production appeared (for
example, plowing, hoe-wielding). These variations were caused by the crops that were used and by
the nature of the environment .
In much of the continent, especially those areas where hoe-based farming was employed, the
environment posed challenges for farmers. The responses that African farmers devised to those
challenges shaped African societies. In most of the continent, soils are too poor to be farmed
continuously and instead farmers practice shifting cultivation, which is a labour-intensive way to
farm. The human labour requirements of farming with hoes and clearing new land on a regular basis
created unique social structures.
For most of African history, land has been abundant and labour scarce. The challenge faced by
farming societies and ambitious individuals was usually that of getting access to labour rather than
land. A wealthy person or people controlled the labour needed to clear and farm land. There were
several ways different African societies went about organising labour. The most common of these
was the kinship group: various types of familial groups (like clans) could be called on to do
agricultural labour. Women were central to these kinship groups and because most farm work was
done by women in hoe-farming societies, the number of women in a family of kinship group was
critical to its success. The number of women in a group is also a critical determination of the group’s
