Histor(ies) of Africa
1. (non)sense of ‘African history’
Eurocentric Africa: stereotypes:
- Country of Africa: huge diversity
- primitive, wild, dangerous, exotic, unspoiled Africa
- Broken Africa ~ Joseph Conrad
- Utopian Africa: counternarrative (eg. Wakanda)
Binyavanga Wainaina:
Kenyan writer → essay ‘How not to write about Africa’
- mocks Europeans who write (/the way they write) about the poverty, many children,
dangerous
- mocks the white saviour (ex. Angelina Jolie)
2. survival of colonial tropes
Colonial tropes: stereotypes:
- made the justification of racism + colonialism possible
- dehumanising: made slavery possible → can't do it if you didn’t make them less than human
- Critics of colonialism were not immune to racism → eg. Joseph Conrad
➢ not just about the words, but the impact they have
Joseph Conrad:
- author of ‘Heart of Darkness’ (end of 19th century) → critique on violence like in Congo
➢ still had very racist ideas: considers Africans as lesser beings, no individuality,
ideas of wildness
➢ ‘Africans are not in the same time (same timeline) as Westerners were’
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013):
- Nigerian writer → one of the most famous African writers
- “Why are we still teaching ‘Heart of Darkness’ in an uncritical way?”
➢ wrote ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’
➢ saw it as a representative of how Europeans looked at Africa(ns),
➢ Conrad was an outsider/visitor → victims of Conrad’s racist slander are the ones
who know how to write about Africa
Valentin Mudimbe:
- One of the most influential thinkers of Africa → Congolese philosopher
➢ phD from a Belgian university → career in the US
- most known for ‘the invention of Africa’ and the concept ‘the colonial library’
➢ collection of texts, documents, knowledge systems (but also ads, stereotypes)
that were created by Europeans during colonisation → made the “invention of
Africa” possible
- “The invention of Africa”
, ➢ challenging Western perceptions of Africa + constructions of Africa as a concept
through Western discourses and representations → often essentialist + eurocentric
➢ profound implications for the continent + people
➢ flattening of ideas of Africa → monolithic + exoticised images → emphasizes the
need for African voices
Johannes Fabian:
- author of ‘Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its object’
- Critique → Western scholars frame non-Western cultures/societies as if they exist outside of
contemporary time/history/in a different archaic era
➢ “frozen in the past, static cultures, timeless, primitive, savage”
- Othering → “westeners are the only ones inhabiting the modern, progressive present”
➢ Also about projecting a better image of yourself, white saviour (Africans need to be
helped)
Mapping Africa:
- Most of our maps = Mercator maps → Africa is depicted smaller than it is
➢ 16th century: Europeans had little knowledge
➢ Map = way to see how we look at the world, to ‘claim’
Nonsense maps:
- eg. maps of how Africa would look like if they respected the tribes
➢ People didn’t necessarily want to live in those states
➢ Those maps are also made by what Europeans thought Africa was back then
Borders:
- are artificial, they create new socio-political realities
- are seen as something inescapable → but not belonging to a state can be a choice
Defining Africa:
- Not possible
- relatively recent idea
- not important to think about Africa as one entity
➢ continent with enormous cultural, linguistic, ecological, … diversity
Sub-Sahara Africa:
- Used to be called ‘black Africa’
- Not correct (some countries are in the Sahara), why Sahara as marker?
- historical + geographic implications of the term, perpetuation of colonial systems of thought
- racist projections of the colonial period → ‘Arab’ vs. ‘Black’
- geo-political relations → MENARG (Middle East and North Africa Research Group)
⇒ All ways to refer to regions in Africa have their problems → still an ongoing debate
, 3. Afrocentrism
Cheikh Anta Diop:
- Senegalese intellectual → 20th century
- takes objection to the idea of sub-Sahara Africa
- Egypt would have existed without slavery + was a Black society + bringer of cultural and
intellectual development
- pointed out the problem that European archaeologists thought that Africans were not
capable of building such a civilisation
- Criticism against him
➢ methodological flaws → linguistic, overstated conclusions
➢ essentialism → focus on single African identity ⇒ erases cultural and historical
complexities
⇒ Afrocentrist African scholars/intellectuals made it possible to get rid of the Eurocentric view
⇒ recognition of Africa in world history
⇒ importance of Africans writing African history to counteract the bias
Were Egyptians black?
- People looked at race in a different way than we do now
- the way Africans think about race ≠ as Americans/Europeans do
Black Athena:
- Novel by Martin Bernal → published in 1980
- Controversy …
➢ intellectual + cultural achievements of Ancient Greece → influenced by Egypt
and Near East
➢ rejects “Aryan model”
- … but did something to Western civilisation
➢ important debate on the foundations of ‘Western civilisation’
➢ changing paradigms (thought patterns) in Ancient History
- critique
➢ sloppy linguïstics + selective evidence
➢ political motivation → pushing an Afrocentric agenda
➢ cultural appropriation? (eg. W.E.B. Du Bois)
⇒ Debate → to what extent are non-white people written in history
Pan-Africanism:
- Recent idea
- It is important to see Africa as a unified entity (as one)
- Kwame Nkrumah → first president of Ghana
- Muammar Gaddafi → leader of Libya (1969 - 2011)
, 4. What is African history?
⇒ Started late as a discipline
History’s relation to colonialism:
- visions on the past were tied into racist ideas underpinning + legitimising colonialism
- anthropology vs. history
➢ Anthropology started as a colonial science (knowledge is power) → necessary to
understand the people you colonise
- decolonisation + independence → written about a lot
➢ a lot of struggles
➢ ° writing national histories → counter-reaction
Kenneth Onwuka Dike:
- Nigerian
- “father of African history”
- wrote not only about what colonisers did → put Africans on the centre stage
- used a lot of oral history
- brought scholarships in ‘African history’ to Africa → not only production outside of Africa
Sources for African history:
- common myth → no written sources on African history
➢ There were written sources → at the coast more than in central Africa
➢ often written by outsiders
⇒ Unesco’s General History of Africa
Jan Vansina:
- made oral traditions usable for history writing by collecting them
➢ very important source → but on different levels biased
- made a career in the US → shows how Belgium deals with its colonial messages
- 1950’s + 1960’s
, Deep African history
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò:
- precolonialism period → before colonialism = too long
- non-European colonialism → Roman/Byzantine colonial pressences
Richard Reid:
- long durée → beyond lifespan of human life
- if you don’t study deeper history → can’t see past/present
- presentism → because sources are easier to use (colonial sources)
- doesn’t see the post-colonial period → archives are not there/badly kept
⇒ more studies for colonial period than post-colonial period
BCE:
- very different sources than for later periods
➢ the closer to the present moment, the more diverse + abundant they become
○ for earlier periods → deduction on the basis of limited materials
○ lots of debates (probably because of limited materials) → insights +
knowledge developing rapidly
- most history is inherently “revisionist”, but for these earlier periods knowledge can shift rapidly
➢ sometimes new sources, questions, insights
➢ not in a bad sense (eg. holocaust denial)
1. Out of Africa
Out of Africa I:
- most of us are mainly out of Africa → mixter of species
- multiple dispersal events → within Africa + outside of Africa
- timescale of millions of years ago → not covered in this course
Out of Africa II:
- Homo sapiens originated in Africa, between 200 000 and 300 000
years ago, populating the world and replacing Neanderthals and
Denisovans
- Multiple dispersal events: homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, in
different waves, using different routes, and involving different
groups
➢ Coastal as well as inland migration routes
- Homo sapiens might have mixed with other groups (Neanderthals
and Denisovans) in Eurasia
- timescale of hundreds of thousands years ago
Knowledge constantly evolving and updated:
- For example: until recently ‘Out of Africa thesis’ posited there was only one dispersal event,
60 000 years ago
- Rapid advances in archeological and genetic data (but…)
- Importance of ecology and climate: climate changes, changes in sea level and vegetation
might have influenced timing and routes of human dispersals
- Debate: rather than one group of ancestors: mosaics of several groups?
- Discussion about where exactly in Africa they departed from?
⇒ current consensus → “mostly out of Africa”
,On categorization: homini vs. homo sapiens:
- people looked at characteristics for a long time → no DNA research possible
- hominin → human like
➢ Denisovans
○ fairly recent discovery → Siberia
○ DNA different form Homo Sapiens + Neanderthal
○ spread in Asia
➢ Neanderthal
○ 19th century discovery → Germany
○ Eurasia
○ disappear of the record around 40 000 BCE
Jebel Irhoud:
- oldest remains considered as Neand. from 40 000 years old
➢ knowledge changes → actually 300 000 years old HS
Other sites with Homo Sapiens in Africa:
- Omo Kibish → Ethiopia
- Florisbad → South Africa
2. Bantu expansion
Bantu expansion:
- initial spread of Bantu languages + the communities speaking it
➢ from current-day Cameroon to 23 contemporary countries
➢ starting around 4000-5000 years ago
➢ influence of climate change → impact of ecological change on
migration pattern
- “one of the most dramatic demographic events in human history”
- can tell us a lot about migration + identities
- Bantu speaking communities → not Bantu people
➢ colonial roots
19th century view:
- they thought that ‘Bantu expansion’ was rapid + brief conquest
- not a classic military conquest
➢ conflict must have existed, but processes of absorption + subordination
- not because of technologically ‘more advanced’
- biggest impact on people who use (abuse) the Bantu expansion today in political context
Languages:
- one in three Africans speaks at least one Bantu language
- Bantu-languages are Africa’s biggest language phylum → group of related
languages bigger than a family
- not necessarily mother language → most speak more than 1 language
From local evolution to continental reach:
- First phase → Split off from Niger-Congo language phylum in borderland of
South-Eastern Nigeria and Western Cameroon (Grasslands) 4 000-5 000 years ago
➢ Slow fragmentation and expansion, e.g. 1000 of years for 200 kms
- Second phase → rapid expansion from these areas to Congo Basin, West Central Africa and
Great Lakes, around 2 500 years ago
➢ Beginning of Common Era: already in South Africa
, ⇒ in less than 2 millennia 4 000 kms
The late split: Through the Equatorial Forest:
- Western Bantu language group more diverse than eastern counterpart
- Around 2 500 Equatorial forest undergoes ecological changes (Congo Basin) → rainforest
less thick
➢ Split between western and eastern Bantu languages happens after this southward
expansion through the rainforest
Not just language spread:
- different environment → comes with new diseases
- Enormous capacity for adaptation to new ecologies and habitats, especially rainforest in
Congo Basin (north-south, as well as east-west)
➢ Yet: ecological change around 4 000-2 500 years ago
- Iron metallurgy arriving in Central Africa coincides with rapid inland Bantu expansion around
2800 years ago
- Only little later: first archeological evidence for food production and domestication
From hunter-gatherers to agriculture?
- Who are hunter-gatherers?
➢ No domestication of food
➢ Hunting and gathering
➢ Probably more egalitarian societies (class as well as gender)
➢ Tending: manipulate the environment
➢ Violence?
- Complex process: slow evolution over time
- Domestication of food does not seem to have propelled start of expansion, but might have
had an influence in later stages
➢ Interpreting Bantu expansion as farming dispersal does not correspond with available
evidence!
➢ However, tools in stone and iron do suggest changes in subsistence strategies
(maybe used for tending)
What kind of evidence do we have?
- Linguistic data
- Archeological data
- Genetic data
- Historical research
Archeology: Shum Laka:
- from where the Bantu expansion began
➢ North-west Cameroon
- Rather constant habitation
- Different genetic make-up
- Tools that suggest some form of ‘tending’
Archeology: Urewe (pottery):
- patterns
- 5th BCE-4th ACE
➢ from after the split
- Lake Victoria-Lake Kivu
- Important metalworking activity
- Connected to eastern Bantu speakers
1. (non)sense of ‘African history’
Eurocentric Africa: stereotypes:
- Country of Africa: huge diversity
- primitive, wild, dangerous, exotic, unspoiled Africa
- Broken Africa ~ Joseph Conrad
- Utopian Africa: counternarrative (eg. Wakanda)
Binyavanga Wainaina:
Kenyan writer → essay ‘How not to write about Africa’
- mocks Europeans who write (/the way they write) about the poverty, many children,
dangerous
- mocks the white saviour (ex. Angelina Jolie)
2. survival of colonial tropes
Colonial tropes: stereotypes:
- made the justification of racism + colonialism possible
- dehumanising: made slavery possible → can't do it if you didn’t make them less than human
- Critics of colonialism were not immune to racism → eg. Joseph Conrad
➢ not just about the words, but the impact they have
Joseph Conrad:
- author of ‘Heart of Darkness’ (end of 19th century) → critique on violence like in Congo
➢ still had very racist ideas: considers Africans as lesser beings, no individuality,
ideas of wildness
➢ ‘Africans are not in the same time (same timeline) as Westerners were’
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013):
- Nigerian writer → one of the most famous African writers
- “Why are we still teaching ‘Heart of Darkness’ in an uncritical way?”
➢ wrote ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’
➢ saw it as a representative of how Europeans looked at Africa(ns),
➢ Conrad was an outsider/visitor → victims of Conrad’s racist slander are the ones
who know how to write about Africa
Valentin Mudimbe:
- One of the most influential thinkers of Africa → Congolese philosopher
➢ phD from a Belgian university → career in the US
- most known for ‘the invention of Africa’ and the concept ‘the colonial library’
➢ collection of texts, documents, knowledge systems (but also ads, stereotypes)
that were created by Europeans during colonisation → made the “invention of
Africa” possible
- “The invention of Africa”
, ➢ challenging Western perceptions of Africa + constructions of Africa as a concept
through Western discourses and representations → often essentialist + eurocentric
➢ profound implications for the continent + people
➢ flattening of ideas of Africa → monolithic + exoticised images → emphasizes the
need for African voices
Johannes Fabian:
- author of ‘Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its object’
- Critique → Western scholars frame non-Western cultures/societies as if they exist outside of
contemporary time/history/in a different archaic era
➢ “frozen in the past, static cultures, timeless, primitive, savage”
- Othering → “westeners are the only ones inhabiting the modern, progressive present”
➢ Also about projecting a better image of yourself, white saviour (Africans need to be
helped)
Mapping Africa:
- Most of our maps = Mercator maps → Africa is depicted smaller than it is
➢ 16th century: Europeans had little knowledge
➢ Map = way to see how we look at the world, to ‘claim’
Nonsense maps:
- eg. maps of how Africa would look like if they respected the tribes
➢ People didn’t necessarily want to live in those states
➢ Those maps are also made by what Europeans thought Africa was back then
Borders:
- are artificial, they create new socio-political realities
- are seen as something inescapable → but not belonging to a state can be a choice
Defining Africa:
- Not possible
- relatively recent idea
- not important to think about Africa as one entity
➢ continent with enormous cultural, linguistic, ecological, … diversity
Sub-Sahara Africa:
- Used to be called ‘black Africa’
- Not correct (some countries are in the Sahara), why Sahara as marker?
- historical + geographic implications of the term, perpetuation of colonial systems of thought
- racist projections of the colonial period → ‘Arab’ vs. ‘Black’
- geo-political relations → MENARG (Middle East and North Africa Research Group)
⇒ All ways to refer to regions in Africa have their problems → still an ongoing debate
, 3. Afrocentrism
Cheikh Anta Diop:
- Senegalese intellectual → 20th century
- takes objection to the idea of sub-Sahara Africa
- Egypt would have existed without slavery + was a Black society + bringer of cultural and
intellectual development
- pointed out the problem that European archaeologists thought that Africans were not
capable of building such a civilisation
- Criticism against him
➢ methodological flaws → linguistic, overstated conclusions
➢ essentialism → focus on single African identity ⇒ erases cultural and historical
complexities
⇒ Afrocentrist African scholars/intellectuals made it possible to get rid of the Eurocentric view
⇒ recognition of Africa in world history
⇒ importance of Africans writing African history to counteract the bias
Were Egyptians black?
- People looked at race in a different way than we do now
- the way Africans think about race ≠ as Americans/Europeans do
Black Athena:
- Novel by Martin Bernal → published in 1980
- Controversy …
➢ intellectual + cultural achievements of Ancient Greece → influenced by Egypt
and Near East
➢ rejects “Aryan model”
- … but did something to Western civilisation
➢ important debate on the foundations of ‘Western civilisation’
➢ changing paradigms (thought patterns) in Ancient History
- critique
➢ sloppy linguïstics + selective evidence
➢ political motivation → pushing an Afrocentric agenda
➢ cultural appropriation? (eg. W.E.B. Du Bois)
⇒ Debate → to what extent are non-white people written in history
Pan-Africanism:
- Recent idea
- It is important to see Africa as a unified entity (as one)
- Kwame Nkrumah → first president of Ghana
- Muammar Gaddafi → leader of Libya (1969 - 2011)
, 4. What is African history?
⇒ Started late as a discipline
History’s relation to colonialism:
- visions on the past were tied into racist ideas underpinning + legitimising colonialism
- anthropology vs. history
➢ Anthropology started as a colonial science (knowledge is power) → necessary to
understand the people you colonise
- decolonisation + independence → written about a lot
➢ a lot of struggles
➢ ° writing national histories → counter-reaction
Kenneth Onwuka Dike:
- Nigerian
- “father of African history”
- wrote not only about what colonisers did → put Africans on the centre stage
- used a lot of oral history
- brought scholarships in ‘African history’ to Africa → not only production outside of Africa
Sources for African history:
- common myth → no written sources on African history
➢ There were written sources → at the coast more than in central Africa
➢ often written by outsiders
⇒ Unesco’s General History of Africa
Jan Vansina:
- made oral traditions usable for history writing by collecting them
➢ very important source → but on different levels biased
- made a career in the US → shows how Belgium deals with its colonial messages
- 1950’s + 1960’s
, Deep African history
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò:
- precolonialism period → before colonialism = too long
- non-European colonialism → Roman/Byzantine colonial pressences
Richard Reid:
- long durée → beyond lifespan of human life
- if you don’t study deeper history → can’t see past/present
- presentism → because sources are easier to use (colonial sources)
- doesn’t see the post-colonial period → archives are not there/badly kept
⇒ more studies for colonial period than post-colonial period
BCE:
- very different sources than for later periods
➢ the closer to the present moment, the more diverse + abundant they become
○ for earlier periods → deduction on the basis of limited materials
○ lots of debates (probably because of limited materials) → insights +
knowledge developing rapidly
- most history is inherently “revisionist”, but for these earlier periods knowledge can shift rapidly
➢ sometimes new sources, questions, insights
➢ not in a bad sense (eg. holocaust denial)
1. Out of Africa
Out of Africa I:
- most of us are mainly out of Africa → mixter of species
- multiple dispersal events → within Africa + outside of Africa
- timescale of millions of years ago → not covered in this course
Out of Africa II:
- Homo sapiens originated in Africa, between 200 000 and 300 000
years ago, populating the world and replacing Neanderthals and
Denisovans
- Multiple dispersal events: homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, in
different waves, using different routes, and involving different
groups
➢ Coastal as well as inland migration routes
- Homo sapiens might have mixed with other groups (Neanderthals
and Denisovans) in Eurasia
- timescale of hundreds of thousands years ago
Knowledge constantly evolving and updated:
- For example: until recently ‘Out of Africa thesis’ posited there was only one dispersal event,
60 000 years ago
- Rapid advances in archeological and genetic data (but…)
- Importance of ecology and climate: climate changes, changes in sea level and vegetation
might have influenced timing and routes of human dispersals
- Debate: rather than one group of ancestors: mosaics of several groups?
- Discussion about where exactly in Africa they departed from?
⇒ current consensus → “mostly out of Africa”
,On categorization: homini vs. homo sapiens:
- people looked at characteristics for a long time → no DNA research possible
- hominin → human like
➢ Denisovans
○ fairly recent discovery → Siberia
○ DNA different form Homo Sapiens + Neanderthal
○ spread in Asia
➢ Neanderthal
○ 19th century discovery → Germany
○ Eurasia
○ disappear of the record around 40 000 BCE
Jebel Irhoud:
- oldest remains considered as Neand. from 40 000 years old
➢ knowledge changes → actually 300 000 years old HS
Other sites with Homo Sapiens in Africa:
- Omo Kibish → Ethiopia
- Florisbad → South Africa
2. Bantu expansion
Bantu expansion:
- initial spread of Bantu languages + the communities speaking it
➢ from current-day Cameroon to 23 contemporary countries
➢ starting around 4000-5000 years ago
➢ influence of climate change → impact of ecological change on
migration pattern
- “one of the most dramatic demographic events in human history”
- can tell us a lot about migration + identities
- Bantu speaking communities → not Bantu people
➢ colonial roots
19th century view:
- they thought that ‘Bantu expansion’ was rapid + brief conquest
- not a classic military conquest
➢ conflict must have existed, but processes of absorption + subordination
- not because of technologically ‘more advanced’
- biggest impact on people who use (abuse) the Bantu expansion today in political context
Languages:
- one in three Africans speaks at least one Bantu language
- Bantu-languages are Africa’s biggest language phylum → group of related
languages bigger than a family
- not necessarily mother language → most speak more than 1 language
From local evolution to continental reach:
- First phase → Split off from Niger-Congo language phylum in borderland of
South-Eastern Nigeria and Western Cameroon (Grasslands) 4 000-5 000 years ago
➢ Slow fragmentation and expansion, e.g. 1000 of years for 200 kms
- Second phase → rapid expansion from these areas to Congo Basin, West Central Africa and
Great Lakes, around 2 500 years ago
➢ Beginning of Common Era: already in South Africa
, ⇒ in less than 2 millennia 4 000 kms
The late split: Through the Equatorial Forest:
- Western Bantu language group more diverse than eastern counterpart
- Around 2 500 Equatorial forest undergoes ecological changes (Congo Basin) → rainforest
less thick
➢ Split between western and eastern Bantu languages happens after this southward
expansion through the rainforest
Not just language spread:
- different environment → comes with new diseases
- Enormous capacity for adaptation to new ecologies and habitats, especially rainforest in
Congo Basin (north-south, as well as east-west)
➢ Yet: ecological change around 4 000-2 500 years ago
- Iron metallurgy arriving in Central Africa coincides with rapid inland Bantu expansion around
2800 years ago
- Only little later: first archeological evidence for food production and domestication
From hunter-gatherers to agriculture?
- Who are hunter-gatherers?
➢ No domestication of food
➢ Hunting and gathering
➢ Probably more egalitarian societies (class as well as gender)
➢ Tending: manipulate the environment
➢ Violence?
- Complex process: slow evolution over time
- Domestication of food does not seem to have propelled start of expansion, but might have
had an influence in later stages
➢ Interpreting Bantu expansion as farming dispersal does not correspond with available
evidence!
➢ However, tools in stone and iron do suggest changes in subsistence strategies
(maybe used for tending)
What kind of evidence do we have?
- Linguistic data
- Archeological data
- Genetic data
- Historical research
Archeology: Shum Laka:
- from where the Bantu expansion began
➢ North-west Cameroon
- Rather constant habitation
- Different genetic make-up
- Tools that suggest some form of ‘tending’
Archeology: Urewe (pottery):
- patterns
- 5th BCE-4th ACE
➢ from after the split
- Lake Victoria-Lake Kivu
- Important metalworking activity
- Connected to eastern Bantu speakers
