AFRICA - A Brief non-history

Africa..... AFRICA.....  AH-FREE-KHA!

The name alone can conjure foreboding; a dark continent, mysterious threatening, and unknown.... or of safaris, photographing the Big Five, mountain gorillas, glamping in the wilderness, and having sundowners while being waited on in luxury by dark servants.

The West’s knowledge of the continent is only of its distant past along the edges of our own history, or our perspective of the West’s engagement in more modern times. No continuous storyline is taught that ties across the centuries, the multiple cultures, or the vast geography of the continent.  Africa doesn’t present an interwoven complex interchange of ideas like the European countries, or the single cultural unity of China or Japan, or the struggle for empire of France, Britain, and Russian, or the replaced history of the Americas since European conquest.  Africa is the origin humankind and has been occupied continuously since then, yet it is arguably the least understood.

The Mediterranean coast of Africa was in the sphere of Europe as most trade was by sea.  The Phoenicians, the Romans, the Jews and the Arabs all traded and settled along its northern coast.  We know of the Pharaohs with their ancient tombs of the Pyramids, Tutankhamn, and Hatchetsup; and temples of Karnak and Luxor along the River Nile; of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in Alexandria; of Hannibal and the Punic Wars, which resulted in the complete destruction of the great African City Carthage that rivaled Rome in trade, size and wealth; a thousand years later of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who seduced first Caesar and then Mark Anthony marking to the end of the Roman Republic.  This is not taught as African history, but the history of Western Civilization

During the Roman Empire that followed, at the beginning of Christianity, St. Augustine wrote his Confessions in what is now Libya, and we might have learned of the expansion of Islam from the Saudi Arabian peninsula across the Maghreb in the first millennia.  Again, this was taught as a history of Religion or Islamic Expansion, not African history and its impact on the peoples. 

Not until the Age of Discovery in the 1500s, and then of Exploration and Colonialism in the 1800s, did we learn about anything south of the Sahara, the great dividing line between the Maghreb along the Mediterranean coast and Sub Saharan Africa.  Between Islam and the Native religions. Between Arab peoples and Black peoples.

In the Age of Discovery we learned of the European “discovery” of the African coast by the Portuguese, the first to round the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz and succeeded by Vasco Da Gama crossing the Indian Ocean.  This established a trading and Christian outpost, in Kerala, India.  And changed the balance of power in Europe.  It broke the monopoly of Arab/Venetian trade with Asia across the Sinai Peninsula into the Mediterranean.  But for Africa all it did was open them up to coastal trade, mostly in humans, and colonization. The interior was still terra incognito.

During the Age of Exploration our knowledge is limited to a few heroic stories of westerners into the interior of a continent occupied for millennia.  Spekes’ and Burton’s quest to discover the headwaters of the Nile is only of their challenges and deeds, not the peoples or cultures that knew of its location.  The story of Stanley and Livingstone left us no further informed of the multiple regions they passed through, or the religions they practiced before Livingstone christianized them. 

In the 1800s as the great powers of Europe experienced a shrinking world to exploit, and their colonies in the Americas increasingly demanded independence, they looked south.  Other European countries that did not exist at the start of colonization, Belgium and Germany, didn’t want to be left out of the last opportunity for spoils.  During The Great Partition of Africa in the late 1800s, and the fight to keep or enslave them, we might have learned about Khartoum and the destruction of the British Army and General Gordon. But how many know where Khartoum is and of the peoples that were destroyed.  We’ve heard of the Boer wars between the British and the Dutch Afrikaans, but again this is European history with little concern for the majority population that were displaced. Even the few names my father, an arm chair historian, told me of in admiration didn’t have any context: the fierce Zulu fighters or of the great library of Timbuktu.

The early twentieth century’s literature is also a reflection of the European experience.  One of the best opening lines since “Call me Ishmael”, is from Out of Africa by Karen Blixen:  “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills” is about the white settlement/exploitation of East Africa.  And Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” from the Congo perpetuated the fear of the unknown, and the insanity it can create. 

Our ignorance and the perception of it being the dark continent (as in unknown) has many reasons: our euro-centric perspective, historic racism, multiple cultures on the continent that left little written record. And all this across a continent that is unimaginably vast.  Africa’s size will be explored in our next post.  

The next posts will be shorter and more visual.  Bill