African societies steadily and to see them whole. They have made clear the meaning and function of cultural elements and institutional arrangements which might otherwise have been dismissed as mere foolish or bizarre custom.’ Thanks to them, we have got ourselves clear of much of the racialist mythology of the nineteenth century: whether from pseudo-scientific Burtoniana of the moralising sort, or from the kind of observation, by no means rare in its connotations of sexual prurience or anxiety, that was offered by an anthropologist of a century ago, in this case a Brazilian, who reassured his learned readers that whereas ‘the penis of the African’ might be ‘large and heavy’ under normal circumstances, it ‘increases little in size during an orgasm, and never achieves complete rigidity’.
Yet it was still necessary to set African reality within its historical context. The anthropologists of the colonial period did not do this. Largely under Malinowski’s severely anti-historical influence, they deliberately looked upon African societies as being timeless entities without past or future. ‘It did not occur to us’, in the words of one of them, ‘to try to relate tribal traditions to a possible actual sequence of historic events in any areas in which we worked.’ Nor, with this view, would it have done any good to try. ‘We cannot have a history of African institutions’, taught the similarly influential Radcliffe-Brown, who for a long time took the same view; there was simply no means of making such a history, and therefore no point in attempting one.
The result of this synchronic approach was greatly to strengthen the impression of a ‘complete otherness’ of African societies. Presented without history, as living in a perpetual vacuum of experience, these strange peoples came to seem the denizens of a Garden of Eden left over from the remote past. Logically enough, they began to be called ‘the undeveloped peoples’. For development supposes history, and they were said to have none.
After the second world war the historians at last got to work in Africa, and the Garden of Eden rapidly disappeared. Soon they were joined by a new and sometimes brilliant school of anthropologists. African societies began to be studied diachronically, as happening in time, and then it was found that in fact a great deal had happened to them. All this has helped to erase the impression of ‘otherness’. It now becomes clear that Africans have developed in ways recognisably the same as other peoples. Individually or collectively, they have arranged their lives on the same basic assumptions, whether of logic or morality, as everyone else. The forms have been as different as Africa is different from Europe, Asia or America: but not the principles of intelligence and apprehension, not the essential content.
What comes out is the picture of a complex and subtle process of growth and change behind and within the technological simplicities of former times. The societies still partially observable yesterday, and even today after the storm-driven erosions of colonial rule, were and are the terminal structures of an ancient evolution. To borrow a phrase applied by Grottanelli to the arts of Africa, they are to be seen not as points of departure but as points of arrival.
In many ways this was a world of its own, a world of country values and beliefs, very much a rural world. Even the large exceptions to this rule, the crowding market cities with their kings and traders, only help to prove it. Much the greatest number of tropical Africans lived in former times, as many live today, in villages or scattered homesteads, having few material possessions, knowing nothing or little of the written word, enjoying the present as a gift from the golden age of their ancestors, and not much caring for a different future. Yet their technological simplicity was no guide to their social and cultural achievement. In truth they had tamed a continent.
East Coast sea-fishing trap of a type with many local varieties, this one being about 100 cms. wide.
2
Formative Origins
IN SETTING OUT TO MASTER THEIR OWN CONTINENT, AFRICANS MADE a first and crucial contribution to the general growth of mankind. Most physical anthropologists seem now to have accepted that vital evolutionary steps which led from near-men towards true men were taken in Africa: in some recent words of Leakey’s that it was ‘the African continent which saw the emergence of the basic stock which eventually gave rise to the apes, as well as to man as we know him today’, and where ‘the main branch which was to end up as man broke away from those leading to the apes’.
Not all the experts would yet agree with Leakey’s third claim for Africa’s primacy in the production of man : that ‘it was also in Africa that true man separated from his manlike (and now extinct) cousins, the australopithecines or “near-men” of two million years ago’. But even if Africa was not in this direct sense the immediate birthplace of homo sapiens, there is now a wide consensus for the view, as Posnansky puts it, ‘that Africa was in some respects the centre of the Stone Age world’. Though only about 125,000 people may have inhabited the continent a hundred thousand years ago, according to a recent guess, they were probably more numerous than the population of any other continent. They had gone further, in other words, towards conquest of their environment. By the end of the Late Stone Age, they may have multiplied to as many as three or four millions.
They belonged to several indigenous types. Some of their surviving descendants include the Pygmies of the Congo forests and the Bushmen of the south-western deserts. These ‘small peoples’ were much more widely spread then than now. There may have been as many as a million Bushmen south of the Zambezi at the end of the Late Stone Age, whereas today there are fewer than 50,000. Other but related types included the ancestors of the Khoi (‘Hottentots’) of Southern Africa; the ancestors of the robust and dark-skinned ‘Negroes’ of western and central Africa; and those who had descended from a mingling of indigenous peoples with neighbouring Asians, in the north and north-east, that possibly occurred as early as the Middle Stone Age.
These ancestral peoples evolved by intermarriage. They did so to such a point that today it is seldom possible, by blood-group analysis, ‘genetically to distinguish very clearly or consistently even among such morphologically diverse groups as Bushmen, Pygmies, and Negroes’. They mingled and moved about their continent, slowly populating it. Of these migrations the most important was that of the ‘Negroes’, whose Bantu-speaking family of peoples, probably spreading originally from western Africa at least three thousand years ago, have long become dominant south of the Equator.
The linguistic evidence is a little more helpful. African linguistic studies are still immersed in controversy about origins and relationships. But they suggest that all the ancient languages of Africa belonged to a handful of ‘founding families’ which derived from remote Stone Age progress. As peoples became more numerous and moved about, these mother tongues divided in the course of centuries into a much larger number of ‘sub-families’; and these in turn ramified as time went by into the multitude of languages spoken today. The actual numbers need not worry us here; the point is in their ramification. As a rough and ready guide to this process one may take a schematic view, adapting Greenberg’s language data:
| Early Stone Age | Late Stone Age | Iron Age |
| Up to 50,000 years ago | Up to 2,000 years ago | Spread and multiplication up to AD 1900 |
| 4 mother tongues 125,000 people | 37 main languages 3–4 million people | 730 languages 150 million people |
Nothing as statistically neat will have actually occurred, but the development of new ethnic identities may have been broadly along these
