and differentiation accelerated in the Late Stone Age and became comparatively rapid after the onset of the Iron Age some two thousand years ago.
In so far as one can hope to trace the origins of African civilisation, it is clearly in this direction one must look: to the formative problems and solutions found by small groups faced with the destiny of peopling one of the world’s largest and physically most testing land masses. Here it is that one may light upon crucial keys to questions of mood and temper, or trace the source of attitudes which have stubbornly combined a firm respect for precedent with a restless onward-shifting readiness for experiment; which have instilled a capacity, greater perhaps than that of any other major civilisation, for the optimism which comes from living always on a frontier, on the edge of ‘somewhere else’, on the verge of ‘something different’, where anything may be possible as long as human courage and endeavour are prepared to make it so: as long, indeed, as a man’s inner force or dynamism can avail to drive him forward. It is sometimes argued that the essence of African belief has rested in the notion of ‘vital force’. Perhaps it is in this that one may glimpse an old attempt at conceptualising the challenge of life and survival in a continent of such natural hostility to man.
I do not want to exaggerate. Questions of ‘mood’ are elusive, fleeting, contradictory. The record of African history is heavy on the side of custom and convention, of ‘what our fathers did before us’: as a Lozi proverb has it, ‘Go the way that many people go; if you go alone you will have reason to lament.’ Yet the record is also strong on the side of new initiative. What in any case mattered most – and it will emerge again and again – lay in the creative tension that was quickened and sustained by circumstances which so emphatically required convention and experiment as dual guides to survival. The Luo-speaking peoples offer a striking illustration. To live and multiply in the scorching grasslands of the Bahr al Ghazal, far out beyond the dust-harried skylines of the southern Nile, the founding fathers of the Luo had to learn techniques of cattle-raising and millet-farming capable of practice in a land of savagely contrasted seasons. Only rigid conventions could stave off disaster, as anyone may easily conclude who observes the peoples living there today: only strong obedience to the rules which governed their relations with each other and with their tawny land.
Yet the Luo, however custom-bound in the country of their birth, none the less became a people of wanderers who experimented with a copious range of new ideas. They adopted variant forms of religion, helped to found prestigious dynasties of kings, lived repeatedly on the ideological as well as physical frontiers of ‘somewhere else’ and ‘something different’. A maxim of their neighbours the Luyia, another compound of wanderers and sedentaries, sounds the characteristic note. Oratseshera akharo khali ebusiba, say the Luyia, ‘Don’t laugh at a distant boat being tossed by the waves [of Lake Nyanza]. Your relative may be in it.’ The rules are there, and the rules are good. But the changes and chances of fate may at any moment overturn them. Then a man must be ready to shift for himself by head-on clash or shrewd evasion.
3
The Physical Problem
IF THERE WERE FOUR MILLION AFRICANS TWO THOUSAND YEARS ago, there were probably as many as 150 million by the eve of the colonial period. They had settled in all but the most arid parts of the continent; even in the deserts they travelled and sometimes lived. When considering how they developed to this remarkable extent one needs to look first of all, even if briefly, at the ecological problems of their environment. These were neither small nor few.
One is helped towards understanding these ecological problems by the fact that Africa’s climate seems to have changed little in historical times. Back in the 540s, Julian the missionary to the Nubians used to say that ‘from nine o’clock until four in the afternoon he was obliged to take refuge in caves where there was water, and where he sat undressed except for a linen garment such as the people of the country wear’. Anyone travelling in Nubia today will understand why.
It was, as it is now, a continent of startling natural extravagance. Nothing here is done by halves. The dimensions are always big; often they are extreme. There are deserts large enough to swallow half the lands of Europe, where intense heat by day gives place to bitter cold by night, and along whose stony boundaries the grasslands run out and disappear through skylines trembling in a distance eternally flat. There are great forests and woodlands where the sheer abundance of nature is continually overwhelming in tall crops of grass that cut like knives, in thorns which catch and hold like hooks of steel, in a myriad marching ants and flies and creeping beasts that bite and itch and nag, in burning heat which sucks and clogs or rains that fall by slow gigantic torrents out of endless skies, and often in the stumbling miles which lie between your feet and where you need to be. There are fine and temperate uplands, tall mountains, rugged hills, but even these are filled with an extravagance of nature.
If you tramp through the African bush you will soon wonder how anyone could ever impose human settlement on this land, much less keep a footing here and steadily enlarge it. All this wild profusion stands there vast and looming, like a conscious presence waiting to move in again the moment your back is turned. Give this giant the merest chance, you will feel, and the whole surrounding scenery will again invade these narrow fields and possess the land once more, possess it utterly, as though humanity had never been. Every African culture bears profound witness to this dominating ‘spirit of the land’.
Yet the appearance of lush natural wealth is often misleading. Much of Africa is paved with a lateritic soil of low fertility and shallow depth. Much of it is covered and, it seems, was always covered in historical times by fruitless bush and poorly timbered trees. Much of it is pestered by tsetse fly inimical to beast and man. Only the development of an inherent immunity—but this never complete—has enabled Africans to withstand widespread malaria. Other parasites demand their toll, jiggers and locusts, pestilential water-snails, fever-bearing clouds of flying creatures.
Initially, moreover, Africa had few good food plants. Early farming was of dry rice and local yams in western Africa, and of millet and sorghum elsewhere, but of little else until the coming of Indonesian bananas and Asian yams in the fourth or fifth century, and of American cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, paw paw and pineapples in the sixteenth. The position with cattle was somewhat better thanks to the spread of Zebu and Sanga breeds in the first millennium BC and later. But even so there were many areas which could raise no cattle because of tsetse.
Poor fertility made it inevitable that this early farming, outside the lower valley of the Nile and some areas of West Africa and the Congo Basin, should always be a matter of frequent shifting from place to place. Settlement for a long time in any one village was difficult or impossible. More often, groups rotated through a series of village sites within the area they claimed as their own. And whenever they moved the wilderness came in behind them and raised its barriers once more.
The crucial inventions in improving this situation, in enabling longer periods of settlement and new processes of growth, seem to have lain in the metallurgy of iron: in identification of the ore, extraction, crushing, smelting, and forging of the metal. Locally evolved or adapted from techniques already known in northern Africa, iron production spread widely in the tropical zones from about two thousand years ago. How greatly its uses were appreciated by Stone Age farmers may be guessed from the mystical rites and beliefs, linking it to an immanent spiritual power, that continued in later times to surround the working of iron and other metals, including copper, gold and tin. Their production was conceived as the fertilisation of matter by energy, the blast furnace of ant-hill earth being the womb with the shaft of the bellows, which were often paired as testicles, as the organ of transmission: a process exercised by specialists under divine protection that was both physical and spiritual, demonstrating man’s command of nature as well as nature’s command of man, in an idiom perfectly at one with African conceptions.
