type of African forced-draught furnace for smelting iron ore. This example has a pair of bowl-bellows and twin shafts, the furnace being filled with alternate layers of ore and charcoal. About 100 cms. high.
This metallurgy remained at the handicraft stage. Though practised intensively by many peoples, it was always laborious. Among the Fipa, whose ironsmiths were widely famous, it was observed a few decades ago that a group of men and women, working with a single furnace, could produce no more than two hoe blades and a few smaller tool heads in a day. But this scale of production was enough for an economy largely of subsistence. Once it became possible, the way was open for radical expansion. Archaeologists are generally agreed that this was true for all comparable civilisations. ‘It was the adoption of the working of copper and its alloys, and later of iron’, in Grahame Clark’s words, ‘that brought about major increases in control over physical environment, not only in working such organic materials as wood and bone, but even more significantly in helping to improve the food-supply through more effective felling and clearance and through the provision of such things as pruning and lopping-knives, ploughshares, coulters and the like.’ The more widely such tools were available and the better they became, ‘the greater must have been their impact on food-production and so on population’. This completely applies to tropical Africa with the exception of ploughshares and coulters, for which, since the plough appears south of Ethiopia only in recent times—along with the tsetse-immune tractor—we must substitute axe blades and hoe blades.
The process was cumulative. All the evidence for Africa suggests that iron smithing combined creatively with new farming techniques. More food permitted the establishment of stores of food, at any rate from one harvest to the next. Stores of food permitted surpluses, however slender in the beginning; and surpluses could be used to feed a growing number of non-food-producing specialists such as were required for smithing and other early industrial skills. So that ‘every increase in the density of population’, itself a product of farming settlement, ‘made possible a finer subdivision of labour, a most essential condition for further technical improvements. The interaction between food-production, population growth, and the ability to use more effective materials for implements and gear was both intimate and continuous.’
With this, the processes of Iron Age history were well in motion by about AD 500. Groups of iron-working farmers appeared in almost every region between the fringes of the Sahara and the hills and plains of the far south. And so the broad picture is rounded out. The ideological formation of the Africans is framed by the gradual peopling and settling of vast areas occupied previously by a few scattered hunters and plant-gatherers, or not occupied at all. These farmers co-exist with the earlier occupants but slowly dispossess them of their traditional feeding grounds, or else absorb them by marriage into a post-Stone Age economy of village settlement and social organisation.
One has to think of these pioneering settlers as of small and isolated groups. Alone in their solitudes, pressing onward in their need for new resources to support their growing numbers, they face the wilderness and forge new identities. They link themselves with their forefathers in self-justifying lifelines back to the Life Force, back to their ideas of Origin, back to their spiritual protection in a land that seems boundless and boundaryless, framed only by a few great rivers or the blue lift of hills upon a distant skyline. Here they evolve their own frontiers and frameworks of belief and thought, each group defining itself, enclosing itself, ruling itself, within its own exclusive charter of self-explanation.
4
Unity and Variation
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THIS RUSTIC CIVILISATION OR GROUP OF civilisations may be regarded as a large achievement in the annals of mankind. But it is one which has had scant attention from the outside world. By contrast, many writers have celebrated the ancient Greeks for the ways in which they overcame an utter ‘lack of precedent’, devising and codifying laws ‘constitutional, civil, sacral and criminal’ with no one to guide or help them—not even, we are told, in the midst of that geophysically so small and helpful Mediterranean world—until they produced what Finley has called a ‘situation of compulsive originality’. Yet even while admiring the ancient Greeks, one may perhaps still wonder how far their ‘lack of precedent’ really existed in the wake of the high civilisations of antiquity which preceded them. Didn’t Herodotus, after all, tell us that the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt?
Without suggesting that the achievements of the ancient Africans were ‘the same’ as those of the Greeks, it may be reasonable to think that they were in one great aspect superior. They really did evolve much out of little, or out of nothing at all. If one should praise ‘the Greek spirit’ as splendidly creative and inventive, one may perhaps express some admiration for an ‘African spirit’ which was far less favourably placed for the elaboration of the arts of life, but none the less made this continent supply the needs of man. Where, after all, lay the precedent for the social and ideological structures built by the Africans, so various and resilient, so intricately held together, so much a skilful interweaving of the possible and the desirable? Where did these systems draw their sap and vigour except from populations who evolved them out of their own creativeness? Even allowing for the distant precedents of Egypt, the peoples who settled Africa had surely less to go upon than the ancestors of Pericles. The balance needs adjusting here.
How great was the African isolation? The evidence that we have, still fragmentary and tentative, points insistently to some kind of ‘common fund’ of long ago. Peoples separated by vast distances have similar ideas which suggest the same Stone Age source. Creation legends offer a good example.
Among the Dinka of the southern Sudan, latterday descendants of those ‘blameless Ethiopians’ whom Homer praised, it is held that long ago in a golden age God lived among men and was in no way separate from them. Separation came to this African Eden when a woman with her eagerness or greed for cultivation happened to hit God with a hoe, whereupon God withdrew into the heavens ‘and sent a small blue bird to sever a rope which had previously given men access to the sky and to him. Since that time the country has been ‘spoilt’, for men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry . . .’ At which point, for good measure, Death came also into the world.
Several thousand miles away, in the forests of Ghana, the Akan have much the same idea, though there is nothing to suggest that they ever knew any contact with the ancestors of the Dinka or with neighbours of the Dinka who tell the same general story. ‘Long long ago’, says the Akan legend, ‘God lived on earth or at least was very near to us. But there was a certain old woman who used to pound her fufu [cassava meal], and the pestle used to knock up against God. So God said to the old woman, “Why do you always do that to me? Because of what you are doing I am going to take myself away up into the sky.” And of a truth he did so.’
Such parallels could be multiplied. ‘Beast burials’ have been found among ancient peoples as far apart as the Nile Valley and southern Africa. Cattle folk as distant from each other as Uganda and Zululand have customarily buried their distinguished dead in shrouds of oxhide. Rams were the symbol of God in ancient Egypt and Nubian Kush, and have so remained among many West African peoples. The python is a similarly prestigious beast.
Simple diffusion from a ‘common fund’, or an effect of like circumstances producing like results? Probably we shall never know. The same basic conceptions of socio-religious belief and organisation appear again and again. But so they do throughout the world of antiquity. Anyone who cares to try his luck at tracing everything to Egypt, or Sumeria, or some other single ‘fount and source’ will find no lack of helpful evidence. The Babylonians, for example, evolved from the Sumerians a ‘universe of seven’, counting the seven steps of their ziggurats by the names of the seven planets corresponding to seven great gods, seven gates to the underworld, seven winds, seven days of the week. Faraway in western Africa, as it
