African Genius

The presentation by the Orator Dr M. C. Horton to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol of Basil Davidson for the degree of Doctor of Letters 1999

WE HAVE THIS AFTERNOON a very unusual event. I am presenting to you a candidate who, only two years ago, received an Honorary Degree in this very same building, not I dare to say, from our University, but from another, from the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, whose Vice-Chancellor came specially to our city to honour a local resident and Bristolian, and you most graciously consented to allow the ceremony to take place within these walls.

Basil Risbridger Davidson was born nearly 85 years ago, in a house at the top of Blackboy Hill which is reached by way of the Whiteladies Road. We can only speculate if living one’s formative years among the ‘white ladies’ and ‘black boys’ influenced the ultimate direction that his career would take, as one of Africa’s foremost modern historians, but this lies in the future of an extraordinary life.

Leaving school at 16, Basil Davidson obtained work as a clerk in a banana warehouse at Avonmouth, but aspired to be a journalist, and after numerous begging letters, obtained work in London with that most ancient of our newspapers, The Colliery Guardian. Indeed he soon rose to be the editor of its sister newspaper, The Quarry and Road Making Journal. It proved to be the foot in the door, and by 1938, he had joined The Economist as a correspondent. But war was to break out, and Basil Davidson was soon at the recruiting office, offering his services to fight fascism. His talents were rapidly recognised, and he found his way into Special Operations Executive, or SOE. He was sent into the Balkans, with cover as a journalist, and survived there for nine months in clandestine operations. But with the German onslaught into the Balkans during April 1941, he was captured, perhaps fortunately, by the Italians. After a brief internment, and an extraordinary exchange deal, which involved 100 British diplomats and agents for one rather minor Italian royal duke, who was taken during the campaign in Ethiopia, he reached Britain, was given ten days leave, and immediately sent back to SOE headquarters in Cairo.

By late 1942 it was clear that British policy towards the Balkans was hopelessly wrong, and now Major Davidson was one of a small group to persuade Churchill, during a visit to Cairo, to switch support to Tito’s partisans. This was to prove a turning point in the war, but also for Davidson, who was able to return to Yugoslavia, to fight with the Serbian partisans in a savage, brutal and hair-raising war. By late ’44 the Balkan war was over and Davidson, rejecting an offer of home leave to return to his devoted wife, Marion, volunteered to be parachuted into Nazi-controlled northern Italy, where again he worked with the partisans and communists behind enemy lines. The official histories record the greatest moment of Davidson’s war career, wrongly, when the surrender of the proud city of Genoa was taken, not by the advancing American Fifth Army, but by a British liaison officer, Colonel Davidson MC. Characteristically, Basil Davidson denies this; the surrender was taken by the Italians themselves, fighting for their own freedom from fascism.

Basil Davidson had a ‘good war’, but unlike many war heroes who returned home to obscurity, and whose fame has been briefly re-remembered in the obituary columns of The Times, decades later, he built upon his experiences to make a unique contribution to the modern world. He resumed his career as a journalist and became The Times’ correspondent in Paris, but soon saw that the injustices that he had fought to eliminate in Europe were still present in colonial Africa. He first travelled to South Africa, where the new Nationalist government had begun to establish the framework of apartheid. Appalled by what he saw, he wrote his first book, A Report on Southern Africa in 1952. This was one of the first liberal outcries against apartheid, and was to prove to be a foundation block of the anti-apartheid movement. By now, thrown out of South Africa, he travelled through colonial Africa, branded by the settler governments as a dangerous subversive and communist sympathiser, and was often escorted to the border, PDQ, on one famous occasion, having to turn down an invitation to stay with the Chief of Police who was an old family friend.

It was to the Portuguese colonial system that Davidson reserved his most active opposition. Fascist, reliant upon forced labour systems, the modern manifestation of slavery, with minimal education or health services for the indigenous population, these colonial relics belonged to the 19th-century world, which those great liberal pioneers, such as E. D. Morel and Henry Nevinson, had exposed. By the early 1950s a few brave Africans were challenging this colonial order, by armed uprisings and guerrilla warfare. Davidson is one of a handful of Europeans who was able to obtain the trust of these Africans and their leaders, fighting for their freedom and liberation, and by his writings was able to plead their case in the world of the colonial rulers. His pen was indeed mightier than the sword.

To gather material for his numerous books and reports to the British press, he travelled to the guerrilla-held areas of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Eritrea, at enormous personal risk. In one visit he walked over 300 miles into Angola. He was still reporting in 1988 from Eritrea, when he was the only journalist present at the final successful offensive against the Ethiopian army. The guerrilla camps of Africa were little different from those of the partisans and the communists of the European war. Amilcar Cabral, one of the liberation movement’s leaders, who was later gunned down by Portuguese agents, wrote how Davidson ‘accepted every risk and fatigue that could bring him into personal touch with the way our people live now; together we shared the same canoes, the same trails in the bush, we drank from the same calabash, the same bombers bombed us, the very mosquitoes mingled our blood’. His books stand as a vital eyewitness record of the emergence of modern Africa.

Between these trips Basil Davidson became a serious historian of Africa. To him, the writing of history is not a self-pleasing activity, but a moral exercise. He had read the texts of the imperial historians, and saw how they had misunderstood Africa; they had promoted a racist view of Africa, a necessary justification for the enslavement and exploitation of black people. They had ignored the rich pre-colonial past, in which African empires and cities had flourished and craftsmen and artists worked to produce some of the finest pieces to survive from Antiquity. Much was misinterpreted, or attributed to foreigners. If these achievements were possible before colonialism, Davidson argued, then surely Africans could also deliver their own future destiny. His groundbreaking book Old Africa Rediscovered, published in 1959, meticulously documented the evidence for pre-colonial Africa. Even today, with the gathering pace of historical and especially archaeological research, his books and writings have a freshness and purpose, and many remain in print as the texts for students of African historical studies.

With victory in the liberation wars assured, the winds of change having swept across Africa, many, including Davidson, hoped for a new beginning: a prosperous, free and democratic continent. But as we all know, it was not to be. Despots and dictators wiped out democracy, while corruption and mismanagement destroyed economies. His most recent books have sought answers to the modern predicament, and he shows little sentiment towards those African leaders who failed to deliver on the earlier idealism. The paradox of nationalism, which at first provided the rallying call to remove the colonial masters, became the yoke of tribal conflict and territorial dispute. The inherited nation state was and is, in Davidson’s immortal phrase, and the title of a recent book, The Black Man’s Burden.

MR VICE-CHANCELLOR, we have here today with us one of the great radical figures of the 20th century. He has pursued, throughout his life, a just cause, without fear for his own personal safety. He has provided an inspiration for millions, through his books and television work, and by his academic writings gave us African history, when many denied that there could be any African history.

MR VICE CHANCELLOR, I present to you Basil Risbridger Davidson MC, as eminently worthy to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.

The African Genius

BOOKS ON AFRICA

By Basil Davidson

Report on Southern Africa (1952)

The New West Africa: Problems of Independence (1953)

(edited with Adenekan Ademola)

The African Awakening (1955)

The Lost Cities of Africa (1959)

The African Slave Trade (1961)

Which Way Africa? The Search for a New Society (1964)

A History of West Africa, 1000–1800 (1965)

(with F. K. Buah)

African Kingdoms (1966)

(with the Editors of Time-Life Books)

A History of East and Central Africa to the Late 19th Century (1967)

(with J. E. F. Mhina)

Africa in History: Themes and Outlines (1968)

The Liberation of Guiné (1969)

The African Genius (1969)

In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s People (1972)

Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (1973)

Can Africa Survive? Arguments Against Growth Without Development (1974)

Let Freedom Come: Africa in Modern History (1978)

No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky (1981)

The People’s Cause: A History of Guerrillas in Africa (1981)

The Story of Africa (1984)

The Long Struggle of Eritrea (1988)

(edited with Lionel Cliffe)

The Fortunate Isles (1989)

Modern Africa (1990)

African Civilization Revisited (1991)

The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992)

The Search for Africa: A History in the Making (1994)

The African Genius

BASIL DAVIDSON

James Currey

OXFORD

Ohio University Press

ATHENS

James Currey Ltd

73 Botley Road

Oxford OX2 0BS

Ohio University Press

Scott Quadrangle

Athens

Ohio 45701

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

© Basil Davidson, 1969

First published as The Africans by Longmans 1969

First distributed in Europe and Commonwealth by James Currey 1996

First published by James Currey 2004

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11     5 4 3

ISBN 0-85255-799-X (James Currey paper)

ISBN 0-8214-1605-7 (Ohio University Press paper)

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Davidson, Basil

The African genius

1. Africa - Civilization   2. Africa - History   I. Title

960

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

available on request

ISBN 978-0-82144-565-5 (Ohio University Press eBook)

ISBN 978-1-78204-791-9 (James Currey ePub eBook)

ISBN 978-1-78204-991-3 (James Currey ePDF eBook)

To Amilcar Cabral for the past yet less than for the future

Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society

Matthew Amold in The Oxford English Dictionary

Contents

Prologue. A SCATTERED WISDOM

PART ONE. AFRICA’S WORLD

1. ‘Just plain nonsense . . .’ and after

2. Formative Origins

3. The Physical Problem

4. Unity and Variation

PART TWO. SOCIAL CHARTERS

5. Founding Ancestors

6. The Balance with Nature

7. A Moral Order

8. Elaborations I: Age Sets

9. Elaborations II: Secret Societies

PART THREE. STRUCTURES OF BELIEF

10. A Science of Social Control

11. Of Witches and Sorcerers

12. Upside-Down People

13. Explanation and Prediction

14. The Danger Within

15. Useful Magic

16. Answers to Anxiety

17. Art for Life’s Sake

18. The Dynamics of Reality

PART FOUR. MECHANISMS OF CHANGE

19. From Elders to Kings

20. The Nature of Kingship

21. Conquest and Clientage

22. Trade and Islam

23. Power, Rank and Privilege

24. The Crisis Opens

PART FIVE. THE DELUGE AND TODAY

25. From a Guerrilla Diary

26. The Great Transition

27. The Kings Resist

28. Twilight of the Old Gods

29. New Redeemers

30. The Modern Context

31. The Masses React

Epilogue. AFRICAN DESTINIES

Acknowledgements

Notes and References

Select Bibliography

Index

Author’s Note

That the Africans have a long and vivid history of their own is now widely understood. But what manner of history has this been? Here I have attempted three things. First, to offer a summary of what is now known, or what it now seems reasonable to think, about the ideas and social systems, religions, moral values, magical beliefs, arts and metaphysics of a range of African peoples, chiefly in tropical Africa. Then to consider the ways in which these cultures have grown and changed from distant times until now. Lastly, to fit these aspects of African civilisation into their modern perspective as the connected parts of a living whole.

Illustrations

Map

Approximate location of sixty-four peoples mentioned in this book (drawn by John Flower)

Drawings in the text

East Coast sea-fishing trap

Forced-draught furnace for smelting iron ore

Ancestral figures from the country of the Ekoi, south-eastern Nigeria

The distribution of parts of a sacrificial beast among the Dinka

Karimojong cattle classification by hide markings

Wooden mask of the Ekpo Society, region of Benin

Soapstone carving from Great Zimbabwe

‘Nomoli’ soapstone figurine from the Mende country of Sierra Leone

Kalabari water-spirit mask in the form of a crocodile

Zither from the Kweri of Tanzania

Diagram of Dogon village

Imaginative reconstruction of an ancient burial chamber at Ukwu in eastern Nigeria

Wrought-iron figure of a long-horned cow from the old kingdom of Karagwe in north-western Tanzania

East African mtepe, coastal trading vessel with ‘sewn’ lashings

Interior of mosque at Zaria, northern Nigeria

Pattern of distribution of temples and domestic shrines in Oyo

Nineteenth-century tomb at Ununio, coast of Tanzania

Siwa or ceremonial horn from Lamu, north-eastern Kenya

African Christian Church symbol on hillside near Johannesburg

Anyanwu, The Awakening: by Ben Enwonwu, Lagos

Photographs (before text)

1. Akan shrine priest, central Ghana

2. Tallensi hut interior, northern Ghana 1965

3. Akan ceremonial stool, central Ghana

4. Ancient bronze ceremonial vessel, Ita Yemoo, Yorubaland

5. Ancient terracotta head, Ife, Yorubaland

6. Benin royal shrine, 1965

7. Balante village shrine, Guinea-Bissau 1967

8. Assembly for public ritual of Karimojong adult juniors, 1957

9. Assembly for public ritual of Karimojong elders, 1957

10. Small bronze figure representing an Akan ancestor

11. Spanish witches in flight, with attendant owl: aquatint from Goya’s Caprichos

12. A medieval ‘Witches’ Sabbath’: woodcut from Hans-Baldung Grien, 1510

13. A missionary opinion from Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee: a history of the S.I.M. by its founder

14. The bodies ‘spiritual’ and ‘natural’ of Bishop Thomas Beckingham (d. 1464) on his tomb at Wells Cathedral, Somerset

15. and 16. The annual ‘pilgrimage’ at Rocia, Alicante, Spain

Acknowledgements

Plates. 1, 2, 3: Paul Strand. 4, 5, 6, 10: Werner Forman, 7: author. 8, 9: plates 5A and 5B from Neville Dyson-Hudson, Karimojong Politics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966. 11, 12: Mansell Collection. 14: Phillips Studio, Wells. 15, 16: John Hilleson Agency Ltd.

Drawings in the text. p. 63, from Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1961. p. 79, from Neville Dyson-Hudson, Karimojong Politics, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1966. p. 171, redrawn from Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotêmmeli, O.U.P. for the International African Institute, 1965. p. 228, from Peter Morton-Williams, ‘An outline of the cosmology and cult organisation of the Oyo Yoruba’, Africa xxxiv.3, 1964.

All drawings in the text not otherwise acknowledged are by Caroline Sassoon, who made them for this book.

Akan shrine priest, central Ghana 1965

Tallensi hut interior, northern Ghana 1965

Akan ceremonial stool, central Ghana

Ancient bronze ceremonial vessel, Ita Yemoo, Yorubaland

Ancient terracotta head, Ife, Yorubaland

Benin royal shrine, 1965

Balante village shrine, Guinea–Bissau, 1967

Assembly for public ritual of adult juniors of Karimojong, 1957

Assembly for public ritual of Karimojong elders, 1957

Small bronze figure representing an Alkan ancestor

Spanish witches in flight, with attendant owl: aquatint from Goya’s Caprichos

A medieval ‘Witches’ Sabbath’: woodcut by Hans Baldung–Grien, 1510

Missionary opinion from Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee:: a history of the S.I.M. by its founder

The bodies ‘spiritual’ and ‘nayural’ of Bishop Thomas Beckingham (d. 1464) on his tomb at Wells Cathedral, Somerset

The annual ‘pilgrimage’ at Rocia, Alicante, Spain

part one

Africa’s World

Behold, I have set the land before you. . . .

Deuteronomy 1.8

And ye shall divide the land . . . for an inheritance among your families . . . according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.

Numbers XXXIII.54

1

‘Just plain nonsense. . . .’ and after

AT ONE OF THEIR GATHERINGS OF 1861 THE DISTINGUISHED Victorians of London’s Ethnographical Society found themselves with a delicate problem. They had invited a foreigner, a gentleman from France, to speak on travels through the unexplored forests of equatorial Africa. And why not? They were men who took pride in a liberal breadth of international outlook. Unfortunately this French gentleman, this M. du Chaillu for whom their shocked Transactions could afterwards find no Christian name, had not proved satisfactory. In discussing a horde of largely naked savages called the Mpongwe, M. du Chaillu had appeared to suggest that these natives might be other than they seemed. He had gone so far as to argue for certain redeeming features. He had even spoken with some respect of their religion.

It was understandable that the ethnographers should have felt a need to set matters right in the wake of such remarks. They lived in dangerous Darwinian years when the frontiers and even the foundations of proper and accepted belief had begun to take a serious buffeting. There were even moments, if you took a long view, when it seemed as though there were no longer any natural and reliable divide to save the members of the Ethnographical Society from a distant origin in beings so unfortunate as those they called the ‘tawny Bosjeman’ and the ‘leather-skinned Hottentot’. Carried to logical conclusions, such opinions could only be subversive of established law and order. Feeling that something must be done, the ethnographers called in Captain Richard Burton. He, they knew, could be relied upon to use his great authority in the proper way.

Captain Burton did not let them down. This already famous explorer began by offering a redeeming African feature to match M. du Chaillu’s. He opined that ‘an abnormal development of adhesiveness, in popular language a peculiar power of affection, is the brightest spot in the negro character’. Yet this was about as much as could sensibly be said for the natives he had known. M. du Chaillu, they must believe, had been lucky: he had run into a better lot than usual. Compared with them, however, there was the ‘superior degeneracy of the eastern tribes’, not to mention all the others one could think of. No doubt the Mpongwe might have some sort of religious belief. It might also be true that ‘the religion of the Africans is ever interesting to those of a maturer faith, as the study of childhood is pleasing to those of riper years’. But one ought not to go too far.

Not only, in Burton’s view, had Africans failed to develop from the primitive to the less primitive: they had also reached a point of helplessness at which, if left to themselves, they would never do any better. In that great schedule of hierarchical progress from Savagery to Civilisation imagined by the more conservative Victorians, with Europe at the peak and zenith of the line, the Africans were simply not in the race. Perhaps they had once set out, though this was more than doubtful: if so, they had long since stopped running. Exactly why was not known. But the reason, whatever it might be, was generally agreed to lie in some fatal deficiency of their nature. Some experts thought it was a matter of the African brain’s being too small for civilised development. Others argued that the root of the trouble lay not so much in brain size as in diminished frontal lobes, or an insufficiently reliable ‘supragranular layer of cortex’. The results, in any case, were understood to be deplorable. Once an African had become adult, Burton opined in a view widely accepted, ‘his mental development is arrested, and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards’.

Defended by their travellers, these Victorians held firm to their hierarchies of racial progress and found plenty of evidence to fortify them. Returning from the Upper Nile in 1866 Sir Samuel Baker assured them that the African ‘mind is as stagnant as the morass which forms its puny world’, and other explorers said much the same. It followed that the evolutionists had clearly got things wrong; and there was quiet satisfaction among the more respectable members of the Ethnographical Society, in that same year of 1866, when the impetuous Dean Farrar proposed once and for all to set the record straight by dividing humanity into three great classes, ‘the Savage races, the Semi-civilised races, and finally the two Civilised races’—the latter categories, of course, including none like the Mpongwe.

We are generally a long way from such views. But they are worth recalling if only for their perfectly dramatic contrast with those of modern science. In 1896 a well-known teacher of philosophy at Durham University, F. B. Jevons, published an Introduction to the History of Religion which became a standard work. Seventy years later a modern anthropologist of Africa, among the most eminent of his day, could summarise current opinion on Jevons’s book by describing it as a ‘collection of absurd reconstructions, unsupportable hypotheses and conjectures, wild speculations, suppositions and assumptions, inappropriate analogies, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations, and, especially in what he wrote about totems, just plain nonsense’.

Old views about Africa are worth recalling for another reason. Though vanished from serious discussion, they still retain a kind of underground existence. The stercoraceous sediment of Burton’s opinions, and of others such as Burton, has settled like a layer of dust and ashes on the minds of large numbers of otherwise thoughtful people, and is constantly being swirled about. What this leads to, despite all factual evidence to the contrary, are endless suspicions that writers such as Lothrop Stoddard were or are just possibly right when they wrote or write about the ‘natural and inherent inferiority’ of Africans; that ‘in the negro, we are in the presence of a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from [other] human types’; or that ‘the negro . . . has contributed virtually nothing’ to the civilisation of the world. However scientifically mistaken, these notions apparently remain part of our culture.

Often it is the aggressive violence of such opinions that most surprises. But perhaps one ought not to be surprised. These notions arose essentially from an identification of categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’. Outside their comfortable windowpanes Victorian men of property saw the hateful Devil of a new proletariat, hungry, abused, always liable to strike; and they feared what they saw. At another remove they viewed the Africans in the same obscuring light: as beings of ‘the lower orders’ whom civilisation, if it were to survive, must keep sternly ‘in their place’. They accordingly tended to think of Africans not only as children incapable of growing up, but as dangerous and potentially criminal children. All but a few agreed that these ‘natives’ could not safely be admitted to the salons of human equality.

If views like these have managed to remain alive, it is also true that the twentieth century has done something to clear them away. Even during the central colonial period, when inquiry into the nature of African humanity was generally at a low ebb, anthropologists who followed Durkheim and Malinowski played an important part, as St Clair Drake has pointed out, in ‘helping us to see 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:

Nothing as statistically neat will have actually occurred, but the development of new ethnic identities may have been broadly along these lines. Very slow in remote Stone Age centuries, the rate of growth 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