INTRODUCTORY PRE- HISTORY OF AFRICA FROM CHAPTER IN JOHN COLLINS AFRICAN MUSICAL SYMBOLISM IN CONTEMPORARY PERSEPCTIVE BOOK (ROOTS RHYTHMS AND RELATIVITY)
(nb John Collins did a BA in Archaeology at the University of Ghana 1969-72)
The origin of humanity lies in Africa, more precisely in the East African Rift Valley where early stone-age hominids known as Australopithecines evolved approximately five million years ago. One branch of them developed into Homo Erectus that slowly spread to Mediterranean Europe, Asia and China one-and-a-half-million years ago. This early form of man provides the first evidence of the use of fire and, according to the musicologists John Blacking and Bruno Nettl, they possessed a kind of communication in which language, rhythm, music and ritual movements were all fused into one.
About one-hundred-thousand years ago Homo Erectus gave way to Homo Sapiens that also originated in Africa and included the Rhodesoids of African itself and the Neanderthals who spread into the Mediterranean area. The engraved animal bones of these Middle Stone Age people suggest they had a lunar calendar and possibly a lunar cult. Another indication of their religious and artistic sensibility is that seventy-thousand years ago they were burying their dead and painting them with red ochre or haematite, implying a reverence for the deceased. These were an adaptable people who, inspite of the advancing ice-age, were able to push into Europe where they lived in caves, the walls of which they painted with abstract geometrical designs.
These first painters were replaced between fifty and thirty thousands years ago by Homo Sapiens Sapiensis, that is modern humanity (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) that are all descended from the same African Eve. Their cave-paintings depict human and animal figures, hinting at fertility cults based on sacred or totemic animals. They were hunter-gatherer societies in which the genders enjoyed a seperate but equal economic arrangement with the men doing the hunting and the women and children gathering food.
One northerly branch of these Late Stone Age people from Russia and northern Europe (the Gravettian Culture of archaeologists) left behind thousands of carved stone and ivory ‘Venus’ figurines some Russian examples of which are punched with holes, thought to be codes concerning the movement of sun, moon and planets. Thirty thousand of these ‘Venus’ statuettes of pregnant females have also been found in Southeast Europe. This all intimates the worship of fertility goddesses during stone-age times when.
The evidence suggests that during Late Stone Age times shamanistic or animistic religions were practised by hunter-gatherer societies from Africa to Siberia and across the Bering Straits to America. These were polytheistic fertility cults based on ancestor worship, the belief in totemic animals, the use of a lunar calendar and the glorification of fecund female nature spirits. These religious cults were run by priests and priestesses who combined the roles of political and spiritual leader, medicine-man/woman, oral historian and soothsayer. They officiated at ceremonies that used music, dance, ritual drama and sometimes pyschotropic drugs such as mushrooms to trigger oracular trance and possession.
When mankind first began to domesticate plants and animals during the so-called 'Neolithic Revolution' of ten thousand years ago, worship still continued to focus mainly on sacred animals, ancestors and Great Mother and Mother Earth deities. The dead were still dedicated to her by being buried in her, rather than being cremated which is a later patriarchal Indo-European custom. Living animals or sometimes humans were also sacrificed to her to ensure a good harvest. Nevertheless, the patriarchy latent in the male-bonding groups of hunter-gatherer societies became stronger in neolithic time when grain surpluses could maintain a permanent masculine military apparatus.
The first Neolithic urban communities were all situated near large rivers and required a centralised society to make maximum use of the annual floods. The ancient Egyptians, living on the banks of the Nile are an example. In pre-Dynastic they ritually sacrificed their early kings or pharoes during the annual Sed Festival and reckoned descent matrilinearly through the female line. We shall return to this later. The equally old Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia was located on the flood plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Its inhabitants worshipped the mother of all gods Ninhursag. Further east and a little later in time (about 2000 BC) the earliest Indian cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were built in the valley of the River Indus, and their supreme deity was a snake goddess. In China, around this time, there was the matrilineal Yang Shao culture of the Yellow River area whose supreme deity was Nu Gua, mother of the God Fu Xi, later demoted to his wife during the patrilineal Shang and Chou dynasties.
Contemporary with the Indus Valley and Yang Shao societies was the Agaean civilisation of the eastern Mediterranean islands and rim that revered the Great Mother goddess in many forms; as sacred caves and ‘navel’ or Omphalos Stones (i.e. Mother Earth's navel) and as the barley and snake goddess Da, Danae or Demeter. In Anitolia and Phoenicia there was the goddess of love, Ishtar or Astarte, later called Aphrodite and Venus by the Greeks and Romans. In archaic Greece there was Gaea the earth-mother of Cronus (Father Time) and Hera, who in turn was the mother of the giant Herakles. Crete had its pale-faced moon goddess Pasiphae and Libya its snake goddess Neith. On the Agaean island of Delos the cult of Artemis flourished that was connected with the legendary women Amazon warriors of the Levant and North Africa.
In the ancient Agaean, all the male gods were children of the various Great Mother deities and in many myths they were killed and reborn in the service of the earth's fertility. This sacrifice was actually carried out in Crete, where the King (Minos) had to die after spending a year as husband of the High Priestess, after which a new King of the waxing year took his place. Later, this annual change in the agricultural seasons was celebrated with animal rather than human sacrifice.
The Neolithic Revolution was spread westwards by the Megalithic culture, noted for it's burial mounds and it's observatories-cum-temples of huge standing stones (i.e.megaliths) such as those at Carnak in France and Stonehenge in England. Remains of such megalithic temples have been found as far afield as the River Danube the North African coast and as far south as Senegambia and Ethiopia.
However, there is now evidence that the first neolithic revolution in Africa took place much earlier than that of the Agaean and Megalithic civilisations. Indeed, recent research in East Africa and the Upper Nile Valley has suggested that incipient agriculture may have occurred there earlier than that in the Fertile Crescent, the area between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers previously considered by historians to be the earliest neolithic area. It is also now accepted that another early major neolithic centre in Africa developed in what was once the fertile Sahara. Animals were domesticated and the population began to make pottery around eight thousand years ago - at least a thousand years before the ancient Egyptians.
These black pastoralists, for they were descendants of the Negro populations which emerged in the Sahel region of West Africa about fifteen thousand years ago, have left us with many rock paintings of their animals and of themselves, tattooed and wearing masks in typical African fashion. But this society did not last, as between five and six thousand years ago, through a combination of over-grazing and long-term climatic change, the Sahara began to turn into a great dust bowl. This gradually pushed the pastoralists in two directions; south-west to the forest regions of West Africa and south-east to the Sudan and the Upper Nile Valley.
This double migration eventually produced the major linguistic differences between the present-day Western and Eastern Sudannic families of languages, called the Niger-Congo and the Nilo-Saharan respectively. Those who migrated east were the ancestors of today's Nilotic cattle people of Eastern Africa. Those who took a southerly course skirting forests through river valleys ended up in the West African coastal regions where they became settled agriculturalists. There is abundant archaeological evidence of their early farming activities.
Despite the increasing desiccation of the Sahara there was four thousand years ago a busy trans-Saharan trade going on between the Mediterranean and West Africa. The then numerous desert oases linked the two areas with cloth and beads going southwards and gold, copper and ivory northwards. Saharan rock paintings depict charioted horses and figure-of-eight shields, typical of the ancient Libyans and Agaeans. However, by approximately 700BC so many oases had dried up that traders began changing from horses to camels. Indeed, by Roman times it was quite impossible for horses to cross the desert, which prevented the expansion of the Roman Empire into Africa as their cavalry could not move southwards beyond the North African desert town of Djado in the Fezzan .
To a certain extent the neolithic peoples who lived around the West African forest lost contact with the north and developed in a largely autonomous fashion. By 500 BC they had skipped the Bronze Age and had jumped straight into the Iron Age, starting at Nok, in Nigeria. With iron instead of stone axes, these people were able to clear the dense jungle rather than remaining on its outer fringes. One more factor was necessary for the final taming of the forest. This was the introduction of South-east Asian forest crops such as the banana, plantain and cocao-yam, brought to Africa from Indonesia by longboat two thousand years ago. It was a combination of iron hoes and axes and the slash
-and-burn cultivation of these imported forest crops that led to the ‘population explosion' of Bantu speaking peoples. This in turn led to their two millenia spread from the Nigerian and Cameroonian area of West Africa southwards through the forests of central to South Africa.
In spite of the increasing isolation of black Africa due to the drying of the Sahara, trade links were maintained between it and post-Roman Muslim North Africa through a series of powerful medieval Islamic African empires, which were located in the southern Sahel stretches of the Sahara. These were the ancient Sudannic empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhai and the Hausa Emirates that traded by camel between the Mediterranean and the forest areas of West Africa.
What finally put an effective end to this Trans-Saharan trade between North and West Africa was not increasing desertification however, but rather the coming of the Europeans to Africa. With their sailing ships they by-passed Muslim North Africa and diverted West African gold and trade goods away from the Trans-Saharan route. Rather than northwards African goods now went south to the European ports on the West African (Guinea) coast. This led to the decline of the Islamic Sudannic empires and the emergence of more southerly centralised black forest states such as the Akan kingdom of Ashanti/Asante, the Fon kingdom of Dahomey and the Yoruba ones of Benin and Oyo. The coming of the Europeans likewise put an end to the Afro-Arabic Zanj states of the East African coast. These states, just like those of the Sudan, had grown up in medieval times from a fusion of Arab and African cultures; a blending that also led to the creation of the East African trade language, Swahili. However, with the destruction of the Zanj states by the Europeans, the purely African Bantu speaking kingdoms of the interior who traded with them, like Enguruka and Great Zimbabwe, declined in power.
To explain the origins of the many well-organised states the Europeans met in Africa (like Benin, Ashanti, Dahomey and Great Zimbabwe) colonial historians produced the 'Hamitic hypothesis’. They simply could not believe that civilisation could be indigenous to Africa but must be a result of whites or whitish Hamitic peoples such as the Egyptians, Romans, Jews or Arabs having invaded the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ from the north. In East Africa for example, these 'Hamitic' civilisers were equated by colonial anthropologists with the 'Abecwesi' of Bantu legend, lightish-skinned invaders who formed the first states amongst the Bantu-speaking peoples. According to these writers (including Rider Haggard in his fanciful book, 'King Solomon's Mines'), the Abecwesi were an African folk-memory of the ancient Egyptians who had moved south. However, in reality, these Abecwesi were simply Nilotic African pastoralists who migrated south and created ruling dynasties over the local Bantu farmers. These Nilotes had in turn and as mentioned earlier been pushed south by the encroaching desert.
To summarise these various points. Incipient agriculture was practised in sub-Saharan Africa as early if not earlier than in the Fertile Crescent, Saharan Africans domesticated animals before the pre-Dynastic Egyptians and the Nigerian iron-age started before that of North Africa. A pattern thereby emerges of a civilisation spreading from a common centre - the once fertile Sahara. It was there that the black humanity originated carrying pastoralism, agriculture and technology with them as they migrated in all directions out of the Sahara. Indeed one branch of the Saharan people who moved northeast became the Badarian ancestors of the ancient Egyptians.
The Sahara has therefore given the continent much of its cultural continuity as well as providing a two-way communication and trading link with the North Africa and the Mediterranean. Ironically, this link was only finally broken by the coming of the Europeans, the very people who talked of Africa's isolation from the mainstream of history.
