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CHAPTER

1

Africa: The Continent and Its People Africa is not one country. It’s a continent: the second

largest continent. Not only is it vast, but it also overwhelms the rest of the world in the diversity of its people, the

complexity of its cultures, the majesty of its geography, the abundance of its resources, and the resiliency

and vivacity of its people.

INTRODUCTION People writing about Africa customarily begin with a brief reference to how little Africa is known among Americans. Unlike European powers, the United States never had colonies in Africa, although Liberia (in West Africa) was founded in 1847 by freed African slaves from the United States, and the U.S. government has maintained special ties with Liberia from then until now. Since the early 1960s, when dozens of African colonies became independent nations, public ignorance in the United States about Africa has declined markedly. Air travel between Africa and America has increased since then, and American television has reported on a wide range of African problems—from severe drought and famine throughout the Sahel and the Horn to political crises in Libya, Nigeria, and Rwanda. Educated Americans now realize that countries such as Egypt, which had formerly (and mistakenly) been regarded exclusively as part of the Middle East (Asia Minor), are actually located in Africa.

The United States has long been a favorite destination of Africans in search of higher education. During the early years of Africa’s independence, tens of thousands of African students traveled to the United States to further their education. The presence of these students made it possible for many educated Americans to meet Africans from different parts of the continent and to show some appreciation for the diversity of the African continent and its people. As the struggle for racial justice and equality in America has involved increasing numbers of African Americans, traditional civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League have joined efforts with such lobbying groups as Africa Action (formerly the American Committee on Africa) and Trans Africa Forum in seeking actively to influence U.S. government policies toward Africa. Although Africa accounts for the smallest proportion of new American immigrants, nevertheless more African students and visitors are choosing to live permanently in the United States, thereby helping to expand Americans’ familiarity with Africa.

Despite such developments and the fact that media coverage of events in independent Africa hasC op yr ig ht @ 2 01 6. R ou tl ed ge .

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improved significantly since colonial times (before 1960), many Americans do not fully appreciate the physical size and ethnic diversity of the African continent. Living in such a huge country as the United States, Americans tend to view Africa as a single country rather than as a continent that includes over fifty different countries; they even assume that it is as easy to travel from Cameroon to Tanzania as it is to drive from Colorado to Tennessee. For instance, it is not uncommon for an American to ask an African visitor from Nigeria whether he knows someone from Senegal or Zambia. This chapter introduces some of the geographic, demographic, and cultural-linguistic diversity in Africa, so that American students can begin to understand the incredible complexity and richness of Africa’s various landscapes and cultures.

GEOGRAPHY Africa is indeed a very large place, the world’s second largest continent. Its land area is 30 million square kilometers, stretching nearly 8,000 kilometers from Cape Town (South Africa) to Cairo (Egypt) and more than 5,000 kilometers from Dakar (Senegal) to Mogadishu (Somalia). It is nearly three and one half times the size of continental United States. The political geography of this huge continent consists of fifty-four modern nations, including island republics off its coasts. With the exception of Western Sahara, unilaterally and forcefully annexed by Morocco when Spain suddenly relinquished its colonial control in 1976, these African countries are independent states with their own political institutions, leaders, ideologies, and identities. All these countries belong to a continental forum called the African Union (formerly the Organization of African Unity, OAU), which is permanently headquartered in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. South Africa was admitted into the organization only in 1994 after being excluded for more than thirty years because its white minority government had constitutionally denied full rights of citizenship to its nonwhite majority. Each of these African nations—except for a handful of states like Somalia, Swaziland, Lesotho, and Botswana—is multilingual. Nigeria, for instance, encompasses more than 300 different language groups (probably more than any other nation), Tanzania has more than 100, Kenya has more than 40, and so on.

Geographically, Africa has been described as a vast plateau and is the most tropical of all continents, lying astride the equator and extending almost equal distances toward both north and south of the equator. Dominating the northern third of the continent is the world’s largest desert—the vast Sahara Desert. Africa’s most significant geological features—the highest and lowest elevations, largest lakes, and source of the world’s longest river, formed by unique patterns of “drift” between the African, Somali, and Arabian continental plates—lie along East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, the earth’s deepest continental crevice. One end of the Great Rift Valley follows the Red Sea northward from Lake Assai (Ethiopia) to the Dead Sea (Palestine); southward, along the rift between the African and Somali continental plates, lie Africa’s highest mountains and largest lakes. Whereas Lake Assai lies many hundreds of meters sea level, suchbelow long-extinct volcanoes as Mt. Kilimanjaro (5,900 meters or 19,340 ft.) and Mt. Kenya (5,200 meters or 17,040 ft.) rise hundreds of meters higher than the highest peaks in the continental United States. Many mountain ranges throughout the continent (e.g., Ethiopian, Drakensberg, Cameroon, and Atlas Mountains) include peaks between 3,000 and 4,900 feet and support dense populations living in various ecozones between 3,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level. Many of Africa’s plateaus and highlands have provided sustenance (and in some cases, refuge) for some of the continent’s densest and most productive populations.

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MAP 1.1 Africa: Political Map Source: Adapted from , African American Institute of New York, 1964.Africa Report

Other dense and productive populations in Africa have settled along the shores of the continent’s freshwater lakes and rivers, as well as along parts of its tropical coastlines. Africa’s great lakes—including Lake Victoria (the world’s second largest freshwater lake, after Lake Superior), Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi (among the four deepest and eighth largest in the world), Lakes Turkana, Nakuru, and Rukwa—lie on the floor of the Great Rift Valley, while shallower lakes like Chad and Bangweulu (or the Okavango Swamp) have served as life-giving water catchments for nearby savanna (or rolling grassland) regions elsewhere in the continent. On a continent where deserts have been expanding and savannas have been becoming drier, not just during past decades but in past millennia, Africa’s river systems (like her lakes) have also been crucial to people’s growth and survival.

Beginning with ancient Egyptian and Cushitic civilizations several thousand years ago, the Nile River Valley has provided the vital water needed to sustain large populations along the only fertile strip that cuts across the entire Sahara Desert. The longest river on earth (more than 6,400 kilometers), the historic Nile originates from Lake Victoria-Nyanza and derives two-thirds of its waters from the Ethiopian Highlands before plunging over several cataracts downriver (northward) into the rich Nile Delta on the Mediterranean Sea. In modern times, the Lower (northern) Nile has become an important source of hydroelectric power, as well as vital irrigation water, to the Egyptians and the Sudanese who benefit from the electricity generated at the Aswan Dam. Much further upstream (southward) and beyond the Sudd marshlands of southern Sudan, the Ugandans and the Kenyans “plug in” to smaller hydroelectric projects at Nalubaale Dam (formerly called the Owen Falls Dam) and Kiira Dam, both near Jinja (Uganda).

Flowing from Lake Bangweulu in central Africa and draining the entire Congo tropical rain forest into the Atlantic Ocean is the world’s tenth longest (and second most voluminous) river—the Congo (over 4,300

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kilo-meters)—which is fed by large tributaries such as the Ubangui, Kasai, and Cuango Rivers. Hydroelectric projects around cataracts near Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo provide electricity for nearby modernizing cities. Also from central Africa, flowing eastward into the Indian Ocean at the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley is the Zambezi River (about 2,600 kilometers) where the Kariba and Cabora Bassa Dams have harnessed much hydroelectric power (creating, as elsewhere, large new reservoirs), even while preserving Africa’s most famous single cataract—the beautiful and wondrous Victoria Falls (called Mosi la Tunya in the local Bemba language). Over in West Africa, where the Sahara Desert has been perceptibly expanding southward into the dry savannas of the Sahel during recent decades, the Niger River (about 4,800 kilometers) has long been regarded as a “lifeline” to the tens of millions of people it serves in about a half dozen nations but especially in Niger and Mali. Along with its major tributary (the Benue River) and such other prominent West African rivers as the Senegal, the Gambia, and the Volta (where the continent’s first major hydroelectric dam was built in Ghana), the Niger’s waters are collected by interior highlands and plateaus.

The Sahara Desert, which is nearly as large as the continental United States and still growing, engulfs much of the northern third of Africa. The Namib and Kalahari Deserts of southern Africa cover much of modern Namibia and Botswana, and Africa’s Horn (especially in eastern Ethiopia, northeastern Kenya, and Somalia) is rapidly devolving from dry savanna into desert proper. Other than such vast and thinly populated deserts and particular areas of densely populated mountain terrain, river valleys or deltas, lake basins, and fertile coastal strips, much of rural Africa is characterized by scattered villages of farmers and herders living on savannas. Less than 10 percent of the continent’s landscape, contrary to popular imagination, can be classified as tropical rainforest or “jungle.” In so far as “jungle” still exists, it is mostly found in the Congo drainage basin (which is lightly populated). Most tropical rainforest on the coastlines are now used for farming, fishing, lumbering, and city life. It can be seen that African people have adapted to countless different, and challenging, local environments. Even now, San hunters-gatherers have been forced to adapt their traditional lifestyles to harsh living conditions on the edge of the Namib and Kalahari Deserts. Nuer and Dinka cattle keepers persist in following intricate traditional patterns of transhumance in the Sudd marshes amid prolonged civil war in the Sudan. Fulani herders and Bozo fishers, despite recent decades of severe drought and famine in the Sahel, continue to practice their traditional patterns of cattle husbandry and canoecraft, while coexisting and trading with local farmers. Africans living in such vastly different local circumstances have naturally developed different customs and lifestyles, although communities that survive today as hunters-gatherers, herders, or fishers are very few compared to the vast majority ofprimarily African farming communities (where hunting, gathering, fishing, and/or herding may be seen as supplemental activities).

Especially in humid tropical rainforests, lake basins, or river valleys, untold varieties of insects and bacteria abound, including many species unknown in more temperate climates. Africans living in areas so rich in life have also had to cope with the lethal varieties of illness that abound in tropical climates. As of1

2008, it was estimated that over 300 million people in the tropics (including Africa) suffered from malaria (which kills nearly 2.7 million people annually and is caused by a parasite carried by the anopheles mosquito), 300 million suffered from schistosomiasis, also known as , a debilitating illness carriedBilharzia by freshwater snails, and another 130,000 (in 1995) suffered from guinea worm disease, carried by water fleas. It was estimated that 5 million children die each year in the tropics of diar-rheal illness, 2 million die of tropical fevers, and 1.5 million from measles. There are estimated to be 18 million cases of onchocerciasis (river blindness) in West Africa, more than 66 million cases of trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) mainly in East and central Africa, and 90 million cases of filaria-sis, a debilitating worm illness, throughout the continent. Trypanosomiasis also severely affects domestic animals, thereby impeding the development of animal husbandry. Tuberculosis and polio, which have been virtually eradicated from much of the world, are still killing Africans, particularly in urban areas. Since 1980, the AIDS virus has spread rapidly across central Africa, from Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) to Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania), through the use of unclean syringes and contaminated blood transfusions as well as unsafe sex, leading some experts to estimate that 10 percent of the babies in central Africa are now being born with the AIDS virus. Thus, the very abundance of life generated in Africa’s humid ecozones, in all these ways, has led to the proliferation of organisms that carry deadly or debilitating illnesses. In the case of malaria, Africa’s major “killer” illness, many Africans have used leaves from the neem tree as an antidote, while some coastalCo

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peoples have inherited a sickle-cell trait in their bloodstreams as a protective adaptation against lethal doses of malaria. When Americans study Africa, they should remember that people living in humid tropical environments have to confront a much wider variety of life forms—and life-threatening illnesses—on a daily basis than do those living in temperate climates such as those of North America, Europe, or Japan.

MAP 1.2 Africa: Physical Map

Source: Drawn by James D. Graham and Vincent B. Khapoya.

DEMOGRAPHY The Population Reference Bureau in Washington estimates that in 2011 Africa was host to nearly 1.05 billion people. Compared to other continents, Africa is not terribly crowded, with a population density of only about 32 people per square kilometer. This compares with 72 in Europe, 93 in Asia, 14 in North America, and 33 in South America. However, when one considers the continent’s high population growth rate (about twice that of the rest of the world), the vast arid and semiarid regions, and the diminishing supplies of arable land, there are serious grounds for concern about Africa’s future capacity to feed its own people.

As in other continents, pockets of population density in Africa have emerged in various rural areas because of favorable local climates, freshwater supplies, cultivable land, or useful minerals. Africa’s largest

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current concentrations of people have historically expanded along the shores of interior rivers and lakes, as well as in well-watered highland areas—near river deltas or mouths—and in Mediterranean strips along some of Africa’s coastlines. Although most of Africa’s interior geography was unknown to Europeans until the nineteenth century, its shorelines were more accurately mapped 300 years earlier by European explorers, traders, slave-raiders, and pirates. Many centuries before then, Africans along the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean coasts were intermediaries between diverse interior trade routes and long-established seagoing commerce.

Africa’s Mediterranean coastal climate supports densely settled agricultural populations, especially in the Maghreb (north of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and the Nile River Delta. The Maghreb has a Mediterranean climate (also typical of the coastal foothills and plains near the extreme southwestern portion of South Africa), which is both well-watered and temperate. A rich variety of foods and wines have traditionally been raised there that the Maghreb was long ago known as “the breadbasket” of Rome’s ancient Mediterranean empire. By turning desert into productive farmland through irrigation along the lower (northern) Nile Valley, most people living in both ancient and modern Egypt and Sudan (about one eighth of Africa’s current total population) have long been able to raise nutritional fruits, grains, and vegetables, as well as livestock. Population along the Nile Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Maghreb coast, as indicated earlier, is quite densely settled.

Much of the West African coast, between the Senegal and Congo Rivers, is also densely populated—especially near the rich alluvial soils of the Niger River Delta and the mouths of other West African rivers. The dominant coastal vegetation (where a few valuable hardwood trees still stand) is tropical rain forest. Between what remains of this coastal rain forest and the vast reaches of the Western Sahara lie the rolling grasslands of the West African Sahel. Prior to the beginnings of European colonialism about a century ago, these West African savannas supported some of the continent’s largest and most famous cities, kingdoms, and empires. After the colonial conquest, and with the deterioration of the more fragile savanna ecosystems during the past few decades, a frightening process of dessication (drying up or desertification) has forced many hundreds of thousands to leave their dried-up lands. West Africa’s highland areas and plateaux, from the Futa Jalon eastward to the Cameroon Mountains, have continued to support sizable local population densities with more patterns of regular rainfall. The continent’s largest remaining tropical rain forest, the central interior drained by the Congo River and its tributaries, is relatively lightly populated except near cities (primarily due to the fragile nature of rainforest soils, which are subjected to constant heavy rains and to being “leached” of their nutrients).

From the East African Horn southward to the Zambezi River, tropical rain forests are limited primarily to coastal or lowland areas (including the Lake Victoria-Nyanza Basin), although lower elevations in the Horn are usually arid. Most of the East African mountain ranges and peaks, however, attract more than adequate rainfall on some very good soils. Highland populations living on the more fertile hillsides of these Rift Valley mountains are among the most densely settled peoples in East Africa. From the Rift Valley savannas of central Kenya and Tanzania to the central savannas drained by the Zambezi River to the south, large numbers of East Africans have traditionally practiced “shifting cultivation” and/or herding; these lifestyles have encouraged much contact and local trade among these plateau peoples. Today, considerable numbers of East African herders and mixed farmers continue to live in scattered settlements, depending primarily on irregular rainfall for their water needs. Meanwhile, dwindling numbers of herders eke out their daily existence on the dessicated former savannas of the Horn. East Africa’s densest populations live in its fertile highlands, population centers along its lake and ocean coasts, and savanna towns.

South of the Zambezi River lies the region of southern Africa, where patterns of population density parallel those discussed above. Density is lowest on the Namib and Kalahari Deserts, where dwindling numbers of San hunters and gatherers persist in maintaining some semblance of their ancient lifestyles. Large villages and towns are scattered among the rural plateaus and savannas of modern Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and northern South Africa, while the densest populations of this region inhabit the areas which have summer rainfall to the south and east of the Drakensberg Mountains as well as the most productive highlands and river valley areas. Modern cities like Johannesburg and Bulawayo have grown up around mineral deposits. Except for European immigrants (Afrikaners and British) and small remnants of the

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region’s original Khoisan inhabitants, the vast majority of southern Africans have traditionally spoken Bantu languages, practiced farming and herding, and developed complex cultures and civilizations that reflected local differences as well as generally similar values.

Off the coast of southeastern Africa in the Indian Ocean lies the world’s fourth largest island, Madagascar, as well as a number of smaller island nations such as Seychelles, Comoros, and Mauritius. Together with Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, these are among Africa’s most densely populated countries. As indicates, Africa’s smallest nation-states (in geographical area) are often among itsTable 1.1 most densely populated.

There are wide variations in population density both these African nations and them. Inwithin between addition to particular ecozones favored by peoples within each country (e.g., the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan), the populations of modern cities have expanded dramatically since World War II. Although two-thirds of Africans still live in the countryside, high rates of rural-to-urban migration have been documented throughout the continent, leading to urban unemployment and overcrowding. In both the countryside and the cities, Africa’s population is growing at an alarming rate. At the continent’s current population growth rate of about 2.4 percent a year, the number of Africans has already hit the 1 billion mark by the year 2011. Indeed, the Population Reference Bureau projects the African population to be 1.4 billion by the year 2025 and 2.3 billion by the year 2050. Mortality rates for African children—74 per 1,000 live births—compared to 44 for the world and 5 for the industrialized countries are among the highest in the world, yet more African children now survive due to modest increases in local availability of vaccines, antibiotics, and clean water. Because the cities and the most productive rural lands of Africa are already overpopulated and so much of the remaining land is arid, it seems to many outsiders (if not to many Africans) that Africa’s high population growth rate will have to decline if the continent is to become self-reliant in sustaining its people’s health and improving their material lives.

TABLE 1.1

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Area, Population, and Population Density of African Nations in Descending Order of Population (2011)

Country Area (in square

kilometers) Population (in millions)

Density (people/sq. km)

Nigeria 913,070 162.3 176 Ethiopia 1,091,509 87.1 79 Egypt 989,850 82.6 83 Congo, Democratic 2,317,699 67.8 29 Republic of South Africa 1,206,897 50.5 41 Tanzania 934,139 46.2 49 Kenya 573,647 41.6 72 Algeria 2,354,153 36.0 15 Uganda 238,249 34.5 143 Morocco 441,377 32.3 72 Sudan 1,864,215 31.1 17 Ghana 235,773 25.0 143 Mozambique 792,305 23.1 29 Côte d’Ivoire 318,725 22.6 70 Madagascar 792,305 21.3 36 Cameroon 469,934 20.1 42 Angola 1,232,259 19.6 16 Burkina Faso 270,828 17.0 62 Niger 1,252,323 16.1 13 Malawi 117,107 15.9 134 Mali 1,225,825 15.4 12 Zambia 743,892 13.5 18 Senegal 194,442 12.8 65 Zimbabwe 386,235 12.1 31 Chad 1,269,128 11.5 9 Rwanda 26,035 10.9 415 Tunisia 151,715 10.7 65 Guinea 243,013 10.2 42 Burundi 27,507 10.2 367 Somalia 630,275 9.9 16 Benin 111,316 9.1 81 South Sudan 619,745 8.3 13 Libya 1,739,159 6.4 4 Eritrea 116,237 5.9 51 Togo 56,133 5.8 103 Sierra Leone 70,909 5.4 75 Central African 615,764 5.0 8 Republic Congo 338,038 4.1 29 Republic ofLiberia 110,080 4.1 37 Mauritania 1,013,642 3.5 3 Namibia 814,743 2.3 3 Lesotho 29,998 2.2 72 Botswana 574,991 2.0 3 Gambia, The 11,169 1.8 157 Guinea-Bissau 35,702 1.6 45 Gabon 264,568 1.5 6 Mauritius 2,017 1.3 630 Swaziland 17,160 1.2 69 Djibouti 22,932 0.9 39 Reunion 2,481 0.9 341 The Comoros 2,204 0.8 813 Equatorial Guinea 27,725 0.7 26 Cape Verde 3,983 0.5 123 Western Sahara 249,201 0.5 2Co py ri gh t @ 20 16 . Ro ut le dg e.

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Mayotte 371 0.2 563 SãoTomé and Principe 952 0.2 187 Seychelles 445 0.1 194

Source: 2011 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, Inc., 2011). For South Sudan, which became an independent state on July 9, 2011, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sudan, accessed on August 11, 2011.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE As African families settled and expanded in different ecozones during past millennia and throughout the continent, they developed somewhat different customs and vocabularies to order and explain their lives. During centuries of interaction, descendants of original settlers and subsequent immigrants to different localities developed cultures and languages that distinguished their particular lifestyles from those of their neighbors (who may have lived in different ecozones or organized their communities according to different ancestral traditions). Anthropologists and linguists alike have argued that “language” and “culture” are virtually the same. Each culture or subculture is most fully described in the particular language or dialect which characterizes it; each language or dialect most intricately names and reflects its particular culture or subculture. It is helpful, when studying the similarities and differences between African peoples, to adopt such a perspective. In this text, a group’s common elements of language and culture are seen as being most significant in identifying different “peoples” or ethnic groups sharing common language and culture. As elsewhere in the modern world, African ethnicity has many variants and undergoes much redefinition through time, yet one’s home “people” (whom one grows up with, knows, or is related to through extended networks of kinship groups) remains a significant point of reference for most Africans today.

One of the most common (and often offensive) questions that Americans sometimes ask a newly introduced African in this country is, “Oh, you are from Africa; what tribe are you from?” Not only do many Africans regard the connotation of the word “tribe” (along with words like “primitive,” “superstitious,” and “natives”) as derogatory, but most Africanist scholars have also come to regard the denotation of the word “tribe” as both imprecise and misleading. Jan Vansina, who pioneered the rigorous collection and analysis of Africa’s rich oral traditions a few decades ago, observed that (1) social groupings in tropical Africa have increased and decreased dramatically (in both population size and geographical area) over time, and (2) the static connotation of the word “tribe” cannot possibly reflect the intricacies of these ever-changing relationships. Ironically, because the term “tribe” was popularized by colonial authorities in Africa and by Western scholars writing about Africa, it is still retained (at least for administrative and political purposes) by many independent African nations. These nations identify people by “tribe” in tax records and birth certificates and on identification cards.

Some of the problems of describing African peoples as “tribes” were summarized by David Wiley and Marylee Crofts:

Unfortunately, the term is a bad word to describe African societies. Even worse, it carries the connotation of uncivilized, dangerous, uncontrolled, superstitious human beings unlike ourselves…. The word “tribe” has been used by scholars from the West to describe people living in smaller societies with less material technology than our own. Thus “tribes” are found in North America, Southeast Asia, ancient Israel, the hills and deserts of the Middle East, and, most of all, in Africa.

However, we can find no definition in the scholarly literature of anthropology that really describes these societies. Some say that tribespeople have a common ancestor, others believe that tribes have a common language; some say persons who live under a chieftain are tribal; others say tribes share a common government or common culture. In fact, when we look at the societies of Africa, we find none of these definitions fits all of the societies that existed before colonial rule …

For these reasons, scholars prefer to discard the term “tribe” because it is misleading and creates an image of an inferior and sub-human people. In fact, Africa’s small scale societies are much like the clans of Scotland or the villages of Ireland and Wales whose people are not called “tribal.” More appropriate terms are societies, ethnicities, classes or simply the name of the people such as the Yoruba or the Lunda.2

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People familiar with names such as Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo (the three largest and best-known peoples of modern Nigeria) or the Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, and Luhya (of Kenya) understand that these indigenous peoples can be distinguished from others by virtue of their different languages, kinship systems, rituals, and traditions. The larger groups of these peoples are often comprised of many subcultures, each speaking its own dialect and maintaining its own traditions. The Hausa peoples of Nigeria, for instance, are comprised of many subcultures, such as the Daurawa, the Gobir, and the Kanawa. Such subcultures, among the Hausa and elsewhere, will often identify themselves as though they were distinct ethnic groups, even fighting fiercely against neighboring and related subcultures.

Africanist scholars have come to regard the concept of “race” as even less accurate than the term “tribe” in distinguishing peoples. Back in 1930, C. G. Seligman’s book culminated more than aThe Races of Africa century of European scholars’ efforts to classify Africans, and others in our world, in terms of skin color as well as physical traits like head form, nose form, hair type, lips, and so on. Since Linneaus (a famous eighteenth-century Swedish botanist) classified the four “races” of humankind as being distinguishable (and ordered divinely in the “Great Chain of Being”) by white, yellow, red, and black skin colors, other European and American scientists have attempted to prove that skin color (genetically related only to eye and hair color) could positively be correlated to head size, intelligence, language complexity, civilization, and so on. Despite all their efforts to establish such implausible correlations, these scholars (including America’s William Shockley, who spent the last two decades of his life trying to correlate skin color with IQ scores) have been unable to prove any of their hypotheses.

Seligman, for example, attributed the development of great civilizations throughout African history mostly to the long-term emigration of light-skinned “Hamites” from the ancient Middle East, because he (and other colonialist scholars) could not admit that the dark-skinned “negroid race” could have developed such remarkable civilizations as ancient Cush and Axum or medieval Mali and Songhay. This “hamitic hypothesis” was widely accepted and taught during colonial times, until Joseph Greenberg (another American scholar) published in 1956. Greenberg and otherThe Classification of African Languages historical linguists have thoroughly exposed the flawed assumptions of Seligman’s hypothesis and suggested that Hamites were a mere fiction, a confused intermixing of obscurely known physical characteristics with inaccurate linguistic-cultural data. Scholars have subsequently demonstrated not only that culture and civilization had nothing to do with people’s skin color but also that the more than 800 languages currently spoken in Africa can be related to one another in only four major language families. Language differences, based on Greenberg’s original classifications, have indeed become the Africanist’s primary tool in trying to differentiate, classify, or compare and contrast the various cultures and peoples of Africa (see ).Table 1.2

TABLE 1.2

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Selected Major Languages Spoken in African Countries

Country Languages Spoken Algeria Arabic (official), French, Tamasight (Berber) Angola Portuguese (official), Umbundu, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Chokwe-Lunda Benin French (official), Fon-Ewe, Yoruba, Bariba, Ge, Dendi Botswana English (official), SeTswana, Shona Burkina Faso French (official), Mossi, Dyula, Mandé, Senufo, Fulani Burundi French (official), Kirundi (official), Swahili Cameroon French (official), English (official), Fulani, Bamileke, Bulu, Ewondo, Kirdi,

Douala Cape Verde Portuguese (official), Crioulo (Creole) Central African Republic French (official), Banda, Baya, Sangho (lingua franca) Chad French (official), Arabic, Sara, Kirdi, Sangho, Wadai, Tubu Comoros French (official), Arabic, Comoran-Swahili Congo French (official), Kikongo, Teke, M’bochi, Lingala, ‘Mbete, Sanga Congo, Democratic Republic of French (official), Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo, Tshiluba Djibouti French (official), Arabic, Somali, Afar Egypt Arabic (official), English Equatorial Guinea Spanish (official), French, Fang, Bubi Eritrea Arabic (official), English, Tigrinya, Tigre Ethiopia Amharic (official), Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali Gabon French (official), Fang, Bateke, Eshira, Mbete, Kota Gambia English (official), Mandingo, Fulani, Wolof, Soninke Ghana English (official), Twi, Ewe, Ga, Hausa Guinea French (official), Malinke, Poular, Sousou Guinea-Bissau Portuguese (official), Balante, Crioulo, Fulani, Mandinga Ivory Coast French (official), Akan, Kru, Mandé, Senufo, Dioula, Abidji Kenya English (official), Swahili (official), Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba, Kalenjin Country Languages Spoken Lesotho English (official), SeSotho, Xhosa, Zulu Liberia English (official), Kpelle, Mano, Kru-Bassa, Krahn Libya Arabic (official), Tamazight (Berber) Madagascar French (official), Malagasy Malawi English (official), Chichewa, Lomwe, Ngoni, Yao Mali French (official), Bambara, Fulani, Malinké, Senufo Mauritania French (official), Arabic, Sarakole, Fulani, Wolof Mauritius English (official), Creole, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil Morocco French and Arabic (both official), Tamazight (Berber) Mozambique Portuguese (official), Makua-Lomwe, Swahili, Chichewa, Shona, Tsonga Namibia English (official), Afrikaans (official), Oshivambo, Herero, Kavango,

Nama-Dama (Khoisan), German. Niger French (official), Hausa, Songhai, Fulani, Kanuri, Tuareg Nigeria English (official), Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Tiv, Kanuri Reunion French (official), Creole Rwanda French (official), Kinyarwanda, Swahili São Tomé and Principe Portuguese (official) Senegal French (official), Wolof, Pulaar, Serer, Mandé Seychelles French (official), English, Creole Sierra Leone English (official), Creole, Temne, Mendé, Mandé, Krio, Fanti Somalia Somali (official), Arabic, Swahili, English, Italian South Africa official languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Swati, Tswana, Pedi,

Ndebele, Venda, Tsonga Sudan Swaziland Arabic (official), Dinka, Acholi, Ta, Lango, English English (official), SiSwati,

Sesotho, isiZulu Tanzania Swahili (official), English, Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Chagga Togo French (official), Hausa, Ewe, Kabre, Moba, Kotocoli, Dagomba Tunisia Arabic (official), French (official) Uganda English (official), Luganda, Lusoga, Runyankole, Rutoro, Acholi, Swahili,

Lango

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Western Sahara Arabic (official), Spanish, Tuareg, dialects of Tamazight Zambia English (official), Bemba, Nyanja, Barotse, Lunda, Lozi Zimbabwe English (official), Shona, IsiNdebele, Nyanja

Source: Donald George Morrison, Robert C. Mitchell, and John N. Paden. , 2nd EditionBlack Africa: A Comparative Handbook (New York: Paragon House, 1989). Helpful suggestions from Keith Gottschalk of the University of the Western Cape, a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Oakland University, 2009–2010.

Greenberg’s successors in historical linguistics have developed some intriguing data (and hypotheses) through the application of rigorous methods of lexicostatistics (and glottochronology) to present-day African languages. Through such methods, it has been possible to determine how closely the basic vocabularies of any two languages are related and to estimate approximately when such language groups may have originally separated and begun to develop different dialects. Through lexicostatistics, historical linguists have subsequently modified and elaborated on Greenberg’s original model of African language families—adding newly researched languages, rearranging language subfamilies, and renaming the four major families.

For this text, it is sufficient to designate the major families (and a few significant subfamilies) of African languages in Greenberg’s original terms. The four major language families that he first identified were Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan (or Click). Except for Afrikaans (an amalgam of Dutch, French, and German now spoken by the so-called Coloureds and about 2 million white South Africans who also call themselves “Afrikaners”), Malagasy (a Malayo-Polynesian derivative spoken on the large Indian Ocean island of Madagascar) and other European languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German), or local creole adaptations, all the many hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects now spoken on the continent are historically related to one of these four basic language families.

The Khoisan languages (including Khoi and San subfamilies) are currently spoken only by isolated groups of hunters and gatherers living on marginal lands in southern and central Africa. The distinctive “clicks” of Khoisan languages seem to have survived from very early speech patterns, and some of these click sounds have been incorporated into neighboring languages like Xhosa and Zulu (in South Africa). A much larger present-day language family, but still considerably less widespread than the other two dominant language families of modern Africa, is what Greenberg called the Nilo-Saharan. Several subfamilies and dozens of different modern languages with Nilo-Saharan roots have been researched and recorded among peoples now living in the area bounded by Lake Chad and the Nile River, the Sahara Desert, and Lake Victoria. Sometimes referred to as Nilotes, such cattle-keeping peoples as the Luo and Maasai, the Nuer and Dinka are linguistically related to one another.

Africa’s most widespread language family (which includes many hundreds of languages spoken throughout the southern two-thirds of the continent) is the one Greenberg named Niger-Congo. He originally identified a dozen Niger-Congo subfamilies, including the populous Mande and Kwa subfamilies of West Africa and the most extensive language subfamily in all of Africa—Bantu. Historians have debated when, why, and where the remarkable expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples started ever since Greenberg estimated that about 400 different languages now spoken south of the Sahara have Bantu origins. These hundreds of Bantu languages apparently began differentiating from one another within the past 3,000 years or so (according to the estimates of glottochronologists). Consequently, many Bantu-speaking peoples, especially those bordering on each other, have similarities in vocabulary and in culture. The most widely spoken Bantu language, which has become somewhat of a lingua franca in East and central Africa, is Kiswahili. Throughout the past millennium, east coast Swahili city states have incorporated different words from Arabic, Asian, and European immigrants into their Bantu-based language, broadening their perspectives and helping to expand their international commerce.

The most widely spoken language in the northern third of Africa is Arabic, which (along with the Hebrew) is classified as part of the Semitic subfamily. Together with four other subfamilies, Semitic languages are classified as part of Greenberg’s Afro-Asiatic family. Glottochronologists have hypothesized that an original Afro-Asiatic mother tongue existed about 10,000 years ago, probably somewhere near the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, before the original speakers of Semitic, ancient Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, and Chadic subfamilies separated and began to disperse in different directions. As the ancient Egyptians went north, Berbers and Chadic (including Hausa) speakers moved westward, Cushitic

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2.

1.

(including Amharic, Somali, and Galla) speakers inhabited Africa’s Horn, and the ancestors of ancient Semites moved into what is now known as the Middle East. In ancient times, these various descendants of Afro-Asiatic speakers built the first great cities and civilizations. Today, the descendants of those ancient subfamilies vary widely in language, skin color, and local traditions, although Arabic (the language of Islam) is widely understood throughout northern Africa and the Middle East.

Because language is so closely associated with culture, it would follow that African peoples have developed more than 800 distinctive cultures (corresponding to their languages) that not only differ from each other (as their languages differ) but also share many common characteristics and values. For example, the Nuer, Dinka, Maasai, and Luo (all of whom, as noted, speak related Nilotic languages) have similar traditions associated with cattle herding, initiation and age grades, even though their particular rituals, traditions, and lifestyles vary considerably according to their local circumstances.

This chapter has only introduced some dimensions of diversity in the African experience. In the following chapters, examples are drawn from different cultures and ecozones to illustrate some common, cross-cultural continuities in African customs, values, and experiences. The very different kinds of ecozones with correspondingly different population densities, the many hundreds of distinctive languages and cultures, and the many dozens of modern nation-states found in Africa provide some indication of what size, variety, and complexity exists on the continent. It is strongly recommended that readers of this text spend some time studying Africa’s physical and political geography (as depicted in the maps in the preceding sections of this chapter), as well as the demographic data ( ) and language/culture list ( on ). InTable 1.1 Table 1.2 p. 14 addition, please refer back to and while reading this text, so as to reaffirm constantly theTables 1.1 1.2 specific different circumstances in which various African peoples live throughout the continent.

Notes Figures pertaining to various tropical diseases were obtained from the following websites in October 2008: www.malaria.org/wheredoesitoccur.html, www.astdhpphe.org/infect/guinea.html, www.emedicine.com/med/topic1667.html, and www.micro.msb.ac.uk. David Wiley and Marylee Crofts, (Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing Group, 1984), pp.The Third World: AFRICA 63–65.

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CHAPTER

2

African Traditional Institutions

“I am because you are.” An African defines himself or herself by the group—the word “tribe” is still inaccurately used—to which he/she belongs. “Communalism” or

“collectivism” is a term which captures the essence of this traditional value. It served the Africans well in the past. Is it a curse in the twenty-first century?

INTRODUCTION Most non-African scholars of Africa tend to emphasize the heterogeneity of the African continent and to imply not only that the differences that exist outweigh the values and institutions that Africans share in common but also that these differences are somehow unbridgeable. Certainly, differences do exist. They are readily discernible in levels of economic development and in the multiplicity of languages.

Nigeria and Kenya are more economically developed than Somalia and Chad. Botswana and Senegal have enjoyed reasonable political stability, whereas Somalia and the Central African Republic have continually experienced painful civil strife. African countries have different languages, ideologies, and political traditions. Indeed, the languages of Europe—English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish—continue to be used by African countries that were colonized by the respective European nations. The adoption of European languages as official languages is due to the fact that African states are politically unable to decide which of their own indigenous languages should be adopted nationally. When attempts have been broached to launch an indigenous language as the official language of a country, serious national conflict has often loomed on the horizon, hampering national debate of the matter. In adopting nine African languages as official languages in addition to the two—English and Afrikaans—which have been used for decades, South Africa is a trailblazer on the language issue.

A wide ideological spectrum is represented among African states. There have been genuine Marxist states in the past, such as Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Republic of the Congo under Marien Ngouabi, and Benin under Mathieu Kerekou. Monarchists in Uganda yearn for the return of traditional kingdoms that were dismantled soon after Britain granted Uganda independence under the leadership of Apollo Milton Obote. There are reigning monarchs in Swaziland, Lesotho, and Morocco with varying constitutional powers. At one time, it was fashionable for African leaders to claim that they were socialists.C

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