World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 13: Africa and the Americas

Mon, Dec 9, 2013

28. Tue, Dec 10, 2013

If the anthropologists in Chapter 1 are right, humanity as a species emerged from Africa and worked its way outward. Strangely, however, this is only the second time the book has returned to humanity's original home, the first being Egypt. Even there, it might be forgiven if we forgot Egypt's African nature, since so much of the focus was on the peoples of the Nile interacting with the peoples of Europe and Asia. And so in this chapter, our textbook covers a huge stretch of time, 1800 BC to AD 1591, in eleven pages, one of which is given over to trumpets.

This is far from unique; while most textbooks now give Africa a chapter, it's nowhere near as thorough coverage as Asia or Europe. Why is Africa so shortchanged? The most charitable view is that there aren't as many sources. This is somewhat true, but we can't understand most of the written records from Minoan Crete, and that did not prevent our text from speaking of it in some detail. Another explanation is that African cultures did not have much influence on "the West" until the Age of Discovery. Also true, but Mali's gold had just as much effect on Europe as China's silk, and contact with the Ethiopians goes back to Homeric and Biblical days. The least generous reason is simple racism; for centuries Africa was "the Dark Continent," a place of savagery and mystery, and such a place and such peoples were clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a civilization. Whether due to intentional discrimination or just bigoted oversight, scholarship simply didn't pay much attention to African history until the 1960s and 1970s.

After all that, however, I (Mr. C) have to admit that Africa is not my area of expertise, either. I cannot significantly enlarge on the coverage that I've just now criticized. Perhaps he who is very much with sin just cast a fair number of stones.

That said, there are a few points of background information that can be useful to us this week. While African religion originated in animism, the three great monotheistic faiths had extensive and ancient influence on Africa. Judaism came to Ethiopia in ancient days, and in fact the Kush of our textbook is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, though often translated as "Ethiopia." Ethiopia proper is a descendant of Aksum, as described in the text, and maintained its Christianity while Islam spread throughout the rest of the continent. In fact Ethiopia is heavily Christian to this day, in a branch kept separate from the rest of Christendom for centuries (perhaps leading to the otherwise mythical story of "Prester John"). One church in Ethiopia claims to still have the Ark of the Covenant.

It's Islam, however, that's had the most influence on Africa; ibn Battuta, the Muslim traveler mentioned in the book, is probably our best source for the West African kingdoms, as ibn Battuta essentially went wherever there were Muslims and wrote a lot down. He was not the only traveller in those days; prosperous and generally peaceful trade extended along much of the African coast up to Arabia and across to India. Islam was not always successful in its expansion, as one story speaks of a missionary trying to explain polygamy and the submission of wives to husbands to a ruling queen. However when the Portuguese sailors circumnavigated Africa in the 1400s, many of the people they met would have been Muslim.

• Yet more geography: what factors have kept Africa more isolated from Europe and Asia? What geographic elements limited the establishment and expansion of major civilizations?
• West Africa was the source of almost all the gold in Europe for time out of mind, with traders crossing the Sahara for centuries. On their journies south, however, the traders carried salt, which was in fact more precious than gold south of the Sahara. Moreover, when Mansa Musa visited Cairo and Mecca while making his hajj (pilgrimage), he brought so much gold that its value plummeted and left the economy of the region depressed for some years! What effect has relative scarcity had on driving expansion and trade in world history?

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