If you tramp through the African bush you will soon wonder how anyone could ever impose human settlement on this land, much less keep a footing here and steadily enlarge it. All this wild profusion stands there vast and looming, like a conscious presence waiting to move in again the moment your back is turned. Give this giant the merest chance, you will feel, and the whole surrounding scenery will again invade these narrow fields and possess the land once more, possess it utterly, as though humanity had never been. Every African culture bears profound witness to this dominating ‘spirit of the land’.
Yet the appearance of lush natural wealth is often misleading. Much of Africa is paved with a lateritic soil of low fertility and shallow depth. Much of it is covered and, it seems, was always covered in historical times by fruitless bush and poorly timbered trees. Much of it is pestered by tsetse fly inimical to beast and man. Only the development of an inherent immunity—but this never complete—has enabled Africans to withstand widespread malaria. Other parasites demand their toll, jiggers and locusts, pestilential water-snails, fever-bearing clouds of flying creatures.
Initially, moreover, Africa had few good food plants. Early farming was of dry rice and local yams in western Africa, and of millet and sorghum elsewhere, but of little else until the coming of Indonesian bananas and Asian yams in the fourth or fifth century, and of American cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, paw paw and pineapples in the sixteenth. The position with cattle was somewhat better thanks to the spread of Zebu and Sanga breeds in the first millennium BC and later. But even so there were many areas which could raise no cattle because of tsetse.
Poor fertility made it inevitable that this early farming, outside the lower valley of the Nile and some areas of West Africa and the Congo Basin, should always be a matter of frequent shifting from place to place. Settlement for a long time in any one village was difficult or impossible. More often, groups rotated through a series of village sites within the area they claimed as their own. And whenever they moved the wilderness came in behind them and raised its barriers once more.
The crucial inventions in improving this situation, in enabling longer periods of settlement and new processes of growth, seem to have lain in the metallurgy of iron: in identification of the ore, extraction, crushing, smelting, and forging of the metal. Locally evolved or adapted from techniques already known in northern Africa, iron production spread widely in the tropical zones from about two thousand years ago. How greatly its uses were appreciated by Stone Age farmers may be guessed from the mystical rites and beliefs, linking it to an immanent spiritual power, that continued in later times to surround the working of iron and other metals, including copper, gold and tin. Their production was conceived as the fertilisation of matter by energy, the blast furnace of ant-hill earth being the womb with the shaft of the bellows, which were often paired as testicles, as the organ of transmission: a process exercised by specialists under divine protection that was both physical and spiritual, demonstrating man’s command of nature as well as nature’s command of man, in an idiom perfectly at one with African conceptions.
A type of African forced-draught furnace for smelting iron ore. This example has a pair of bowl-bellows and twin shafts, the furnace being filled with alternate layers of ore and charcoal. About 100 cms. high.
This metallurgy remained at the handicraft stage. Though practised intensively by many peoples, it was always laborious. Among the Fipa, whose ironsmiths were widely famous, it was observed a few decades ago that a group of men and women, working with a single furnace, could produce no more than two hoe blades and a few smaller tool heads in a day. But this scale of production was enough for an economy largely of subsistence. Once it became possible, the way was open for radical expansion. Archaeologists are generally agreed that this was true for all comparable civilisations. ‘It was the adoption of the working of copper and its alloys, and later of iron’, in Grahame Clark’s words, ‘that brought about major increases in control over physical environment, not only in working such organic materials as wood and bone, but even more significantly in helping to improve the food-supply through more effective felling and clearance and through the provision of such things as pruning and lopping-knives, ploughshares, coulters and the like.’ The more widely such tools were available and the better they became, ‘the greater must have been their impact on food-production and so on population’. This completely applies to tropical Africa with the exception of ploughshares and coulters, for which, since the plough appears south of Ethiopia only in recent times—along with the tsetse-immune tractor—we must substitute axe blades and hoe blades.
The process was cumulative. All the evidence for Africa suggests that iron smithing combined creatively with new farming techniques. More food permitted the establishment of stores of food, at any rate from one harvest to the next. Stores of food permitted surpluses, however slender in the beginning; and surpluses could be used to feed a growing number of non-food-producing specialists such as were required for smithing and other early industrial skills. So that ‘every increase in the density of population’, itself a product of farming settlement, ‘made possible a finer subdivision of labour, a most essential condition for further technical improvements. The interaction between food-production, population growth, and the ability to use more effective materials for implements and gear was both intimate and continuous.’
With this, the processes of Iron Age history were well in motion by about AD 500. Groups of iron-working farmers appeared in almost every region between the fringes of the Sahara and the hills and plains of the far south. And so the broad picture is rounded out. The ideological formation of the Africans is framed by the gradual peopling and settling of vast areas occupied previously by a few scattered hunters and plant-gatherers, or not occupied at all. These farmers co-exist with the earlier occupants but slowly dispossess them of their traditional feeding grounds, or else absorb them by marriage into a post-Stone Age economy of village settlement and social organisation.
One has to think of these pioneering settlers as of small and isolated groups. Alone in their solitudes, pressing onward in their need for new resources to support their growing numbers, they face the wilderness and forge new identities. They link themselves with their forefathers in self-justifying lifelines back to the Life Force, back to their ideas of Origin, back to their spiritual protection in a land that seems boundless and boundaryless, framed only by a few great rivers or the blue lift of hills upon a distant skyline. Here they evolve their own frontiers and frameworks of belief and thought, each group defining itself, enclosing itself, ruling itself, within its own exclusive charter of self-explanation.
4
Unity and Variation
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THIS RUSTIC CIVILISATION OR GROUP OF civilisations may be regarded as a large achievement in the annals of mankind. But it is one which has had scant attention from the outside world. By contrast, many writers have celebrated the ancient Greeks for the ways in which they overcame an utter ‘lack of precedent’, devising and codifying laws ‘constitutional, civil, sacral and criminal’ with no one to guide or help them—not even, we are told, in the midst of that geophysically so small and helpful Mediterranean world—until they produced what Finley has called a ‘situation of compulsive originality’. Yet even while admiring the ancient Greeks, one may perhaps still wonder how far their ‘lack of precedent’ really existed in the wake of the high civilisations of antiquity which preceded them. Didn’t