BEFORE EVEN THE BRITISH CAME INTO RELATIONS WITH OUR PEOPLE, WE were a developed people, having our own institutions, having our own ideas of government.

—J. E. CASELY-HAYFORD, 1922

African (Gold Coast) Nationalist

A General Overview

It has been shown that, using comparative standards, Africa today is underdeveloped in relation to Western Europe and a few other parts of the world; and that the present position has been arrived at, not by the separate evolution of Africa on the one hand and Europe on the other, but through exploitation. As is well known, Africa has had prolonged and extensive contact with Europe, and one has to bear in mind that contact between different societies changes their respective rates of development. To set the record straight, four operations are required:

(1)Reconstruction of the nature of development in Africa before the coming of Europeans.

(2)Reconstruction of the nature of development which took place in Europe before expansion abroad.

(3)Analysis of Africa’s contribution to Europe’s present “developed” state.

(4)Analysis of Europe’s contribution to Africa’s present “underdeveloped” state.

The second task has already been extensively carried out in European literature, and only passing references need be made; but the others are all deserving of further attention.

The African continent reveals very fully the workings of the law of uneven development of societies. There are marked contrasts between the Ethiopian empire and the hunting groups of pygmies in the Congo forest or between the empires of the Western Sudan and the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert. Indeed, there were striking contrasts within any given geographical area. The Ethiopian empire embraced literate feudal Amharic noblemen as well as simple Kaffa cultivators and Galla pastoralists. The empires of the Western Sudan had sophisticated, educated Mandinga townsmen, small communities of Bozo fishermen, and nomadic Fulani herdsmen. Even among clans and lineages that appear roughly similar, there were considerable differences. However, it is possible to distinguish between what was uniquely “African” and what was universal in the sense of being characteristic of all human societies at a given stage of development. It is also essential to recognize the process of dialectical evolution from lower to higher forms of social organization; and, in looking at the most advanced social formations, one would appreciate the potential of the continent as a whole and the direction of change.

The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to describe Western Europe and North America. As far as Africa is concerned during the period of early development, it is preferable to speak in terms of “cultures” rather than civilizations.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously, unique features came into existence in virtually every locality with regard to all social details. In addition, the continent of Africa south of the great Sahara desert formed a broad community where resemblances were clearly discernible. For example, music and dance had key roles in “uncontaminated” African society. They were ever present at birth, initiation, marriage, death, as well as at times of recreation. Africa is the continent of drums and percussion. African peoples reached the pinnacle of achievement in that sphere.

Because of the impact of colonialism and cultural imperialism (which will be discussed later), Europeans and Africans themselves in the colonial period lacked due regard for the unique features of African culture. Those features have a value of their own that cannot be eclipsed by European culture either in the comparable period before 1500 or in the subsequent centuries. They cannot be eclipsed because they are not really comparable phenomena. Who in this world is competent to judge whether an Austrian waltz is better than a Makonde Ngoma? Furthermore, even in those spheres of culture that are more readily comparable, such as “the fine arts,” it is known that African achievements of the pre-European period stand as contributions to man’s heritage of beautiful creations. The art of Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia was known to the rest of the world at an early date. That of the rest of Africa is still being “discovered” and rediscovered by Europeans and present-day Africans. The verdict of art historians on the Ife and Benin bronzes is well known. Since they date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they are very relevant to any discussion of African development in the epoch before the contacts with Europe. Nor should they be regarded as unusual, except with regard to the material in which the sculptures were executed. The same skill and feeling obviously went into sculpture and art-work in non-durable materials, especially wood.

African dance and art were almost invariably linked with a religious world-outlook in one way or another. As is well known, traditional African religious practices exist in great variety, and it should also be remembered that both Islam and Christianity found homes on the African continent almost from their very inception. The features of the traditional African religions help to set African cultures apart from those in other continents; but in this present context it is more important to note how much African religion had in common with religion elsewhere and how this can be used as an index to the level of development in Africa before European impact in the fifteenth century.

Religion is an aspect of the superstructure of a society, deriving ultimately from the degree of control and understanding of the material world. However, when man thinks in religious terms, he starts from the ideal rather than with the material world (which is beyond his comprehension). This creates a non-scientific and metaphysical way of viewing the world, which often conflicts with the scientific materialist outlook and with the development of society. African ancestral religions were no better or worse than other religions as such. But by the end of feudalism, Europeans began to narrow the area of human life in which religion and the church played a part. Religion ceased to dominate politics, geography, medicine. To free those things from religious restraints, it had to be argued that religion had its own sphere and the things of this world had their own secular sphere. This secularization of life speeded up the development of capitalism and later socialism. In contrast, in the period before the coming of the whites, religion pervaded African life just as it pervaded life in other pre-feudal societies, such as those of the Maoris of Australia or the Afghans of Afghanistan or the Vikings of Scandinavia.

Religion can play both a positive and a negative role as an aspect of the superstructure. In most instances in early Africa, religious beliefs were associated with the mobilization and discipline of large numbers of people to form states. In a few instances, religion also provided concepts in the struggle for social justice. The negative aspects usually arose out of the tendency of religion to persist unchanged for extremely long periods, especially when the technology of earning a living changes very slowly. This was the case in African societies, as in all other pre-capitalist societies. At the same time, the religious beliefs themselves react upon the mode of production, further slowing up progress in that respect. For instance, belief in prayer and in the intervention of ancestors and various gods could easily be a substitute for innovations designed to control the impact of weather and environment.

The same kind of two-sided relationship also exists between the means of earning a living and the social patterns that arise in the process of work. In Africa, before the fifteenth century, the predominant principle of social relations was that of family and kinship associated with communalism. Every member of an African society had his position defined in terms of relatives on his mother’s side and on his father’s side. Some societies placed greater importance on matrilineal ties and others on patrilineal ties. Those things were crucial to the daily existence of a member of an African society, because land (the major means of production) was owned by groups such as the family or clan—the head of which were parents and those yet unborn. In theory, this pattern was explained by saying that the residents in any community were all direct descendants of the first person who settled the land. When a new group arrived, they often made a pretense that they too had ancestry dating back to the settling of the land or else they insured that members of the earliest kin groups continued to perform the ceremonies related to the land and water of the region.

Similarly, the labor that worked the land was generally recruited on a family basis. A single family or household would till its own plots and it would also be available to share certain joint farming activities with other members of the extended family or clan. Annual hunts and river fishing were also organized by a whole extended family or village community. In a matrilineal society such as that of the Bemba (Zambia), the bridegroom spent a number of years working for the father of his bride; and many young men who had married daughters of the same household often formed work teams to help each other. In Dahomey, a young man did not go to live with his wife’s family, but the dokpwe, or work team, allowed a son to participate in carrying out a task of some magnitude for the father of his wife. In both of those examples, the right of the father-in-law to acquire labor and the obligations of the son-in-law to give labor were based on kinship. This can be contrasted with capitalism where money buys labor, and with feudalism where the serf provides labor in order to have access to a portion of land which belongs to the landlord.

Having been produced on land that was family property and through family labor, the resultant crops and other goods were distributed on the basis of kinship ties. If a man’s crops were destroyed by some sudden calamity, relatives in his own village helped him. If the whole community was in distress, people moved to live with their kinsmen in another area where food was not scarce. In Akan country (Ghana), the clan system was highly organized, so that a man from Brong could visit Fante many hundreds of miles away and receive food and hospitality from a complete stranger who happened to be of his own clan.

Numerous examples could be brought forward to show the dominance of the family principle in the communal phase of African development. It affected the two principal factors of production—land and labor—as well as the system of distributing goods. European anthropologists who have studied African societies have done so mainly from a very prejudiced and racist position, but their researchers can nevertheless provide abundant facts relating to family homesteads and compounds, to the extended family (including affinal members who join by association rather than by birth), and to lineages and clans which carried the principles of kinship alliances over large areas. However, while the exact details might have differed, similar social institutions were to be found among the Gauls of eleventh-century France, among the Viet of Indochina at the same date, and virtually everywhere else in the world at one time or another—because communalism is one phase through which all human society passed.

In all African societies during the early epoch, the individual at every stage of life had a series of duties and obligations to others in the society as well as a set of rights: namely, things that he or she could expect or demand from other individuals. Age was a most important factor determining the extent of rights and obligations. The oldest members of the society were highly respected and usually in authority; and the idea of seniority through age was reflected in the presence of age-grades and age-sets in a great many African societies. Circumcision meant initiation into the society and into adulthood. From that moment, a man was placed with others in his own age-group and a woman likewise. Usually, there were at least three age-grades, corresponding roughly to the young, the middle-aged, and the old.

In large parts of Europe, when communalism broke down it gave way to widespread slavery as the new form in which labor was mobilized. This slavery continued throughout the European Middle Ages, with the Crusades between Christians and Moslems giving an added excuse for enslaving people. Slavery in turn gave way to serfdom, whereby the laborer was tied to the land and could no longer be sold and transported. Because it took many years for the transition from slavery to feudalism to take place in Europe, it was common to find that feudal society still retained numbers of slaves. Parts of China, Burma, and India also had considerable numbers of slaves as the society moved away from elementary communalism, but there was never any time-span when slavery was the dominant mode of production in Asia. In Africa, there were few slaves and certainly no epoch of slavery. Most of the slaves were in North African and other Moslem societies, and in those instances a man and his family could have the same slave status for generations, within the overall feudal structure of the society. Elsewhere in Africa, communal societies were introduced to the concept of owning alien human beings when they took captives in war. At first, those captives were in a very disadvantaged position, comparable to that of slaves, but very rapidly captives or their offspring became ordinary members of the society, because there was no scope for the perpetual exploitation of man by man in a context that was neither feudal nor capitalist.

Both Marxists and non-Marxists alike (with different motivations) have pointed out that the sequence of modes of production noted in Europe were not reproduced in Africa. In Africa, after the communal stage there was no epoch of slavery arising out of internal evolution. Nor was there a mode of production which was the replica of European feudalism. Marx himself recognized that the stages of development in Asia had produced a form of society which could not easily be fitted into a European slot. That he called “the Asian mode of production.” Following along those lines, a number of Marxists have recently been discussing whether Africa was in the same category as Asia or whether Africa had its own “African mode of production.” The implications of the arguments are very progressive, because they are concerned with the concrete conditions of Africa rather than with preconceptions brought from Europe. But the scholars concerned seem to be bent on finding a single term to cover a variety of social formations which were existing in Africa from about the fifth century A.D. to the coming of colonialism. The assumption that will underlie this study is that most African societies before 1500 were in a transitional stage between the practice of agriculture (plus fishing and herding) in family communities and the practice of the same activities within states and societies comparable to feudalism.

In a sense, all history is transition from one stage to another, but some historical situations along the line have more clearly distinguishable characteristics than others. Thus under communalism there were no classes, and there was equal access to land, and equality in distribution—at a low level of technology and production. Feudalism involved great inequality in distribution of land and social products. The landlord class and its bureaucracy controlled the state and used it as an instrument for oppressing peasants, serfs, slaves, and even craftsmen and merchants. The movement from communalism to feudalism in every continent took several centuries, and in some instances the interruption of internal evolution never allowed the process to mature. In Africa, there is no doubt that the societies which eventually reached feudalism were extremely few. So long as the feudal state was still in the making, elements that were communal coexisted with elements that were feudal and with some peculiarities due to African conditions. The transition was also characterized by a variety of social formations: There were pastoralists and cultivators, fishing societies and trading societies, raiders and nomads. They were all being progressively drawn into a relationship with the land, with each other, and with the state, through the expansion of productive forces and the network of distribution.

In feudal societies, there were clashes between the landlord and peasant classes and later on between the landlord and merchant classes. Under capitalism, the principal class contradiction inside Europe was between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Those hostile class relations provided the motive force within the respective societies. African communal societies had differences such as age-grades and differences between ordinary members and religious leaders such as rainmakers. However, those were not exploitative or antagonistic relations. The concept of class as a motive force in social development had not yet come about; and in the communal phase one must look at the fundamental forces of production to understand the process of change.

Using a number of methods and concepts, it is possible to reconstruct the most likely manner in which isolated family living was broken down and production increased. For instance, the rise of age-grades can be seen as responding to the need for greater solidarity, because age-grades included and cut across many families. Similarly, communal labor was entered into by cross sections of the community to make work more efficient. The dokpwe work group of Dahomey mentioned above had a wider application in serving the whole community to perform such heavy tasks as clearing land and housebuilding. With the offer of some food and beer or palm wine, a work team or “work bee” could be mobilized in a short time in most African communities, including those of the light-skinned Berbers of North Africa.

Of course, while the organization of labor might have helped to produce more, the principal change in the productive forces was that which comprised new techniques—using the word in its broadest sense to include both tools and skills in dealing with the environment and new plant and animal species. The first prerequisite for mastery of the environment is knowledge of that environment. By the fifteenth century, Africans everywhere had arrived at a considerable understanding of the total ecology—of the soils, climate, animals, plants, and their multiple interrelationships. The practical application of this lay in the need to trap animals, to build houses, to make utensils, to find medicines, and above all to devise systems of agriculture.

In the centuries before the contact with Europeans, the overwhelmingly dominant activity in Africa was agriculture. In all the settled agricultural communities, people observed the peculiarities of their own environment and tried to find techniques for dealing with it in a rational manner. Advanced methods were used in some areas, such as terracing, crop rotation, green manuring, mixed farming, and regulated swamp farming. The single most important technological change underlying African agricultural development was the introduction of iron tools, notably the ax and the hoe, replacing wooden and stone tools. It was on the basis of the iron tools that new skills were elaborated in agriculture as well as in other spheres of economic activity.

The coming of iron, the rise of cereal growing, and the making of pottery were all closely related phenomena. In most parts of Africa, it was in the period after the birth of Christ that those things came about. The rate of change over a few centuries was quite impressive. Millet and rice had been domesticated from wild grasses just as yams were made to evolve from selected wild roots. Most African societies raised the cultivation of their own particular staple to a fine art. Even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first European colonialists supposed. That simple form of agriculture was based on a correct evaluation of the soil potential, which was not as great as initially appears from the heavy vegetation; and when the colonialists started upsetting the thin topsoil the result was disastrous.

The above remarks show that when an outsider comes into a new ecological system, even if he is more skilled he does not necessarily function as effectively as those who have familiarized themselves with the environment over centuries; and the newcomer is likely to look more ridiculous if he is too arrogant to realize that he has something to learn from the “natives.” However, it is not being suggested that African agriculture in the early period was superior to that of other continents. On the contrary, African standards of husbandry on the land and with livestock were not as high as those independently evolved in most parts of Asia and Europe. The weakness in Africa seemed to have been the lack of a professional interest in acquiring more scientific knowledge and in devising tools to lighten the load of labor as well as to transform hostile environments into areas suitable for human activity. As far as agriculture in Europe was concerned, this professionalism was undertaken by the class with a vested interest in the land—namely, the feudalist landowners and later the capitalist farmers.

It has previously been stated that development is very much determined by the social relations of production (i.e., those which have to do with people’s functions in producing wealth). Where a few people owned the land and the majority were tenants, this injustice at a particular stage of history allowed the few to concentrate on improving their land. In contrast, under communalism every African was assured of sufficient land to meet his own needs by virtue of being a member of a family or community. For that reason, and because land was relatively abundant, there were few social pressures or incentives for technical changes to increase productivity.

In Asia, where much of the land was communally owned, there were tremendous advances in some types of farming, especially irrigated farming. This was because the state in India, China, Ceylon, and other places intervened and engaged in irrigation and other hydraulic works on a large scale. This was also true of North Africa, which in most respects followed a pattern of evolution similar to that of Asia. The African land tenure pattern was closer to that of Asia than to that of Europe, but even the most politically developed African states did not play the role of initiators and supervisors of agricultural development. One reason may have been the lack of population pressure and hence the scattered nature of settlements. Another may have been state concentration on trading non-agricultural products to the exclusion of other things. Certainly, when African societies became linked up with other social systems outside the continent on the basis of trade, little attention was paid to agriculture.

When it comes to the question of manufacturing in Africa before the time of the white man, it is also essential to recognize where achievements have been underestimated. African manufacturers have been contemptuously treated or overlooked by European writers, because the modern conception of the word brings to mind factories and machines. However, “manufactures” means literally “things made by hand,” and African manufacture in this sense had advanced appreciably. Most African societies fulfilled their own needs for a wide range of articles of domestic use, as well as for farming tools and weapons.

One way of judging the level of economic development in Africa five centuries ago is through the quality of the products. Here a few examples will be given of articles which came to the notice of the outside world. Through North Africa, Europeans became familiar with a superior brand of red leather from Africa which was termed “Moroccan leather.” In fact, it was tanned and dyed by Hausa and Mandinga specialists in northern Nigeria and Mali. When direct contact was established between Europeans and Africans on the East and West coasts, many more impressive items were displayed. As soon as the Portuguese reached the old kingdom of Kongo, they sent back word on the superb local cloths made from bark and palm fiber—and having a finish comparable to velvet. The Baganda were also expert barkcloth makers. Yet, Africa had even better to offer in the form of cotton cloth, which was widely manufactured before the coming of the Europeans. Well into the present century, local cottons from the Guinea coast were stronger than Manchester cottons. Once European products reached Africa, Africans too were in a position to make comparisons between their commodities and those from outside. In Katanga and Zambia, the local copper continued to be preferred to the imported items, while the same held true for iron in a place like Sierra Leone.

It was at the level of scale that African manufactures had not made a breakthrough. That is to say, the cotton looms were small, the iron smelters were small, the pottery was turned slowly by hand and not on a wheel. Yet some changes were taking place in this context. Under communalism, each household met its own needs by making its own clothes, pots, mats, and such. That was true of every continent. However, economic expansion from there on was associated with specialization and localization of industry—people’s needs being met by exchange. This trend was displayed in the principal African manufactures, and notably in the cloth industry. Cotton fiber had to be ginned (separated from the seed), then carded and spun into yarn, before being woven. Either the yarn or the woven cloth had to be dyed, and the making of the dye itself was a complex process. There was a time when all these stages would be performed by a single family or rather by the women in a single family, as in Yoruba-land. But economic development was reflected in the separation of dyeing from cloth-making, and the separation of spinning from weaving. Each separation marked greater specialization and quantitative and qualitative changes in output.

European industry has been intensively studied, and it is generally recognized that in addition to new machinery a most decisive factor in the growth of industry was the changeover from domestic production to the factory system, with the guild marking an intermediary stage. The guild was an association of specialists, passing on their skills by training apprentices and working in buildings set aside for that purpose. Africa, too, had elements of the guild system. At Timbuktu, there were tailoring guilds, while in Benin guilds of a very restricted caste type controlled the famous brass and bronze industry. In Nupe (now northern Nigeria) the glass and bead industry operated on a guild basis. Each Nupe guild had a common workshop and a master. The master obtained contracts, financed the guild, and disposed of the product. Both his own relatives as well as strangers were free to enter the guild and learn the various specialized tasks within the glass industry. What this amounted to was simply that there was increasing specialization and division of labor.

Traditional African economies are usually called “subsistence” economies. Often, small villages farmed, hunted, fished, and looked after themselves independently with little reference to the rest of the continent. Yet, at the same time, the vast majority of African communities fulfilled at least a few of their needs by trade. Africa was a continent of innumerable trade routes. Some extended for long distances, like the routes across the Sahara or the routes connected with Katanga copper. But in the main, it was trade between neighboring or not too far distant societies. Such trade was always a function of production. Various communities were producing surpluses of given commodities which could be exchanged for items which they lacked. In that way, the salt industry of one locality would be stimulated while the iron industry would be encouraged in another. In a coastal, lake, or river area, dried fish could become profitable, while yams and millet would be grown in abundance elsewhere to provide a basis for exchange. The trade so readily distinguishable in every part of the continent between the tenth and fifteenth centuries was an excellent indicator of economic expansion and other forms of development which accompanied increasing mastery over the environment.

As part of the extension of trade, it was noticeable that barter was giving way to some forms of money exchange. Barter was generally practiced when the volume of trade was small and when only a few commodities were involved. However, as trade became more complicated, some items began to be used as the standards for measuring other goods. Those items could be kept as a form of wealth easily transformed into other commodities when the need arose. For example, salt, cloth, iron hoes, and cowry shells were popular forms of money in Africa—apart from gold and copper, which were much rarer and therefore restricted to measuring things of great value. In a few places, such as North Africa, Ethiopia, and the Kongo, the monetary systems were quite sophisticated, indicating that the economy was far removed from simple barter and subsistence.

There were many other changes of a socio-political nature accompanying the expansion of the productive forces. Indeed, things such as agricultural practices, industry, trade, money, and political structures were inseparable—each interacting with the others. The most developed areas of Africa were those where all the elements converged, and the two sociopolitical features which were the outstanding indices to development were the increase of stratification and the consolidation of states.

The principles of family and deferment to age were slowly breaking down throughout the centuries preceding the arrival of Europeans in their sailing ships. Changes in technology and in the division of labor made that inevitable. The introduction of iron, for example, gave economic and military strength to those who could make and acquire it. Better tools meant more food and a greater population, but the latter tended to outrun the supplies of material goods, and the possibilities of wealth opened up by the possession of iron were seized upon by a few to their own advantage. Skilled workers in iron, cloth, pottery, leather, or salt-making tended to pass on their skills in closed groups known as castes. That insured that the division of labor operated in their favor, because their position was privileged and strategic. Ironworkers were particularly favored in some African societies in which they either became the ruling groups or were very close to the top of the social hierarchy. The division of labor also carried over into non-material spheres, producing professional minstrels and historians. They too had certain special rights and privileges, notably the ability to criticize freely without fear of reprisal. In some circumstances, skilled castes were reduced to very low status. But that was rare, and in any case it does not contradict the general assertion that the tendency was for communalism to give rise to more and more stratification.

Social stratification was the basis for the rise of classes and for social antagonisms. To some extent, this was a logical follow-up of the previous non-antagonistic differences in communal society. For instance, old men could use their control over land allocation, over bride-price, and over other traditional exchanges to try to establish themselves as a privileged economic stratum. Secret societies arose in the area that is now Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and they permitted knowledge, power, and wealth to pass into the hands of the elders and ultimately to the elders of particular lineages.

The contradiction between young men and their elders was not the type that caused violent revolution. But young men clearly had reasons for resenting their dependence on elders, especially when it came to such vital personal matters as the acquisition of wives. When disgruntled, they could either leave their communities and set up for themselves or they could challenge the principles within the society. In either case, the trend was that some individuals and families were more successful than others, and those families established themselves as permanent rulers. Then age ceased to matter as much because even a junior could succeed to his father, once the notion of royal blood or royal lineage was established.

In the period of transition, while African society retained many features that were undisputably communal, it also accepted the principle that some families or clans or lineages were destined to rule and others were not. This was true not only of cultivators but of pastoralists as well. In fact, livestock became unevenly distributed much more readily than land; and those families with the largest herds became socially and politically dominant.

An even more important aspect of the process of social stratification was that brought about by contact between different social formations. Fishermen had to relate to cultivators and the latter to pastoralists. There were even social formations such as bands of hunters and food-gatherers who had not yet entered the phase of communal cooperation. Often the relationship was peaceful. In many parts of the African continent, there arose what is known as “symbiosis” between groups earning their living in different ways—which really means that they agreed to exchange goods and coexist to their mutual advantage. However, there was also room for considerable conflict; and when one group imposed itself by force on another, the result was invariably the rise of social classes with the conquerors on top and the conquered at the bottom.

The most common clashes between different social formations were those between pastoralists and cultivators. In some instances, the cultivators had the upper hand, as for instance in West Africa where cultivators like the Mandinga and Hausa were the overlords of the Rulani cattlemen right up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reverse situation was found in the Horn of Africa and most of East Africa. Another type of clash was that in which raiding peoples took power over agriculturalists, as happened in Angola and in and around the Sahara, where the Moors and Tuareg exacted tribute from and even enslaved more peaceful and sedentary peoples. The result in each case was that a relatively small faction held control of the land and (where relevant) cattle, mines, and long-distance trade. It meant also that the minority group could make demands on the labor of their subjects—not on the basis of kinship but because a relationship of domination and subordination existed.

In truly communal societies, the leadership was based on religion and family ties. The senior members of the society shared the work with others and received more or less the same share of the total product. Certainly, no one starved while others stuffed themselves and threw away the excess. However, once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, conquest, or trade, the style of life of the ruling group became noticeably different. They consumed the most and the best that the society offered. Yet, they were least directly involved in the production of wealth by farming, cattle herding, or fishing. The ruling class and the kings in particular had the right to call upon the labor of the common man for certain projects and for a given number of days per year. This is known as corvée labor, from a similar procedure followed in feudal France. Such a system meant greater exploitation and at the same time greater development of productive resources.

Social stratification as outlined above went hand in hand with the rise of the state. The notion of royal lineages and commoner clans could not have any meaning except in a political state with a concrete geographical existence. It is significant that the great dynasties of the world ruled over feudal states. To the European or European-trained ear, the names of the Tudors, Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs would already be familiar. Japan had its Kamakuras and its Tokugawas; China had its T’ang and its Ming; India had its Guptas and its Marathas; and so on. All of those were feudal dynasties existing in a period some centuries after the birth of Christ, but in addition there were dynasties which ruled in each of those countries before feudal land tenure and class relations had fully crystalized. It means that the transition to feudalism in Europe* and Asia saw the rise of ruling groups and the state as interdependent parts of the same process. In that respect, Africa was no different.

From a political perspective, the period of transition from communalism to feudalism in Africa was one of state formation. At the beginning (and for many centuries), the state remained weak and immature. It acquired definite territorial boundaries, but inside those boundaries subjects lived in their own communities with scarcely any contact with the ruling class until the time came to pay an annual tax or tribute. Only when a group within the state refused to pay the tribute did the early African states mobilize their repressive machinery in the form of an army to demand what it considered as its rights from subjects. Slowly, various states acquired greater power over their many communities of citizens. They exacted corvée labor, they enlisted soldiers, and they appointed regular tax collectors and local administrators. The areas of Africa in which labor relations were breaking out of communal restrictions corresponded to areas in which sophisticated political states were emerging. The rise of states was itself a form of development, which increased the scale of African politics and merged small ethnic groups into wider identities suggestive of nations.

In some ways, too much importance is attached to the growth of political states. It was in Europe that the nation-state reached an advanced stage, and Europeans tended to use the presence or absence of well-organized polities as a measure of “civilization.” That is not entirely justified, because in Africa there were small political units which had relatively advanced material and non-material cultures. For instance, neither the Ibo people of Nigeria nor the Kikuyu of Kenya ever produced large centralized governments in their traditional setting. But both had sophisticated systems of political rule based on clans and (in the case of the Ibo) on religious oracles and “Secret Societies.” Both of them were efficient agriculturalists and ironworkers, and the Ibo had been manufacturing brass and bronze items ever since the ninth century A.D., if not earlier.

However, after making the above qualification, it can be conceded that on the whole the larger states in Africa had the most effective political structures and greater capacity for producing food, clothing, minerals, and other material artifacts. It can readily be understood that those societies which had ruling classes were concerned with acquiring luxury and prestige items. The privileged groups in control of the state were keen to stimulate manufactures as well as to acquire them through trade. They were the ones that mobilized labor to produce a greater surplus above subsistence needs, and in the process they encouraged specialization and the division of labor.

Scholars often distinguish between groups in Africa which had states and those which were “stateless.” Sometimes, the word “stateless” is carelessly or even abusively used; but it does describe those peoples who had no machinery of government coercion and no concept of a political unit wider than the family or the village. After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests. Generally speaking, one can consider the stateless societies as among the older forms of socio-political organization in Africa, while the large states represented an evolution away from communalism—sometimes to the point of feudalism.

Again, it must be emphasized that a survey of the scene in Africa before the coming of Europeans would reveal considerable unevenness of development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism, feudalism, and many positions intermediate between the last two. The remainder of this section will be devoted to a review of the principal features of several of the most developed societies and states of Africa in the last thousand years or so before Africa came into permanent contact with Europe. The areas to be considered are Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia, Morocco, the Western Sudan, the interlacustrine zone of East Africa, and Zimbabwe. Each serves as an example of what development meant in early Africa and what the direction of social movement was. To a greater or lesser extent, each was also a leading force on the continent in the sense of carrying neighbors along the same path, either by absorbing them or influencing them more indirectly.

Some Concrete Examples

Egypt

It is logical to start with Egypt as the oldest culture in Africa which rose to eminence. The glories of Egypt under the Pharaohs are well known and do not need recounting. At one time, it used to be said or assumed that ancient Egypt was not “African”—a curious view which is no longer seriously propounded. However, for the present purposes, it is more relevant to refer to Egypt under Arab and Turkish rule from the seventh century onwards. During that latter period, the ruling class was foreign, and that meant that Egypt’s internal development was tied up with other countries, notably Arabia and Turkey. Colonized Egypt sent abroad great amounts of wealth in the form of food and revenue, and that was a very negative factor. But the tendency was for the ruling foreigners to break with their own imperial masters and to act simply as a ruling elite within Egypt, which became an independent feudal state.

One of the first features of feudalism to arrive in Egypt was the military aspect. The Arab, Turk, and Circassian invaders were all militarily inclined. This was particularly true of the Mameluks who held power from the thirteenth century onwards. Political power in Egypt from the seventh century lay in the hands of a military oligarchy which delegated the actual government to bureaucrats, thereby creating a situation similar to that in places like China and Indochina. Even more fundamental was the fact that land tenure relations were undergoing change in such a way that a true feudal class came on the scene. All the conquerors made land grants to their followers and military captains. Initially, the land in Egypt was the property of the state to be rented out to cultivators. The state then had the right to reappropriate the land and allocate it once more, somewhat like the head of a village community acting as the guardian of the lands of related families. However, the ruling military elements also became a new class of landowners. By the fifteenth century, most of the land in Egypt was the property of the sultan and his military lords.

If there was a small class which monopolized most of the land, it followed that there was a large class of landless. Peasant cultivators were soon converted into mere agricultural laborers, tied to the soil as tenants or vassals of the feudal landlords. These peasants with little or no land were known as the fellahin. In Europe, there are legends about the exploitation and suffering of the Russian serfs, or muzhik, under feudalism. In Egypt, the exploitation of the fellahin was carried out even more thoroughly. The feudalists had no interest in the fellahin beyond seeing that they produced revenue. Most of what the peasants produced was taken from them in the form of tax, and the tax collectors were asked to perform the miracle of taking from the peasants even that which they did not have! When their demands were not met, the peasants were brutalized.

The antagonistic nature of the contradiction between the feudal warrior landlords and the fellahin was revealed by a number of peasant revolts, notably in the early part of the eighth century. In no continent was feudalism an epoch of romance for the laboring classes, but the elements of development were seen in the technology and the increase in productive capacity. Under the patronage of the Fatimid dynasty (969 A.D. to 1170 A.D.), science flourished and industry reached a new level in Egypt. Windmills and waterwheels were introduced from Persia in the tenth century. New industries were introduced—papermaking, sugar refining, porcelain, and the distillation of gasoline. The older industries of textiles, leather, and metal were improved upon. The succeeding dynasties of the Ayyubids and the Mameluks also achieved a great deal, especially in the building of canals, dams, bridges, and aqueducts, and in stimulating commerce with Europe. Egypt at that time was still able to teach Europe many things and was flexible enough to receive new techniques in return.

Although feudalism was based on the land, it usually developed towns at the expense of the countryside. The high points of Egyptian feudal culture were associated with the towns. The Fatimids founded the city of Cairo, which became one of the most famous and most cultured in the world. At the same time, they established the Azhar University which exists today as one of the oldest in the world. The feudalists and the rich merchants were the ones who benefited most, but the craftsmen and other city dwellers of Cairo and Alexandria were able to participate to some extent in the leisured lives of the towns.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia, too, at the start of its history as a great power was ruled over by foreigners. The kingdom of Axum was one of the most important of the nuclei around which feudal Ethiopia eventually emerged, and Axum was founded near the Red Sea coast by a dynasty of Sabean origin from the other side of the Red Sea. But the kings of Axum were never agents of foreign powers, and they became completely Africanized. The founding of Axum goes back to the first century A.D. and its ruling class was Christianized within a few centuries. After that they moved inland and participated in the development of the Christian feudal Ethiopian state.

The Ethiopian, Tigrean, and Amharic ruling class was a proud one, tracing its descent to Solomon. As a state which incorporated several other smaller states and kingdoms, it was an empire in the same sense as feudal Austria or Prussia. The emperor of Ethiopia was addressed as “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings.” In practice, however, the “Solomonic” line was not unbroken. Most of the consolidation of the inland Ethiopian plateau was carried out in the twelfth century by an intruding dynasty, the Zagwe, who made claims to descent from Moses. The Zagwe kings distinguished themselves by building several churches cut out of solid rock. The architectural achievements attest to the level of skill reached by Ethiopians as well as the capacity of the state to mobilize labor on a huge scale. Such tasks could not have been achieved by voluntary family labor but only through the labor of an exploited class.

A great deal is known of the superstructure of the Ethiopian empire, especially its Christianity and its literate culture. History was written to glorify the king and the nobility, especially under the restored “Solomonic” dynasty which replaced the Zagwe in 1270 A.D. Fine illuminated books and manuscripts became a prominent element of Amharic culture. Equally fine garments and jewelry were produced for the ruling class and for the church. The top ecclesiastics were part of the nobility, and the institution of the monastery grew to great proportions in Ethiopia. The association of organized religion with the state was implicit in communal societies, where the distinction between politics, economics, religion, medicine, was scarcely drawn. Under feudalism everywhere, church and state were in close alliance. The Buddhists were pre-eminent in feudal Vietnam, Burma, Japan, and to a lesser extent in China. In India, a limited Buddhist influence was overwhelmed by that of the Hindus and Moslems; and of course in feudal Europe it was the Catholic church which played the role paralleled by the Orthodox church in Ethiopia.

The wealth of Ethiopia rested on an agricultural base. The fertile uplands supported cereal growing and there was considerable livestock raising, including the rearing of horses. Craft skills were developed in a number of spheres, and foreign craftsmen were encouraged. For instance, early in the fifteenth century, Turkish artisans settled in the country and made coats of mail and weapons for the Ethiopian army. Coptics from Egypt were also introduced to help run the financial administration. No one denies that the word “feudal” can be applied to Ethiopia in those centuries, because there existed a clear-cut class contradiction between the landlords and the peasants. Those relations grew out of the communalism that had characterized Ethiopia, like other parts of Africa, much earlier.

Feudal Ethiopia included lands that were communally owned by village and ethnic communities as well as lands belonging directly to the crown; but in addition large territories were conferred by the conquering Amharic dynasties on members of the royal family and on soldiers and priests. Those who received huge areas of land became Ras, or provincial princes, and they had judges appointed by the emperor attached to them. The peasants in their domain were reduced to tenants who could earn their living only by offering produce to the landlord and taxes to the state (also in produce). The landlords exempted themselves from tax—a typical situation in feudal societies, and one which fed the fires of revolution in Europe when the bourgeois class grew powerful enough to challenge the fact that the feudalists were using political power to tax everyone but themselves. Ethiopia, of course, never reached that stage of transition to capitalism. What is clear is that the transition to feudalism had been made.

Nubia

Nubia was another Christian region in Africa, but one which is not so famous as Ethiopia. In the sixth century A.D., Christianity was introduced into the middle Nile in the districts once ruled by the famous state of Kush, or Meroë. In the period before the birth of Christ, Kush was a rival to Egypt in splendor, and it ruled Egypt for a number of years. Its decline in the fourth century A.D. was completed by attacks from the then expanding Axum. The three small Nubian states which arose some time afterwards were to some extent the heirs of Kush, although after their conversion to Christianity it was this religion which dominated Nubian culture.

The Nubian states (which had consolidated to two by about the eighth century) achieved most from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, in spite of great pressures from Arab and Islamic enemies; and they did not finally succumb until the fourteenth century. Scholarly interest in Nubia has focused on the ruins of large red-brick churches and monasteries which had murals and frescoes of fine quality. Several conclusions can be drawn from the material evidence. In the first place, a great deal of labor was required to build those churches along with the stone fortifications which often surrounded them. As with the pyramids of Egypt or the feudal castles of Europe, the common builders were intensely exploited and probably coerced. Secondly, skilled labor was involved in the making of the bricks and in the architecture. The paintings indicate that the skills surpassed mere manual dexterity, and the same artistic merit is noticeable in fragments of painted pottery recovered from Nubia.

It has already been indicated that the churches and monasteries played a major role in Ethiopia, and this is worth elaborating on with respect to Nubia. The monastery was a major unit of production. Numerous peasant huts were clustered around each monastery, which functioned very much as did the manor of a feudal lord. The wealth that accumulated inside the churches was alienated from the peasants, while the finest aspects of the non-material culture, such as books, were accessible only to a small minority. Not only were the peasants illiterate, but in many cases they were non-Christians or only nominally Christian—judging from the better known Ethiopian example of the same date. When the Christian ruling class of Nubia was eliminated by the Moslems, very little of the achievements of the old state remained in the fabric of the people’s daily lives. Such reversals in the historical process are not uncommon throughout human experience. Ultimately, the dialectic of development asserts itself, but some ebbing and flowing is inevitable. The Nubian states were not in existence in the fifteenth century, but they constitute a legitimate example of the potentialities of African development.

One can go further and discern that Kush was still contributing to African development long after the kingdom had declined and given way to Christian Nubia. It is clear that Kush was a center from which many positive cultural elements diffused to the rest of Africa. Brasswork of striking similarity to that of Meroe was reproduced in West Africa, and the technique by which West Africans cast their brass is generally held to have originated in Egypt and to have been passed on by way of Kush. Above all, Kush was one of the earliest and most vigorous centers of iron mining and smelting in Africa, and it was certainly one of the sources from which this crucial aspect of technology passed to the rest of the continent. That is why the middle Nile was a leading force in the social, economic, and political development of Africa as a whole.

The Maghreb

Islam was the great “revealed” religion which played the major role in the period of the feudal development of the Maghreb—the lands at the western extremity of the Islamic empires that stretched across Africa, Asia, and Europe within years of the Prophet Mohammed’s death in the seventh century of the Christian era. The Arab empire-building under the banner of Islam is a classic example of the role of religion in that respect. Ibn Khaldun, a great fourteenth-century North African historian, was of the opinion that Islam was the most important force allowing the Arabs to transcend the narrow boundaries of small family communities which were constantly struggling among each other. He wrote:

Arab pride, touchiness and intense jealousy of power render it impossible for them to agree. Only when their nature has been permeated by a religious impulse are they transformed, so that the tendency to anarchy is replaced by a spirit of mutual defense. Consider the moment when religion dominated their policy and led them to observe a religious law designed to promote the moral and material interests of civilization. Under a series of successors to the Prophet [Mohammed], how vast their empire became and how strongly was it established.

The above remarks by Ibn Khaldun cover only one aspect of Arab imperial expansion, but it was certainly a crucial one, and attested to the essential role of ideology in the developmental process. That has to be considered in relation to and in addition to the material circumstances. Furthermore, in judging the material conditions at any given time which might form the basis for further expansion of production and further growth of the society’s power, it is also necessary to consider the historical legacy. Like Islamic Egypt and Christian Nubia, the Maghreb of the Islamic dynasties inherited a rich historical and cultural tradition. It was the seat of the famous society of Carthage which flourished between 1200 B.C. and 200 B.C., and which was a blend of foreign influences from the eastern Mediterranean with the Berber peoples of the Maghreb. The region had subsequently been an important section of the Roman and Byzantine empires; and before becoming Moslem the Maghreb had actually distinguished itself as a center of non-conformist Christianity which went under the name of Donatism.

The striking achievements of Moslem Maghreb were spread over the naval, military, commercial, and cultural spheres. Its navies controlled the western Mediterranean and its armies took over most of Portugal and Spain. When the Moslem advance into Europe was turned back in the year 732 A.D., North African armies were already deep into France. In the eleventh century, the armies of the Almoravid dynasty gathered strength from deep within Senegal and Mauritania and launched themselves across the Strait of Gibraltar to reinforce Islam in Spain, which was being threatened by Christian kings. For over a century, the Almoravid rule in North Africa and Iberia was characterized by commercial wealth and a resplendent literary and architectural record. After being ejected from Spain in the 1230s the Maghreb Moslems, or Moors as they were called, continued to maintain a dynamic society on African soil. As one index to the standard of social life, it has been pointed out that public baths were common in the cities of Maghreb at a time when in Oxford the doctrine was still being propounded that the washing of the body was a dangerous act.

One of the most instructive aspects of the history of the Maghreb is the interaction of social formations to produce the state. A major problem that had to be resolved was that of integrating the isolated Berber groups into larger political communities. There were also contradictions between sedentary groups and nomadic pastoral sectors of the populations.

The Berbers were mainly pastoralists organized in patriarchal clans, and in groups of clans, and in groups of clans connected by a democratic council of all adult males. Grazing land was under communal ownership, and maintaining irrigation was also a collective responsibility for the agriculturalists. Yet, cooperation within kin-groups contrasted with hostility between those who had no immediate blood ties, and it was only in the face of the Arab invaders that the Berbers united—using a non-conformist Kharijite Islam as their ideology. The Kharijite revolt of 739 A.D. is considered in one sense as being nationalistic and in another sense a revolt of the exploited classes against the Arab military, bureaucratic, and theocratic elite, who professed the orthodox Sunni Islam. That revolt of the Berber masses laid the basis for Moroccan nationalism, and three centuries later the Almohad dynasty (1147–1270) brought political unity to the whole of Maghreb as a product of the synthesis of Berber and Arab achievements in the sphere of state-building.

Unfortunately, the Maghreb nation did not last; and instead the region was bequeathed the nuclei of three nation states—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Within each of the three areas, divisive tendencies were very strong in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For instance, in Tunisia the ruling Hafsid dynasty was constantly involved in crushing local rebellions and defending the integrity of the state. It has been noted already that the political state in Africa and elsewhere was a consequence of development of the productive forces, but the state in turn also conditioned the rate at which the economy advanced, because the two were dialectically interrelated. Therefore, the failure of the Maghreb to build a nation-state and the difficulties of consolidating state power even within the three divisions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were factors holding back the further development of the region. Moreover, political division weakened the Maghreb vis-à-vis foreign enemies, and Europe was soon to take advantage of those internal weaknesses, by launching attacks from the year 1415 onwards.

The experience of the Maghreb can be drawn upon to illustrate the lengthy nature of transition from the one mode of production to another and the fact that two different ways of organizing society could coexist side by side over centuries. Throughout the period under discussion, a great deal of land in that part of Africa retained its communal ownership and family labor. Meanwhile, considerable socio-economic stratification had taken place and antagonistic classes had emerged. At the very bottom of the ladder were the slaves, or harratine, who were most often black Africans from south of the Sahara. Then came the akhamme, or landless peasants, who worked the proprietors’ land and gave the latter four-fifths of whatever was produced. Special mention should be made of the position of women, who were not a class by themselves but who suffered from deprivations at the hands of their own menfolk and of the male-controlled ruling class. Therefore, the women in the akhamme class were in a very depressed condition. At the top of the society were the big landowners, who wielded political power along with other devotees of the Moslem religion.

None of the African societies discussed so far can be said to have thrown up capitalist forms to the point where the accumulation of capital became the principal motive force. However, they all had flourishing commercial sectors, moneylenders, and strong handicraft industries which were the features which ultimately gave birth to modern capitalism through evolution and revolution. The Maghreb merchants were quite wealthy. They gained from the energies of the cultivators, cattlemen, and shepherds; they indirectly or directly mobilized the labor in the mines of copper, lead, antimony, and iron; and they appropriated surplus from the skills of the craftsmen making textiles, carpets, leather, pottery, and articles of brass and iron. The merchants were a class of accumulators, and their dynamism made itself felt not only in the Maghreb but also in the Sahara and across the Sahara in West Africa. In that way, the development of the Maghreb acted as a factor in the development of what was called the Western Sudan.

The Western Sudan

To the Arabs, the whole of Africa south of the Sahara was the Bilad as Sudan—the Land of the Blacks. The name survives today only in the Republic of Sudan on the Nile, but references to the Western Sudan in early times concern the zone presently occupied by Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta, and Niger, plus parts of Mauritania, Guinea, and Nigeria. The Western Sudanic empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai have become by-words in the struggle to illustrate the achievements of the African past. That is the area to which African nationalists and progressive whites point when they want to prove that Africans too were capable of political, administrative, and military greatness in the epoch before the white men. However, a people’s demands at any given time change the kinds of questions to which historians are expected to provide answers. Today the masses of Africa seek “development” and total emancipation. The issues that need resolution with regard to Western Sudanic history are those which illumine the principles underlying the impressive development of certain states in the heart of Africa.

The origins of the empire of Ghana go back to the fifth century A.D., but it reached its peak between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Mali had its prime in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Songhai in the two subsequent centuries. The three were not in exactly the same location; and the ethnic origin of the three ruling classes was different; but they should be regarded as “successor states,” following essentially the same line of evolution and growth. They have been called trading states so often that it is almost forgotten that the principal activity of the population was agriculture. It was a zone in which several species of millet were domesticated, along with a species of rice, several other food plants, and at least one type of cotton. It was a zone which saw the relatively early introduction of iron in the millennium before the birth of Christ, and iron tools exercised their attendant benefits on agriculture. The open savannah country of the Western Sudan also favored livestock. Some groups such as the Fulani were exclusively pastoralist, but livestock was to be found in varying degrees throughout the huge region. Cattle were the most significant domesticated animals, followed by goats. The rearing of horses, mules, and donkeys was also carried on, which was made possible by wide tsetse-free areas. To add further variety, the great Niger River allowed for the rise of specialist fishermen.

Population, the indispensable factor of production, could only have reached the density which it did because of increasing food supplies; while handicraft industry and trade sprang primarily from the products of agriculture. Cotton cultivation led to the making of cotton cloth with such a variety of specialization that there was internal trade in particular cotton cloths, such as the unbleached fabric of Futa Djalon and the blue cloth of Jenne. Pastoralism provided a variety of products for manufacture, notably cattle hides and goatskins which went into the making of sandals, leather jackets for military use, leather pouches for amulets, and so on. Horses served as a means of transport to the ruling class and made a major contribution to warfare and the size of the state. For the purpose of interbreeding, some horses were imported from North Africa where the Arab bloodstock was of the finest quality. For pack transport, the donkey was of course better fitted; and the Mossi kingdom of Upper Volta for a long time specialized in breeding those pack animals which were associated with long distance trade within the vast region. On the edge of the Sahara, the camel took over—another “technological” asset introduced from the north.

Mining was a sphere in which production was important. Some of the royal clans in the Western Sudan, such as that of the Kante, were specialist blacksmiths. In a period of expansion by warfare, the control over iron supplies and over iron-working skills was obviously decisive. Besides, the two most important articles of long distance trade were salt and gold, both obtained principally by mining. Neither the salt supplies nor the gold supplies were originally within the domains of Ghana, but it took steps to integrate them either by trade or by territorial expansion. Ghana struck north into the Sahara, and towards the very end of the tenth century it captured the town of Awdaghast from the Berbers—a town useful for the control of the incoming salt mined in the middle of the desert. Similarly Mali and Songhai sought to secure control of Taghaza, which was the largest single center of salt mining. Songhai took the prize of Taghaza from the desert Berbers and held it for many years in the face of opposition from Morocco. Another crucial but seldom stressed element in the pattern of production was the ownership of copper mines in the Sahara by both Mali and Songhai.

To the south of Ghana lay the important sources of gold on the Upper Senegal and its tributary the Falémé. It is said that Ghana obtained its gold by “silent” or “dumb” barter which was described as follows:

The merchants beat great drums to summon the local natives, who were naked and lived in holes in the ground. From these holes, which were doubtless the pits from which they dug the gold, they refused to emerge in the presence of the foreign merchants. The latter, therefore, used to arrange their trade goods in piles on the river bank and retire out of sight. The local natives then came and placed a heap of gold beside each pile and withdrew. If the merchants were satisfied they took the gold and retreated, beating their drums to signify that the market was over.

The writer of the above lines (E. W. Bovill), a supposed European authority on the Western Sudan, then goes on to say that silent trade or dumb barter was a feature of the Western Sudan’s gold trade throughout all the centuries until modern times. Actually, the only thing dumb about the trade is what he writes about it. The story of dumb barter for gold in West Africa is repeated in several accounts, starting with ancient Greek scripts. It is clearly a rough approximation of the first attempts at exchange of a people coming into contact with strangers, and it was not a permanent procedure. During the rule of Ghana, the people of the two principal gold-fields of Bambuk and Boure were drawn into regular trade relations with the Western Sudan. Ghana probably, and Mali certainly, exercised political rule over the two regions, where the mining and distribution of gold became a very complicated process. During the centuries of Mali’s greatness, extensive mining of gold began in the forest of modern Ghana to supply the trans-Saharan gold trade. The existing social systems expanded and strong states emerged to deal with the sale of gold. The merchants who came from the great cities of the Western Sudan had to buy the gold by weight, using a small accurate measurement known as the benda.

When the Portuguese arrived at the river Gambia and got a glimpse at how gold was traded on the upper reaches of the river, they marveled at the dexterity shown by the Mandinga merchants. The latter carried very finely balanced scales, inlaid with silver and suspended from cords of twisted silk. The gold dust and nuggets were weighted with brass weights. The expertise of the Mandinga in measuring gold and in other forms of commerce was largely due to the fact that within that ethnic group there was a core of professional traders, commonly referred to as the Dioulas. They were not very wealthy, but were distinguished by their willingness to travel thousands of miles from one end of the Western Sudan to another. They also reached the coast or very near to the coast of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana. The Dioulas handled a long list of African products—salt from the Atlantic coast and the Sahara; kola nuts from the forests of Liberia and Ivory Coast; gold from Akan country in modern Ghana; leather from Hausaland; dried fish from the coast; cotton cloth from many districts and especially from the central area of the Western Sudan; iron from Futa Djalon in modern Guinea; shea butter from the upper Gambia; and a host of other local articles. In addition, the trade of the Western Sudan involved the circulation of goods originating in North Africa, notably fabrics from Egypt and the Maghreb and coral beads from Ceuta on the Mediterranean coast. Therefore, the pattern of Western Sudanic and trans-Saharan commerce was integrating the resources of a wide area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean.

Long-distance trade across the Sahara had special characteristics. Some scholars have spoken of the camel as the ship of the Sahara, and the towns which the camel caravans entered on either side of the desert were called “ports.” In practice, the trans-Saharan trade was as great an achievement as crossing an ocean. Much more than local trade, it stimulated the famous cities of the region such as Walata, Timbuktu, Gao, and Jenne; and it brought in the literate Islamic culture. Long-distance trade strengthened state power, which meant in effect the power of the lineages who transformed themselves into a permanent aristocracy. However, it is a gross oversimplification of cause and effect to say that it was the trans-Saharan trade which built the Western Sudanic empires. Ghana, Mali, and Songhai grew out of their environment, and out of the efforts of their own populations; and it was only after they had a certain status that their ruling classes could express an interest in long-distance trade and could provide the security to permit that trade to flourish.

It is significant that the Western Sudan never provided any significant capital for the trans-Saharan trade. The capital came from the merchants of Fez, Tlemcen, and other cities of the Maghreb; and they sent their agents to reside in the Western Sudan. To some extent, it was a colonial relationship because the exchange was unequal in North Africa’s favor. However, the gold trade was at least capable of stimulating the development of the productive forces within West Africa, while the accompanying trade in slaves had no such benefits. Ghana, Mali, and Songhai all exported small numbers of slaves, and the empire of Kanem-Bornu gave slave exports a much higher priority because it controlled no gold supplies. Kanem-Bornu used its power to raid for captives to the south as far as Adamawa in modern Cameroon. The negative implications of such policies were to be fully brought out in later centuries, when the steady trickle of slaves from a few parts of West Africa across the Sahara was joined by the massive flow of the continent’s peoples towards destinations named by Europeans.

Though falling considerably short of the feudal stage, state formation was more advanced in the Western Sudan than in most other parts of Africa in the period 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. Apart from Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu, there were outstanding kingdoms in Hausaland, in Mossi, in Senegal, in the Futa Djalon mountains of Guinea, and in the basin of the Benue tributary of the river Niger. The Western Sudanic techniques of political organization and administration spread out to many neighboring regions, and influenced the rise of innumerable small states scattered throughout the coastal region from the river Senegal to the Cameroon mountains. Some specific Sudanic features were discernible in many kingdoms, notably the position of the “Queen Mother” in the political structure.

The strengths and weaknesses of the Western Sudanic states attest to the point which they had reached on the long road away from communalism—with respect to social relations and to the level of production. The state held together several clashing social formations and ethnic groups. In the case of Kanem-Bornu, pastoralists and cultivators were even able to integrate the camel nomads of the desert. Elsewhere, the Tuareg nomads were kept at bay, so that cultivators and other sedentary peoples could live their lives in peace. Men, domestic beasts, and goods were free to move for thousands of miles in security. However, the state had not yet broken down the barriers between different social formations. The state existed as an institution which collected tribute from the various communities and restrained them from clashing. In periods of weakness, the superstructure of the state almost disappeared and left free scope for divisive political and social tendencies. Each successive great state was a further experiment to deal with the problem of unity, sometimes on a conscious level and more often as an unconscious by-product of the struggle for survival.

Under feudalism, the ruling class in the state for the first time tore away the social institutions which prevented the first embryo states from exercising direct action on each subject. That is to say, feudalism brought about a series of direct obligatory ties between the landed rulers and the landless subjects. In the Western Sudan, that clear-cut class division had not come into existence. By the time of Mali’s pre-eminence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a small amount of local slavery had come into existence, and by the end of the fifteenth century there were both chattel slaves and “domestic slaves” comparable to feudal serfs. For instance, in Senegal, the Portuguese traders found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency. Nevertheless, most of the population still had ample access to land through their kin, and in political terms that meant that the authority of the ruling class was exercised over heads of families and clans rather than over each subject.

Although communal egalitarianism was on its way out, communal relations still persisted and had by the fifteenth century become a brake on the development of the Western Sudan. Such surplus as was being produced by the society over and above subsistence needs came out of tribute from the collective communities rather than directly from the producer to the exploiting class. That gave an incentive for maintaining the old social structures, although they were incapable of increasing labor mobilization and specialization to a much greater degree. It was unlikely that there would be a violent social revolution. Under those circumstances, major advances of technology were required to spark off further changes. The degree of economic integration had to be enhanced by greater productivity in various areas—allowing for more trade, more specialization in the division of labor, and the possibility of surplus accumulation. But wheeled vehicles and the plow stopped in North Africa, and so too did large-scale irrigation. Indeed, through the critical absence of large-scale irrigation, the productive base in the Western Sudan actually decreased, for the Sahara was advancing. Ghana had stood on fertile agricultural land, but both Mali and Songhai had their centers farther south, because the former northern terrain of Ghana was claimed by the Sahara through desiccation. Techniques necessary for the control of this hostile environment and for the increase of agricultural and manufacturing capacity had either to evolve locally or to be brought in from outside. In the next phase of African history after the coming of the white men, both of those alternatives were virtually ruled out in West Africa.

The Interlacustrine Zone

The high level of social evolution in the Western Sudan has been the cause of lengthy debates as to whether the region had achieved feudalism of the European variety, or whether it should be classed together with the great Asian empires, or whether it created a new and unique category of its own. On the eastern side of the continent, development in the same period was definitely slower. For one thing, the people of East Africa acquired iron tools at a much later date than their brothers in the north and west; and, secondly, the range of their technology and skills was narrower. However, by the fourteenth century, state formation was well under way, and the principles of development revealed in the process are worth considering. An area of special interest is that of the great lakes of Africa and particularly the zone around the group of lakes which the British thought fit to rename in honor of various members of the British ruling family—Victoria, Albert, Edward, George. In that interlacustrine zone, several famous states eventually emerged, one of the earliest and largest being that of Bunyoro-Kitara.

Bunyoro-Kitara comprised in whole or in part the regions which today are called Bunyoro, Ankole, Toro, Karagwe, and Buganda—all of which fall in Uganda, except Karagwe which is in Tanzania. Historical traditions have been orally preserved by these various peoples who at one time fell within the boundaries of Bunyoro-Kitara; and the traditions concentrate on the ruling dynasty, which is known as the Bachwezi. The Bachwezi were supposedly an immigrant pastoralist group. They introduced long-horned humped cattle, which later became the major species in the interlacustrine zone. Possession of these cattle undoubtedly aided them to become a ruling aristocracy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They became a social stratum above the clans which previously existed, and which had narrow territorial bases. The period of Bachwezi pre-eminence is also associated with ironworking, the manufacture of barkcloth, the technique of sinking well shafts through rocks, and (most striking of all) the construction of extensive earthwork systems, used apparently both for defense and for enclosing large herds of cattle. The largest of the earthworks was at Bigo, with ditches extending over six and a half miles.

The division of labor between pastoralists and cultivators and the nature of their contacts intensified the process of caste formation and class stratification in the interlacustrine area. The pastoralist Bahima had imposed their rule over the cultivators, or Bairu. Social classes grew out of a situation of changing labor relations. The earthworks of Bigo and elsewhere were not built by voluntary family labor, and some form of coercion must also have been used to get the cultivators to produce a surplus for their new lords. For instance, the Bachwezi are said to have established a system by which young men were conscripted into the king’s service and were maintained by Bairu who occupied and cultivated land assigned for the support of the army. They also introduced slave artisans and administrators. When administrative officials were appointed at a local level to rule on behalf of the aristocrats, that was a first step toward setting up feudal fiefs as in Ethiopia; for while the question of land grants had not yet entered the picture, it must be borne in mind that inequality in the distribution of cattle meant in fact unequal access to the means of production.

Much uncertainty surrounds the precise identification of the Bachwezi. It is possible that they were not immigrants. Nevertheless, it is generally held that they were light-complexioned pastoralists coming from the north. Assuming that this was so, it is essential to stress that whatever was achieved in the interlacustrine region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a product of the evolution of African society as a whole and not a transplant from outside. In order to place those East African events within the context of universal human achievement, a parallel can be drawn with India. Centuries before the birth of Christ, Northern India was also the recipient of light-complexioned pastoral immigrants known as Aryans. There was a time when everything in Indian culture was attributed to the Aryans; but then careful scrutiny revealed that the basis of Indian society and culture had been laid by the earlier population known as the Dravidians. Therefore, it is now considered far more sensible to see the achievements of North India as a product of synthesis or combination of Aryan and Dravidian. Similarly in East Africa, one needs to seek the elements of synthesis between the new and the old and that in effect was the path of development in the interlacustrine zone in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

As has just been noted, the Bachwezi are associated with techniques such as ironworking and barkcloth manufacture. It is not at all clearly established that they introduced such techniques for the first time, and it is much more probable that they presided over the elaboration of such skills. Certainly, iron-using societies were known in East Africa several centuries before the Bachwezi period. At Engaruka, just south of the present Kenya-Tanzania border, there are to be found the ruins of a small but impressive iron-age society, which flourished sometime before the end of the first millennium A.D. (i.e., before 1000 A.D.). Engaruka was a concentrated agricultural settlement engaging in terracing, irrigation, and the construction of walls by the technique known as dry stone building, whereby no lime was required to hold the stones together. In the interlacustrine area itself, there had emerged a banana-based agriculture, which was capable of supporting a large sedentary population. That was the sort of precondition for moving from communal isolation to statehood.

It is significant that orally preserved traditions imply the existence of kingdoms in Bunyoro and Karagwe before the Bachwezi. State formation was already in an embryo stage when the outsiders arrived, and the likelihood is that they did not remain outsiders for long. Unlike the Aryans in India, the Bachwezi did not even impose their own language, but adopted the Bantu speech of the local inhabitants. That reflects the dominance of local rather than foreign elements in the synthesis. In any event, the cultural product was African, and was part of the pattern of development through localized evolution combined with the interplay of social formations on a continent-wide scale.

Among the contributions supposedly made by the Bachwezi to the interlacustrine kingdoms was the introduction of religion based on the phases of the moon. In all of the situations examined so far, religion played a significant role in promoting the building of the state, leading away from the simple organization of the family community. Christianity and Islam have been most frequently associated with large-scale building both inside and outside of Africa. That is to be explained not so much by the actual religious beliefs, but because membership in a powerful universal church gave the ruling class of a young state many advantages. A Christian or Moslem prince had access to a literate culture and a wider world. He dealt with traders and craftsmen professing that religion; he used administrators and churchmen who were literate; and he could travel to parts of the world such as Mecca. Above all, the universal religions replaced “traditional” African ancestral religions in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, the Maghreb, and progressively in the Western Sudan because Christianity and Islam were not rooted in any given family community and therefore could be used to mobilize the many communities that were merging into the state. However, religious beliefs which had been accepted by a single clan or ethnic group could be elevated in the same form or in a slightly altered form to become the religion of the whole state. This was the situation in the interlacustrine zone, and indeed in most other parts of Africa outside the regions already described.

Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe, one of the great constructions in brick (dated around the fourteenth century) is commonly referred to as a “temple” and is felt to have served religious purposes. Even from the scanty evidence, it is clear that the religious aspect of social development was of the greatest importance in serving to cement ties between individuals in that emergent African society. For instance, the ruling class in the fifteenth century empire of Mutapa in Zimbabwe were pastoralists and their religious ritual included objects that were symbolic of cattle, as was found in the interlacustrine kingdoms such as Bunyoro and Karagwe. One can guess that the rituals also symbolized the dominance of the cattle owners, just as they also paid respect to pre-existing ideas of the cultivators in order to effect a stable synthesis. The details of the picture are not available in the present stage of knowledge, but what is required is that any discussion of African religion must seek to present it in a mobile evolutionary manner and to relate it to changing socio-economic forms and institutions. That task being beyond the confines of the present study, it is proposed to examine Zimbabwe as yet another region where the productive base and the political superstructure can be ascertained to have developed appreciably in the last few centuries before Africa was drawn into contact with Europe.

Within the southernmost section of the continent, the area in which striking achievements were registered by the fifteenth century was that between the rivers Zambezi and Limpopo, covering the territories that were later to be called Mozambique and Rhodesia. Iron-using and state-building peoples were active there from early in the first millennium A.D., and eventually there emerged in the fifteenth century the empire which Europeans called Monomotapa. The term “Zimbabwe” is being used here to designate the Zambesi-Limpopo cultures in the few centuries preceding the European arrival, because it was from the eleventh to the fourteenth century that there flourished the societies, whose most characteristic feature was the building of large stone palaces, known collectively as Zimbabwe.

Much has been written about the buildings which distinguish the Zimbabwe culture. They are a direct response to the environment of granite rocks, being built upon granite hills and of flaked granite. The most famous site of surviving stone ruins is that of Great Zimbabwe, north of the river Sabi. One of the principal structures at Great Zimbabwe was some 300 feet long and 220 feet broad, with the walls being 30 feet high and 20 feet thick. The technique of laying the bricks one on the other without lime to act as a cement was the same style noted in the description of Engaruka in northern Tanzania. It was in fact a peculiar aspect of material culture in Africa, being widely found in Ethiopia and the Sudan. The style of the encircling brick walls at Great Zimbabwe and other sites was also characteristically African in that it was an elaboration of the mud enclosures, or kraals, of many Bantu-speaking people.

One European archaeologist is reported to have said that there was as much labor expended in Zimbabwe as on the pyramids in Egypt. That is surely an overstatement, for the pyramids were raised through an incredible amount of slave labor, which could not possibly have been at the disposal of the rulers in Zimbabwe. However, it is definitely necessary to reflect on the amount of labor which would have been required to construct the buildings within the Zimbabwe region up until the fifteenth century. The workers may well have been from particular ethnic groups who were subjugated by other ethnic groups, but in the process of subjugation they were acquiring the character of a social class whose labor was being exploited. Nor was it sheer manual labor. Skill, creativity, and artistry went into the construction of the walls, especially with regard to the decorations, the inner recesses, and the doors.

When Cecil Rhodes sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they and other Europeans marveled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people. Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons. The sense of reality can only be restored by making it clear that the architecture rested on a foundation of advanced agriculture and mining, which had come into existence over centuries of evolution.

Zimbabwe was a zone of mixed farming, with cattle being very important, since the area is free from tsetse flies. Irrigation and terracing reached considerable proportions. There was no single dam or aqueduct comparable to those in Asia or ancient Rome, but countless small streams were diverted and made to flow around hills, in a manner that indicated an awareness of the scientific principles governing the motion of water. In effect, the people of Zimbabwe had produced “hydrologists” through their understanding of the material environment. On the mining side, it is equally striking that the African peoples in the zone in question had produced prospectors and “geologists” who had a clear idea of where to look for gold and copper in the subsoil. When the European colonialists arrived in the nineteenth century, they found that virtually all the gold-bearing and copper-bearing strata had been mined previously by Africans—though of course not on the same scale as Europeans were to achieve with drilling equipment. Among the Zimbabwe people, there also arose craftsmen who worked the gold into ornaments with tremendous skill and lightness of touch.

The presence of gold in particular was a stimulus to external trade, and in turn it was external demand which did most to accelerate mining. In the first millennium A.D., there was a gold-using aristocracy at Ingombe Ilede just north of the Zambezi. Presumably, they got their supplies from gold mines farther south. However, gold is required in large quantities only in a society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or into coinage and money to promote capitalism (as in Western Europe). The pre-feudal African societies did not have such a surplus, nor the social relations which made it necessary for gold to circulate a great deal internally. Hence, it was the presence of Arab traders as far south as Sofala in the Mozambique channel which spurred Zimbabwe to mine more gold for export just about the same time in the eleventh century when stone-building was beginning. The implication is that a number of factors coincided: namely, the intensification of class stratification, of state consolidation, of production and building techniques, and of trade.

Several different ethnic groups contributed to Zimbabwe society. The earliest populations of the region were the “Bushmen” and Khoisan type of hunters who today are found only in small numbers in Southern Africa. They were incorporated into the physical stock of newcomers from farther north speaking Bantu languages, and in fact they made their contribution to the Bantu languages of the area. Among the Bantu speakers, there were also several different groups coming into their own at different times. The material evidence which has been revealed by archaeologists shows various pottery styles, contrasting burial positions, and different bone structures among skeletons. Other material artifacts show that over the centuries many societies occupied the region of Zimbabwe. Much of the interpenetration of one group by another was done peacefully, although at the same time, the very existence of the fortified hilltops and stone defenses shows that the largest states were engaged in military struggles for survival and pre-eminence. Furthermore, some ethnic groups must have been permanently relegated to inferior status, so as to provide the labor for agriculture, building, and mining. Other clans specialized in pastoralism, warfare, and the control of religious apparatus such as divination and rainmaking.

It is believed that the inhabitants of Zimbabwe in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries were Sotho-speaking; but by the time the Portuguese arrived a Shona-speaking dynasty had taken control of most of the region. That was the Rozwi clan, which set up the state of Mutapa, between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. The ruler was known as the Mwene Mutapa, which apparently meant “the great Lord of Mutapa” to his own followers, but was held to mean “the great pillager” by peoples whom he conquered and wielded together into a single empire. The first individual to hold the title Mwene Mutapa ruled from about 1415 to 1450, but the dynasty had already been growing prominent before that date. The capital was at first sited at Great Zimbabwe, and later moved north. What was important was that the Mwene Mutapa appointed governors to rule over various localities outside the capital, in a manner comparable to that of the Western Sudanic empires or the interlacustrine Bachwezi states.

The Rozwi lords of Mutapa did most to encourage production for export trade, notably in gold, ivory, and copper. Arab merchants came to reside in the kingdom and the Zimbabwe region became involved in the network of Indian Ocean commerce, which linked them with India, Indonesia, and China. One of the principal achievements of the Rozwi lords of Mutapa was to organize a single system of production and trade. They exacted tribute from the various communities in their kingdoms, which was both a sign of sovereignty and a form of trade, because the movement of goods was stimulated. There is no doubt that the foreign trade strengthened the Mutapa state; but above all it strengthened the ruling strata which had a monopoly over that aspect of economic activity. In comparison with other African elites at that time, the Rozwi of Zimbabwe still had a long way to go. They were not in the same category as the Amharic nobility of Ethiopia or the Arab-Berber feudal lords of the Maghreb. They did imbibe a few influences from outside, but they did not travel, as did the rulers of Mali and Songhai, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Their dress was still mainly animal skins, and such cloths as they utilized were recent imports from the Arab traders rather than the product of the evolution of their own skills in that field. In that respect, Zimbabwe also trailed behind other early African states such as Oyo in Yorubaland, Benin in the same area, and the fourteenth-century empire of Kongo (which Europeans referred to as the greatest state in West Africa at the time of their arrival).

It has been considered necessary for the purposes of illustration to consider some (though by no means all) of the outstanding areas of development in Africa before the coming of the Europeans. Nor should it be forgotten that there were innumerable village communities emerging to become states that were small in size, but were sometimes sharply stratified internally and displayed an impressive level of material advance. Those described above should be sufficient to establish that Africa in the fifteenth century was not just a jumble of different “tribes.” There was a pattern and there was historical movement. Societies such as feudal Ethiopia and Egypt were at the furthest point of the process of evolutionary development. Zimbabwe and the Bachwezi states were also clearly on the ascendant away from communalism, but at a lower level than the feudal states and a few others that were not yet feudal such as those in the Western Sudan.

Conclusion

In introducing the concept of development, attention was drawn to the fact that the slow, imperceptible expansion in social productive capacity ultimately amounted to a qualitative difference, with the arrival at the new stage sometimes being announced by social violence. It can be said that most African societies had not reached a new stage that was markedly different from communalism, and hence the use in this study of the cautious term “transitional.” It can also be noted that nowhere had there been any internal social revolutions. The latter have taken place in European and world history only where class consciousness led to the massive intervention of people’s wills within the otherwise involuntary socio-economic process. Such observations help to situate African development up to the fifteenth century at a level that was below mature, class-ridden feudalism.

It should also be reiterated that slavery as a mode of production was not present in any African society, although some slaves were to be found where the decomposition of communal equality had gone furthest. This is an outstanding feature illustrating the autonomy of the African path within the broader framework of universal advance. One of the paradoxes in studying this early period of African history is that it cannot be fully comprehended without first deepening our knowledge of the world at large, and yet the true picture of the complexities of the development of man and society can only be drawn after intensive study of the long-neglected African continent. There is no escaping the use of comparisons as an aid to clarity; and indeed the parallels have been narrowly restricted to Europe even though they could also be provided by examples from Asian history. Therein lies the cultural imperialism which makes it easier for the European-educated African to recall names like the (French) Capetians and the (Prussian) Hohenzollerns rather than the Vietnamese dynasties of Id and Tran, for the latter are either unknown to him, or would be considered unimportant if known, or might even be judged too difficult to pronounce!

Several historians of Africa have pointed out that after surveying the developed areas of the continent in the fifteenth century and those within Europe at the same date, the difference between the two was in no way to Africa’s discredit. Indeed, the first Europeans to reach West and East Africa by sea were the ones who indicated that in most respects African development was comparable to that which they knew. To take but one example, when the Dutch visited the city of Benin they described it thus:

The town seems to be very great. When you enter into it, you go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam. . . .

The king’s palace is a collection of buildings which occupy as much space as the town of Harlem, and which is enclosed with walls. There are numerous apartments for the Prince’s ministers and fine galleries, most of which are as big as those on the Exchange at Amsterdam. They are supported by wooden pillars encased with copper, where their victories are depicted, and which are carefully kept very clean.

The town is composed of thirty main streets, very straight and 120 feet wide, apart from an infinity of small intersecting streets. The houses are close to one another, arranged in good order. These people are in no way inferior to the Dutch as regards cleanliness; they wash and scrub their houses so well that they are polished and shining like a looking-glass.

Yet, it would be self-delusion to imagine that all things were exactly equal in Benin and in Holland. European society was already more aggressive, more expansionist, and more dynamic in producing new forms. The dynamism within Europe was contained within the merchant and manufacturing class. In the galleries of the exchange at Amsterdam sat Dutch burghers—the ancestors of the modern bourgeoisie of industry and finance. This class in fifteenth-century Europe was able to push the feudal landowners forward or aside. They began to discard conservatism and to create the intellectual climate in which change was seen as desirable. A spirit of innovation arose in technology, and transformation of the mode of production was quickened. When Europe and Africa established close relations through trade, there was therefore already a slight edge in Europe’s favor—an edge representing the difference between a fledgling capitalist society and one that was still emerging from communalism.

Brief Guide to Reading

Studies on early African history are lacking for many reasons, the most obvious being that African history was for a long time considered by the colonialists as having so little value that it was not worth reconstructing. Another decisive factor is that studies of Africa were mainly carried out by European bourgeois anthropologists, whose philosophical outlook on “primitive societies” caused them to separate African society from its historical context. There was a concentration on micro-units and no reference to overall patterns. The new African scholarship has been under way for too short a time to have provided any significant breakthrough. The few books cited below are part of the new approach.

BASIL DAVIDSON, Africa in History. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

HENRI LABOURET, Africa before the White Man. New York: Walker and Co., 1962.

MARGARET SHINNIE, Ancient African Kingdoms. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.

K. M. PANIKKAR, The Serpent and the Crescent. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963.

The above group of books are assessments by non-Africans from a sympathetic perspective and with sufficient value for them to be respected and widely used inside Africa. K. M. Panikkar is an unusual example of an Asian scholar with a professional interest in the African continent.

J. AJAYI and I. ESPIE (editors), A Thousand Years of West African History. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.

B. A. OGOT and J. A. KIERAN (editors), Zamani, a Survey of East African History. New York: Humanities Press, 1968.

African historians have begun to provide syntheses of the continent’s history by putting together relevant collections—usually on some section of the continent, as in the two examples above. Unfortunately, the quality varies from one selection to another, and African writers have not as yet provided any coherent overview of the regions with which they are supposedly dealing.

G. J. AFOLABI OJO, Yoruba Culture, a Geographical Analysis. London: University of London Press, 1967.

B. M. FAGAN, Southern Africa during the Iron Age. New York: Praeger, 1965.

What these two dissimilar books have in common is an awareness of the material environment. Afolabi Ojo is a Nigerian geographer and B. M. Fagan is an English archaeologist.

 

* In Europe, communalism gave way to slavery, and therefore dynasties and strong states were present on the eve of the slavery epoch.