History of Africa

                                                             so red spent the last six months in a

course on African civilization in

history and since history is my jam we

decided to put together a video about it

luckily for me it was pretty easy f

or

red to do most of the scripting for this

video since African history is nice and

simple with no moral gray areas

clear-cut good and bad guys and not a

whole lot going on over all right red

fantastic let's take a look

Africa is complicated and it's rife with

misconceptions most people still think

that it's some kind of giant mud pit

full of clay huts and savages but really

it's because the concept of Africa even

having a history or being developed in

any substantive way is less than a few

decades old and that conveniently segues

into misconception number one Africa is

one big thing

Africa is actually home to more than 50

nations and over 200 distinct languages

but it gets treated like some kind of

super country where everyone knows

everyone and everyone acts the same it's

like getting confused as to why Canada

and Mexico are so different when they're

part of the same landmass no Africa is

freaking enormous it's over the size of

three Europe's and everyone agrees that

European societies are diverse so it's

silly to think that Africa could

possibly be home to one single culture

West Africa had huge empires the East

African coast had a giant trade network

that stretched all the way to China

Nubia had a lot of contact with Egypt

but they have their own Empire to hell

even the central rainforest had several

distinct societies living within it

Africa is about as far as you can get

from one big thing adding on to that is

misconception number two which is that

Africans live in tribes now the concept

of a tribe is originally greco-roman

and it pretty much just a notes of

voting unit later on that convention got

adopted to describe the twelve tribes of

Israel and just became a word that meant

a smallish group of people but the

notion of Africa being tribal is

European during colonization in the late

1800s the tribal label was used to

distinguish Africa from the nationalized

urbanized and big air quotes to

civilized Europeans so it took on a more

derogatory meaning ie they're not

civilized they're tribal the idea of a

tribe is also problematic because it

assumes a static quality that the tribes

have are and will be the same but this

couldn't be farther from the truth as

things were constantly dynamic

to illustrate this a little better let's

do some climate signs right off the bat

Africa is really bloody big and in

general on large land masses like Africa

deserts tend to form and land at around

30 degrees off from the equator which is

in part why we have the Sahara and the

Kalahari deserts meanwhile on the

equator

there's a giant rainforest basin in part

due to the fact that there's pretty much

a continuous band of storms and rain

along the equator fostering deep forest

growth and in-between the rain forests

and the deserts there are savannas and

then in the regions between all of these

regions there are intermediate areas and

relatively constant flux one example is

the Sahel a band of relatively arid land

between the Sahara and the savanna the

Sahel drifts north and south every year

and is populated by various nomadic

hurting populations and for linguistic

fact Sahel means shore in Arabic because

given the difficulty in crossing it the

Sahara was functionally in ocean

separating sub-saharan Africa from Egypt

but the thing is all of these

environments are affected by yearly

rainfall and rain is the one

unpredictable aspect of the environment

in Africa since Africa has basically no

mountains there's no predictability to

when and where the rains fall the

savanna regions starve if there's

insufficient rainfall for whatever

reason while the central rainforest

erodes and the soil loses its nutrients

if there's excessively heavy rainfall in

a given year

this means that nearly every ethnic

group in Africa adapts on a year-to-year

basis for the ever changing climate

around them and this environment of

constant adaptation does not create

static urbanized societies it's straight

up can't you might imagine that such an

environment doesn't quite lend itself

very well to large-scale agriculture

since an ideal plot of land one year

could be a barren dry wasteland the next

the one exception to this are the river

valleys of which there are a few the

most notable river valley is of course

the Nile which we've discussed elsewhere

but there's also the Great Lakes region

to the east these areas are more

conducive to agriculture and

stereotypically civilized build up where

people can settle semi-permanently but

they're rare Europe by contrast has

steady and regular rainfall so

maintaining a society in one place was

always a no brainer it wouldn't even

occur that rain patterns could change

massively on-the-fly

unfortunately for most of Africa it's

almost impossible to farm the same land

for multiple years in a row

so sustaining a city in one place simply

isn't

feasible now this conveniently leads

directly into misconception number three

Africans didn't build anything it's true

that there are large parts of Africa

without much in the way of agriculture

for reasons we've described above but

there are at least two regions that defy

this misconception completely Great

Zimbabwe and killakee Suwannee these

were two ends of a trading network that

stretched all the way up the East

African coast and traded with the Middle

East and even China between the 11th and

15th centuries Great Zimbabwe was

sitting on a gold mine no like a literal

gold mine with gold and stuff while

kilwa was right off the coast and facing

some very useful trade winds now both of

these places are archaeologically

impressive for different reasons Great

Zimbabwe is put together entirely

without mortar which for its difficulty

is an old favorite when it comes to

ancient awesome architecture and just

look at the architecture in kilwa it's

gorgeous and the cool thing is the

Somali coast doesn't have much in the

way of stone that's viable for

construction so Kilwa is built almost

entirely from coral and I think we can

all agree that's just flat-out cool it

may or may not surprise you to learn

that there have been furious debates

over whether or not these grand feats of

architecture were actually built and

designed by Africans short answer yes

long answer yes detailed answer the

architecture of Great Zimbabwe strongly

mirrors the small-scale architectural

designs of the Shona people including

symbolically significant arrangements of

living spaces such as the king being

physically elevated and more and in case

anybody forgot there's also all of Egypt

to consider Egypt kicked ass culturally

architectural II and in all sorts of

other ways because it was afforded a

stable climate in the favorable River

take Egypt as an example of what amazing

stuff Africa and Africans can do when

they had the chance to stay in one place

and make it fantastic and before anyone

questions whether Egypt counts as

African basic geography would indicate

yes essentially when Africans could

build man did they next up there's a

small misconception that nonetheless is

much more pervasive than some of the

more dramatic ones we've discussed so

far which is that African villages and

groups all had Chiefs now societies in

Africa had a huge variety of power

structures some of them had personified

leadership and others were led by

councils while some had entirely

different systems altogether

when Britain rolled into town and

decided to take up the old white man's

burden in the late 18-hundreds they

decided that flat-out conquering Africa

wasn't quite their speed

not to mention impractical given its

size and many unfamiliar diseases so

they set up what's called indirect rule

which is a system that's been around in

many forms from Alexander to the Romans

and beyond what they do is maintain the

existing power structures but have those

structures effectively report back to

England and even that didn't often work

out all that well because social

administration in England and in any

given African society often worked

differently and since Africa has a large

internal variety of cultures not all

societies had a power structure that fit

that mold and in those cases the British

would simply impose it so the notion of

all African societies having a chief

much like the idea that all Africans

live in tribes is an artifact of

colonization and a gross

oversimplification the reality is as

always rather more complicated now let's

move on to misconception number four

Africans had slaves - no that one's

actually true what it is they did but

blue I thought you were all about

unjustly flattering cultures that people

nowadays tend to treat negatively to the

comments section of your Islam video

lied to me well maybe a little

but that's not the point look

anthropology and history aren't about

glorifying one culture or another it's

about trying to learn and learning as

accurately as you can I'm trying to

present you with perspectives that you

likely haven't seen before and in my

case that usually means showing a

flattering side to things that's often

overlooked but if all I'd talked about

were the clean pretty parts of African

history I'd be misleading you that way

too because there was and is some pretty

nasty stuff going on on that continent

that doesn't negate or devalue all the

other stuff but it did happen and in

some cases is happening and it's

important to understand it as completely

as we can because the whole point is to

understand so back to the point at hand

before we get all oh every site is

equally guilty there's some substantive

differences between the systems of

slavery in Africa and in Europe and

especially if we're considering America

first of all Africa generally didn't

have a slave based economy and

especially not a transcontinental slave

trade there were slaves but they were

mostly used for things like small

amounts of additional labour an extra

pair of hands

the house or an additional life without

the complications have been laws very

few African civilizations actually

relied on slaves for most of their labor

also anyone can become a slave

regardless of background ethnicity or

whatever people became slaves as a

result of being taken prisoner in the

aftermath of a war or in some cases on

account of crimes they did or they were

just randomly kidnapped one day slavery

had nothing to do with someone's

background most of the time and it

certainly didn't have the same imposed

inferiority as say the American slave

system it was something that just kind

of happened if you want a more detailed

breakdown of the differences between

enslavement in Africa and America you

might want to look up a lauda equiano's

memoir called Africa remembered that

criolla was born in West Africa in 1745

enslaved at age 11 sold up the West

African coast and after changing hands

several times ended up on a slave ship

headed for America his memoir is a very

comprehensive breakdown of his

experiences as a slave both in Africa

and in America and which one he felt was

objectively more nightmarish spoiler

alert it was America but he tells it a

lot better than I do now this

misconception is a doozy Africa is poor

short answer yeah kind of but also not

really you see poverty is a weird

concept and not one that transfers

clearly from culture to culture to the

hurting pastoralists wealth was in cows

but to the Europeans wealth was in money

lands and gold each consider the other

to be hilariously impoverished but

there's no denying that there are parts

of Africa that are poor by any standards

where the standards of living are just

kind of god-awful

and since there's no denying that I

won't but I will deny the idea that

Africa is just somehow naturally poor so

let's rewind for a quick recap of

colonization there were African slaves

in China and Portuguese sports in Africa

centuries before Europe officially set

their sights on full-on colonization in

the late 18-hundreds colonization went

into overdrive when all of Europe wanted

in during that time the British

discovered massive stores of gold and

diamonds under some of South Africa's

finest farmland

and what were they to do besides the

victim opals from their prime farmland

and start constructing mines for the

stuff we've already discussed that

farming in Africa is hard because rains

can be unreliable but now people were

getting thrown off the farmland that

actually worked and being stuck with

lame desiccated Badlands that didn't

produce anywhere near as

much food that's step one of the push

into poverty step two was taxes see

those mines were full of gold and

diamonds but the Europeans couldn't and

didn't want to dig it all up themselves

so they started taxing the local

Africans for money what money well if

they didn't have money they had to earn

money by working in the mines and here

we actually see the roots of the system

of apartheid because the colonists

wanted to keep things efficient

specifically they didn't want to have to

financially support anyone who wasn't

pulling their weight by working in the

mines

so the mining cities were totally closed

off only people will the work pass could

actually get in and live there African

men would come into work and they'd get

paid just enough to live in the city and

eat stuff but their families would be

kept out of the city living in second

and third rate farmlands trying

desperately not to starve this was

already a system of controlling who was

allowed to live where and who was

allowed to work where it's easy to see

how this later evolved into the system

of apartheid the other way the colonists

got workers for the mines was by

building prisons and locking people up

for crimes both real and imagined

wherein they would be put to work in the

mines again fun fact making this

extensive prison system and throwing in

both really bad criminals and total

innocents had the unfortunate side

effect of leading to the creation of a

very scary underworld / gang thing

called the unko suez in Taba also known

as the Ninevites which basically wreaked

havoc through South Africa for the

better part of 40 years so long story

short parts of Africa are very poor but

for the most part they're poor because

of colonization and speaking of

colonization if you take a look at

Africa's modern borders you'll notice

something unique to Africa and parts of

the Middle East straight lines most

societies find natural borders like

mountains rivers Plains or other places

where you just naturally stop in the

absence of any such natural borders

societies will often mark territorial

bounds based on cultural groupings

instead the fact that Africa has

multiple straight borders means that

those were drawn by people who weren't

familiar with local politics or cultural

groupings the post-colonial boarders

left Africa a mess with friendly groups

being separated from each other parts of

a group being separate from itself and

unfriendly groups being lumped together

this is by far the most effective way to

leave a continent predisposed to a

century of various civil wars people

were thrown together into new nations

with little rhyme or reason and were

largely forced to adopt entirely new

political structures these borders were

drawn

jealously by people who just didn't know

but even if the borders were drawn with

an eye to ethnic and cultural groupings

the inherent unpredictability of African

weather and the necessity of regularly

mild to moderate migration would make

those borders obsolete within years

colonialism forced a set of constructs

and rules that flat-out don't work with

the way Africa is and that's a huge

reason that Africa's recent legacy is

one of severe political strife and

economic adversity and here's

misconception number six Africa didn't

have technology now here's where stuff

gets tricky because very few cultures in

Africa actually wrote much stuff down

instead relying on oral tradition to

transmit information through the ages in

fact in West Africa especially

storytellers and other such history

keepers were almost revered and

considered absolutely vital to the

workings of a healthy Empire the act of

telling a story itself was very delicate

and ritualistic in some rare cases a

carefully guarded written document would

record the most essential aspects of a

story but for the most part an oral

tradition was the basis for information

and this means that unfortunately all it

takes is a cultural disruption big

enough to cut off one generation from

the next just one to destroy any and all

information exclusively transmitted by

in-person teachings and wouldn't you

know cultural disruption is just about

the best phrase possible to describe

what happened in Africa from the 1400s

onward

this makes archaeology anthropology and

other such history finding fields rather

more difficult than in parts of the

world that wrote stuff down more

regularly back to the point since the

methods by which various technologies

were crafted were also passed down

orally a lot of them got lost in the

colonization process too and in the

absence of any written records it was

easy for everyone to assume that there

just wasn't anything there in the first

place for quite a while we didn't

actually know what kind of stuff was

invented in what tech the various

civilizations in pre-colonial Africa had

lying around

because Europe had muddled our chances

of ever finding out in fact part of the

reason why those advances don't have any

physical evidence lying around is

because a lot of them were in medicine

in the West African city of Janee for

instance cataract removal surgery was a

surprisingly common practice at a time

where Europe had no such thing and in a

similar vein Africans in what is

currently Uganda Andrew

were reported to have been performing

consistently reliable c-sections in at

least the 1800s with an expertise that

implied the practice was in fact much

older and this was at a time when it had

made global news that British doctor

James Miranda Stewart berry who fun fact

was also biologically female had managed

to perform the first successful

c-section in the entire history of the

British Empire

another medical advance happened in

southern Kenya at some point were the

Masai people one of those herding

societies I mentioned earlier figured

out how to suture blood vessels and

intestines using ants of all things and

another fun Medical News the akan people

in West Africa figured out how to

immunize themselves to smallpox this

news reached America in the early 1700s

at a time when smallpox was tearing

through both the Native Americans and

the colonists Cotton Mather first

learned about the inoculation procedure

by way of his slave Onesimus who

explained the procedure he remembered

undergoing as a child in West Africa

that had made him immune to the disease

Mather proceeded to go on an inoculating

campaign through Boston and get elected

to the Royal Society for his quote

unquote innovation while an Decimus fell

out of the history books in 1717 after

attempting to buy his freedom other fun

advances in technology included

metalworking and we only found out this

one recently because a professor of

brown had actually tracked down a few

members of the highe people who had

managed to preserve the oral tradition

containing the information for building

furnaces and smelting iron when he

analyzed the furnace in the iron had

produced he found that it reached

temperatures of 1800 degrees Celsius

which was around 200 degrees hotter than

anything contemporary European smelting

practices could produce they had been

using this to make carbon steel for

2,000 years which meant that they had it

at a time when the only other producer

worldwide was Sri Lanka and they were

only able to hit those temperatures

because they were powering their

furnaces with won-soon winds now here's

one last misconception that I think

might actually be at the heart of all

the other misconceptions I've talked

about so far Africa is just less

developed than the rest of the world now

what does that mean real question I'm

not just being snarky here

how would you redefine some places being

less or more developed well the concept

is actually grounded in an idea that's

surprise-surprise a couple centuries old

and that idea was that civilization was

a sliding scale in this model societies

evolved like Pokemon rather than like

you know

actual evolution it happened in stages

and if he found a civilization that

seemed way worse than yours it was just

because it hadn't gotten enough sweet XP

yet to make the jump from subsistence

farming to sleeping on a bed of futile

peasants from England's perspective the

single goal of humanity was to become an

urbanized society just like England and

everyone else through no necessary fault

of their own simply hadn't caught on yet

now in this model unglamorous lifestyles

like subsistence farming or nomadic

hunting and gathering was just a social

precursor to proper society which is

what was meant by less developed Africa

was still doing things that the

colonists societies had for the most

part stopped doing centuries ago the

theory was that stuff like multi-story

buildings and irrigation din giant

sprawling metropolis would naturally

arise from those precursor societies and

they just hadn't figured it out yet but

of course nowadays we know that

societies develop and evolve like

organisms do they form in a given

circumstance change with the environment

and sometimes a new development in the

society propels it up the chain and

makes it easier for it to thrive but if

you just plop down a European city on

the edge of the Sahara the lack of

supporting agriculture will have it

starving within a week but those

quote-unquote primitive hunter-gatherers

will survive just as well as they always

have in that exact same environment

stuff develops and survives where it can

survive and there's no universal model

for society that can survive equally

well anywhere now I'm not gonna lie that

it is definitely comfier for me to live

in a city than it would be for me to

practice subsistence farming on a plot

of land that might be totally desiccated

by next year but you work with what

you've got that doesn't make a society

inherently better or worse or more or

less developed the fact that we still

refer to all non-urbanized societies

under the blanket term the developing

world is an artifact of colonialism but

development isn't even a useful

measuring stick to scale the world

against and thanks to Britain we have

centuries of wildly diverse evidence to

support the notion that dropping your

culture on top of an existing one and

expecting everything to work out more

often than not leads to catastrophe for

everyone involved less-developed isn't

the same thing is simply different to

sum up a killer whale might be an

untouchable apex predator in the ocean

but it doesn't do so hot in the savanna

now for all the reasons described above

and more it would be next to impossible

for me to even attempt to provide any

type of canal

of Africa so I hope to be able to go

in-depth with specific civilizations in

the future but for the sake of not

making this already 20-minute video over

an hour long I think it's best that I

call it a day here the point of this

video wasn't to be definitive by any

stretch quite the opposite in fact I

wanted to try and provide a rough

outline of an alternate angle on Africa

that statistically you probably haven't

seen before Africa has gotten the short

end of the stick a lot in the past

couple centuries and as a result the

popular conception of it tends to boil

down to either pity per its current

state or a mix of disdainful dismissal

and Dinis and ignorance of its

accomplishments I made this video to

show how Africa is so much more than

those reductionist assumptions as well

as how those assumptions came to be a

narrow perspective is woefully

insufficient when we're talking about a

place this being and especially when

we're dealing with so much cultural

variety but for the perspective of

someone far more qualified to talk about

this than me please do yourself a favor

and listen to this excellent talk by

novelist and speaker Chimamanda Adichie

on the danger of a single story and

remember that just because Africa

doesn't fit some neat linear chronology

like the Greeks or the Romans or whoever

which remember will be because it's too

long in too diverse in the first place

doesn't mean that it doesn't have

history