1
Introduction: Understanding the Contours of Africa's Past

The stories of entire continents cannot adequately be told in single-volume histories. It is a matter of debate, indeed, why individual (or groups of) historians actually do what they do, and even more so, what it is that they aim to achieve. But in a volume such as this, the aim is - indeed, can only be - to grasp key ideas and apply them broadly; to appreciate thematic coherence while equally recognizing discord in this regard; to identify overall processes while paying due attention to the individuals and whirlpools that make up the great flow of human history. It is a sad but inevitable truth that in writing wide-ranging survey histories of peoples - even where, as in this one, the timeframe is carefully capped - the number of individual lives which are mentioned is infinitesimal, vis-à-vis the millions of lives which are actually lived. Yet above all the aim in a book like this is to do justice to Africa and Africans. If this is even approached, then the author can be, if not content, then at least somewhat relieved.

This book is concerned with the past two centuries, a timeframe that is not simply a matter of organizational convenience: rather, the central idea is that Africa's twentieth century cannot be understood in isolation from its nineteenth century and that transformative processes - political, social, and economic - span the entire period under examination and are distinctive to it.1 We return to this later. More broadly, it is important, at the outset, to elucidate some of the core themes which run through the narrative, whether explicitly or implicitly. The continent remained underpopulated until the second half of the twentieth century, and thus, a host of states and societies were concerned first and foremost with the maximization of numbers.2 As a result, African ideologies were frequently centered around the celebration of fertility, and myths of creation around the carving of civilization out of wilderness, and its subsequent defence against Nature. Fertility and reproductive capacity were sought through polygamy; control of people - frequently through the practice of slavery, for example - was more significant as a feature of social organization than control of land, which was plentiful, with a handful of important exceptions, as we shall see. Thus, for example, West African history is characterized by frequently violent competition for women because women underpinned male status, worked land, and produced children who would do likewise. Across the continent more generally, intergenerational conflict among men over women was common. Marriage was very much a public rather than a private affair, involving alliances between lineages; the distribution of women represented sociopolitical arrangements. Of course the status of women themselves varied greatly across the continent, ranging from low and exploited, to respected, influential, and economically independent.3

One of the major challenges for ruling elites across the continent - in the nineteenth century as in more recent decades - was the construction of permanent systems of governance by which large numbers of people might be controlled. Underpopulated regions in particular were often characterized by the instability of the polity and by the failure of would-be state-builders to extend their control beyond the "natural" limits imposed by demography and geography. In underpopulated areas, discontented people might rebel against the existing order - forming an "armed frontier" which might march on the center, or otherwise consume it - but they might just as easily migrate beyond the reach of that order, in so doing often causing its very downfall.4 This constant cycle of violent fission and fusion drove much political and social change in Africa, and it was an increasingly violent process in the nineteenth century with the emergence of new polities and social systems. Territorial states with ambitions beyond the immediate community had to overcome the problem of how to ensure loyalty across a wider area and how to create supra-provincial identities. The problem is exemplified by the situation in the West African savannah, where states and empires have historically been confronted with localism and segmentation. The savannah was characterized by countless local communities, groups of villages which formed miniature states, known as kafu; the kafu symbolized the localism of African politics, and empire-builders had both to construct their polities around them, and to dominate them through military force and control of wealth.5 Again, this was as true in the colonial and post-colonial eras as it was in the nineteenth century. Throughout the book, then, we are concerned with the emergence of identities, local, regional, even continental, over time, and the dynamics involved in the shaping of those identities.

In understanding the continent's history over the past two centuries, moreover, due emphasis needs to be placed on the longue durée as well as on dramatic change; there has been much continuity as well as upheaval between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries, and in many respects colonialism - the focus of the bulk of Africanist scholarship in recent decades6 - constituted a mere "moment" in time, with a variable impact across the continent. Firstly, Africa's nineteenth century was a period of violent reformation, of political destruction and reconstruction, and the effects of this prolonged transformation continued to be felt deep into the twentieth century and beyond, especially during, and in the wake of, decolonization. Secondly, these internal processes of change need to be understood at least partly against the backdrop of emerging patterns of external economic relations - in essence, between Africa and the northern Atlantic economies - in the course of the nineteenth century. In many respects, colonial rule was only the latest manifestation of a Westernized commercial system - fundamentally disadvantageous, in terms of modern ideas about development, to African producers, though not necessarily to the elites who governed them - which long pre-dated it. Colonialism, then, was clearly significant in its own terms, as will be demonstrated in the course of the story which follows. Arguably, it had the greatest impact through the manner of its departure, in the sense that it left much of the continent ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of independence. But colonial rule must be contextualized: with regard to internal political development, it was in many respects co-opted into ongoing African processes of change, while in terms of external economy it represented only the latest stage of a system which had been a long time in the making. What came after it - the era of the "post-colony" and the "new" international order - must be understood in terms of what preceded it. What is certainly clear is that colonial rule was in many ways as African as it was European, and cannot be understood as some great unilateral imposition: Africans shaped their own societies in the age of foreign rule much more effectively than any colonial official or European government could, even in the face of - and to a large extent in response to - an aggressively extractive external economic system.

Social, political, and economic change, moreover - as with every other human community - was represented in African art and material culture. This is not a subject to which this volume has been able to devote much space, unfortunately; nonetheless, suffice to observe here that aesthetic endeavors often provide vital clues to African political as well as culture life. Art was a mediation between the living and the dead, and thus often underpinned political power, as well as attempting to ensure agricultural prosperity; sculptures represented - as with story-telling - social and political commentary and critique. Belief in the supernatural and the afterlife shaped Egyptian art and architecture, as it did along much of the Nile valley, notably in Nubia; Christianity spurred artistic achievement in the Ethiopian highlands, and Islam did the same along the east African coast and across the western African savannah.7 African craftsmen - working in terracotta, gold, copper, brass, bronze, wood, and stone - told stories of the formation of kingship, the struggle against Nature, and the quest for fecundity; they produced material cultures which were both aesthetically pleasing and had sociopolitical utility, as they projected ideas about group cohesion or reinforced hierarchy. The spread of artistic styles, moreover, was the result both of political upheaval - population movement on the back of the slave trade, for example, or of widespread conflict - and commercial interaction. Traders brought culture as well as commodities, and networks of artistic exchange opened up in the precolonial era just as trading systems did. Africans borrowed from one another and adapted styles accordingly; and so too did external influence come to have an important impact on local art forms? Islamic input, again, is evident in Swahili architecture, notably,8 and later European colonialism influenced the form which African artistic expression took in certain areas.9

Indeed, another of the core issues that arises in a study of...