Eight years after South Africa became a democracy, an architect working on the renovation of the University of Pretoria came across a locked room. Oddly, no keys were to be found. But he needed access to complete his measurements and so, eventually, he broke the door down. At first its contents – scores of small boxes – seemed unremarkable. But when he opened them, he was astonished. He found figurines made from gold; carved ivory and bone; glass beads; refined iron; copper wire; pottery; and Chinese Celadon ware. One of the items was a beautifully made rhinoceros, its body covered in thin sheets of gold leaf attached to its wooden core with tiny gold nails.
The objects were treasures from the Kingdom of Mapungubwe, a precolonial state in South Africa’s Limpopo province that flourished for about 150 years after 1075, part of a network of kingdoms on the gold trading route to Rhapta and Kilwa Kisiwani in present-day Tanzania. The question was, what were they doing in Pretoria, lying in a locked room with no key, and how long had they been there?
The excavations of Mapungubwe, led by members of the University of Pretoria archaeological department, started in 1932. Three years later, Captain Guy Gardner, the chief archaeologist, announced that its builders were of ‘pre-Bantu’ stock and contained ‘a dash of Mongoloid mixed … with a primitive Hamitic culture’,1 a reference to an abiding, but baseless, belief in a mysterious non-African population that travelled south and did clever things. But just to be sure no one got ahead of themselves, the findings were kept quiet and not publicly released until the early 1990s. And it was only in 2002 that its treasures were rediscovered and publicly displayed.
It emerged that the site was built by an Iron Age Bukalanga kingdom, which covered parts of the current South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Gold objects were used as burial gifts for its elite. On the top of a hill, the site was a key staging point in the kingdom’s vast trading network: the Chinese Celadon ware gives a hint of how far it extended. The site was reserved for the kingdom’s ruling class; at its peak, it had about five thousand inhabitants. Its ruins include both stone and wooden enclosures and show evidence of a large-scale pottery industry.
What most people in South Africa did not know, until after apartheid ended, was that the Iron Age in Africa went back 3,000 years. The technique of iron smelting, which involves heating iron ore to 1535°, found its way to Southern Africa about 2,500 years ago and was used very widely on the continent to produce weapons and agricultural tools. By the later Iron Age, sub-Saharan Africans were building in stone and the production of iron had spread to thousands of sites. They were sculpting in gold, and producing ornaments using glass, tin, ivory and copper. Bantu-speaking farmers, who originated in West Africa, arrived in South Africa at least 1,800 years ago. Soon they were clearing land, rotating crops and mining for salt. Later they started mining for gold, tin and copper; 800 to 900 years ago there were several sites devoted to smelting. They were also spinning and weaving, making rope and establishing hundreds of trading centres. The most impressive of these late Iron Age sites is Mapungubwe, closely linked to an even grander site, Great Zimbabwe, which emerged in its full glory soon after Mapungubwe’s decline.
Great Zimbabwe is a 722-hectare royal palace, whose construction began about a thousand years ago. Today it remains the most impressive of two hundred Iron Age fortified structures around Southern Africa. When I first visited with my family, in 1973, the grandeur of its huge stone walls, conical towers and giant soapstone birds gave an instant impression of a powerful kingdom from the distant past. I remember asking the Rhodesian guides who had built it and being told it was probably the work of Arabs. It later emerged that Rhodesian bureaucrats had ordered the archaeologists to say it was the work of non-Africans. The state bowdlerised guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks and other media to maintain this myth. The site’s chief archaeologist was instructed that it was ‘okay to say the yellow people built it but I wasn’t allowed to mention radiocarbon dates’. He said this was the ‘first time since Germany in the Thirties that archaeology has been so directly censored’.2
While the rewriting of the archaeological record was astonishing, the mythology was nothing new. J. Theodore Bent, an English archaeologist patronised by Cecil Rhodes, wrote, after ‘discovering’ the ruins in 1891, that they were too sophisticated to be the work of Africans. He surmised that ‘a civilised nation must once have lived there’ and presented his conclusion: ‘I do not think that I am far wrong if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah and the building in the plain a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon.’3 This bizarre speculation became the favoured explanation in white Rhodesia, with Arab, Semitic, Eastern and ‘Hamitic’ versions presented as alternatives. Anyone would do, as long as they weren’t a sub-Saharan African. The problem was that by the 1950s Rhodesia’s archaeologists knew full well that it was, indeed, the work of sub-Saharan Africans, constructed from the eleventh century onwards by the ancestors of the Shona people, serving as a seat of power for monarchs who ruled a late Iron Age kingdom.
The white rulers had a problem: how could this be explained? That 850 years before Rhodes, black Africans built a city with walls 250 metres long, eleven metres high and six metres thick; a city of densely packed housing units and nine-metre-high towers? How could they admit that the soapstone sculptures, iron tools and copper wire, the bronze spearheads and copper ingots, the crucibles and coins, the glass and gold beads and ivory ornaments, were products of an African society that traded up and down the Swahili coast, part of a network that extended all the way to China, India and the Middle East? When Ian Smith’s government insisted on its right to rule, to deny the vote to more than 95 per cent of the population and to control the mines and farms, how could it acknowledge that the ancestors of the 95 per cent had extracted twenty million ounces of gold from around the ruins (early Portuguese traders wrote of it being surrounded by gold mines) or engaged in cattle trading and agricultural production on a huge scale?4
It might have been even harder to explain to white voters raised on colonial mythology that the area was settled by the ancestors of the Shona in the fourth century CE, 1,500 years before Rhodes cast his imperial eye on its mineral riches, and that soon after their arrival these people were farming the area and mining its iron, let alone the fact that by 1300 CE around eighteen thousand inhabitants lived within the city’s walls, and its kings ruled over a huge empire, stretching from the Zambezi to the Limpopo, for more than two hundred years.5 The coastal cities of this trading kingdom did brisk business with seafaring European and Arab cities and kingdoms, starting with ancient Greece and ending with colonial Portugal.
It began 2,600 years ago, when Africans used fast, light dhows for coastal trade. Later, when the gold trade took off, it expanded into the Arabian Peninsula and Asia. The Greco-Roman epic, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in about 60 CE, makes extensive reference to trade on the east coasts of Africa and Ethiopia. The author writes about the ‘last port of trade on the coast of Azania, called Rhapta, a name derived from the … sewn boats, where there are great quantities of ivory and tortoise shell’.6 He adds that Indian and Arabian traders came to buy these products, including rhinoceros horn, in exchange for glass, spears and daggers. These descriptions led experts to place Rhapta in Tanzania. The archaeologist Felix Chami said he found evidence of its location on the coast near the Rufiji River and Mafia Island, where his team found Greco-Roman and Indian pottery and Persian glass beads that have been carbon dated to 600 BCE. Other archaeologists found Roman coins on nearby Pemba Island. There is also locally produced pottery in the area, some of it 2,000 years old, suggesting it was a key centre of local and international trade, at a time when European and Asian contact with this African civilisation appears to have been reciprocal and perhaps even respectful.
The gold trade came later; the Tanzanian city Kilwa Kisiwani was its key centre. Early Portuguese traders described it as a large city, with houses made of coral stone and a hundred-room palace garnished with gold, silver and jewels. They said their trading partners were ‘black Moors’, reflecting the conversion of the local population to Islam (one of Kilwa’s remaining sites is its eleventh-century Great Mosque). The gold was mined in South Africa and Zimbabwe and carried to the Mozambican trading centre of Manyikeni, before ending up in Kilwa (as shown by a Kilwa-minted copper coin found in Great Zimbabwe).7
This is just one illustration of precolonial industry, trade and construction in Africa. I chose it not only because it throws some light on the ‘dark continent’ but also because it provides examples of the falsification of archaeological records, illustrating how racist rulers found the idea of black precolonial achievement so threatening. But the other side of this cautionary tale is of a passive acceptance made possible by pre-existing perceptions. These stories illustrate not just the obvious point that those with political agendas tend to distort, invent and ignore history to create narratives that suit their ends, but also that focusing on a narrative of European or American civilisation and ignoring African history can create more insidious, less obvious distortions.
In my South African childhood and later, living in America and Britain, I’ve periodically been confronted by enquiries that began something like this: ‘I’m not a racist but can you just explain to me why Africa has produced nothing of worth? I mean, is it something in their culture or does it go deeper?’ Always, the point is that there’s something missing in African history that reflects something missing in Africans, exposing the idea that Africans are incapable of invention and innovation or feats of construction, engineering, science or literature, and that the apparent lack of any evidence to the contrary rather proves the point.
I am spoilt for choice when it comes to prominent European thinkers who echo the view of the inherent inferiority of the African brain,8 from the eighteenth-century Scottish enlightenment thinker David Hume9 to the twentieth-century English historian Arnold Toynbee.10 I’ll focus on just one, particularly virulent, example: Carl Jung, the German-Swiss founder of analytical psychology, whose views retain their appeal for many ‘seekers’ despite convincing evidence that he indulged in scientific fraud in a bid to promote his ideas,11 and his not-exactly contemporary views on women and on homosexuality.12 Jung was deeply influenced by the writings of the racist German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose ideas he placed in a mixing bowl with his Lamarckian view of evolution, Aryan mythology, polytheistic religion and beliefs in magic and the occult, all contributing to the race-based edge in his notions of universal archetypes in an inherited collective unconscious. One example: he believed African, Jewish and European mythical themes of sacrifice and death could be explained by inherited distinctions between ‘races’, justified by his Lamarckian perspective that characteristics acquired in the lifetime of members of one generation could be passed on genetically to members of the next. From Haeckel he drew his ‘recapitulationist’ view that we carry traces of our primitive past in our psyches. He viewed the adult African as comparable to the European child, prompting his desire to study the ‘archetypes’ of European children and ‘primitive’ African adults.13
Jung visited Kenya and Uganda in 1925 to carry out a ‘scientific inquiry’ into ‘primitive psychology’ and ‘primordial darkness’, although he admitted his real intent was to ask himself ‘the rather embarrassing question: What is going to happen to Jung the psychologist in the wilds of Africa?’14 He referred to the fact that while in Africa he’d had just one dream featuring a black person; the barber he’d used in Tennessee twelve years earlier. In the dream, the barber held a red-hot iron to Jung’s head to style his hair. Jung woke in terror but later decided this dream was a warning from his unconscious that he was in danger of being swallowed by the primitive African world. ‘At the time I was obviously all too close to “going black”’, he concluded. At times he admired ‘primitive’ African qualities, such as the ‘tender monkey-love of primitives’ but warned Europeans against being drawn in to the point where they coexisted with Africans, because they, too, could face the danger of going black. ‘Even today the European … cannot live with impunity among the Negroes in Africa; their psychology gets into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro,’ he wrote.15 He added to this warning by drawing on Haeckel’s theories, noting that the ‘inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers in the psyche’.16
If these Jungian views seem so ridiculous as to not be worth mentioning, we should remember that today’s most vocal Jungian is the YouTube darling of the alt-right, Jordan Peterson, who shares one dimension of the master’s views on race: that there are innate differences in the brains of different groups. Peterson insists ethnic differences in IQ are biologically based but worries ‘this is something you can’t say anything about without being killed.’17 As we shall see, Peterson is wrong about IQ, and wrong about racially based intelligence differences.
To return to Africa; we can see the ‘nothing good ever came out of the dark continent’ perspective in the writing of a former Oxford biology professor, John Randal Baker. His 1974 book, Race, classified human races in the same terms as animal subspecies, and offered twenty-three criteria for determining whether they had reached civilisation. Baker concluded that no indigenous civilisations in Africa had ever been civilised.18 His work was embraced by the contemporary racist psychologist Richard Lynn, who claimed that Negroid Africans never made the Neolithic transition and ‘achieved virtually none of the criteria of civilisation’.19 In his 2006 book, Race Differences in Intelligence, Lynn went further, saying that African intelligence had evolved to a level where they could make ‘a little progress in the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture but not sufficient to develop anything that could be called civilisation with a written language and arithmetic, construction of a calendar, cities with substantial stone buildings and other criteria set out by Baker’.20
You can see the picture: a pervasive view, held over centuries, that Africans were too primordially primitive to become civilised; a view that persisted in the intellectual mainstream until the horror of its implications emerged in the Holocaust. Since then, you might suppose it was confined to backwaters such as apartheid South Africa, and yet it continues to pop out of the mouths of today’s race scientists, psychologists and right-wing politicians. A quick taste: the Australian Gregory Lauder-Frost, vice-president of the Traditional Britain Group and a former Tory Monday Club stalwart, claims: ‘The Africans never had it so good as when Britain governed their colonies there … We owe Africa nothing whatsoever. It owes us eternal gratitude for lifting it out of barbarism.’21
It is not only white racists who indulge. As a child, I read several biographies of Muhammad Ali, and was astonished to discover some of the Nation of Islam nonsense he propagated: Elijah Muhammad’s talk of a race of white devils created by an evil scientist, and so on. But ideas not a million miles from these continue to flourish. Afrocentrists range from those re-tilting the colonial balance by emphasising African achievement to those who dip into faux-biology to make claims about the superiority of the African character.
Like white racists, some Afrocentrists portray Africans as a single race, with even ancient Egyptians portrayed as black. Egyptian art showing otherwise is said to be the result of ‘symbolic drawing’, in which all people were portrayed as having reddish-brown skins.22 In reality, the ancient Egyptians had a wide ethnic range, from dark-skinned to light, all reflected in Egyptian art. Afrocentrists also make outlandish claims about Africans having been behind every advance in civilisation and white people behind every disaster, such as the claim that HIV/Aids was a Western plot to attack Africans.23 This mythology also extols the mystical powers of melanin (the pigment that darkens hair and skin), the subject of much discussion on a Web forum, MelaNet. People with high doses (black people) are portrayed as stronger, better coordinated and more athletic, and in some versions, quicker-thinking, more attuned to light and music, more communal and even more psychically attuned. White people are, like albinos, portrayed as suffering from a melanin deficiency, making them physically and morally weaker.
One advocate of this view is Leonard Jeffries, professor of black studies at the City College of New York, who claimed melanin allowed black people to ‘negotiate the vibrations of the universe’.24 He also said it was the source of the higher intelligence and creativity and compassion, as well as the peaceful nature of the ‘sun people’, whereas melanin shortfalls among the ‘ice people’ make them cold, greedy, militaristic and authoritarian. Jeffries was fired as chairman of his department after a long legal battle over his claim that Jews financed the slave trade and used Hollywood to hurt black people. In a subsequent interview he was asked what kind of world he would wish for his children. ‘A world in which there aren’t any white people’, he replied.25
I have no hesitation in describing Jeffries as a racist, both for his anti-Semitism and his general attitude to white people, which returns me to the question I touched on in Chapter 1: can black people be racist when they don’t have power? There, I used the example of anti-Semitism as a form of racism, making the point that both black and white people are capable of being anti-Semitic. But it goes further. By redefining racism (or, indeed, sexism) and coupling it with ‘power’, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of ‘let’s change the meaning of words so that only we can use them’. In Rwanda, in 1994, black Hutus committed genocide against black Tutsis, partly motivated by the false belief that the Tutsis had Eurasian ‘blood’. Not racism?
Hardly surprisingly, the view that while black people can be prejudiced they can’t be racist, because they don’t have power, is largely confined to the United States, where by every measure they face prejudice, powerlessness and expressions of racism that many white people struggle to understand. Even the wealthy and well educated are not immune from its sting. When it comes to power, the word ‘imbalance’ hardly covers it. At an individual level it might be tricky to define and it is easy to get tied in knots (‘Surely you aren’t saying that unemployed Mr White from the trailer park has more power than Barack Obama?’) but pound-for-pound it is clear-cut: a poor white person is likely to have better prospects than a poor black person. Some might argue that the racism of a white person is therefore harder to excuse, particularly if that white person wields real power. But it doesn’t mean that attitudes such as those of Jeffries don’t count. The point is that racism is all about the false belief in racial attributes. Power is something different.
Let’s return to an example of people with racist beliefs who wielded real power. Nowhere was this belief more systematically advanced than in South Africa, where the obfuscation of the historical record was viewed as imperative, and scientists, psychologists, church ministers and historians contributed.
The Calvinist churchmen who provided the theological underpinning for white rule used the tale of the Tower of Babel to make their point that God’s intention was to separate people and create nations by causing them to speak in different languages. The African nations, however, had an irreparable drawback. They were said to be descendants of Ham, Noah’s youngest son who, according to Genesis, saw his drunken father naked, prompting Noah’s curse that Ham’s son should be the ‘lowest of slaves’ to his brothers.26 This curse conflated with Joshua’s on the Gibeonites: that they should ‘never cease being slaves, both hewers of wood and drawers of water’.27 Apartheid’s founders borrowed this biblical gloss from European and American theology to justify policies built on a nationalist version of the Boer experience. But it also needed scientific gravitas, which came from the same well American segregationists drew on: skull measuring, eugenics and IQ testing.
The notion of ‘Hamites’, variously described as a brown or Mediterranean race, was mobilised in different guises throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, Professor Augustus H. Keane, of University College London, was more positive about the South African Bantu than the ‘Negro’, because of the ‘leavening’ impact of Hamitic blood. In 1899, Keane, a former vice-president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, wrote about the temperament, character and intelligence of different races, and described the Hamite-infused Bantu as ‘far more intelligent than the true Negro, equally cruel but less fitful and more trustworthy’.28 This myth was embraced in South Africa. One of the most influential historical accounts of the black African presence in South Africa came from the gentleman historian, explorer and colonialist Sir Harry Johnston, who explained the Bantu migration to South Africa as the product of a ‘trickle of Caucasian blood’ through a ‘vigorous type of Negro’ being ‘impregnated’ by a ‘semi-white race’ such as the ‘Hamites’.29
The implication was that Africans, by themselves, were incapable of exploration but give the sprightlier a few drops of whitish Hamite blood and a bit of whitish Hamite influence and off they would go. The odd idea of the vaguely defined ‘Hamites’ prompting civilisation in Africa remained popular until the Second World War. The notion that a more intellectually advanced, lighter-skinned people was the impetus for everything they admired in Africa: the grammatical sophistication of the Nguni languages, the advanced military strategies of the Zulus, the construction of Great Zimbabwe and the Buganda kingdom, the Benin bronzes, even the inclination to be converted to Christianity. One widely read British historian, Charles Seligman, writing in 1930, put it like this: ‘The Hamites were, in fact, the great civilising force of black Africa.’30 The Hamites did not, in fact, exist.
When I attended white South African state schools in the 1960s and 1970s, the history textbooks and teachers were largely guilty by omission, but they didn’t shy away from outright distortion. The story we heard, year after year, was of the God-fearing Voortrekkers leaving the Western Cape to start their Great Trek, in protest against autocratic British colonial rule and its anti-slavery policies; travelling north and east with their ox wagons, Bibles and rifles, and meeting African tribes travelling in the opposite direction. These competing groups collided in the middle, and the Boers were compelled to defend themselves against the rapacious aggression of the Bantu.
The Afrikaner historian Gustav Preller went further, insisting that the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias erected his cross on South Africa’s south coast ten years before the first ‘Bantu migrants’ arrived and that white settlers reached the Eastern Cape before the Xhosa. ‘[S]o far from the white man having been the intruder, who robbed the Bantu of his land,’ he wrote, ‘it was the Bantu who … crept into the white man’s backyard in the Eastern Province,’31 And if history weren’t enough for Preller, there was always biology. ‘Science is now gradually discovering the remarkable physiological differences between the brain of the white man of European descent and that of the Bantu – differences that are innate and constitute the measure of their respective intellectual capacities.’32
I was taught that the superior technology (guns), organisation, morality and courage of the outnumbered Voortrekkers secured them divinely blessed victories because, like the Israelites, they were God’s chosen. By then, official apartheid propaganda was focusing more on the need for ‘separate development’ of nations but the classroom story remained one of treacherous, superstitious African tribesmen who, for all their animal cunning, had not advanced beyond spears and shields, and were outwitted by more honourable men who farmed the land and formed the nation. Africans, whose farming methods were illogical (they stupidly ploughed down hills, rather than around them), were pushed by crop failure and pulled by bright lights to work in the white man’s farms, factories and mines.
The archaeological record shows that African farmers lived in South Africa for 1,400 years before the Dutch settlers arrived, and that the Xhosa had lived in the Eastern Cape (where they first confronted the trekkers) for about 1,100 years. The claim that they were incompetent farmers is belied by the historical record, which includes evidence of white farmers demanding action against the more efficient African farmers. In fact, one reason why some white trekkers headed north was because of their inefficient subsistence farming, and many English settler farmers were no better. In 1870, a state-appointed statistician in the Eastern Cape noted that ‘the native district of Peddie surpasses the European district of Albany in its productive powers.’ Ten years later, a prominent white politician and lawyer noted that ‘man-for-man the Kaffirs of these parts are better farmers than the Europeans, more careful of their stock, cultivating a larger area of land and working themselves more assiduously.’33 But it was not to last. By 1913, black Africans were confined to 7.5 per cent of the land that had once all been theirs. The resulting overcrowding, rather than poor farming methods or bright lights, forced them to seek work on the white man’s terms.
The problem with the history I was taught at school comes less from its distortion of the historical record than from the stories it chose not to tell. More specifically, from its refusal to impart anything of the record of African achievement before colonisation beyond a none-too-accurate version of the stories of Shaka’s rise and fall and Dingane’s treachery. I’ve already touched on the gold trading network of city states from Mapungubwe via Great Zimbabwe to Rhapta and Kilwa Kisiwani in present-day Tanzania. There is no space here for a detailed history but it is worth at least a cursory glance at some other examples of precolonial African development.
The most durable was Nubia (in modern Sudan), which lasted for nearly 5,000 years. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic scripts suggest it was known for its treasure, dancing girls, wrestlers and slaves, while Egyptian artwork portrays dark-skinned Nubian traders, different from the lighter-skinned Egyptians.
Nubia was a formidable kingdom. It now lies beneath the Sahara Desert but then, it was verdant. Archaeological evidence indicates it was first settled more than 7,000 years ago, and there is evidence of a cattle cult as well as Stonehenge-type astronomical devices that pre-date Stonehenge by 2,000 years. Hundreds of stone gongs, used to communicate between villages and settlements, have been found, which suggests a shift from foraging to farming. A unified Nubian kingdom emerged about 5,300 years ago, interacting closely with Egypt and serving as a trade corridor between Egypt and tropical Africa. This role continued when the first Nubian kingdom declined, about five hundred years later; gold, copper, ivory, incense, ebony and exotic animals were imported through Nubia. In this period, Egypt built fortifications in Nubia to protect its assets but there is also evidence of close interaction between Nubians and Egyptians. During Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty (1991–1786 BCE), several of its pharaohs were black African Nubians.
Nearly 4,000 years ago, the new Nubian Kingdom of Kerma emerged and unified the region. It used slave labour to build monuments, palaces and tombs and traded goods from sub-Saharan Africa to the Red Sea. There are many examples of intricate, glazed pottery but also evidence of a darker side; some thirty thousand graves of men, women and children showing evidence of ritual human sacrifice. Nubia was annexed by Egypt in 1520 BCE and Kerma was destroyed, after which it became the centre of Egypt’s gold production. The Egyptians eventually decolonised and a new Nubian kingdom, Kush, became a major trading centre. Archaeological digs revealed evidence of a town surrounded by walls and moats and containing a palace, two hundred houses and a huge religious-ritual platform. Kush invaded and controlled Egypt in the eighth century BCE, after which the Nubian king Taharka became the Egyptian pharaoh. The Nubians colonised Egypt for almost a century before the Assyrians forced them out. The Nubian rulers moved north to Meroe, where the next kingdom emerged on the east bank of the Nile; it lasted for 1,150 years, until 350 CE. Its archaeological sites provide a glimpse of a civilisation that had developed its own writing, moving away from Egyptian hieroglyphics to a twenty-three-sign alphabet, and built nearly two hundred pyramids. Moroe was the military and industrial centre of the region, specialising in iron production. The Greek historian and philosopher Strabo wrote that this kingdom’s Nubian archers, led by their one-eyed queen, fought off the invading Romans in 24 BCE.34 But it eventually fragmented and was conquered by another kingdom to the south; the desert encroached, and Nubia became Christianised. Later, Arab traders introduced Islam, prompting the collapse of the last Nubian kingdom in 1504.
Ethiopia was another durable kingdom, claiming roots in the biblical tale of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a story repeated in a thirteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript, which says the kingdom was founded in 950 BCE by Menelik, son of Solomon and Sheba, but the Ethiopian kingdom itself had deeper roots, going back 2,700 years. This kingdom lasted four hundred years before falling. In about 100 CE, the Aksumite empire, described by a Persian writer as one of the world’s great empires (along with Rome, Persia and China) emerged. It became a major international trading power, ruling over an area that extended to Yemen.35 Ethiopia was the first major power to adopt Christianity (coins minted there in 324 CE bear crosses, whereas earlier coins are decorated with suns and moons) but from at least 200 BCE, a section of the Ethiopian population had converted to Judaism. Later, Muslims and Christians coexisted with minimal conflict, both supporting the state. Although Ethiopian dynasties rose and fell, the country was never colonised. In the seventeenth century, Emperor Fasiladas, in his ornate hilltop castle, ordered that the covetous Portuguese and ambitious Jesuits should be expelled; in 1896, under Menelik II, the Ethiopian army repelled an Italian invasion. But in the second Italian attempt, forty years later, Mussolini’s troops used bombs and mustard gas to overcome Haile Selassie’s defences, although resistance continued until Allied forces liberated it five years later. Selassie continued to rule until, overcome by hubris and corruption, he was overthrown in 1974.
In 2012, the Daily Mail ran a story carrying the headline: ‘Meet the 14th century African king who was richest man in the world of all time (adjusted for inflation!)’. It claimed that Mansa Musa I, who was born in 1280 and ruled an empire that covered modern Ghana and Mali, had personal wealth worth the equivalent of US$400 billion in today’s money ‘by the time of his death in 1331 [sic].’36 This was based on research showing that his empire produced half the world’s salt and gold, which he used to build huge mosques that still survive.37 Musa I did indeed rule an empire of astonishing power and wealth. During his twenty-five-year reign trade revenues trebled and he doubled the size of the empire, making it larger than any of the European kingdoms whose courts his envoys visited. Several cities became trading centres; by the middle of the fourteenth century Timbuktu had become a world trading centre and cultural hub, hosting huge libraries, a lively international book trade, a university and ornate mosques. It became a permanent settlement by about 1100 CE, growing rapidly, as a result of changed regional trading routes, into a centre of international trade for more than four hundred years. Repeated invasions and the encroachment of the desert heralded its decline but in its heyday, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, it traded gold, ivory and slaves, and smelted precious metals, which were mixed with alloys and cast by local craftsmen.38 The first bronze sculptures in Africa were produced in Timbuktu, using a technique later (from about 1550 to 1700) employed with great sophistication by the artists who produced the Benin bronzes.
Nigeria’s Benin Empire, established in the fifteenth century, featured five thousand kilometres of earth walls, some nine metres tall, in and around Benin City, that divided it into forty wards. It traded with the Portuguese from the late 1400s, exchanging ivory, palm oil and pepper for manila and guns; in the early 1500s the two countries exchanged ambassadors. Its metal workers produced bronze sculptures of people and, from the 1700s, weapons, including firearms. As the empire grew, it supplemented its well-drilled forces with mercenaries and made more use of cannon and muskets. It traded with the British in the sixteenth century but later cut its ties, to forestall colonial ambitions, and rebutted persistent British attempts to take control of its trade routes and rubber plantations. The British invaded in 1897, burning and looting Benin City, colonising the country, and seizing the best of the bronzes, which were rehoused in the British Museum, where they remain. After examining these sculptures, the racist biologist John R. Baker speculated in 1974 that the Greeks were behind them, because Arabs were unlikely to have condoned the creating of images of humans and uncivilised Africans couldn’t possibly have been up to it.39
Finally, two closely related Great Lakes kingdoms. Archaeologists trace Bunyoro’s origins to 1000 CE. In its heyday, in the 1500s and 1600s, it controlled the region through its powerful military and an economy that included salt mining, metal-forging and jewellery production. It declined in the eighteenth century, as a result of clan rivalries, but rose again in the nineteenth under King Kabelega, who unified the country and expanded trade networks, buying guns from Zanzibar traders in exchange for ivory. It was crushed in 1899 by a British-led African force; massacre, starvation and disease killed two million people in five years. The Bugandan kingdom emerged in the late 1300s, formed by a prince (Kimera) who escaped the conflict in neighbouring Bunyoro. It expanded after 1700, eclipsing Bunyoro and doubling its territory to become a regional superpower. Its centralised government was based on the kabaka (king) who appointed chiefs to ensure that roads, bridges and viaducts were constructed, to enable tax collection. The kingdom had a navy on Lake Victoria, with a fleet of 230 large war canoes to transport commandos to trouble-spots. They traded extensively with Arabs from the Swahili coast, exchanging ivory and slaves for guns and ammunition. In 1875 the explorer Henry Morton Stanley estimated Buganda’s army as 125,000 strong. When he visited its capital, he found a well-ordered town of forty thousand people. In its centre, on a hilltop, was the king’s palace and compound, surrounded by a four-kilometre-long wall. Stanley called it the ‘Pearl of Africa’, describing its king as an enlightened despot.40 But other explorers, unable to understand such an advanced African society, reached for the Hamite legend. The Victorian explorer John Hanning Speke said Buganda’s ‘barbaric civilisation’ must have been a product of the influence of the fair-skinned ‘Hamitic’ pastoralist race.41 In the late nineteenth century, as its great rival Bunyoro rose again, Buganda declined. The last of the great kabakas, Mwanga II, was defeated by the colonising British in 1897. He was captured but escaped to lead a rebellion, which was crushed.
There were several other significant examples of innovative sub-Saharan kingdoms and centres of power, including the Ashanti confederacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which used firearms, sophisticated military organisation, a highly stratified social structure and the slave trade to forge an empire that stretched from its centre in Ghana to the Ivory Coast and Benin. Another is the Zulu kingdom, which used tight military organisation, rigid discipline and new fighting techniques and tactics to unite most of the northern Nguni tribes under a single monarch in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The point has been established: the notion that Africa and Africans are incapable of technological, architectural and organisational sophistication – a view held by just about everybody in the nineteenth century, by apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia in the twentieth and by the likes of James Watson and Richard Lynn in the twenty-first – is simply wrong. My purpose in these sketches is to counter the flawed premises of an argument that has echoed through the centuries: that absence of evidence of civilisation is evidence of the absence of civilising potential. But really, this should be superfluous. Even if there were no examples of great African kingdoms, it would tell us nothing about the intellectual potential of its people, then or now. Their collective intelligence can’t be read from the level of the ‘civilisation’ or ‘advancement’ of a particular population at a particular time.
One more question needs an answer: why did these civilisations die out without leaving many traces on modern African society? Why wasn’t Africa like Europe, which built on early advances? The answer relates partly to geography but also to what was happening in the rest of the world, which, through slavery and colonisation, had an immense impact on Africa, and to internal factors in the empires. Some lasted longer than others, but they all fell eventually. The factors prompting decline were peculiar to each. In Nubia and Mali, the spread of the desert contributed. In most of Africa the factors included slavery and colonisation, disruption of trade routes and the decline of local industries (not least iron smelting, mainly as a result of cheaper imports under colonial rule).
In Eurasia, population density and favourable transport routes meant that one empire was likely to influence another through trade, migration and conquest. The ‘invention’ of writing in Mesopotamia had an impact on Egyptian writing, which influenced the Greek and Hebrew alphabets; the Latin alphabet emerged from the Greek, and so on. To take a different example, gunpowder was invented in China in about 800 CE; its first recorded use in weaponry was to defend against the Mongols. It was then used by the Mongols when they invaded Asia and Europe; its use spread across Asia and the Islamic world and through Europe, reaching Britain in the mid-1300s. Similarly, the mathematical knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome was appropriated by Islamic scholars and, through this repository, contributed to the Renaissance in Western Europe.
Wider spaces, lower population density and different climatic and geographical conditions meant there was not the same domino effect between the decline of one African civilisation and the rise of another. I have stressed the impact of trade within and between African kingdoms but, overall, precolonial Africa was more isolated than Europe. The availability of space and game allowed, in some places, for coexistence between hunter-gatherer, agricultural and urban peoples, whereas in Europe population density, conquest, disease and trade put an end to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle about 4,000 years ago.
As I discussed in Chapter 3, some tiny communities in South America and Africa are trying to maintain hunter-gatherer lifestyles. In some countries (such as Botswana) there has been a desire to force them into modernity, born of the misconception that premodern modes of existence are demeaning. Another way to see the choices made by these communities is that they are trying to pursue a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, which might seem to them a better option than the dire fate of other hunter-gatherers who latched on to modernity. Either way, their choices say nothing about brain power.
If you see history as a relentless forward march, and each advance in technology, industry and wealth a sign of progress, then the culture of the Botswana Bushmen, the Congo pygmies or the native Amazonians might indeed seem ‘backward’. Then again, the notion of history as progress doesn’t look quite so clever when we consider the human contribution to global warming, the spread of weapons of mass destruction or the coexistence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. This doesn’t imply cultural relativism and absence of value judgements. Some cultures are superior to others; not, as the likes of Christopher Hitchens had it, because of their intellectual achievements but rather because they treat people better.