Africa, Fourth Edition / Edition 4
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ISBN-13: 9780253012920
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: 04-18-2014
Pages: 376
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range: 18 Years
Maria Grosz-Ngaté is an anthropologist and Associate Director of the African Studies Program at Indiana University. She has conducted long-term research in Mali and Senegal with a focus on rural social transformations, gender, and Islam. John H. Hanson is Associate Professor of History at Indiana Universityand an editor of History in Africa. His research concerns the history of West Africa Muslim communities during the past 200 years. Patrick O'Meara is Special Advisor to the Indiana UniversityPresident, Vice President Emeritus and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs and Political Science. He was the editor (with Phyllis Martin) of all of the previous editions of Africa. His interests include South African politics and international development.
Africa A Geographic Frame James Delehanty Africa is a continent, the second-largest after Asia. It contains fifty-four countries, several of them vast. Each of Africa's biggest countries—Algeria, Congo, and Sudan—is about three times the size of Texas, four times that of France. Africa could hold 14 Greenlands, 20 Alaskas, 71 Californias, or 125 Britains. Newcomers to the study of Africa often are surprised by the simple matter of the continent's great size. No wonder so much else about Africa is vague to outsiders. This chapter introduces Africa from the perspective of geography, an integrative discipline rooted in the ancient need to describe the qualities of places near or distant. The chapter begins by examining how the world's understanding of Africa has developed over time. Throughout history, outsiders have held a greater number of erroneous geographic ideas about Africa than true ones. The misunderstandings generated by these false ideas have been unhelpful and occasionally disastrous. After this survey of geographic ideas, the chapter settles into a general preference for what is true, probing, in turn, Africa's physical landscapes, its climates, its bioregions, and the way that Africans over time have used and shaped their environments. A final section outlines the difficulties Africa has confronted and the betterment Africans anticipate as they integrate ever more fully and fairly with emerging global systems. Knowledge of geography is a frame for deeper inquiry in all fields because the qualities of place shape every human endeavor. Anyone striving to understand the challenges and potentialities that citizens of African countries have to work with in their struggle to obtain for themselves and their families the security and prosperity that is their birthright would do well to reflect regularly on Africa's geography. A map, especially one's own emerging mental map of Africa, is an excellent organizing tool. It structures information according to the fundamentally interesting question "Where?" It is a solid place to start any journey, including one's personal passage toward a more nuanced understanding of Africa. THE IDEA OF AFRICA Places are ideas. Consider, for example, that most significant of places, home. Every home is a physical entity—it exists concretely—but the meaning of home, its reality, is all tied up in the experiences and emotions of the people who live in that place or otherwise know it. Or consider Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a particular collection of buildings, roadways, rivers, people, and a great deal else occupying a defined portion of western Pennsylvania, but it also is an idea. More correctly, it is a set of ideas, because each of us has a different sense of Pittsburgh based on our views of cities in general and whatever memories and associations, accurate and false, Pittsburgh as place or word conjures in our minds when we encounter it. So too Africa. Though without doubt a continent, Africa, like all continents, also is a complex of ideas that have flowed through the human imagination, accurately and fancifully, generously and carelessly, over a great span of time, giving rise to many meanings and actions, some grounded in truth and noble, others based in error and unfortunate. If Africa is a continent but also a product of the human imagination, the first question that must be asked is when it originated. Physical Africa, the continental landmass, is easy to date. Any basic geology text will describe how Africa took shape after the breakup and drifting apart of the pieces of the supercontinent Pangaea about 180 million years ago. As for the idea of Africa, it is somewhat more recent. The idea of Africa came into being over the last two thousand years, and it did so largely in Europe. The fact that the idea of Africa developed mostly in Europe goes a long way toward explaining how Africa is conceived worldwide, even now. This claim—that Europeans were largely responsible for the idea of Africa—is easy to substantiate and does not discredit Africa and its people. Europeans invented America too, just as Chinese invented Taiwan and Arabs the Maghreb. All through world history, at scales ranging from the continent to the community, outsiders have given identities to places. A common way this happens is by first naming. There were no Native Americans, only hundreds of distinct peoples such as the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes and the Navajo of the western desert, until Europeans crossed the Atlantic five hundred years ago and announced the existence of a continent to be called America. Another way outsiders give identity to place is by inspiring or provoking, sometimes by threat or aggression, unity and regional loyalty where none existed before. There was no Germany until Bismarck, around 1870, convinced the German-speaking principalities of central Europe that they were one and that joining Prussia to form an entity called Germany would be in the interest of all. Even though few early Africans knew the bounds of the continent or could imagine Africa as a whole (the same can be said of early people on all of the continents), there were exceptions. One interesting case comes down to us from the Greek historian Herodotus, who in the fifth century BCE (Before the Common Era) wrote a brief but tantalizing report of a sea journey by Phoenicians, organized by King Necho II of Egypt, around the landmass we call Africa (which Herodotus called Libya), undertaken about two hundred years before Herodotus's time. While no other evidence of this expedition survives, it is pleasant and plausible to believe that it occurred. If it did, then at least one small group of Africans, probably a few Phoenician adventurers from Egypt, learned of the entirety of the African landmass as long as twenty-seven hundred years ago. This knowledge appears to have died with them. It did not lead to any mapping or broad understanding within Africa of the continent's extent. Even Herodotus knew next to nothing about what those sailors saw; he only reported the legend of their trip. European ideas about Africa began to take shape during the period of classical antiquity. The ancient Greeks and Romans had a great deal of solid knowledge about the nearer parts of Africa. After the Roman defeat of Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) during the Punic Wars of the second century BCE, the Roman Empire expanded to encompass much of the continent's northern reaches. The cultural and economic ties between Rome and its African provinces were strong. Northern Africa quickly became known as the granary of the empire. The word "Africa" dates from this era. It possibly comes from "Afer," which in the Phoenician language was the name for the region around Carthage. According to this theory, Roman geographers, needing a word for the landmass to the south, borrowed "Afer," Latinized it, and broadened its application to the entire continent south of the Mediterranean (much as Herodotus had used "Libya" in the same way, for the same purpose, a few hundred years before). Commerce has linked Africa with the rest of the world for the last two thousand years. Never was Africa entirely isolated from the main currents of global interaction and trade. Roman coins and artifacts from the second and third centuries of the Common Era (CE) have been unearthed in lands south of the Sahara, evidence that Africa's great desert was traversed occasionally in early days. Sailors and settlers from Borneo and Sumatra, in present-day Indonesia, traveled to Africa beginning about 350 BCE. Their descendants and language dominate Madagascar today, and the crops that these settlers carried from Southeast Asia, such as plantain, became dietary staples all across continental Africa. As early as the seventh century CE, Persian and Arab traders established outposts up and down Africa's Indian Ocean coast, drawing commerce from the interior, linking producers in eastern and central Africa through trade with the Middle East and the wider world. There are clear records by the fourteenth century of voyages by imperial Chinese trading vessels carrying silk, porcelain, and other goods from the ports of Asia to the East African coast. The Christian kingdom of Ethiopia exchanged emissaries with the courts of Europe, including the Vatican, in the fifteenth century. And many Africans traveled great distances within the continent and beyond. A good example is Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, commonly known as Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century Moroccan adventurer who voyaged all across the northern third of Africa and eventually as far as China and Southeast Asia, reporting his discoveries in Arabic manuscripts read throughout the Muslim world. These contacts of non-Africans with Africa, and the rich descriptions of portions of Africa provided to the world by outsiders and African writers such as Ibn Battuta, were elements of a partial geography of Africa. Yet an accurate cartography—a map of the continent's position, size, and proportions—awaited the voyages of European seafarers during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their transmittal of information to European mapmakers capable of accurately rendering Africa's outline. In other words, despite early knowledge of many parts of Africa in many lands, including Europe, China, and the Middle East, and of course among every African who ever lived, the definition of Africa as a whole, its description as a geographic totality, fell to Europeans. And this made all the difference. Europe was poised in 1500 to rise to global dominance. The accurate and inaccurate ideas that Europeans began attaching to their categorical creation, Africa, spread around the world with European power. What of these ideas? What did Africa come to mean in the European imagination? Portrayals of Africa and Africans in the literature and art of Europe before 1500 or so, though hardly widespread, were largely benign. That is, until about five hundred years ago European intellectuals appear to have known little about Africans (only a few people from Africa would appear now and then in the cities of Europe), and less still about Africa as a continent, but when they did consider Africa and Africans it was with a rough sort of equality. This is not to say that Europeans harbored no fantastic ideas about Africa, but their fantasies were not very much different from those constructed about many unknown lands: rumors of dragons, giants, astonishing creatures, and strange physical and cultural variations of the human family populating regions that were unbearably hot and forbidding. These were ancient motifs, long ascribed in many cultures to unfamiliar places. But Africa in Renaissance Europe was not deemed particularly backward, primitive, or frightful. In paintings Africans usually were depicted as simply another shade of human being. They were sometimes a point of interest in a picture, but no malign attention was drawn to them. Physical exaggerations or contortions were not seen. Nor in European writing of this time do we see much overt anti-African racism, only the kinds of physical and cultural speculations that were applied to unfamiliar people from all unexplored or unknown areas. Living standards in Europe and Africa five hundred years ago were little different. On both continents nearly everyone lived off the land, most in agriculture. Diet was unvaried. Hunger was common. Life span was short. Almost no one on either continent was well educated. Why should Europeans have considered Africans, five hundred years ago, to be in any manner inferior? There was no material reason for Europeans to stigmatize Africa and Africans in particular at this time, and generally they did not. This changed. Increasingly in written descriptions and paintings from Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Africans took on qualities that are familiar to us now. Africans came to be defined by Europeans as poor, uneducated, technologically unsophisticated, underdeveloped, and non-Christian. Why did this happen? Why, about five hundred years ago, did Africa in the European mind go from being a somewhat mysterious but not fundamentally different assortment of peoples and cultures to being the anti-Europe, the antithesis of everything that made Europe great? One reason was that standards of living, technology, education, and knowledge were rising in Europe, lifting many people (though far from all) above the levels of basic subsistence that had long been their lot. People living in vibrant economies often lose interest in the rest of the world except to the extent that it can supply what they desire. Certainly Europe's economic progress is part of the story. But the main reason for Europe's emerging negative view of Africa was the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which started in a major way in the 1500s and rose to its height over the next two hundred years. This is not the place to dwell at length on the slave trade, but this much must be said: from the 1500s to the 1800s, European slave traders transported millions of Africans from the shores of the continent to work in European colonies in the New World. Slavery was an ancient and nearly universal human institution long before the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the world had never seen anything like this, with so many millions of people pulled from their homeland in a sustained and organized fashion and sent to the far ends of the earth purely for the economic advantage of well-off Europeans. How could this commerce possibly be justified morally and psychologically? Europeans did so by convincing themselves that Africa was populated by people who did not warrant the concern one might have for others. As the slave trade ratcheted up, the idea spread quickly around Europe that Africans were not part of our common humanity. Did everyone in Europe during the period of the slave trade think about or firmly believe these ideas? Certainly not. Africa and Africans were quite tangential to the lives of most Europeans. But to the extent that Europeans thought at all about Africa and Africans in early modern times, racist assumptions of African inferiority became the default. Much later, in the nineteenth century, these theories of racial inferiority were elaborated and developed into a pseudoscience, but the roots of anti-African racism are here, in the rise of the slave trade in early modern Europe and the need in Europe and eventually the Americas for a moral and psychological crutch to support it. The trade endured for more than three hundred years. Ideas of inferiority, once embedded, lasted longer than that. A whole set of negative qualities began to be attributed to Africa and Africans to set them apart from Europeans. These qualities were oppositional: if we are white, they are black; if we are good, they are bad; if we are Christian, they must be immoral; if we are sophisticated, they must be primitive; if we are enterprising, they must be lazy; if we are cerebral, they must be physical; if we are moral, they must be licentious; if we are orderly, they must be chaotic; if we are a people capable of self-governance, they must need our help. We live with this legacy. About the realities of Africa—as opposed to the imagined qualities of Africa's people, land, economies, and political geography—the West knew little until the twentieth century. What about African ideas of Africa? When did Africans discover and begin to form thoughts about the continent? This is not an absurd question. As noted already, the geographic category of "Africa" arose in Europe, and almost no one anywhere, including Africa, had any knowledge of the extent of the African landmass until the fifteenth century. Thus there is a history of African ideas of Africa, just as there is a history of Western ones. It starts with the slave trade. Throughout the slave trade period and continuing after it ended, a trans-Atlantic discourse linked intellectuals in Africa to communities of African descent in the Americas. In these communities—in North America, South America, and the Caribbean—a continental perspective on Africa developed early because slaves and their descendants needed a unitary sense of Africa, a conception of Africa as a whole, for their identity and their dignity. After all, people from many corners of Africa were enslaved but as the years passed most knowledge of a family's precise roots in Africa was lost. Adult captives who survived the trans-Atlantic journey certainly knew from where in Africa they had been taken, and sometimes this knowledge persisted through a few generations, passed down from parents to children, often as a scrap of information, perhaps just a word for some now unknown village or kingdom. But even these tidbits tended naturally to fade over time. Eventually most people in the New World whose forebears had been transported as slaves knew nothing whatsoever of the origins in Africa of their various ancestors. They knew not whether they were descended from Hausa, Wolof, Yoruba, or Ewe people (or from what mix of different African ethnicities), but they did know that their people had come from Africa. It was in this context of definitional necessity, largely in the Americas after the sixteenth century, that people first began to conceive of themselves as being of essentially African origin and to think of the totality of Africa as a place, their ancestral home. Read an Excerpt
Africa
By Maria Grosz-Ngaté, John H. Hanson, Patrick O'Meara Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Indiana University Press
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ISBN: 978-0-253-01292-0
CHAPTER 1
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Africa has long been the best introduction to the dynamism of the African continent and to the struggles and aspirations of its peoples. This fully updated and largely rewritten 4th edition is thus a most welcome resource for all who seek to introduce students to the complex lived reality of the African continent in the 21st century. A comprehensive survey of a continent in motion.
"A remarkable textbook that reflects and explains the diversity, dynamism, and dilemmas of the contemporary African continent. The chapters are engaging and accessible; they explore a broad range of topics, from the legacies of colonialism to popular art and debates about human rights. Africans are depicted as neither victims nor victors, but men and women seeking connections, security, pleasure, and creativity in an ever-changing world. I am sure that Africa will quickly become the 'go-to' text for introductory classes in African studies."
"This excellent and comprehensive collection succeeds in representing the diversity, dynamism, and flux that characterize contemporary Africa. Entries by leading Africanist scholars focus on processes and interconnections rather than on 'traditions,' revealing how Africans have long engaged in complex regional and global relations. The chapters make African agency visible and provide illustrations of African ingenuity, innovation, and creativity. The authors convey a sense of the controversies and the broad range of perspectives through which Africa and African issues have been perceived. The writing is lucid and lively. This state of the art compendium will be of use to all those interested in Africa."
Africa has long been the best introduction to the dynamism of the African continent and to the struggles and aspirations of its peoples. This fully updated and largely rewritten 4th edition is thus a most welcome resource for all who seek to introduce students to the complex lived reality of the African continent in the 21st century. A comprehensive survey of a continent in motion.
"This fourth edition of Africa is an outstanding up-to-date introductory text that discusses a range of subjects, from contemporary social and political relations to health, illness and healing; from economic development to literature, the visual arts and rural and urban life. Well-written and appropriate for both students and the general reader, this volume brings to life Africa's past, and its many present-day 21st century realities. No other text covers so much and yet remains so accessible."
This excellent and comprehensive collection succeeds in representing the diversity, dynamism, and flux that characterize contemporary Africa. Entries by leading Africanist scholars focus on processes and interconnections rather than on 'traditions,' revealing how Africans have long engaged in complex regional and global relations. The chapters make African agency visible and provide illustrations of African ingenuity, innovation, and creativity. The authors convey a sense of the controversies and the broad range of perspectives through which Africa and African issues have been perceived. The writing is lucid and lively. This state of the art compendium will be of use to all those interested in Africa.
A much anticipated and welcome update to a classic introductory text in African studies. This beautifully assembled and presented book probes in appropriate detail a wide range of topics that will provide students with a firm foundation for understanding the African continent.
"A much anticipated and welcome update to a classic introductory text in African studies. This beautifully assembled and presented book probes in appropriate detail a wide range of topics that will provide students with a firm foundation for understanding the African continent."
"Africa has long been the best introduction to the dynamism of the African continent and to the struggles and aspirations of its peoples. This fully updated and largely rewritten 4th edition is thus a most welcome resource for all who seek to introduce students to the complex lived reality of the African continent in the 21st century. A comprehensive survey of a continent in motion."What People are Saying About This
Universityof Florida - Leonardo A. Villalón
ContributorsTable of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Africa: A Geographic Frame
James Delehanty
2. Legacies of the Past: Themes in African History
John Akare Aden and John H. Hanson
3. Social Relations: Family, Kinship, and Community
Maria Grosz-Ngaté
4. Making a Living: African Livelihoods
Gracia Clark and Katherine Wiley
5. Religions in Africa
John H. Hanson
6. Urban Spaces, Lives, and Projects in Africa
Karen Tranberg Hansen
7. Health, Illness, and Healing in African Societies
Tracy J. Luedke
8. Visual Art in Africa
Patrick McNaughton and Diane Pelrine
9. African Music Flows
Daniel B. Reed and Ruth M. Stone
10. Literature in Africa
Eileen Julien
11. African Film
Akin Adesokan
12. African Politics and the Future of Democracy
Amos Sawyer, Lauren M. MacLean and Carolyn E. Holmes
13. Development in Africa: Tempered Hope
Raymond Muhula and Stephen N. Ndegwa
14. Human Rights in Africa
Takyiwaa Manuh
15. Print and Electronic Resources
Marion Frank-Wilson
Index