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Formative Origins

IN SETTING OUT TO MASTER THEIR OWN CONTINENT, AFRICANS MADE a first and crucial contribution to the general growth of mankind. Most physical anthropologists seem now to have accepted that vital evolutionary steps which led from near-men towards true men were taken in Africa: in some recent words of Leakey’s that it was ‘the African continent which saw the emergence of the basic stock which eventually gave rise to the apes, as well as to man as we know him today’, and where ‘the main branch which was to end up as man broke away from those leading to the apes’.

Not all the experts would yet agree with Leakey’s third claim for Africa’s primacy in the production of man : that ‘it was also in Africa that true man separated from his manlike (and now extinct) cousins, the australopithecines or “near-men” of two million years ago’. But even if Africa was not in this direct sense the immediate birthplace of homo sapiens, there is now a wide consensus for the view, as Posnansky puts it, ‘that Africa was in some respects the centre of the Stone Age world’. Though only about 125,000 people may have inhabited the continent a hundred thousand years ago, according to a recent guess, they were probably more numerous than the population of any other continent. They had gone further, in other words, towards conquest of their environment. By the end of the Late Stone Age, they may have multiplied to as many as three or four millions.

They belonged to several indigenous types. Some of their surviving descendants include the Pygmies of the Congo forests and the Bushmen of the south-western deserts. These ‘small peoples’ were much more widely spread then than now. There may have been as many as a million Bushmen south of the Zambezi at the end of the Late Stone Age, whereas today there are fewer than 50,000. Other but related types included the ancestors of the Khoi (‘Hottentots’) of Southern Africa; the ancestors of the robust and dark-skinned ‘Negroes’ of western and central Africa; and those who had descended from a mingling of indigenous peoples with neighbouring Asians, in the north and north-east, that possibly occurred as early as the Middle Stone Age.

These ancestral peoples evolved by intermarriage. They did so to such a point that today it is seldom possible, by blood-group analysis, ‘genetically to distinguish very clearly or consistently even among such morphologically diverse groups as Bushmen, Pygmies, and Negroes’. They mingled and moved about their continent, slowly populating it. Of these migrations the most important was that of the ‘Negroes’, whose Bantu-speaking family of peoples, probably spreading originally from western Africa at least three thousand years ago, have long become dominant south of the Equator.

The linguistic evidence is a little more helpful. African linguistic studies are still immersed in controversy about origins and relationships. But they suggest that all the ancient languages of Africa belonged to a handful of ‘founding families’ which derived from remote Stone Age progress. As peoples became more numerous and moved about, these mother tongues divided in the course of centuries into a much larger number of ‘sub-families’; and these in turn ramified as time went by into the multitude of languages spoken today. The actual numbers need not worry us here; the point is in their ramification. As a rough and ready guide to this process one may take a schematic view, adapting Greenberg’s language data:

Early Stone Age	Late Stone Age	Iron Age
Up to 50,000 years ago	Up to 2,000 years ago	Spread and multiplication up to AD 1900
4 mother tongues 125,000 people	37 main languages 3–4 million people	730 languages 150 million people

Nothing as statistically neat will have actually occurred, but the development of new ethnic identities may have been broadly along these lines. Very slow in remote Stone Age centuries, the rate of growth and differentiation accelerated in the Late Stone Age and became comparatively rapid after the onset of the Iron Age some two thousand years ago.

In so far as one can hope to trace the origins of African civilisation, it is clearly in this direction one must look: to the formative problems and solutions found by small groups faced with the destiny of peopling one of the world’s largest and physically most testing land masses. Here it is that one may light upon crucial keys to questions of mood and temper, or trace the source of attitudes which have stubbornly combined a firm respect for precedent with a restless onward-shifting readiness for experiment; which have instilled a capacity, greater perhaps than that of any other major civilisation, for the optimism which comes from living always on a frontier, on the edge of ‘somewhere else’, on the verge of ‘something different’, where anything may be possible as long as human courage and endeavour are prepared to make it so: as long, indeed, as a man’s inner force or dynamism can avail to drive him forward. It is sometimes argued that the essence of African belief has rested in the notion of ‘vital force’. Perhaps it is in this that one may glimpse an old attempt at conceptualising the challenge of life and survival in a continent of such natural hostility to man.

I do not want to exaggerate. Questions of ‘mood’ are elusive, fleeting, contradictory. The record of African history is heavy on the side of custom and convention, of ‘what our fathers did before us’: as a Lozi proverb has it, ‘Go the way that many people go; if you go alone you will have reason to lament.’ Yet the record is also strong on the side of new initiative. What in any case mattered most – and it will emerge again and again – lay in the creative tension that was quickened and sustained by circumstances which so emphatically required convention and experiment as dual guides to survival. The Luo-speaking peoples offer a striking illustration. To live and multiply in the scorching grasslands of the Bahr al Ghazal, far out beyond the dust-harried skylines of the southern Nile, the founding fathers of the Luo had to learn techniques of cattle-raising and millet-farming capable of practice in a land of savagely contrasted seasons. Only rigid conventions could stave off disaster, as anyone may easily conclude who observes the peoples living there today: only strong obedience to the rules which governed their relations with each other and with their tawny land.

Yet the Luo, however custom-bound in the country of their birth, none the less became a people of wanderers who experimented with a copious range of new ideas. They adopted variant forms of religion, helped to found prestigious dynasties of kings, lived repeatedly on the ideological as well as physical frontiers of ‘somewhere else’ and ‘something different’. A maxim of their neighbours the Luyia, another compound of wanderers and sedentaries, sounds the characteristic note. Oratseshera akharo khali ebusiba, say the Luyia, ‘Don’t laugh at a distant boat being tossed by the waves [of Lake Nyanza]. Your relative may be in it.’ The rules are there, and the rules are good. But the changes and chances of fate may at any moment overturn them. Then a man must be ready to shift for himself by head-on clash or shrewd evasion.