Rethinking
Africas transcontinental continuities in pre- and
protohistory for ALL conference details, please contact Marieke van Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ) |
||
The Great Enclosure of the Great
Zimbabwe complex, one of the most contested sites in the study of Africas transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory |
this conference is to mark Wim van Binsbergens retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden, after 35 years OBSERVERS. Specialists, interested non-specialists, and all people associated with Wim van Binsbergen in the course of his career are welcome to attend the first day of the conference with observer status (attendance fee EUR25). Considering the expected massive interest it is important to register beforehand. Please contact Marieke van Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ) for details. |
a contemporary Chinese depiction of a giraffe presented to the Chinese emperor in the context of Admiral Zheng He's voyages, early 15th c. CE |
return to: Topicalities page | Shikanda portal index
(no longer of any relevance)
4. CLICK HERE FOR THE FINAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME AS PER 10 APRIL 2012 (PDF)
5. CLICK HERE FOR A SELECTION OF CONFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHS
6. LIST OF ACCEPTED TITLES AND ABSTRACTS, as per 15 March 2012; LOGIN ACCESS TO DRAFT PAPERS
please note: Whereas titles and abstracts of the conference papers are open to the general public, for obvious reasons (copyright, the papers' provisional state) we have restricted access to the draft papers themselves to conference participants and observers. Those qualifying have been issued with a specific Username and Password, with which to open the following key so as to gain access to webpage containing the conference papers, in the same order as in which titles and abstracts are listed below.
Editor
in chief of the peer reviewed journal The Cahiers Caribéens
dEgyptologie and the electronic papyrus i-Medjat
Referring to the historical mapping of the African populations inside the light of genetics studies, and taking into account recent archaeology of Upper Egypt and its wider Saharan and Sudanese hinterland, this paper outlines the geographical location and movements of early peoples in and around the Nile Valley. So, primarily linguistic resources are used in this view for comparative studies of natural phenomena names, and that of the material culture, as worship places or key-artifacts in Ancient Egyptian and contemporary African cultures, are sketched out. The paper pursues by a comparative overview of the immaterial culture by the way of a short but basic conceptual vocabulary shared by the contemporary Chadic-speakers, Cushitic-speakers peoples and contemporary Nilo-Saharanspeakers within Ancient Egyptian-speakers one. This cultural and linguistic enlightenments suggest firstly that ancestors of these peoples were able to share in ancient times a common cultural homeland - perhaps a saharo-nubian area of ethnic and linguistic contact and compression; and secondly that the earliest speakers of the Egyptian language could be located to the south of Upper Egypt or, earlier, in the Sahara. As a matter of fact, the marked grammatical and lexicographic affinities of Ancient Egyptian with Chadic languages are well-known, and consistent Nilotic cultural, religious and political patterns are detectable in the formation of the first Egyptian kingships. The question all these data raise is the historical and sociological articulation between the languages and the cultural patterns of this pool of ancient African societies from which emerged Pre-dynastic Egypt.
Though the very first human myths were probably created in Africa and brought to other continents with the "Out-of-Africa" migration of early Homo sapiens, many, if not most of the stories recorded in Tropical Africa by missionaries, ethnologists and linguists can have Eurasian and not African roots. In some of such stories animals like sheep, goat and dog play crucial role and because these species were domesticated in Eurasia and spread into Africa rather late the African origin of the stories themselves is also under doubt. I mean first of all some versions of the "muddled message" and interpretation of the stars of Orion as a hunting scene. Another large set of stories is related to fairy-tales and have extensive parallels in Eurasia. The existence of North American (though not South American) cases means that the plots in question were known in Eurasia at least 12-15 millennia B.P. The complete lack of Australian cases means that these stories were hardly known to the early modern humans. Both Eurasian and African origin is possible for these stories but the former is more plausible. The Eurasian parallels are more numerous in West Africa where the myths that most probably have African origin are just rare. Some animal stories unite Africa and Europe being unknown anywhere else (a hare or a bird who refused to dig with the others a well or a river is an example). Here the direction of the diffusion is unclear. All the plots that I write about have wide distribution in Tropical Africa and hardly could spread recently thanks to the modern European influence. If we "delete" possible Eurasian influence in Tropical African folklore, we would get an idea of what the worldview of local hunter-gatherers could be before spread of productive economy and emergence of trade connections with North African and Near Eastern societies.
The
Afroasiatic migrations can be divided into historical and
prehistorical. The linguistic evidence of the historical
migrations is usually based on epigraphic or literary witnesses.
The migrations without epigraphic or textual evidence can be
linguistically determined only indirectly, on the basis of
ecological and cultural lexicon and mutual borrowings from and
into substrata, adstrata and superstrata. Very useful is a
detailed genetic classification, ideally with an absolute
chronology of sequential divergencies. Without literary documents
and absolute chronology of loans the only tool is the method
called glottochronology. Although in its
classical form formulated by Swadesh it was
discredited, its recalibrated modification developed by Sergei
Starostin gives much more realistic estimations. For Afroasiatic
G. Starostin and A. Militarev obtained almost the same
tree-diagram, although they operated with 50- and 100-word-lists
respectively.
Afroasiatic
(S = G. Starostin 2010; M = A.
Militarev 2005)
internal |
|||||||||||||||
-9500 |
-8500 |
-7500 |
-6500 |
-5500 |
divergence |
||||||||||
Omotic |
|||||||||||||||
-14
760S |
(-6.96S/-5.36M) |
||||||||||||||
-7
870M |
Cushitic |
||||||||||||||
(-6.54S/-6.51M) |
|||||||||||||||
Afroasiatic |
-10
010S |
Semitic |
|||||||||||||
-9
970M |
(-3.80S/-4.51M) |
||||||||||||||
-7
710S |
Egyptian |
||||||||||||||
-8
960M |
(Middle:
-1.55) |
||||||||||||||
Berber |
|||||||||||||||
-7250S |
-5
990S |
(-1.48S/-1.11M) |
|||||||||||||
-7710M |
-5
890M |
Chadic |
|||||||||||||
(-5.13S/-5.41M) |
|||||||||||||||
Rather
problematic results for Omotic should be ascribed to extremely
strong influences of substrata. Various influences, especially
Nilo-Saharan, are also apparent in Cushitic, plus Khoisan and
Bantu in Dahalo and South Cushitic. Less apparent, but
identifiable, is the Nilo-Saharan influence in Egyptian (Takács
1999, 38-46) and Berber (Militarev 1991, 248-65); stronger in
Chadic are influences of Saharan from the East (Jungraithmayr
1989), Songhai from the West (Zima 1990), plus Niger-Congo from
the South (Gerhardt 1983).
To
map the early Afroasiatic migrations, it is necessary to localize
in space and time the Afroasiatic homeland. The assumed
locations correlate with the areas of individual branches:
Cushitic/Omotic:
North Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea between the Nile-Atbara and Red
Sea - Ehret (1979, 165); similarly Fleming (2006, 152-57), Blench
(2006). Hudson (1978, 74-75) sees in Greater Ethiopia a homeland
of both Afroasiatic and Semitic.
Area
between Cushitic & Omotic, Egyptian, Berber and Chadic:
Southeast Sahara between Darfur in Sudan and the Tibesti Massiv
in North Chad - Diakonoff 1988, 23.
Chadic:
North shores of Lake Chad - Jungraithmayr 1991, 78-80.
Berber-Libyan:
North African Mediterranean coast - Fellman 1991-93, 57.
Egyptian:
Upper Egypt - Takács 1999, 47.
Semitic:
Levant Militarev 1996, 13-32. This solution is seriously
discussed by Diakonoff (1988, 24-25) and Petrácek (1988, 130-31)
as alternative to the African location.
These
arguments speak for the Levantine location:
Distant
relationship of Afroasiatic with Kartvelian, Dravidian,
Indo-European and other Eurasiatic language families within the
framework of the Nostratic hypothesis (Illic-Svityc 1971-84;
Blaek 2002; Dolgopolsky 2008; Bomhard 2008).
Lexical
parallels connecting Afroasiatic with Near Eastern languages
which cannot be explained from Semitic: (i) Sumerian-Afroasiatic
lexical parallels indicating an Afroasiatic substratum in
Sumerian (Militarev 1995). (ii) Elamite-Afroasiatic lexical and
grammatical cognates explainable as a common heritage
(Blaek 1999). (iii) North Caucasian-Afroasiatic parallels
in cultural lexicon explainable by old neighborhood (Militarev,
Starostin 1984).
Regarding
the tree-diagram above, the hypothetical scenario of
disintegration of Afroasiatic and following migrations should
operate with two asynchronic migrations from the Levantine
homeland: Cushitic (& Omotic?) separated first c.
12 mill. BP (late Natufian) and spread into the Arabian
Peninsula; next Egyptian, Berber and Chadic split from Semitic
(the latter remaining in the Levant) c. 11-10 mill. BP and
they dispersed into the Nile Delta and Valley.
The
present scenario has its analogy in the spread of Semitic
languages into Africa. The northern route through Sinai brought
Aramaic and Arabic, the southern route through Bab el-Mandeb
brought Ethio-Semitic.
References
Blaek,
Václav. 1999. Elam: a bridge between Ancient Near East and
Dravidian India? In: Archaeology and Language IV. Language
Change and Cultural Transformation, eds. Roger Blench &
Matthew Spriggs. London & New York: Routledge, 48-78.
Blaek,
Václav. 2002. Some New Dravidian - Afroasiatic Parallels. Mother
Tongue 7, 171-199.
Blench,
Roger. 2006. Archaeology, Language, and the African Past.
Oxford: AltaMira.
Bomhard,
Allan R. 2008. Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative
Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, I-II. Leiden-Boston:
Brill.
Diakonoff,
Igor M. 1988. Afrasian languages. Moscow: Nauka.
Dolgopolsky,
Aaron. 2008. Nostratic Dictionary. Cambridge:
<http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/196512>
Ehret,
Christopher. 1979. On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia. Journal
of African History 20, 161-177.
Fellman,
Jack. 1991-93. Linguistics as an instrument of pre-history: the
home of proto Afro-Asiatic. Orbis 36, 56-58.
Fleming,
Harold C. 2006. Ongota. A Decisive Language in African
Prehistory. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Gerhardt,
Ludwig. 1983. Lexical interferences in the Chadic/Benue-Congo
border area. In: Studies in Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics,
ed. by Ekkehard Wolff, Hilke Meyer-Bahlburg. Hamburg: Buske,
301-310.
Hudson,
Grover. 1978. Geolinguistic evidence for Ethiopian Semitic
prehistory. Abbay 9, 71-85.
Illic-Svityc,
Vladislav. 1971-84. Opyt sravnenija nostraticeskix jazykov,
I-III. Moskva: Nauka.
Jungraithmayr,
Herrmann. 1991. Centre and periphery: Chadic linguistic evidence
and its possible historical significance. Orientalia
Varsoviensia 2: Unwritten Testimonies of the African Past.
Proceedings of the International Symposium (Warsaw, Nov
1989), ed. by S. Pilaszewicz, E. Rzewuski. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa
Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 61-82.
Militarev,
Aleksandr. 1991. Istoriceskaja fonetika i leksika
livijsko-guancskix jazykov. In: Afrazijskie jazyki 2.
Moskva: Nauka, 238-267.
Militarev,
Aleksandr. 1995. umery i afrazijcy. Vestnik drevnej
istorii 1995/2, 113-127.
Militarev,
Alexander. 1996. Home for Afrasian: African or Asian? Areal
Linguistic Arguments. In: Cushitic and Omotic Languages.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium (Berlin, March
1994), ed. bz C. Griefenow-Mewis, R.M. Voigt. Köln: Köppe,
13-32.
Militarev,
Alexander. 2005. Once more about glottochronology and the
comparative method: the Omotic-Afrasian case. In: Orientalia
et Classica VI: Aspekty komparatistiki, 339-408.
Militarev,
Aleksandr, Starostin, Sergei. 1984. Obcaja
afrazijsko-severnokavkazskaja kulturnaja leksika. In: Lingvisticeskaja
rekonstrukcija i drevnejaja istorija Vostoka 3: Jazykovaja
situacija v Perednej Azii v X-IV tysjaciletijax do n.e.
Moskva: Nauka, 34-43.
Petrácek,
Karel. 1988. Altägyptisch, Hamitosemitisch und ihre
Beziehungen zu einigen Sprachfamilien in Afrika und Asien. Praha:
Univerzita Karlova.
Starostin,
George. 2010. Glottochronological classification of Afroasiatic
languages. Ms.
Takács,
Gábor. 1999. Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, Vol. I:
A Phonological Introduction. Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill.
Zima,
Petr. 1990. Songhay and Chadic in the West African Context. In:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress (Vienna, Sept
1987), Vol. 1, ed. by Hans Mukarovsky. Wien: Afro-Pub, 261-274.
Professeur
émérite, Université Paris Diderot Paris-7
This paper intends to demonstrate, by the way of an historical overview of Africas centrality from the beginnings of mankind, that all over successive historical globalisations, Africa South of the Sahara (we may roughly take it as a geographical subcontinent) was no more no less than other worlds (Indian Ocean world, Mediterranean world, Far East Asia, Europe, etc.) at the centre of the other worlds. Europeans have built their idea of Africa, which they believed and still believe they had discovered, while they were by large the last ones to do so. Africa and Africans developed a long history before Europeans interfered. Moreover, they played a prominent role at different stages of world globalization before Western intervention.
Needless to remind that mankind began in Africa and diffused from Africa all over the world.
Geographically, Africa is located at the core of three worlds. Africa allowed them to be connected one with the other: the Mediterranean world (from Ancient times), the Indian Ocean World, and (quite later) the Atlantic world.
Therefore, from the beginning of Ancient history, Africa played a major worldwide role:
-
Africa was for long the major provider of gold, either to the
Indian Ocean world (from Zimbabwe), as to the Mediterranean and
European world (from western sudan). It was already known by
Herodotus (fifth century BC) and was superseded only in the 18th
century when gold began to be imported from Brazil. African gold
was a major incentive to help develop the rest of the world. Of
course Africans did not know it, but African gold, transmitted to
Europe by the Arabs, financed Marco Polos travel to China
in the 13th century. African gold payed for the
Portuguese fleet in the fifteenth century, and for the creation
of the first sugar plantations in Canaries islands, Saõ Tome
then Brazil.
-
Africa was a major world provider of force of labor, sending
slaves to the rest of the world, as well to the Muslim world, to
India, as to the Americas. Plantations, whose economic importance
was prominent in the premodern era, were possible only thanks to
African manpower
-
With the industrial Revolution, Africa was a major provider of
raw materials for British and French growing industrialisation:
tropical vegetal oil seeds and tinted wood conditioned
lightening, oiling of machines and textile industry all over the
nineteenth century, as long as electricity and chemical dyes did
not yet exist. It went on with rubber, coffee and cocoa at the
turn of the twentieth century
-
Useless to remind that today, Africa is a leader in sources of
energy (gas) and precious minerals again. South African gold
renewed with the ancient gold streams, providing 60percent of the
gold in the world (80percent of the western gold after the soviet
revolution)
The question is not so much to demonstrate it, which might (and should) be relatively well known, but to understand why these evidences were let aside, forgotten, or even denied. Of course we may (negatively) assert that others confiscated African gold, African men and African raw materials. But it may be as instructive to (positively) look at the process by which Africa afforded so many wealth and products without which other continents could not develop. Africa was necessary to world development and Africans were actors and unceasingly adapting partners to be studied as such, and not to be just reduced to passive victims (no more no less than others, for other reasons; plantations could not develop without planters, but also without slaves; industry could not develop without industrial discoveries and steam machines, but it could not produce without African raw materials).
Why was it denied only for Africa, which was just made a periphery by the will of Western knowledge as early as European believed to have discovered Africa? Let us rather say that Africans discovered Europeans, long after they had already met Arabs, Indians, and even Chinese. Africa was not marginal to capitalism: like others, it was a major condition for world development, i.e. for the making of capitalism.
It is an undisputed fact that at some stage in the distant past Austronesian-speaking mariners from the Indonesian islands crossed the Indian Ocean to Africa and Madagascar.
But this poses many questions: Was this crossing a single event? Or were there ongoing crossings over many years even centuries? Did these mariners settle in Africa? If so, where? How far inland did they penetrate? In what ways, if any, did they influence the cultures of Africa? Precisely who were the Indonesian mariners who came to Africa? Why did they come? Were they driven by opportunities to trade or was there some basic urge to explore the unknown as must have been the case with their brethren in the Pacific? Was their interest restricted to the East coast of Africa? Or did they sail round the Cape and up to the Bight of Benin and beyond? How did the settlement of Madagascar feature in this geographic puzzle? What was the relationship between Austronesian-speaking Madagascar and mainland Africa?
This paper endeavours to answer these questions on the strength of the available evidence, with particular focus on the Zanj of East Africa, and evidence of Indonesian influences in Western Africa including a speculative flurry as to how Mahayana Buddhists of SEA may have left their mark on important aspects of Nigerian culture.
There has long been a widespread historical and anthropological idea that, up till very recent times, women everywherewhatever the kin structure of their societywere always, in the last analysis, under the authority of the men of their society. Whether in societies with matrilineal or patrilineal descent, womens position was the same. Under patriliny the husband has that authority; under matriliny, the mothers brother. But is that universally true? The vast majority of historians come from and write on societies, from China and Japan in the east to Europe in the west, characterized by long histories of often outright patriarchy. Male dominance tends to be woven into the understandings that historians grow up with and confront in their personal lives. But what if we shift our historical attention to regions outside the long middle belt of the Eastern Hemisphere? Does matriliny equally entail male dominance over the course of time, or might matriliny have significantly different consequences for the roles of women in history? Two very long-term histories from widely separated parts of the African continent offer arresting perspectives on this issue. One of these histories involves the peoples of the southeastern regions of central Africa; the other, the ancient societies of the northern Middle Nile Basin.
Historian/Reseacher, INDO-AFRICA, Rondebosch, South Africa.
Just after midnight on the 15th of September 2006, this historian, ETV crew, a journalist, a number of interested academics from the University of Stellenbosch, a government minister and several interested laymen together with the farm owner Mr. David Luscombe and his and my sons gathered on the summit of a small rantjie (little ridge) in the Moordenaars Karoo (South Africa, 300 km NE from Cape Town), where a 530 m long stone wall running the full length of the rantjie reached its summit. The mixed gathering came to witness the Moon Major Standstill at its rising that would be observable on a fixed line marked in the veldt by three stone built shrines. I predicted this event with reference to my research of 27 years in hundreds of stone structures of this kind all over South Africa and Zimbabwe. Should it work, as I was sure it would, though not all of the present observers shared the unequivocal sentiment with me, the question to answer would be: who, when and for what purpose built this kind of structures in southern Africa. My answer was simple: The Quena or Otentottu (commonly known as Hottentots), who inherited this astronomical knowledge and the religion that called for it from their Dravida ancestors, who, searching for gold in Africa miscegenated with the Kung or Bushman women and produced the Mixed (Otentottu) Quena (Red People worshipping the Red God of India) owners of pre-European southern Africa. None of the archaeology departments at South African Universities was interested. The Moon at its rare and extreme distance from the sun rose precisely as predicted on the line of the three stone shrines, which were marked by burning fires, plus one fire marking the monolith of the true East shrine. The event was filmed and photographed, and was shown the following day on ETV as well as in the local newspapers the following weekend (16Se2011). A feat that has never been witnessed and recorded on the continent of Africa (ancient Ethiopia)!
The following Weekend Argus of 23 September 2006, p. 39, brought a comment from Prof. Andy Smith, the Head of Archaeology Department at the University of Cape Town, under the title: No evidence for India star-gazing heritage: Archaeologist Andrew Smith challenges interpretation of origins of Karoo stone walls. Smith opened his article with: THE ENTIRE story of the Indian origins of alignments in the Karoo to read lunar events is a complete fabrication by Dr. Cyril Hromník., Weekend Argus, September 16. His only explanation of these stone walls in the Karoo and elsewhere was that they may have been constructed by Khoisan [a fictitious archaeological name for the genuine Quena] people defending themselves against Boer expansionism in the 18th century.
This paper will present and explain some of the stone temple structures in the Moordenaars Karoo in their Indo-African historical context. Cheap Marxist archaeology is no longer sustainable.
For more than two
decades historians endeavour to reconstruct the past of ancient
Africa in terms of World History but they often do this in
general and speculative frame of mind. They insist on economical
and cultural developments and mostly neglect the formation of
states and dynastic history. The reason for this one-sided
approach to the history of ancient Africa is the supposed dearth
of sources. In fact, traditions of origins as well as oral and
written king lists and chronicles in Arabic contain, if properly
analysed, surprisingly rich material for the reconstruction of
state foundations in sub-Saharan Africa during the pre-Christian
era.
In order to
illustrate the validity of this approach we will concentrate on
the founding of the major states in Central West Africa by
refugees from the collapsed Assyrian Empire towards 600 BCE. On
the basis of recent scholarly work, we will try to show that
these states were established by people belonging to various
communities formerly deported by the Assyrian authorities and
resettled by them in Syria-Palestine. When after the defeat of
the Assyro-Egyptian coalition in 605 BCE, these people were
up-rooted by their aggressive local neighbours, they followed the
Egyptian army in its flight to the Nile valley and they continued
to Central West Africa. Here they must have confronted the local
inhabitants, expelling some and subjecting others. Unfortunately,
the traditions are too vague on these encounters between the
foreign invaders and the autochthones to allow firm conclusions.
The evidence
provided by the dynastic traditions of Kanem-Bornu, the Hausa and
Yoruba states is more precise with respect to the different
ancient Near Eastern groups participating in state-building
process. Contrary to what might have been expected, the members
of the Assyrian elite were largely excluded from the leading
positions in the new states. In their stead the available
dynastic sources in the different states bear witness to strong
reactions against them. In the traditions of the individual
states these early antagonisms are expressed in different terms:
in Kanem tradition by the Babylonian-led Duguwa opposition
against Sefuwa domination, in Hausa tradition by the rise of the
proto-Israelite followers of Magajiya and the marginalization of
Bayajidda and in Yoruba tradition by the Babylonian-led revolt of
Abiodun against the tyrannical Gaha. In all these cases ancient
Near Eastern traditions were profoundly reshaped in accordance
with the fierce opposition of the people against any restoration
of an oppressive Assyrian state on African soil.
Other aspects of
anti-Assyrian attitudes in Central West Africa are reflected in
the rise of states in which the kings were systematically
deprived of effective power and in which queen mothers and queen
sisters were instead given considerable responsibilities. In
conjunction with state-building, ancient Near Eastern influences
can also be suspected in other dimensions of social complexity:
the spread of metal-working and other handicrafts, urbanization,
intensive agriculture, well-digging and even the proliferation of
slavery. In view of the considerable impact of the Assyrian
factor on sub-Saharan history, it is quite conceivable that even
the great Bantu expansion was a distant consequence of the
upheavals produced by the Near Eastern invaders in Central West
Africa towards 600 BCE.
This is a study of the history of long contact and cultural exchange between China and Africa during the pre-modern time. The article will be divided into three parts. The first part deals with the historiography of Chinese literature regarding the transnational and trans-continental activities, including the Chinese classics, such as the ancient official historical documents as called 24 Histories, the non-official historical studies, and the study by the modern Chinese scholars. The second part will cover the historical evidence including the archeological discovery in China and Africa, the data and interpretation of the cultural contact between China and Africa in early time, and the summary of the historical study by scholars worldwide. As some Chinese scholars indicate, the early exchange of commodities occurred in pre-Han Dynasty while the archeological discovery in Egypt indicates that such contact may occur as early as the the 1000s before Christ. The third part illustrates the possible resource of the future study, which might provide more sources of the historical study of China-Africa relations in the ancient time.
Ndu Life Njoku, Ph.D
Department of History/International Studies
Faculty of
Humanities
Imo State
University
Owerri, Nigeria
In the context of
anti-imperialism and area studies, colonial and post-colonial
African cultural and development experience have benefited
tremendously from a popular aspect of African diaspora education
and culture, namely: the intellectual consciousness aroused by
academic discourses on Africa. Through the "expository"
and radical works of scholars and writers like W.E.B Dubbois,
Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Malcolm X, Frantz
Fanon, Walter Rodney, to mention just these, disciplinary
approaches have crystallized and have been adopted to enable each
discipline identify its relevance to the theme of development,
and from the perspective of that discipline propose ideas, offer
new visions, and make meaningful contributions to social develop-
ment thinking in/on Africa. This paper investigates the depth and
relevance of this strong cultural impact
from across the Atlantic. The paper shows that, in both the
short and long terms, varying degrees of not just literary but
also socio-cultural benefits are accruable to the African
experience from the "African-African diaspora intellectual
multi-nationalism" that underlies the African experience.
But, more importantly, the paper asks whether the social and
intellectual climate in Africa today makes for an enabling
environment which would continue to animate and sustain the
Pan-Africanist intellectual cooperation, and make for a
revival and re-invigoration of the fading concern for
Africa's development in a rapidly globalizing world.
Tshwane University of Technology,
South Africa
African discourses on Egyptology are becoming more and more established and they often seek to counter the common Eurocentric bias that Africa had no history or culture worth talking about. African scholars of Egyptology in addition to some North Atlantic intellectuals are now claiming that Africa is in fact the Cradle of Humanity and hence the foremost vehicle of civilisation. Increasingly, research is deepening in this respect. But Dani Nabudere, an eminent Ugandan scholar is taking the project even further. Rather than stop with the task of proving the primacy of the Egyptian past and its numerous cultural and scientific achievements, Nabudere is strenuously attempting to connect that illustrious past with the African present. This, remarkably, is what makes his project worthy of careful attention. And this is essentially what his philosophy of Afrikology is about; tracing the historical, cultural, scientific and social links between the Cradle of Humankind and the contemporary world with a view to healing the seismic severances occasioned by violence, false thinking, war, loss and dispossession in order to accomplish an epistemological and psychic sense of wholeness for African collective self. Of course, this proposition has considerable importance as a philosophy of universalism and not just as an African project. Afrikology intends to transcend the dichotomies of inherited from Western epistemology that maintains a divide between mind and body or heart and mind and revert back instead to an earlier cosmology perfected in ancient Egypt that conceives of knowledge generation as a holistic enterprise where the fundamental binarisms of the Western universe do not really apply.
This paper interrogates the viability of Afrikology as both a philosophy of action and consciousness.
HDR, Egyptologue,
linguiste et politologue
Université de
Yaoundé I / Cameroun
De
lhistoire comme « Janus de la vie moderne »
(J . Capart, 1945 : 15), donc continuité entre le
passé et lavenir, à lhistoire conçue comme rupture
entre un passé qui ignore lécriture et un passé qui en
procède, il y a toute une différence de conception qui soulève
la question de la pertinence épistémologique dune
histoire paradoxalement appelée préhistoire .
Dans le cas de
lAfrique, il y a lieu dadmettre avec certains auteurs
que létude de sa préhistoire est absolument indispensable
à la compréhension de son histoire, dautant plus que
cest dans celle-là, en particulier dans la connaissance du
Sahara « humide » néolithique que se trouve la clef
de la naissance de la civilisation égyptienne et en même temps
celle de lunité culturelle du monde noir (R. et M.
Cornevin, 1970 : 6).
A cet égard,
légyptologie apparaît aujourdhui, de plus en plus,
comme une source majeure et primordiale de la nouvelle
historiographie africaine inaugurée par le déchiffrement des
hiéroglyphes en 1822 par J.F. Champollion, de par la
diversité, loriginalité et labondance de sa
documentation.
Dans le cadre de
létude des rapports réels ou supposés que lAfrique
semble avoir entretenus avec dautres continents dans un
passé reculé dit préhistorique ou protohistorique,
lobjet de notre communication sinscrit dans une
démarche qui consiste à réfléchir sur léclairage que
peuvent apporter certaines sources mythologiques, iconographiques
et linguistiques dans lintelligence de lhistoire
africaine dont les époques les plus reculées sont évoquées en
égyptien ancien par des expressions caractéristiques telles
que »le temps du dieu », « depuis le temps de
Rê », « les années de Geb ou Koba, le dieu
du Temps, équivalent du grec Chronos (Oum Ndigi, 1996,
1997 : 383) que lon retrouve dans certaines
langues bantu (basaa, duala, ewondo) : Koba
« autrefois », « temps anciens » ;
ndee Koba « temps de Koba » ou « temps
anciens » ; mbok Koba « monde ancien »
(Oum Ndigi,2009 : 20-21
Cest ainsi
que le dieu égyptien Aker, le dieu romain Janus et le dieu
nubien Apedemak, en tant que représentations symboliques de la
double face de lhistoire, font partie de limaginaire
des Bantu comme le révèlent leur art, dun côté, et
certaines de leurs désignations temporelles, en
loccurrence, akiri et yani signifiant à la fois
« hier » et « demain ». Autant
déléments suggestifs qui semblent consacrer
luniversalité dune conception de lhistoire
comme projection dun même esprit, lÊtre-Temps, à
la fois dans le passé et dans le futur, comparable au dieu
Yahvé des Hébreux ou de
In the paper I will follow Wim van Binsbergens' recent discussions of the nature of large scale and long term interactions and connectivities in African prehistory. First I will summarise some of the most recent archaeological evidence for long-term interractions between Africa and Eurasia in terms of exchanges and movements of crops and food technologies over last four thousand years. Second I will suggest that a theorising of civilisation by Mauss provides us with a more flexible framework within which some of the aspects of regional flows and connectivites and long term continuities can be understood. Third the suggestion that boundaries between 'house cultures' and 'body cultures' as cosmocracies sustain both interactions and connectivites between Africa and Eurasia but also suggest the presence of long-term 'civilisational' identities.
Space
and maritime context. Forces of marin orientation and maritime
migration. Terrestric and maritime lifestyles. Sedentarisation
and terrestrism. Mobility as historical stigma. Present division
between Land and sea resulted from the last ice age around 10.000
years ago.
Political
leadership in Southeastasian societies was not bound to territory
and had moving centres with occasional reunion of people (
amphictyonia ). Rounding up people and concentrating them in a
certain place within systemic clientelism. Resistance to
oppression resulted in ikut
strategy or flight. Far away colonies were won for
the many princes (Vak)
within polygyny of kings. Economy of plunder, whereby furage was
used to increase and satisfy the clientel. Maritime migrations
were manyfold and did not be a one way afair. North-South and
West-East migrations through the Indian Ocean. Out off and into
Africa, Europa, India, Indochina and Australia. Indian
Ocean culture and society established as a continuum between
three continents. Chinese cultural objects were transmitted into
Africa, Europe and vice versa from Africa and Europe to the Far
East. The central role of Same/ Bajo/ Bugis.
The Cham of Lin-ye and
Funan in present Vietnam, the Iban
and Ngaju in present
Borneo/Kalimantan and the Segeju/Bajun
of Eastafrica. The monsuns and appropriate technical innovations
for sailing and crossing oceans. The emergence of the Malay world
and expansion of the Austronesian group of languages eastwards up
to the Southamerican coast, southwards to Northwest Australia (
Melville Island and Carpentaria Bay ) and Northwards up to Taiwan
and Japan (Okinawa). The space of dibawah
and diatas angin and
Malay as lingua franca in the harbours around the Indian Ocean
until the eight century. Traces of Same/Bajo
serpentines from East and Westafrica up to the Indonesian
Archipelag, Taiwan and Japan. The masters of the
mountains in Nordostafrika and the Federation of
Sungaya. The Etymon Somal, Boran
and Pokomo (Oromo) and
the Galla Phratry
represent the Austronesian category of serpentines (dragons) and
demonstrates Austronesian space categories related to
status. The Shaka appear
as red kings in Northeast-Afrika down to the Zulu
of Southeastafrika and the Sakalava
and Anteisaka of
Madagaskar. Malays appear as Kalanga in Mocambique. The colour
white is not a somatic but a ideological category
since the serpentine (dragon) is symbolised by the milky way and
in Hindu/Buddha context denotes within the varna
category ritual purity of the Brachman elite against the impure
blacks, like traders, even one finds some
Brachmans within international trade in early times, and
red characterizes the habit category of the warrior
class among the Indo-arians. This proofs that colours are not
somatic categories, but ideological ones out of varna
und guna
classifications.
We can
now trace ethnic similaritis between the Somali
of Northeastafrika and the Samal
of the Central-Philippines, the Temuru
as foreigners arriving in Eastafrica und the Anteimoro.
Among the migration legends of the Anteimoro,
who start at the Mekkan sands, is one place, called Ussu, which
also is the toponym of origin of the Bajo-Bugis
at the bay of Bone in the island of Sulawesi/Indonesia. The
toponyms Bédjaya (Vidjaya) und Bugia in Nordafrika and their
economy of plunder directed up to South Italy demonstrate former
Austronesian identity. In Kiwayu and Shanga in the Lamu area of
present Kenya we found traces of remote pre-Islamic
and pre-Bantu
Austronesian context which can answer the question of a
speculative pre-Bantu language niveau in that area. The Etymon Wadebuli
and Wadubuki in Songo
Menara near Kilwa refer to Austronesian space and status
categories. In Swahili Madagaskar
is called Buki, and the
Etymon Buques and Ubuque,
as their language, stand as names of reference for Madagaskar
before the Cazis
arrived and confirm with the Eastcoast of Sulawesi/ Indonesia
from where the traces moved towards the Straits of Malacca, the
Indian Ocean South of Sri Lanka, the Maledives, the Comoro
Archipelago or the island of Reunion to Eastafrica or Madagaskar.
The Wak-Wak armadas
mentioned during the 10th century in East African waters as
arrivals from the Far East had their local base on Comoro islands
from where they plundered Islamic trading cities along the East
African coast. Beginning in the 13.Century traces of Austronesian
people at the coast of Eastafrica disappear and can be found
later only around Lake Nyassa in the Hinterland, around the Niger
in Westafrica and in Madagaskar. At the same time migrations into
the Indonesian Archipelago prevail and transmit African cultural
heritage.
(due to serious illness Prof. Tauchmann will not be able to attend the conference; in addition to the above abstract, Wim van Binsbergen will use the present slot in the programme to report on 'the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann hypothesis of extensive South and South East Asian impact on sub-Saharan Africa in protohistorical times´)
Anthropology Department, School of
Social Sciences & Chair, Wits University / Human Sciences
Ethics Committee (Non-Medical), University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa
The paper examines possible links between the southern African
practices of traditional healing (known as
bungoma as practiced by initiated practitioners
called sangoma) and trance and healing in southern India. The
paper is based on archaeological evidence and artefacts in
southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique)
and southern India, and on new archaeological analysis of these
materials, especially the material culture associated with this.
It also utilizes a reading of South Indian iconography, but is
not primarily based on historical reading of texts or oral
evidence. Evidence for an early linkperhaps dating from 600
CE to 1600 CEis developed by comparing instances of
material culture from traditions of the sangoma in the southern
Africa and the iconography of southern India, especially of
Ganesha and Hanuman. In particular, the ritual use of metal tools
and glass objects, specifically beads (ubuhlalu, insimbi, made of
metal and glass), the mace (sagila), axe
(lizhembe), spear (umkhonto, sikhali), the knife
(mukwa), and the fly whisk (lishoba, made either of
tails of hyaena [impisi] or of blue wildebeest [ngongoni]). All
of these items are found in the ritual practices and iconography
of the sangoma and of iconography and practices of devotees of
Hanuman and Ganesha, among other gods, in south Indian Hinduism.
This material culture, especially the weapons of the
southern African sangoma and the south Indian icons and ritual
practices, show strong similarities that suggest more than trade
was involved in early links between the southern Indian region
and the southern African region.
African Studies
Centre, Leiden
A fierce debate
reigns in African archaeology over the origin of iron production
and iron work in Africa. New dates of early iron sites keep
pushing the first dates of iron production farther back in
history, well into the First Millennium BCE, and gradually, the
earliest African dates seem to be approaching the inception of
iron production in the Middle East. Thus, an increasing number of
scholars posits an independent invention of iron smelting on the
old continent itself, and for some good reasons: the rather
sudden appearance of iron smelting in various areas south of the
Sahara at roughly the same time; the sheer diversity of oven
types used in Africa; and finally the fact that the traditional
diffusion routes, such as along the Nile valley, seem have been
discredited. On the other hand, the absence of a preceding bronze
technology still forms a considerable obstacle, as it is hard to
imagine how a full-fledged iron smelting could develop without
that intermediary phase.
This contribution will not try to formulate a definitive position
on this debate, as that has to be solved by new diggings and thus
new findings, especially better dating. I will approach this
problem from an anthropological perspective, and explore the ways
in which the iron smelting and smithing as two distinct
occupations have developed into integrated positions
within African societies. Africa-wide, several patterns of smith
integration into the societies can be discerned, ranging from a
fairly business-like arrangement of specialists, to deep
caste-like divisions in society, and from strictly iron
tdechnology to a clustering of specialisations. This pattern of
smith-integration then will be compared to selected examples from
South East Asia and the Middle East, to ascertain whether there
are systematic differences. The guiding notion of this
contribution is that there are indeed structural differences
between the larger regions, and that these differences may shed
some light on the early phases of the adoption of iron.
ABSTRACT. Why should we study Africas transcontinental continuities, and how could this be a surprising and counter-paradigmatic topic, more than a century after the professionalisation of African Studies? Let me introduce this topic by explaining how I myself came to study Africas transcontinental continuities. My interest here is not to engage in autobiographical self-indulgence, but to help lay bare the structures and preconceptions of Africanist research to the extent to which they determine our view of these transcontinental continuities. In the process we shall also address the important issue of why transcontinental continuities were obscured, not only from the (potentially hegemonic) view of Western scholars but also from the consciousness of historical actors in Africa and Asia. After a few methodological considerations, we will end with the question of what a fuller awareness of transcontinental continuities brings to Africa, and what it risks to take away from, Africa -- finally considering the interplay between empirical regional Area Studies, and Intercultural Philosophy.
ABSTRACT. The argument considers selected aspects of South and South East Asian culture and history (the kingship, musical instruments, ceramics and gaming pieces), against the background of the results (here briefly summarised in Section 2) of the authors earlier results into transcontinental continuities between Asia and Africa in the field of divination and ecstatic cults. After posing preliminary methodological questions, the leading framework that emerges is that of a multidirectional global transcontinental network, such as appears to have gradually developed since the Neolithic. Having argued the possibility of Hinduist and Buddhist influences in addition to the well-acknowledged Islamic ones, the next question discussed is: what kind of attestations of possibly transcontinental continuities might we expect to find in sub-Saharan Africa? From a long list, in addition to divination three themes are highlighted out as particularly important: ecstatic cults, kingship, and boat cults. The discussion advances conclusive evidence for the Hinduist / Buddhist nature of the state complex centring on Great Zimbabwe, East Central Zimbabwe, as a likely epicentre for the transmission of South-East-Asian-inspired forms of kingship and ecstatic cults. A provisional attempt is made at periodisation of the proposed Hinduist / Buddhist element in sub-Saharan Africa, and the limitations of transcontinental borrowing in protohistorical and historical times is argued by reference to an extensive prehistoric cultural substratum from which both South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are claimed to have drawn and which becomes manifest, for instance, in the tree cult. On the basis of future research advocated here, new insights in transcontinental continuities are to be expected, that throw new light on the extent to which Africa has always been part of global cultural history, and should not be imprisoned in a paradigm that (out of a sympathetic but mistaken loyalty to African identity and originality) seeks to explain things African exclusively by reference to Africa.
Note: initially Wim van Binsbergen was scheduled to present the following argument, a summary of his book of the same title, which is now nearing completion; however, this would have been too large a scope for a mere paper, and would have taken us into a technical philosophical discussion of the Ancient Greek Presocratics, while the above replacement paper has more immediate Africanist content.
This
argument seeks to contribute to the study of the global history
of human thought and philosophy. It calls in question the
popular, common perception of the Presocratic philosophers as
having initated Western philosophy, and particularly of
Empedocles as having initated the system of four elements as
immutable and irreducible parallel components of reality. Our
point of departure is the puzzling clan system of the Nkoya
people of South Central Africa, which turns out to evoke a
cosmology of six basic dimensions, each of which consists of a
destructor, something that is being destroyed, and a third,
catalytic agent. This is strongly reminiscent of the East Asian
correlative systems as in the yì jing
cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of
the eight trigrams two taken at a time; and particularly of the
five-element cosmology of Taoism in general, in which the basic
relations between elements are defined as an unending cycle of
transformations by which each element is either destructive or
productive of the next. Further explorations into Ancient Egypt,
India, sub-Saharan Africa and North America suggest, as a Working
Hypothesis, that such a transformative cycle of elements may be
considered a prehistoric substrate, possibly as old as dating
from the Upper Palaeolithic, informing Eurasian, African and
North American cosmologies; but possibly also only as recent as
the Bronze Age, and transmitted transcontinentally in
(proto-)historical times. With this Working Hypothesis we turn to
the Presocratics and especially Empedocles, whose thought is
treated in some detail. Here we find that the transformative and
cyclic aspects of the putative substrate system also occasionally
surface in their work and in that of their commentators
(especially Aristotle and Plato), but only to be censored out in
later, still dominant, hegemonic and Eurocentric interpretations.
This then puts us to a tantalising dilemma: (1) Can we vindicate
our Working Hypothesis and argue that the Presocratics have build
upon, and transformed (as well as misunderstood!), a cosmology
(revolving on the cyclical transformation of elements) that by
their time had already existed for many centuries? Or (2) must we
altogether reject our Working Hypothesis, give up the idea of
very great antiquity and transcontinental distribution of a
transformative element system as an Upper Palaeolithic substrate
of human thought and in fact revert to a Eurocentric
position, where the attestations of element systems world-wide
are primarily seen as the result of the recent transcontinental
diffusion of Greek thought from the Iron Age onward. Both
solutions will be considered. Typologically, but with
considerable linguistic and comparative mythological support, our
argument identifies essential consecutive steps (from range
semantics to binary oppositions to cyclical element
transformations and dialectical triads), in humankinds
trajectory from Upper Palaeolithic modes of thought towards
modern forms of discursive thought. It is here that the present
argument seeks to make a substantial contribution to the theory
and method of studying the prehistory of modes of thought
worldwide. On the one hand we will present considerable
linguistic arguments for the claim of great antiquity of the most
rudimentary forms of element cosmology. On the other hand, we
will apply linguistic methods to identify the origin, in West
Asia in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, not of the postulated
substrate system as a whole but at least of part of the
nomenclature of the Chinese yì jing system.
The region indicated constitutes a likely environment from where
the cross model as a mechanism of Pelasgian
expansion (van Binsbergen 2010 and in press; van Binsbergen
& Woudhuizen 2011) might allow us to understand subsequent
spread over much of the Old World and part of the New World
including the presence of the transformative element cycle
among the Nkoya. However, in the penultimate section of the
argument a strong alternative case will be presented: that for
direct, recent demic diffusion from East or South Asia to
sub-Saharan Africa in historical times.
return to: Topicalities page | Shikanda portal index
page last modified: 01-05-2012 18:47:00