Africa in proto-globalisation

The pattern of Africa's wider global involvement can only be assessed through painstaking, concrete historical research. In order to appreciate processes of cultural transformation on the African continent today, and to explode the condescending stereotypes to which North Atlantic inquiry into African cultural history has often given rise, the third part of the project will consist of an extended case study highlighting processes of 'early', 'pre-twentieth century', 'proto-'globalization in which major parts of the African continent were involved, in interaction with adjacent continents. Islam, Christianity, the slave trade, and popular music are well-known examples of such exchanges. However, this part of the project will specifically focus on African diagnostic and therapeutic systems deriving from Arabian geomancy, which are found practically all over Africa today. Uncovering the complex and astounding intellectual and ritual exchanges that accompanied this instance of global exchange and participation, we hope to identify the specific forms and processes of cultural globalization and localization in Africa, the growth of cultural identities and orientations, and the specific patterns of localization which, by the second half of the second millennium, made Africa into a peripheral recipient of global cultural processes, instead of (as in earlier millennia) actively participating in their initiation and global circulation. From my complementary website on Ancient models of thought may access an Internet book on the diffusion of geomantic divination and mankala board-games as instances of proto-globalisation.

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