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Overview
The great strength of Jaffe's work lies in its unique theoretical perspective, which stresses the distinctive character of Africa's social structures and historical development. Crucially, Jaffe rejects all efforts to impose Eurocentric models of history onto Africa, whether it be liberal notions of 'progress' or Marxist theories of class struggle, arguing instead that the key dynamics underpinning African history are unique to the continent itself, and rooted in conflicts between different modes of production.
The work also includes a foreword by the distinguished economist and political theorist Samir Amin, in which he outlines the contribution of Jaffe's work to our understanding of African history and its ongoing post-colonial struggles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783609857 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2017 |
| Series: | African History Archive |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 723 KB |
About the Author
Samir Amin is a renowned radical economist, the director of the Forum du Tiers Monde (Third World Forum) in Dakar, Senegal, and chair of the World Forum for Alternatives.
Samir Amin is Director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal; and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives.
Read an Excerpt
A History of Africa
By Hosea Jaffe
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 1985 Vittoria Ada Tutone JaffeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78699-065-5
CHAPTER 1
African Communism and Despotism
From the 10th Century, during the Crusades — which the South African thinker Ben Kies has called 'the first great plundering expedition of Europe' — learned historians in the African countries bordering the Mediterranean, writing in Arabic, described the civilizations of the Sudan and the regions along the course of the Niger. El Bekri, El Idrisi, Ibn Hawkal, Ibn Khaldoun, Ibn Battuta, El Masudi and Leo Africanus revealed the existence of a series of societies, which were subsequently 'discovered' by European travellers and writers such as Dapper, Lopez, Cresques, Mungo Park, Barth and Frobenius. Since the political independence gained after the war, knowledge of these and similar societies in Central and East Africa has been extended by African scholars in proportion to their ideological independence of Euro-American schools. Only the most generalized data have been included in our brief chronology, with the main object of illustrating the antecedents of the modern liberation movements.
Apart from the well known civilizations that flourished in Egypt Carthage, Kerma, Napata and Meroe in the pre-Christian era, many societies existed in other parts of Africa comparable with those that grew up at the same time in Europe and Asia. The writings of James Africanus Horton, Edward Blyden and Casely Hayford in the 19th Century, and Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and Amilcar Cabral in more recent times, indicate that the 'lost past' is itself an important 'memoria' for the independence movements. Some of the illustrative examples in this section suggest that for Ethiopia and the liberation movement in Zimbabwe, for instance, the 'lost' — or better, perhaps, 'buried' — past is a vital element of our own times. Mali, Ghana, Benin, Zaire and Tanzania, among others, have taken their very names from this past Ancient kings' titles have been made into honorific prefixes of the presidents in Ghana, Mali, Zaire and Swaziland and of the former tribal administrators in Ankole, Ijebu, Rwanda and Burundi. Modibo Keita, the leader of Mali's struggle for independence, who died in prison in 1977, laid claim to the illustrious name of the Keitas of the kingdom of Mansa Moussa, whose dynasty is recorded in Abraham Cresques's Catalonian map of 1375. Cabral, Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere,Neto, Keita, Sekou Touré and Samora Machel, each in their own way, have shown how independence movements 'are attempting to recapture the origins and authenticity of the African heritage', as the Nigerian President General O. Obasanjo, put it when he opened the 1977 Lagos Arts Festival. Kenyatta recalled the old co-operative spirit of 'Harambee' — 'let us work together' — for purposes which came in for criticism within Kenya, but none the less he too had recourse to this African 'memoria'. Nyerere, on a different intellectual plane, made the old 'Zanj'-Swahili collectivist spirit of 'Ujamaa', of mutual sharing, cooperative work and mutual respect (based on the ancient family structure of the gens), an essential part of his 'African socialism' and of the Arusha Declaration of 1967. Thus the 'lost past' lives again in the thought the symbolism and the practices of liberation movements and of the independent nations themselves.
The Present as Colonialised Past
The connection between the past and the liberation movements is not only subjective, as in the foregoing examples: above all it is objective, and the factor linking past and present was European colonialism. It is this mediation, with its slave trade, its conquest dispossession and subjection — material and spiritual — by both secular and religious agencies, that transmuted and then transmitted the essential elements of the ancient past to the present. This mutation and transmission was a real process. What came out of it may seem to be the past, but its essence is quite different, even in quality, from its appearance. The 'essence' may indeed be the opposite of the 'phenomenon', and the latter may invert and mystify the former. The problem of the pre-colonial past cannot be resolved simply by considering this past but only by considering the whole connecting system: pre-colonial society-colonialism-liberation movements. A single example will clarify this: the colonialists transmuted the role played by African kings and chiefs a thousand years ago, and it is the product of this mutation, not the original role, that in the 20th Century, after the Second World War, became part of the role assumed by the kings and presidents of a number of states after independence. Thus it is not the past that is perpetuated, but its colonialist mutation, albeit in an apparently non-colonialist setting.
The very first modern-style political analyses of the African past (as described by Arabic-language historians in the countries bordering the Mediterranean, from El Masudi, Ibn Hawkal and Ibn Khaldoun of the 10th Century onwards) were made by the Liberian President Stephen Allen Benson (1816-65) who went to Liberia from the United States at the age of six; by Edward W. Blyden (1832-1912), a West Indian who went to Liberia in 1851; by Alexander Crummell (1821-98), who went to Liberia from the United States by way of Cambridge in 1853; and by the Edinburgh-trained Sierra Leone doctor, James Africanus Horton (1835-83). Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford (1866-1930), a barrister from Cape Coast Gold Coast (Ghana), educated at Fourah Bay, a disciple of Blyden, may be regarded as the last of the old school and one of the first of the more recent if not more modern, African nationalists.
All these political writers and scholars went back to the indigenous culture of West Africa, the 'communism' or 'socialism' of the 'aborigines'. What they studied, however, was not the authentic past, but a version transmuted by four centuries of colonialism. All of them, too, looked at the past through European spectacles of 'race': they all accepted that man could be divided into different racial groups and, implicitly or openly, that the civilization built up by the white races in Europe was superior. The racial classification they accepted, thanks to European or American indoctrination by church, state and university, was that of dividing man into 'white' and 'black' — a racial theory that ran through their study of the communal aspect of early West African societies. Thus, these first African political analyses of the history of West Africa — like those in the autobiography of the Arabic-speaking rebel Tippoo Tib in East Africa, written at the beginning of this century — were already biased by the European-created colonialist concept of race. Hence not only were the objective societies which they studied not originals but colonialist 'copies', but also their subjective view of those societies was, literally, coloured by the racial ideology of colonialism. This combination of obstacles to an understanding of the ancient past has persisted to the present day, albeit to an extent that varies with place and time. The weakness was not peculiar to the African pioneers mentioned above, nor to the others, less well known, who lived a century or so ago. The point here is the way in which objective and subjective changes were made to the old past by colonialism as a mediator between past and present.
One significant difference between Benson, Blyden and Hayford on the one hand and Joseph Kizerbo, Sekene Mody Cissoko and some other modern African historians on the other, is that the former saw mainly the communitarian, collective, 'communist' side of the old societies, while the latter take account of other elements such as hierarchy and private property. And in the final analysis it is this double-sided nature of the past that is most important for a modern reconstruction of it.
The most important societies for the modern liberation movements were: Zanj or Azania in East Africa, the kingdoms of the Sudan and of the Niger in West Africa; Nubia and Meroe in Sudan; Pharaonic Egypt; Ethiopia at the time of Axum and after King Ezana; the Congo kingdoms of Central Africa, and Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. In their territorial-temporal union these cover much of the continent. For the most part their genesis and rise took place in the period that our chronology calls the 'lost past'. The decline of some took place under Ptolemaic and Roman colonialism, but, for the most, mainly in the 'colonial' period from the 15th Century onwards. The whole process spans the millennia of the rise of Egypt, Carthage, the Sudan, Axum, Zanj, the Saharan and Niger-Sudanese, Zaire, Zambezi and Lake kingdoms, and the swift decline of the complex of tribal, despotic and feudalised African societies during the past 500 years. The first phase, of growth, has been described and documented, particularly by Arab-Africans, while Europeans have, in the main, given their own description and documentation of the phase of decline. For an understanding of the original, pre-colonial, societies, the Arab-African sources and research done by a handful of disinterested African, English, French, American and Eastern European, Russian and Indian scholars, since independence, are of fundamental importance. In the accounts of the declining phases by European and North American writers, however honestly intended, the distortions due to their colonialist history are almost inevitable.
The African Iron Ages
By the 1 st Century AD a series of Arab-Bantu speaking communities on the East coast of Africa was trading with Rome, Arabia and Asia, exporting ivory, oil, gold and craftware. Iron was the dominant material for tools and weapons in Meroe (700 BC to AD 350) on the Sudanese Nile, in Nok (before 500 BC) and Igbo Ukwu in Nigeria, and later in Zimbabwe, among the Masai of Kenya-Tanzania, the pastoral Baganda and the agricultural Bunyoro between Lake Victoria and the Ruwenzori mountains, and in some Saharan societies. Although some of these societies were classless and hence also stateless, while others had a sociopolitical stratification, all had strongly communitarian forms of landownership, cooperative labour, whether agricultural, pastoral, fishing or mining and crafts, and strong gentile linkages (exogamous with respect to the gens 'family', but endogamous within the tribe or federation of tribes). The social cell, as in most of America, Asia and Europe before classes formed, was the gens. The gens took many forms in Africa: thus the Masai had an intra-gentile grading of its largely nomadic population, while the Bunyoro gentes drew tribute from the agricultural Ganda, whose own kingship, the Kabaka, and Council of Elders, the Lukiko, were drawn largely from the leading gentes. Despite missionary 'divide and rule', the Bunyoro, led by the Kabarega, their king, fought by the side of the Ganda against England, thereby overcoming three-quarters of a millennium of tributary interdependence. Tribal and gentile inequalities in other African groups either overcame their ancient antagonisms or else were grist to the mill of European 'divide and rule' and 'indirect rule'.
African independence has driven the threshold of the Iron Age and of the Bantu diaspora further and further backwards in African historiography. This itself was a struggle of non-racial thinking and carbon-14 dating against the racist ideas about Bantu iron-users of Inskeep, Dart, Broome, Bleek and Meinhof. By 1940 the Bantu Iron Age was being mooted by Euro-archaeology as having begun about 1500. By 1960 the threshold had moved back to AD 1000; by 1980 it was conceded to be a thousand years earlier. Although Meroe island is no longer regarded by all as having been the 'Birmingham of Africa', Meroe — and Axum — worked iron by about 700 BC. Meroe and Axum followed on the metal-working Nubian Kerma and Napata societies, which provided some of Egypt's Pharaohs. The African scholar, Wai Andah, has shown that the Nigerian Nok people worked iron before 500 BC. From the Niger-Zaire centre, from Carthage after 850 BC, from Meroe, from the ancient haemetite-using peoples of the East African lake districts, from the fragile laterite iron ores in the soil of Zaire and Uganda, came not only the wondrous colours for the San, Khoi-Khoin, Bantu and other rock-paintings and incisions of central Tanzania and other sites, but axes and other tools. By 1000 BC the Bantu diaspora began from the Niger-Zaire Atlantic coast and Benue Plateau region, and 'Iron was in use by those who expanded and all would agree to the rapid, some would say explosive, expansion of the Bantu'. The iron-smiths of Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria, before the 8th Century AD, continued the ancient tradition in West Africa. In East Africa, from the Cape to the Horn, iron became a daily product, with copper and sometimes gold Iron production accompanied a transition in which hunting and fishing (once the main occupation, when the lakes were many times their present size, before 4000 BC and again in the 3rd millennium BC) rapidly took second place to nomadic pastoralism. Both were overwhelmed by mixed farming from at least the start of our present era. For some 500 years before the colonial holocaust the Xhosa and Natal Nguni mined and smelted iron, the Sotho worked with iron, copper and tin, and San hunters, Khoi-Khoin herders and Bantu mixed farmers were co-extensive territorially and socio-economically over Southern, East and parts of West Africa. The tourist-apartheid stricken remains of the nomadic Masai, San, Hadza, Sandawe and of forest-dwelling clients of the Bantu, can give no idea of the social and technological progress made from the time when the first crops were sown about 13000 BC in plateau and lacustrine East Africa, or from the time when cattle were domesticated in Algeria and Libya by 5700 BC.
European 'Africanists have made too little of the Early (from 700 BC, they say, to AD 400) and Late Iron Age in Africa, but too much, in general about iron, on which Greek and Roman technology rested after iron and iron-working were imported from Anatola, Turkey, where, by 1500 BC, it had been properly mined and worked, and the Hittite expansion, which also struck Egypt for a brief while. China, however, began using iron widely only after about 600 BC, Needham has informed us, but had a highly organized social and cultural life using stone and bronze before that, and iron did not change the basic social formation of China for millennia. The Americans used stone for the 50,000 years before the continent was 'discovered' by Columbus (or the Vikings), yet, with this single material — and wood — they managed to construct several levels of 'primitive communism', as well as the finely and deeply stratified Olmec, Mayan, Toltec, Aztec and Inca forms of the 'Asiatic mode' of production. The similar society of Pharaonic Egypt (3000 BC to the Ptolemaic conquest in 323 BC), used stone and timber as basic materials of labour; bronze refurbished but did not change the mode of production. Tutankhaman (1362-1352 BC) had a gold death-mask, but also an iron dagger (whose nickel content indicates a probable meteoric origin), but the introduction of iron by the Hyksos in no way rewove the fabric of Pharaonic 'communal despotism', as Ibn Khaldoun could have described it.
Gentile Communism
More important than the materials of labour — stone, wood, bronze, iron — was the geo-economic dynamic setting of society. This led, eventually, to the separation of the paths of modal development as between Europe and the rest of the world. The sea-valley-mountain stage, on which the drama of political economy was enacted in Europe, differed from the desert and mountain-bound river valleys of the great Asian and African civilizations, and from the forest-plateau, desert-ocean bound societies whose driving force was not irrigation but production for long-distance foreign trade, such as the Sahara-Sudan, Axum and Zanj societies, the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs, or the Carthaginians — those Phoenician settlers who were Africanized by Roman destruction, tribute and tyranny, after they had themselves exploited the Berbers, Numidians, Libyans and Mauretanians for half a millennium after they came to Africa around 1000 BC.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Africa by Hosea Jaffe. Copyright © 1985 Vittoria Ada Tutone Jaffe. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Preface by Samir AminPart One: African Communism and Despotism
Part Two: European Colonialism – Resistance and Collaboration
Part Three: Africa in the Inter-National Class Struggle
Part Four: Imperialism – African Emancipation