Recent archeological discoveries indicate that Africa was the birth place of humankind. Over the ages, the riches and wonders of Africa have attracted the world. Yet the Africans themselves often remained unknown or misunderstood. Here is a book to set the historical record straight.
Recent archeological discoveries indicate that Africa was the birth place of humankind. Over the ages, the riches and wonders of Africa have attracted the world. Yet the Africans themselves often remained unknown or misunderstood. Here is a book to set the historical record straight.
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Overview
Recent archeological discoveries indicate that Africa was the birth place of humankind. Over the ages, the riches and wonders of Africa have attracted the world. Yet the Africans themselves often remained unknown or misunderstood. Here is a book to set the historical record straight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781934389959 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | For Beginners |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2007 |
| Series: | For Beginners |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Shey Wolvek-Pfister is a painter and illustrator. This is her fourth For Beginners book.
Read an Excerpt
AFRICAN HISTORY FOR BEGINNERS
Part 1: African Dawn â?" A Dlasporan View
By Herb Boyd, Shey Wolvek-Pfister
For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1994 Herb BoydAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-934389-95-9
CHAPTER 1
FIRST WORDS
Call me Olagun. I am a griot, a master of words and memory, a keeper of the flame and the history of my people who dwell in the rain forests and the deserts, and beyond the distant African plains and savannas. I descend from the immortal griot Mamadou Keita of Mali and trace my ancestry back to the first African dawn. Since those primordial days my family has been the village griots, the talking books, who have not forgotten their duty to keep "the keys to the twelve doors of Mali."
Do not take lightly my words because they are recited and not written. What is said, a proverb of my people informs, lives the same eternity as that which is chiseled on a cave wall or scratched upon parchment. A talking book is no less valuable than one whose words are silent. To see history through the eyes of the Whites is nothing when you can hear it from the lips of a griot.
Hear my words, for I am but a vessel, a conduit through which the past is revealed, our history etched on the wind. Listen then, Children of Africa, we have had a glorious past and it presages a promising future.
In my generation, the fifteenth in our lineage, the Mandingo, the Bambara, the Fulani, and the Ashanti are threatened by a storm gathering in the north. There is much corning and going here in my village of Belandougou near the Sankarani river, within an arrow's flight from the tomb of Sundiata, the greatest of the Mali kings.
Already there are murmurs of war and pestilence in the silk-cotton trees and the divination stones foretell of great sailing boats from the north bearing jinns and evil ghosts. The griots, knowing that "all true learning should be a secret," have assembled from the four corners of the continent to make sure the past is secured from the invaders.
I, Olagun, the son of Omawale, because of my power to invoke the past and to predict the future, have been asked to speak. It is my task to open the first door, to speak of events since the dynasty of the Almoravids and the reign of Tenkhamenin.
It was told to me by my father, who was told by his father's father and passed along from the family of Ogun and Shango that the first breath of humankind occurred in Africa. Thus, my children, our oldest ancestors stepped from the mist and darkness 40,000 harvests ago. These black ancestors ventured from that "ancient Eden," setting out to discover the land beyond the Mountains of the Moon, beyond the vast savannas and veld land especially to build major civilizations here and all over the world.
I owe to a gift of prophecy a way of knowing how the first bones will offer hints of the dark past. How, in the corning days the prophets of your time, such as Charles Darwin, will write of man's descent.
Listen, for this sage speaks a truth, a truth that has been a part of our legends and songs since the Word was given to us by the gods. It is from our issue that all others are traced. It is part of the same story that the archaeologists, L.S.B. and Mary Leakey will tell in another future generation.
I can envision the moment when Mary Leakey stumbles upon that jawbone of a hominid at Olduvai Gorge and can see how she and her husband will then assemble the puzzle of fragments into a complete cranium.
In Nupe, you may have heard, a hunter in pursuit of a water buffalo tripped over a skull...
Amazed at the skull's ability to speak, the hunter ran back to the village to tell of his encounter. The king, hearing of the hunter's tale, was curious to see and hear this talking skull.
The hunter led the king with his retinue of guests to the spot in the forest. The king approached the skull and asked ...
But the skull was silent. After several inquiries the skull still refused to speak. Now the king was furious and ordered his soldiers to cut the hunter's head off on the spot.
Later, after the king and his party were gone, the skull spoke to the hunter:
Well, my friend, how did you get here?
The hunter replied:
Talking brought me here.
The skull of myth and proverb teaches us one lesson, while the bones the Leakeys and their team of anthropologists led by Kamoya Kimeu will find imparts another truth. These bones, like the talking skull, will give them a passage to the past and a lighted way into the deep mysteries of my people's history. But hush now and let me tell you what the talking bones told our diviners centuries before the scientists of your day came with their microscopes and telescopes.
My children, you must understand the role of myth and cosmology. People have myths to explain where others come from, too, and how they stand in relationship to the whole of humankind. The ancient Greeks, to the distant north, not only saw themselves at the center of the universe but had a myth to explain how and why Africans are black. They tell us that Phaeton drove his sun chariot too close to the earth and scorched the people of Ethiopia.
There are others who accept the Biblical curse of Ham — that his son Canaan, and all their descendants will be black — as a sufficient explanation for the color of Africans.
From that day forward the missionary never uttered a word from his holy book.
According to a creation legend among the Gikuyu, when humans began to populate the earth, the man Gikuyu was summoned by Mogai (the Divider of the n1verse) and was given the rivers, the forests, the game — all the gifts of nature.
Meanwhile, Mogai, in all his power and omnipotence, made a big mountain called Kere-Nyaga or Mount Kenya.
At the summit of this great mountain he carved a resting place. It was from the crest that Mogai showed Gikuyu the full majesty of the land he had bestowed upon him.
When Gikuyu reached the appointed place amid the fig trees he found a wife, Noombi, waiting for him. How delighted Gikuyu was to find yet another beautiful gift from Mogai.
From their union came several daughters. After the ninth girl, Gikuyu wondered if he would ever have a son, so once more he called upon Mogai.
Gikuyu was told to be patient. He was instructed to go and kill one lamb and one kid and place them under a fig tree near his homestead.
There they found nine young men who were willing to marry their daughters.
Gikuyu told the young men he would give his consent only if they promised to live in his homestead under a matriarchal system.
Unable to resist the loveliness of Gikuyu's daughters, the young men agreed to the terms and the weddings were soon held. It is from these marriages, my children, that the Gikuyu of Kenya formed the original nine clans.
Before I go on, let me play for you a tune on the mbira. The prongs symbolize the several clans of my village. Played in perfect harmony, the music exemplifies the goodwill and peace that prevails there during the harvest season.
I should explain that the women of the Gikuyu were physically stronger and better fighters than the men. They also practised polyandry (the custom of having more than one husband). Eventually, they were overthrown by men who took advantage of the leaders' vulnerability while pregnant. Following this triumph, the men took over the leadership of the community and became heads of the family, thus replacing matriarchal rule with patriarchy. They also established the rule of polygamy (having more than one wife). It is from such a myth that Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other future thinkers will get their ideas about the nature of ancient societies and how women lost their "mother-right."
My children, we must be clear about the differences between matriarchal and matrilineal. Matriarchal means that women rule the society; however, when a society is matrilineal, it traces the line of descent through the females of the family. In my travels I have seen all sorts of formations, but most commonly there is a tendency for the patrilineal (descent through the father) and the matrilineal to coexist in a clan.
There is no conflict. One line of descent usually carries the "blood," while the other carries the "soul," as it is among the Ashanti. Among the Wolof and the Baganda, descent is patrilineal, except for nobility and royalty, who derive from the mother. None of these lines of descent interferes though with the vitality of the extended family, which is the lifeblood of African culture.
In Gola society, as it is here, the women tend the farms, gather the nuts and berries, and raise the children. It is the duty of the men to hunt and to bring in the meat for the family. However, the griots tell of a man and a woman—a small baby strapped to her back—who were travelling through the bush country when they became very hungry. In a clearing they spotted a herd of cows.
The man, feeling lazy and not much like hunting, said to the woman:
In a matter of moments the woman had safely set aside her child and began transforming into a leopard. Spotted hair sprung up all over her body, fangs jutted from her mouth, and her hands and feet turned into fierce looking claws.
The man was so terrified by the transformation that he hurriedly climbed a tree for safety. With the man shaking like a leaf at the top of the tree, the leopard ran off to capture a cow.
She returned promptly dragging a large cow. Still frightened by all that had transpired, the man begged the leopard to change back into a woman.
Like magic, the leopard's spots began to vanish, the claws retracted and disappeared, and once again the woman was standing below him. But he was still not convinced.
When she had dressed and secured her baby on her back once again, she turned to the man and said:
Never ask a woman to do a man's work again.
In some villages it is strictly taboo for a man to touch the tools of a woman. Among the Dogon, men carry out the harvesting, while the women gather the stalks and pound the millet. Among the Shona, boys, at a very early age, begin to herd cattle and to learn the ways of men, while the girls, by the time they are six, are ready to accompany their mothers to the fields to weed.
Some of the practices I have seen, though, defy convention, like the nomadic Wodaabe of the Sahara. Wodaabe men, who average between 6 and 7 feet tall, participate in a ritual where they adorn themselves with beads and hats, and dye their lips blue to attract a female. During the ceremony, they stand shoulder to shoulder facing the women. To demonstrate their beauty they grimace in such a way as to highlight the whiteness of their teeth and eyeballs.
When a man is chosen by a woman for his beauty, he must spend at least one night with her and if she is pleased, he may receive a marriage proposal.
But the Wodaa be are not alone in finding a unique way to sustain and multiply their clan. The Lele, who live along the Kasai River, take no chances. Girls are often betrothed as soon as they are born. Their much older future husbands have to wait until they grow up. In the meantime, the future in-law is expected to do whatever chores the girl's father requests.
By this era, my people, the Bambara had domesticated their animals, were cultivating plants, and had begun threshing grain and making flour. The Stone Age was a significant transitional period and is an important story told by all the noted griots of the region.
Our culture today has not changed much since those remote times. We are very much like the settled pre-dynastic Egyptians. We hunt and fish, cultivate grain, and make our own clothes and baskets.
Langston Hughes, a great poet of your time has provided a most fitting preface to this glorious African Dawn:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow of human blood in
human veins.
My soul has grown deep
like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns
were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled
me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the
Pyramids above it ...
My Soul has grown deep like the rivers.
In our next meeting by Ogun's fire I will tell you about the marvellous civilizations from which we all descend, about Nubia and Kush; for it is from Napata and Meroe that the earliest glimmer of refinement and technology first emerged. From these vistas, my children, it is only a short journey up the Nile to the seminal grandeur of Egypt.
CHAPTER 2Part II
A 19th century English griot with a pen and renown Egyptologist, Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, in his book Egypt, suggests that the builders of these kingdoms may have originated even farther south in Uganda and Punt or Somalia. His words are not untrue, for even before the first pharaoh, this tale was told.
Kush and Nubia were the most prominent of the predynastic kingdoms that flourished in the Nile Valley. Very little is known of the origins of Kush and much of that is shrouded in legend and myth.
This mixed population of Tasians, Badarians, and Amratians and used instruments made of flint, copper, gold, and ivory.
These people, my ancestors, bore the knowledge and technology that formed, in the words of the honored Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, "the basis of Egyptian Civilization."
It would take a team of griots to properly assess the impact of ancient Egyptian culture on the world, but I will do my best to recall its majesty and its seminal role in the sciences, literature, philosophy and technology upon which rest the hallmarks of Greek and Roman civilization.
While many of us know of the importance given to the thought and wisdom of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we know nothing of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian founder of wisdom and the sciences, or of Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer.
One need only gaze for a moment upon the majesty of the great pyramids or the sphinx at Giza to understand how Egyptian scholarship is at the base of culture.
How is it possible to talk about the "glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome" without understanding the mysteries of Egypt?
Over the years, being a griot who can see beyond the veil into the future, let me say that it was the unbridled ethnocentrism of European scholars and writers that made it difficult for them to acknowledge the African character of Egyptian culture.
When they did recognize the accomplishments of Egypt, they appropriated the culture without accepting its progenitors.
To their thinking, we must assume, if the Egyptians were so remarkable, they must have been Europeans. Even such a celebrated historian as Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History regarded Egyptian civilization as "white" or European.
These impressive murals indicate that the Egyptians, including the regal queens Cleopatra and Nefertari, were a dark-skinned people. They certainly could not be mistaken for white in any future land in the West.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AFRICAN HISTORY FOR BEGINNERS by Herb Boyd, Shey Wolvek-Pfister. Copyright © 1994 Herb Boyd. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
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