posted
This is another essay I wrote about ancient Egypt. It discusses the question of why the Egyptians were able to construct a more technologically advanced civilization, with more impressive architecture, than other African cultures. My thesis is that Egypt's geography and climate were more helpful to the development of a civilization.
quote:A few months ago, I wrote an essay titled “The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Civilization”. My thesis was that the ancient Egyptians, far from being of European or Asian descent as is popularly believed, were an indigenous African population whom we might consider “black”. They were biologically most closely related to other Africans, particularly northeast Africans, and their culture developed inside the African continent. Ancient Egypt should therefore be considered a homegrown African civilization, not a “Mediterranean” or “Near Eastern” one as it is popularly classified.
Like any statement that touches on the contentious issue of racism, my thesis was a controversial one. Many people have a difficult time accepting that Africans could have constructed one of the ancient world’s most famous and influential civilizations. It does not sit well with their preconceptions that pre-colonial Africans were dim-witted primitives incapable of building anything more spectacular than a mud hut.
A common objection to an African Egypt goes, “If the ancient Egyptians were really Africans, why was the rest of Africa so backward when Europeans colonized it? The Egyptians could not have been of the same ‘race’ as those other Africans!”
As an argument against the Egyptians being Africans, this objection is fallacious. It would be like saying that the ancient Mayans could not have been Native American because they were more advanced than the Sioux! People from the same “race” can in fact develop cultures with varying levels of technological advancement.
Nonetheless, it is true that the ancient Egyptians were more technologically advanced than other Africans prior to the colonial period. Few African nations built stone monuments as colossal and enduring as those of the Egyptians. To ask why that is the case is to ask a very good question, but one need not conclude that the Egyptians were unusually intelligent or creative among Africans to answer that question. I submit that the answer to that question lies in factors beyond any human being’s control, namely environmental factors. Egypt’s geography and climate were more conducive to the development of a civilization than the rest of the continent.
Egypt’s geography can be quickly summed up as a narrow river valley bisecting a desert. When the ancestors of the Egyptians migrated to this region from eastern Africa, they found themselves in a much more constricted environment than Africans living in the continent’s rainforest and savanna regions. They had to cling to the Nile River for their very survival. This constrained environment was prone to crowding quickly, especially once the Egyptians discovered agriculture. Such a high population density encouraged the growth of cities. The growth of cities, in turn, encouraged the development of civilization with all its institutional and infrastructural trappings.
Egypt’s narrow habitable space also meant a lower number and diversity of dangerous wild animals. Some species of aggressive wildlife, such as lions, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses did live in the Nile Valley, but the valley’s limited space could not support many other dangerous African animals such as Cape buffalo, rhinoceroses, and elephants. The Egyptians therefore did not have to worry with running away from danger as much as Africans living in more verdant regions. Their crops and livestock were also safer.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, the Egyptians also benefited from their country’s arid climate. One advantage of living in a desert climate was that the soil, once irrigated, was actually richer with nutrients. In sub-Saharan Africa, high rainfall during the wet season leaches the topsoil of its nutrients, lowering its agricultural value. By contrast, Egypt’s lower rainfall levels meant that the soil was not leached so badly, making it more productive.
The dry Egyptian climate also protected the Egyptians and their livestock from disease. Africa’s tropical regions are notorious for their diseases, sleeping sickness and yellow fever being examples. Egypt’s low moisture levels, combined with cool desert nights, prevented the festering of tropical diseases.
Because of all these factors, the Egyptians were able to expand their population and evolve their civilization to a greater degree than other African peoples. They weren’t necessarily smarter than their sub-Saharan kin, but they were more fortunate.
Now, in this modern age, the technology exists for African nations outside of Egypt to overcome the challenges of their environment and develop advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, most of that technology is found in industrialized nations outside of Africa, and despite what it likes to claim, I doubt the industrialized world is really concerned with the welfare of African people. Modern nations would rather throw “aid” to corrupt African leaders, in effect paying them to keep their own citizens poor and doomed to a fate of working in sweatshops and factories producing goods for modern nations to consume. The modern world does not truly respect Africans. To it, Africa is nothing more than yet another source of cheap labor.
I believe that all of Africa’s people have the potential to advance beyond their current tragic state, but they will have great obstacles to overcome. They will have to get rid of corrupt leaders who govern them much as European imperialists did. They will also have to deal with an industrialized world interested only in exploiting them and hogging the bulk of this planet’s dwindling resources. Only then will Africa have the same level of power and influence in the modern world that one African people did in the ancient world.
Posts: 7094 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
You may want to expand it and add a short bibliography if not some end notes.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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As a farmer the Negro is more efficient than the Chinese and the Hindi
The above statement is not to be taken lightly
“Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1800” By John Kelly Thornton
Page 75
quote:Indeed, the Capuchins who visited the area in 1662 regarded it as so populated it resembled “a continuous and black anthill” and noted that “this kingdom of Arda [Allada] and most of this region [Lower Guinea] exceed in number and density [the population] of all other parts of the world
quote: The more the darkness lifts from African civilizations, though inferior in intellectual power to the Chinese and the Indians, the less we feel inclined to rate Negro culture below that of the Bedawin and the Berber.
As a farmer the Negro is more efficient than the Chinese and the Hindi. Selous credits him with building the structures at Simbabye and with working the Shuna gold=mines. Negro dexterity in the practice of a new handicraft is remarkable. His precocity in book=learning is equally great. His capacity of endurance seems infinite; pestilence, rum, slavery, war and the woes of barbarian society have never exhausted his stamina and vitality. His animal spirits are irrepressible. Pagan Africa dances and sings when the sun goes down. He works willingly, though the easiness of life in a tropical home enables him to exemplify Emerson's assertion that "we are all as lazy as we dare to be". As a free man he is capable of any amount of work. The bonds of kinship are so strong that homesickness is one of his most fatal affections. Love among Negro mothers is as potent as among white women, and their influence much greater than that of the father. The man performs the tasks of strength, the woman those of skill and endurance.
The Negro is a born diplomat, orator and trader; and his inner life finds expression in a folk=lore not without poetry and power and in a theological thought possessing lofty and noble ideas, however concealed and defiled by superstition and witchcraft.We must term the Negro half=civilized. An extinct civilization in Fezzan, outdating the Carthaginians, has been rightly credited to him; and though he might have had only a share in originating it, the presumption is that his native genius had struck out its path before Berber, Carthaginian, Egyptian, Hellene, Roman or Saracen sent germs of culture to Sudan. The smelting and working of iron afford an instance. This, the most useful of metallurgic discoveries, is an independent invention of the Negro yet the aborignal American, his mental superior, never attained the art. The average of Negro civilizations, though below those of Mexico, Peru and Yucatan, is higher than that of America's other Indians. Evidence abounds to demonstrate the fact that very many tribes untouched by foreign influence have independently and voluntarily risen above the plane where Caesar found the British and even from European stand=points are quite civilized. To cite another concrete proof, the Negro is a greater bridge=builder than the Germans whom Tacitus knew. Nor has the Negro devoted his native capacity merely to material advancement. He has revealed natural ability to build great states and to govern himself. Ashanti and Dahome prove this. Such kings of men, genuine and home= bred, as Tshaka and Ketchwayo the Zulu, Sibituani the Kololo, Gezo the Dahoman or Ahmadu the Bambara are nature's precedent for such statesmen as Douglass and I/Ouverture. They were the premises of which these through Christianity became the logical conclusion. Negro progress has also been made in the teeth of surroundings adverse to spontaneous advance. [b]We may therefore accord to African cultures a respect little less than that yielded to American semi=civilizations*
**Dr D.G. Brinton and professor A.K. Keane dissent from this view, and it is not a light matter to differ from them: but the evidence adduced by these scientists fails in convincing power, as it apparently omits several essential elements
quote:The assumption that Sudanese civilization is wholly due to Islam has but doubtful validity. Reclus has shown that thousands of years before Islam the Negro had shared in civilizing work: "From remotest antiquity Africans, even beyond Egypt, took part in man's triumphs over nature . . The civilized world is indebted to the natives for several domestic animals
Even in industries Africa has contributed to the inheritance of mankind. The monuments of Egypt can not all have been the work of the Rotu [Egyptians] alone. Among the products of Egyptian industry are frequently recognized forms recurring in Nubia and Sudan. Smelting and working iron have been attributed to the Negroes. The Bongo as well as other African tribes constructed furnaces of very ingenious type. The tribe was acquainted with the art of minting. Among the Ogowai Fans bits of iron are current coins in common use". The Negro, when independent of outside influences, has shown native capacity for material advancement, self=elevation and state=building. The Ashanti and Dahomans, true Negroes, typical Guinea Negroes, spontaneously developed considerable civilizations*. They were realms of woman's rights. The Dahoman culture is credited with having elicited admiration from Herbert Spencer. The Mangbattu and Zande on the water=shed draining toward the Kongo, the Nile and the Shari amazed Schweinfurth, — the former by the high development of the industries and the sentiment of nationality; the latter, little inferior in material civilization, by their Christian respect for woman. According to Baker the pagan Nyoro of Lake Albert had independently "developed administration, sub=governors, taxes, good clothing, art, agriculture and architecture". Uganda was not inferior, but as its ruling race is of Hamitic extraction, possibly this civilization can not be credited to the Negro.No such hesitancy need be felt as to the Kongo and Zambezi peoples. Before the appearance of Arabs or Europeans, these Negroes had originated empires and republics possessing complex governmental arrangements. Some at least were not without the elements of true civilization. Whatever Islam may have done for the Negro was in being, not the initial impulse for his advance, but the reinforcement of his native faculties. Even in Sudan it has merely aided, not created, his capacity for progress. But "Islam is a reform which has stifled all other reforms. It has chained every people which has accepted it to a certain stage of moral and political growth". The sterility and unprogressiveness of Negro civilizations, Negro states, are as much due to the paralyzing death=grip of Islam as to nature's foreclosure of his intellectual powers when she mortgages the growth of his brain after puberty.
posted
Of course the environment did inhibit in many areas but were actually forced to advance in different ways. For example metallurgy and they also had to be efficient at it to save fuel
quote: But carbon steel had been made long before either Kelly or Bessemer. One of the oldest and most sophisticated methods was that of the Haya people. They're an African tribe in what is Tanzania today. The Hayas produced high-grade carbon steel for about 2000 years.
The Hayas made their steel in a kiln shaped like a truncated upside-down cone about five feet high. They made both the cone and the bed below it from the clay of termite mounds. Termite clay makes a fine refractory material. The Hayas filled the bed of the kiln with charred swamp reeds. They packed a mixture of charcoal and iron ore above the charred reeds. Before they loaded iron ore into the kiln, they roasted it to raise its carbon content.
The key to the Haya iron process was a high operating temperature. Eight men, seated around the base of the kiln, pumped air in with hand bellows. The air flowed through the fire in clay conduits. Then the heated air blasted into the charcoal fire itself. The result was a far hotter process than anything known in Europe before modern times.
Anthropologist Peter Schmidt wanted to see a working kiln, but he had a problem. Cheap European steel products reached Africa early in this century and put the Hayas out of business. When they could no longer compete, they'd quit making steel.
Schmidt asked the old men of the tribe to recreate the high tech of their childhood. They agreed, but it took five tries to put all the details of the complex old process back together. What came out of the fifth try was a fine, tough steel. It was the same steel that'd served the subsaharan peoples for two millinea before it was almost forgotten.
This ancient African steel was the fruit of unalloyed human ingenuity. This complex metal, flowing from simple native elements, forms a mute tribute to the power of the human mind over matter.
posted
Ironicly, it was skills in agriculture that had to have played a factor in the targeting of "black Africans" in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For some reason near the end of the 17th century and afterward there was a big demand for "Negro" slaves in particular
Perhaps it was because "black Africans" were generally skilled in agriculture but less advanced in other areas. It is called the African slave trade because it effected more than the western coast
William Pitt, The Younger. 1759-1806.
352. From His Speech On The Abolition Op The Slave-trade . April 2, 1792.
Do you think nothing of the ruin and the miseries in which so many other individuals, still remaining in Africa, are involved, in consequence of carrying off so many myriads of people? Do you think nothing of their families which are left be- bind I of the connections which are broken ? of the friendships, attachments, and relationships that are burst asunder! Do you think nothing of the miseries in consequence, that are felt from generation to generation? of the privation of that happiness which might be communicated to them by the introduction of civilization, and of mental and moral improvement? A happiness which you withhold them so long as you permit the slave-trade to continue. What do you know of the internal state of Africa? You have carried on a trade to that quarter of the globe from this civilized and enlightened country. but such a trade, that, instead of diffusing either knowledge or wealth, it has been the check to every laudable pursuit. Instead of any fail interchange of commodities; instead of conveying to them, from this highly favored land, any means of improvement; you carry with you that noxious plant by which everything is withered and blasted; under whose shade nothing that is useful or profitable to Africa will eves flourish or take root. Long as that continent has been known to navigators, the extreme line and boundaries of its coasts is all with which Europe is yet become acquainted; while other countries in the same parallel of latitude, through a happier system of intercourse, have reaped the blessings of a mutually beneficial commerce. But as to the whole interior of that continent you are, by your own principles of commerce, as yet entirely shut out: Africa is known to you only in its skirts. Yet here you are able to infuse a poison that spreads its contagious effects from one end of it to the other, which penetrates to its very center, corrupting every part to which it reaches. You there subvert the whole order of nature; you aggravate every natural barbarity, and furnish to every man living on that continent motives for committing, under the name and pretext of commerce, acts of perpetual violence and perfidy against his neighbor.
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