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Nile Valley Culture:
In the chronicle of human existence as attempted by modern historians, the struggle to identify and explain the sources of contemporary social and cultural institutions and practices is often informed by contemporary political needs and desires . The linchpin moment for the construction of "Western Civilization" has been the identification of classical Greece as the primary source of the western tradition in politics and culture .
Review of the primary sources which remain from ancient Greece reveal what was widely acknowledged by modern historians until the middle of the seventeenth century: That the Greeks found themselves in a cultural exchange, often as junior partners, with a number of other peoples, including the inhabitants of Northeast Africa, a land known to them as Aegyptos (or Egypt). The political exigencies of an emerging European bloc of international superpowers who relied on racial exploitation to fuel their empire building caused European intellectuals to, for the first time, devote serious attention to discussing the racial identities of these classical-era Northeastern African and their contemporary descendants. The resulting drive to "separate Egypt from Africa" is best illustrated by Hegel's classic pronouncement on the relationship of Egypt to Africa and Africa to the "world" again found in the pages of his text on "The Philosophy of History":
"At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it-that is, in its northern part-belong to the Asian or European world. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase or civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History. Having eliminated this introductory element, we find ourselves for the first time on the real theatre of History. "
What may appear at first to be an antiquated opinion of Africa and African people remains in place today as the justification for many types of educational reform aimed at African students. For many in charge of teaching children of African descent, their students arrive as the junior partners of world history, cultural beggars from a historical tradition with very little save fascinating but ultimately trivial cultural peculiarities to offer. Contemporary African-American cultural expressions, from Hip Hop to distinct systems of language use are informed by a cultural perspective which, transmutations and syntheses notwithstanding, stems from a long cycle of African historical identity, including Nile Valley civilizations.
Modern researchers have countered the politically-driven removal of Egypt from Africa with findings which reestablish the African biological, cultural and social roots of classical Nile Valley civilization. The most prominent researcher of African descent to work in this area was the Senegalese iconoclast Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986), who marshaled linguistic, botanic, anthropological, archaeological and other research to undergird his contentions. As contemporary researchers delve deeper into the study of the similarities between classical Nile Valley society and other African civilizations, Diop's pioneering hypotheses, while undergoing constant refinement, are nevertheless being borne out.
Egyptian history as a manifestation of the Nile Valley cultural complex stretches from the Khartoum mesolithic cultures of the sixth millennium B.C.E. through the Badarian, Amratian and Gerzean cultural complexes of Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt in the period stretching from 4,500 B.C.E. to 3,500 B.C.E. Classical Egyptian history has been periodized by reference to a chronology of Egyptian rulers written by a Heliopolan priest named Manetho in the third century B.C.E. Manetho is said to have written his text in order to educate the Greek population of Alexandria, though it was said to have been commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphus in order to correct earlier histories written by Greek historians such as Hecataeus and Herodotus . Manetho's actual text does not survive: instead, only discussions of it in the work of Josepuhus, Julius Africanus, Syncellus and Tarasius, later Jewish and Christian historians, survive .
Manetho divided nearly 3,000 years of Egyptian history into 30 dynasties of rulers, known as the "per-uahs" or "Pharaohs" (literally "great houses"). According to modern archaeologists, these dynasties stretch from 3200 B.C.E. to approximately 332 B.C.E., interrupted by periods of national instability with the unifying symptom of invasion of foreigners from the north and subsequent expulsion of foreigners from southern Egyptian rulers . The first six dynasties (3200 B.C.E. to 2181 B.C.E.) were responsible for the construction of all the major pyramids, the institutionalization of the expansive Egyptian state system (centered around several dozen administrative centers, or "nomes") and the writing of the major surviving Egyptian religious and cultural texts.
After intervening periods of stability and instability, the central Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty (2040 B.C.E.), Amen-em-hat, reestablished by then ancient Egyptian literary, administrative, architectural and cultural forms in what was called Whm Msw (literally "repetition of the birth" or, colloquially, "renaissance"). Another period of national instability punctuated by invasion from foreigners led to the rise of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties (1570 B.C.E.), among whose Pharaohs were Ahmose, the female ruler Hatchepsut, Akhnaten, Djehutymose III and Ramses II. (also known as "Rameses the Great"). More instability presaged the rise of the twenty-fifth dynasty in 750 B.C.E. and its trio of famous rulers, Piiankhi, Shabaka and Taharqua. By the twenty-seventh dynasty, the first Persian invaders assume the throne of Egypt and, in 332 B.C.E., the first invaders of European descent, the Greeks, established control over the northern delta. By this time, dynastic Egyptian national society was at least thirty centuries old.
Classical African civilization in the Nile Valley was not assimilated into invading cultures with the fall of northern Egypt into Greek, then Roman and Persian hands. In the south, the African civilizations of Kush, Meroë and Axum flourished and carried Nile Valley society into the medieval age of African history. Recent scholarship has discovered cultural commonalties between classical Egypt and other African societies in areas such as governmental structure, spiritual and religious systems, social rituals (e.g. circumcision and initiation) and artistic form, among others .
Medieval Africa to the Eve of the Enslavement:
African social formations are generally considered to have followed migration patterns which have only relatively recently begun to reveal themselves to geographers, anthropologists and other students of human culture. According to Richard Newman, the reliance of African societies on agriculture was virtually complete by two thousand years ago. With this reliance came the rapid spread of a mode of production which greatly increased the number of people living in centralized societies, which in turn created larger socio-cultural complexes. The largest areas of settlement reflected the following factors: the annual rise and fall of flood waters, which turned certain river valleys and lake shores into prime settlement sites; areas in the highlands with rich volcanic soils, which sustained farming; the technological innovation of iron making, which made sites rich in iron ore strategic locations which gave home to key societies around which other groups gathered and found direction and emulation of cultural practices .
Eventually, as trade between more sedentary and established societies developed, kinship networks were spread, systems of conscription based in enslavement appeared in areas, and these activities congealed into larger governmental structures, of which "kingdoms/chiefdoms," "religious states," and "stateless societies" are three major types. Even larger "empires" based on the production of commodities and more expansive interregional trading opportunities appeared, of which Egypt is perhaps the example with the longest continuous history. Because of the open nature of many African social systems which could accommodate the incorporation of strangers through marriage, societies expanded rapidly .
Among the more prominent and geographically-expansive African state complexes of the medieval period were Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Kanem. The Ghanian state covered an expanse of land bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, the Niger River valley on the east and the Sahel region to the north. The Ghanian influence over many of the trans-Saharan trade routes, particularly with regard to their powerful salt and gold repositories, made the Ghanian state well known beyond Africa. By 1076, invaders from the Maghrib area, the Almoravids, were able to splinter the governing apparatus of the Ghanian state.
By the mid 13th century, however, Africans led by the Mandingo ethnic group and the Keita family were able to annex smaller states and create a federation of societies that became known as the Mali empire. The Malian era saw the strengthening of ties between African and Arab cultures, culminating in the appropriation of Islam as the religion of state governance and Arabic as the language of intellectual work in West Africa. By the mid 15th century, as Europe stirred from its last "Dark Age," Mali had been superceded by the Songhai empire, a federation of African societies whose geographical boundaries would have rivaled the modern United States in size. One of the most prominent features of the Songhai empire was its educational system, famous beyond its state borders. The great mosques at Timbuctu, Gao and Jenne produced a series of brilliant African Muslim scholars.
Groupings of Africans could just as easily re-form in response to impulses such as the decentralization of power in a large empire, the erosion of strategic alliances with neighboring groups, or invasions and/or conquests which might accelerate instability. By the time of medieval African history (approximately 600 C.E. to 1500 C.E.), non-African groups such as the Arabs, Romans and Chinese intensified the longstanding intercultural contact between Africans and non-Africans. During this period, the Roman name "Africa" (the proper adjective form of the Latin Afer, or "the south west wind") replaced the Greek term "Ethiopia" (Greek for "burnt face") as the name for the entire continent south of the European mainland.
One of the consequences of African cultural and material exchanges with non-Africans was the identification of urban patterns of settlement by non-Africans as the central sites of "African civilization," which was not always the case. Cultural and religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism served as sites of intercultural dialogue. Ultimately, the large-scale engagement of European nations with Africans from the fourteenth century onward altered world history in unforeseeable ways.
Though European incursions as colonizers in Africa can be traced back at least to the Ptolemaic period in Northeast Africa and the colonization of Cetua on the north Moroccan coast in 1415 by Portugal, the last decade of the 15th century serves as a significant marker in the construction of the emerging global system of intercultural economic, political and military relations. Historian John Henrik Clarke argues that three events which took place in 1492-93 symbolize the emergence of this new system.
The first event was the opening of the Western hemisphere to European exploitation symbolized by the first voyages of Christopher Columbus. The second event was the routing of the African and Arab cultural, political and military occupiers of medieval Spain, thus helping to galvanize the political energies of an emerging European consciousness given political and religious fervor by Charlemagne and infusions of cultural and intellectual capital from Asia and Africa. This era, which has come to be known culturally as the "Enlightenment," dawned in full vigor just as the third event, the decline of the last major West African nation, the Songhai polity, occurred .
The reemergence of European interest in Africa, this time couched in a voracious praxis of global conquest and exploitation described as "the modern world system" by the French social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein , had two major cultural effects. The first was the framing of the cultural perspective of "whiteness" as a series enabling identity characteristics, which has been described. For Africans brought to the Western hemisphere as labor to work lands simultaneously being depopulated of their indigenous inhabitants, the second effect was the process of bonding based on cultural commonalities made possible by the condition of "blackness" imposed upon them by the conditions of their new environment.
III. Enslavement and Push Factors:
The history of Africans in the United States must be understood in as a narrative of migrations, beginning with the initial forced migration of enslavement and continuing in patterns of intranational movement. The entire experience of movement, in which Africans have been "pushed" in response to external economic and political exigencies, must also be framed by the understanding that, while African ethnic groups shared inter-cultural similarities prior to European enslavement, the process of enslavement created broader platforms for inter-African cultural essentialization. This essentialization had two major dimensions: The first, a "push" factor, was caused by the overarching oppression and exclusion of African people from the emerging West Atlantic European political and economic power structure, except in the indispensable function of chattel labor. This process literally pushed Africans to construct intercultural relationships based on common definitions stemming from the oppression, e.g. "blacks," "******s," "negroes," etc. The second, a "pull" factor, was a byproduct of the oppression/exclusion process as well: Africans recognized and drew upon their inter-cultural similarities to create the first blocks in a Pan-African cultural consciousness which would inform strategies of resistance to cultural and political oppression .
As Historian Vincent Harding observes, the seeds of a fierce African determination to regain political sovereignty and maintain spheres of autonomous cultural and historical identity took root in the spirit of the first African who, just before being loaded on the slave ship, scooped a handful of earth from the beach of her native land and placed it in her mouth. Nurtured in West Atlantic sites by various manifestations of African spirituality and a methodology of identity construction which relied heavily on moments of physical and cultural resistance, this aspiration to maintain cultural and historical integrity and regain political autonomy has sustained itself to varying degrees through the present era.
The question of how much of African cultural traditions were retained by the initial African prisoners of war transported to West Atlantic enslavement has been a central and constant dimension of controversy. In order to effectively teach contemporary African-American students, instructional practices must be informed by a perception of the decidedly African dimensions of the contemporary African-American personality. A significant dimension of that personality is a fierce pride in lineage, whether it is an abbreviated lineage such as neighborhood or small group affiliation or a larger affiliation, such as that more commonly associated with nation-states.
Pride in group lineage is certainly not exclusive to African-Americans. What is unique, however, about African-American group loyalty is the combative dimension of suspicion born of the retention of very particular narratives about the African experience in the West which have survived and adapted over centuries. These narratives preserve concepts of identity which, while not "national" in the sense of unbroken identification with land bases or political systems, nevertheless are "nationalist" in the sense of the Latin nasci, "to be born." Africans in the West constructed and maintain discrete "imagined communities," complete with genealogies for which resistance to white oppression is a crucial element.
Cultural Historian Sterling Stuckey writes that
The precise details of certain experiences that bear directly on black nationalism will remain forever enshrouded in obscurity-the degree to which Africans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to think positively of their ancestral home; the extent to which they preferred living apart from white people; the length of time the majority of them remained essentially African in America; and the exact nature of Pan-African acculturation, the process by which differences between Africans from various parts of Africa, the West Indes, and North America were virtually destroyed on the anvil of American slavery .
Political Scientist Ronald Walters picks up on Stuckey's theme and brings the question of the "Africanness" of the African-American into the contemporary era:
The African personality in the imagination has thrived because African life was a subject of the first-hand experience of many Blacks who survived slavery and lived on into the twentieth century; their associations and first-generation relatives passed down African customs, names and languages, and an unshakable African kinship was formed. Indeed, the question should be rather put in reverse: when did we stop being African?
Africans taken from the African continent went through a cultural bonding or essentialization process .From various ethnic groups, they had to adapt cultural practices across indigenous African languages, a process made even more complicated by the imposition of European languages. This process was made easier for those ethnic and cultural groups which were able to preserve relatively large blocs, such as the Yoruba and Ibo in Brazil and the Caribbean. In the United States, however, ethnic group dispersal was much more prevalent and effective.
Over the course of the trade in enslaved Africans, which lasted from 1502 to 1888, millions of Africans were ripped from the African continent and strewn throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe by both European and Arab enslavers. An estimate of 10 to 15 million Africans became forced labor during this period. Another estimated 4 million perished in the "Middle Passage," never making it to the Americas. Further, countless millions, in excess of one third of all Africans captured in some reports, perished during the marches to the Atlantic coast from areas in inland Africa. Africans were taken by force and were held in coastal fortresses until the slave ships came for them.
Almost every seagoing European nature had interests in the enslavement of Africans at one time or another, participating in what became known as the "triangle trade." Ships departed from Europe (where they were often financed by small businessmen, communities and even municipalities, all of which grew rich on the trade), picked up Africans along the so-called "Guinea, Gold and Slave coasts" of Africa, and sailed to South America and the Caribbean, where Africans were brutally assimilated into enslavement and relocated throughout the hemisphere.
Upon their arrival in the West, Arwin D. Smallwood notes that the trade in enslaved Africans can be broken down with regard to percentage into the following relative dispersal of Africans: 33% went to Portuguese Brazil, 20.3% to the French Caribbean, 11.7% to Spanish America, 6.7% to the Dutch Caribbean, 5.4% to British North America and 0.4% to the Danish Caribbean. He notes further that, unlike the relationship between Africans and Native Europeans in British North America, other Europeans often intermarried with Africans and created mixed-blood classes, including mulattos and mestizos, "developing a social economic system based on various shades of skin color. "
Further, the largest ethnic groups to remain relatively intact in the relocation process came from West Africa, the source of over 60% of the Africans taken to the Americas. Orlando Patterson identifies six major areas of the West African coast as the major sources of Africans taken to North America, Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica and elsewhere. The first was the Senegambia, which produced the Manidingo, Fula, Wolof and Jola grous, who were taken throughout the western hemisphere. The second was the Sierra Leone and Windward Coast, which comprised the Bakwe, Bassa, Belte, Dida, Greobo, Dru, Sapo, Wobe, Temme, Gola, Kissi, Bullom, Guru, Mende and Kono peoples. This was never a major source for African labor.
The next area was the Gold Coast, home of the Twi-speaking people, the Akan, Fanti, Gae, Guang, and Adangme, as well as the more inland Mamprusi,Dagomba, Nankanse, Talense, Isala and Lober. British and Dutch labor supplies dominated the direction of Africans taken from here. The fourth (and the busiest) area was the Dahomey area, known as the "slave coast" and home of the Ewe, Yoruba and Bini. Most of these Africans went to French territories. The fifth area was Benin and the Niger Delta, including the Ibo, Ibibo, Edo, Igo Atisia, Ogony and the Epie. Most of these Africans went to Portuguese and Brazilian traders.
The sixth and final area was South-Western Africa, which included Cameroon, Congo, Angola, Gabon and Zaire, the largest supplier of Africans to Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean. Many of the Africans from this region were Ibo, Kongo and Ovimbundu .
In the United States, the upper colonies (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina) tended to be most heavily populated by West Africans (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Liberian and Slave Coasts, Niger Delta) and the lower colonies (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) from Central Africa (Bakongo, Malimbo, Bambo, Ndungo, Balimbe, Badongo, Luba, Loanga, Luango, Ovimbundu) .
The templates of African identity in various west Atlantic sites were forged along broad cultural lines, ranging from commonalties in musical form and instrumentation to similar culinary, agricultural and clothing/adornment techniques to similar spiritual practices and uses of narrative form and convention. Didactic literature, prevalent in Africa in the form of proverbs and wisdom tales, employed the familiar tools of animal imagery to convey life lessons.
Additionally, the adult Africans dispersed throughout the Western hemisphere were relied upon by their enslavers for a range of intellectual abilities and professional skills. In Africa, many had served as master agriculturists, blacksmiths, healers, builders, spiritualists and musicians, among other vocations. William Banks notes that, of the pre-enslavement vocations practiced by Africans, the two largest professions which survived enslavement were the "priest" and the "healer. " Additionally, African planters introduced irrigation and planting techniques which led to the maximization of plantation crop use and profit. African architects and builders teamed with enslaved survivors of blacksmith guilds to construct many of the private and public buildings of South and Central America, the Caribbean and the southern United States.
IV. Oppression and Exclusion:
H.E. Boubou Hama has commented in relation to the African view of history that "a people that has long been victorious does not have the same consciousness of its past as one that has long been subjugated. " Africans fought to preserve images of victory so that they could point to a historical narrative of triumph to strengthen their efforts to reestablish an order consistent with historical and social optimism.
While oppression and exclusion from emerging Western societies shaped and informed the resistance of enslaved Africans, it was not then nor is it now the central defining characteristic of Africana worldviews. Cedric Robinson makes the distinction between the sources of African resistance and the conditions that made that resistance necessary over the past five hundred years. In noting that Africans had to generate frameworks of resistance to respond to European oppression, he correctly observes that "this experience, though, was merely the condition for Black radicalism-its immediate reason for and object of being-not the foundation for its nature and character."
Stressing, therefore, that African traditions of resistance to oppression and exclusion cannot be understood merely within the contexts of their genesis, he continues, writing that "it is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inceptions of Western civilization ."
Nevertheless, the role of oppression and exclusion in the modern Africana historical experience does extend beyond providing a galvanizing force against which Africans organized and resisted. African cultural practices adapted various elements of Western thought and culture and turned them to use in resistance struggles. Many of these initial vestiges of oppression and exclusion remain embedded in African-American cultural practices to this day.
Rhett Jones identifies four distinct stages through which African cultural practices passed, "each representing a synthesis or fusion of events in the previous stage." He contends that the first synthesis was the fusion of the many cultures the enslaved Africans brought with them, saying that they soon realized that, "in addition to important differences among them, there were certain underlying cultural similarities. "
The second synthesis came "as a result of the need of blacks to meet the challenge of Christianity," a need made immediately vital because of the disruption of African spiritual practices which were heavily dependent on family lineages, most of which had been severely or totally disrupted. Jones notes that, "as late at the 1730s, the vast majority of slaves and many free blacks were not Christians," and that, until the mid 18th century, enslavers were not generally concerned with African religious practices. The third synthesis, accomplished after Africans had assimilated some forms of Christianity, was the modification of the syncretic religious traditions received through combining African and European practices to reflect the larger role black women played in African cultural life. The final synthesis, which took full root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was the incorporation of European political thought, such as the struggle for concepts such as "liberty," "individual freedoms" and the like into African frames of reference .
Many students of the African-American historical experience examine the oppressive and exclusionary nature of American civil society and its intellectual and cultural foundations without paying sufficient attention to the stages transformation and incorporation which Jones describes, particularly the fourth stage. Africans in the United States did not arrive as "blank slates" ready to be filled with the concepts of "liberty and justice for all." Rather, they assimilated the high rhetorical pronouncements of the Franklins, Jeffersons, Madisons and Adamses into pre-existing African worldviews. In this manner, then, elements of European oppression and exclusion were actually turned by Africans to serve their goal of securing political and cultural autonomy.
V. Resistance to Oppress/Diversity and the Diaspora:
Africans resisted enslavement from the time they were descended upon by rival African ethnic groups working on behalf of European traders through the Middle Passage and directly into the first moments of chattel enslavement in the Western hemisphere. This resistance to oppression has continued throughout the African world and the eras of de jure and de facto enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism. In the United States, resistance to oppression has continued as an unbroken thread informing the struggles to end enslavement, legal apartheid (Jim Crow), and race-based denial of access to equality of both opportunity and outcome in the full panoply of human endeavor in American civil society.
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