Kandace Presents . . . An Outline of West African History

[kandace]

It's that time of the year again. Black History Month is upon us once again. That means it is time for the annual Kandace Presents . . . Black History thread. This year's thread will focus on the region of West Africa, a region that has been very much in the news recently. Timbuktu, Djenne, and Gao, ancient West African cties most frequently bandied about in African Studies courses, are now bylines for international news articles:

In Africa the West’s foes will claim the desert.

The U.S. airlift of French forces to Mali to fight Islamic extremists is expected to go on for another two weeks, Pentagon officials said.

This thread will provide a brief outline of the civilizational background of this region that has recently burst into Western consciousness (and is destined to loom ever larger in Western affairs).

[kandace]

Geographically, West Africa, which has an area of 2.5 million square miles, consists of three major regions: The Western Sudan, the Grasslands, and the Forest regions. West Africa, with a population of roughly 325 million people, is the most densely populated region on the African continent. West Africa civilization’s core is found in the Western Sudan, a region which may be deemed the second Nile. The second Nile, like the first Nile, is a river valley that has spawned urban based civilizations. From this second Nile, peoples and their cultures slowly fanned out to the rest of West Africa over the centuries.
While West African contains numerous cultures, peoples, tribes and nations, there are foundational similarities that unite otherwise vastly disparate peoples. These similarities are:

Matrilineality
High Status of Women
Divine Kingship
Constitutional Monarchy
Urbanism
Equestrianism
Settlerism
Trade Networks
Islamization

These civilizational similarities will be explained later.

[kandace]

Matrinlineality, the historical organizing principle of West African family life, is a much misunderstood concept. Many confuse matrilineality, the tracing of familial rights through a mother, with matriarchy, the rule of women in society. West African societies have historically been matrilineal and patriarchal, that is, women determine th status of the men who rule society.

The most prominent Western matrilineal patriarchy is of course Judaism, where Jewishness is deemed to be transmitted via the mother. [The origin of the now seemingly inocuous question, "What's your mother's maiden name?" that we see on so many applications was originally intended to discriminatorally ferret out Jews.

Under the matrilineal systems of various West African societies, in particular in ancient Ghana, among the Akan and even among the quasi nomadic Tuareg, who your mother was determined your place in society, and your inheritance rights. The heir apparent of the Akanistic Ashanti royalty is the king's nephew, as inheritance flows from the king's sister rather than his wife.

Hence, the brother sister dynamic is more important than the husband wife dynamic. Therefore in the classic West African Epic of Sundiata, the hero's sister is more important to the plot than a wife.

This nephew succession echoes the ancient customs of the Nile Valley civilzation of Kemet (Egypt) where the Pharaoh would marry his sister, hence making his son also his nephew and having more direct control over his heir (with admittedly dysgenic conequences).

The concept of matrilineality leads to the related concept of the high status of women, which will be discussed later.

[Hexexis]

...numerous cultures, peoples, tribes and nations, there are foundational similarities that unite otherwise vastly disparate peoples. These similarities are:

Matrilineality
High Status of Women
Divine Kingship ...

Some 20+ yr ago, when I was making some extra money as a night security guard, my relief was a young guy from Liberia, who was working, going to school.

One morning I was grousing about my current divorce/court proceedings, & he looked stunned: "We never do [court proceedings over divorce, other strictly interpersonal matters] in my country!" He went on to say that these sortsa things were handled by a tribal leader, who brought together relevant parties, extended family together to hash things out.

@The time I was reading about "family networks" in the US of A, England, where psychiatrists were bringing together nuclear & extended family, even pets to hash out resolution for the targeted troubled person. This could go on over weeks, even years: the recurring but thoroughly unanticipated theme was long-simmering trouble among family members, always denied @the surface but which as everyone discovered was being worked into selected troubled person ("You're just like your father's g*dd**ned uncle!").

It appears that neither tribal leaders nor psychiatric experts would permit emotional dishonesty of any kind, which they soon found was frequently @the root of troubled couples, troubled families; @which point luxury concepts like privacy were dispensed with.

[kandace]

The matrilineality of West African societies accorded women a high status. West African women were unveiled and they moved freely in public. Any form of purdah or home confinement was unknown. Women were not barred from public life. The market was a female domain, with female traders running local trade stalls. Daughters such as Yaanenga of Dagomba and Amina of Zaria learned statecraft from their fathers and would accompany them on military campaigns. The militant Muslim Jihadist and founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, viewed the education of his daughter Nana Asma’u in the classical liberal arts of Islamic scholarship and governance as a moral obligation.
This is not to state that there were no gender roles in West African society. Women were intimately tied to the home. While village goods were sold by women, long distance trade, which required travel, was a man’s job. There were female generals but soldiering was preeminently a man’s job. In various societies, such as among the Akan people, weaving by strip loom was a male monopoly. The famous Kente clothes of the Ashanti were traditionally woven by men only, as women were deemed ritually unclean because of menstruation. Indeed, in some instances women are excluded from even being in the vicinity of a strip loom. West African societies were permeated with taboos and rituals, many of which were gender specific. Nonetheless, West African women managed to exercise a significant degree of social freedom unknown in the other societies.

[kandace]

Hexexis:

One of the major problems in our society is that we lazily lump in mental illness with emotional disturbance. The genuinely mentally ill, such as the hapless homeless people (or even math genius John Nash) having conversations with non existent people are absurdly conflated with people underging temporary emotional difficulties. And typically these emotional difficulties are rooted in their social environment, particularly the behavior of family members or themselves. The overall social embrace of high levels of divorce, out of wedlock childbirth, and drug abuse has spawned legions of emotionally damaged people and armies of therapists arise to treat indivisuals rather than alter the broad social behavior that triggers the individuals' problems.

[kandace]

Monarchialism ran deep in West Africa, and republicanism in the Greco-Roman sense was unknown. A peculiar strain of monarchialism known as Divine Kingship was widespread across vast expanses of the African continent and West Africa was no exception. The king in African culture, however, was not like a king in the European conception. The European king was preeminently a war leader. The king in West Africa, like kings in other parts of Africa, was first and foremost a priest. West Africa (like the rest of Africa) had no concept of separation of church and state. (In this respect it was akin to other pagan cultures). Essentially West African kings were more akin to Popes in that their authority derived from religious sources. The West African king’s authority was derived from his ability to commune with the gods, the ancestors and the elemental spirits. The king, it was believed, had powers over the unseen and consequently over the seen. This belief in the supernatural powers of the king was such that kings needed little coercion to extract loyalty from their subjects. To rebel against the king was deemed a sin. The concept of the king as priest was taken to its most logical conclusion in the Igbo kingdom of Nri (948-1911). The Nri kingdom was ruled by the Eze Nri, a king chosen by the diviner priests. The king did not enforce his rule with a standing army. Rather, he enforced allegiance via religious rituals and his traveling religious authorities, who went from village to village instructing and governing. Rebellion, it was believed, would punished by the king using his supernatural powers to call down pestilence, death and drought.

[kandace]

The West Africans Monarchies tended to be of a limited, that is to say, Constitutional nature. This may seem strange and quite contradictory to the institution of divine kingship. However, the two concepts were actually intimately connected. The king’s preeminent task was priestly in nature, to intervene on his people’s behalf with the supernatural forces that the people believed governed the cosmos. The king was deemed divine only to the extent that he was able to exercise his supernatural power. To exercise his power, he had to remain ritually clean by following strict ritual regimens. To deviate from these customary regimens was to invite divine disfavor. Hence, the king must be of exemplary character. Mere reliance on hereditary succession was deemed foolhardy. Often, successors would have to in effect be vetted by the religious and political elders. In other words, kings (and occasionally queens) were in effect chosen by the religious orders that dominated their societies. Among the Yoruba peoples in general, and in the case of the Yoruban kingdom of Oyo in particular, the king or Oba was chosen by the peoples’ and elders councils.
Once chosen, the kings’ de facto power was limited by ritual limitations on his travel. The Emperors of Ghana as well as Mossi seldom left their capitals or even their palaces.
A monarch who was deemed to falter in his duties would be removed from office. This removal often took the form of execution or ritual suicide. [Across numerous African cultures, suicide was only deemed permissible for ritual reasons] The ruler of the Hausa city state of Katsina would be ritually slain by a public official charged with that task. This institutional regicide was the norm among the ancient pre-Islamic Hausa city states. The Yoruban Oyo kingdom institutionalized monarchial suicide. The king would receive a message from the representatives of the religious orders, people and aristocrats stating that it was time for him to end his life. (This echoed the ancient practices of the Nubians in East Africa).

[kandace]

Urbanism is, as a general rule, a defining feature of West African civilizations. This is not to state that the village was the principal abode of most people. Rather, it is to state that the cities, like those of ancient Greece and pre-imperial Roman Italy, were the central entities around which villages politically, socially and religiously orbited.

Along the Niger river and near its related tributaries, major cities such as Djenne, Timbuktu, Gao, Kumbi Selah slowly arose, beginning in the third century B.C. to the latter part of the 8th century A.D., using the river and its tributaries as an aquatic highway to transport goods. These cities had their own unique style of Western Sudanic architecture, that of adobe mud style buildings.

Further eastward, in the area near Lake Chad, the Hausa city states (Daura, Katsina, Zazzau, Gobir, Kano, Rano, and Biram )arose around the 10th century A.D.

Southward, in what is today southern Nigeria, there arose the Yoruba city states, the chief of which was Ile Ife (founded circa 600 B.C.)

[Terry K]

Urbanism is, as a general rule, a defining feature of West African civilizations. This is not to state that the village was the principal abode of most people. Rather, it is to state that the cities, like those of ancient Greece and pre-imperial Roman Italy, were the central entities around which villages politically, socially and religiously orbited.

Along the Niger river and near its related tributaries, major cities such as Djenne, Timbuktu, Gao, Kumbi Selah slowly arose, beginning in the third century B.C. to the latter part of the 8th century A.D., using the river and its tributaries as an aquatic highway to transport goods. These cities had their own unique style of Western Sudanic architecture, that of adobe mud style buildings.

Further eastward, in the area near Lake Chad, the Hausa city states (Daura, Katsina, Zazzau, Gobir, Kano, Rano, and Biram )arose around the 10th century A.D.

Southward, in what is today southern Nigeria, there arose the Yoruba city states, the chief of which was Ile Ife (founded circa 600 B.C.)

Interesting West African history but how do these attributes square with West Africa's primary involvement in slavery? Wasn't it the Ashanti of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Imbangala of Angola who actively engaged in the practice of slave trading and selling to European traders? Didn't Henry Lewis Gates indicate ""without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred"?

[kandace]

Interesting West African history but how do these attributes square with West Africa's primary involvement in slavery? Wasn't it the Ashanti of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Imbangala of Angola who actively engaged in the practice of slave trading and selling to European traders? Didn't Henry Lewis Gates indicate ""without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred"?

I will relate these attributes to the slave trade later in the thread. They did play an interesting role.

[kandace]

The equestrian heritage of West Africa is central to understanding the region’s development. The horse was in the ancient Sahara as early as the first millennium B.C. The horse would gradually filter southward into the Sudanic region, perhaps as increasing desertification in the Sahara region resulted in an increasingly hostile environment for them. However, the environmental peculiarities of the African contient would result in an unusual evolution of equestrianism among West African civilizations. The Africa Tsetse fly would ravage horses with disease to such a degree that the long term survival of horses in the forest belt of West Africa would prove difficult to almost impossible. Hence, equestriasm would be limited to a much greater degree than it was in Europe.

Nonetheless, in the Western Sudanic areas where horses could flourish, they would prove invaluable to the military, economic, and political development of the region. BY the latter half of the 11th century, the kingdom of Ghana (not to be confused with the present day nation of Ghana), had a total calvary strength of 100,000 horsemen.

The West African equestrian heritage continues to play an important role in the festivals of various regions, especially in what is today northern Nigeria.

[kandace]

Had to leave town unexpectedly but now that I am back the thread can come back to life.

Settlerism:

The West African region, in contrast to North east Africa, was a sparsely populated region for a much longer period than was the case for the NorthEast/Nile region of Africa. While the large, urban controlled, trade orietnted empires of Kemet (Egypt), Nubia, and Axum (Ethiopia) and even the coastal cities of Punt (Somalia) waxed and waned over the course of centuries and millenia, West Africa remained considerably rustic until the beginnings of the A.D. period. Small villages and towns were for the most part not linked to large cities and cities were small and widely dispersed. However, throughout the centuries, a steady flow of migrants flowed from Northeast Africa through the Sahara into the Sahel. They brought their skills with them, often resulting in paradoxical growth spurts in West African technology, such as iron working preceding bronze working.

The legends and chronicles of various west African peoples, such as the Yorubas, Mossi, and Hausa echo a common theme of an indigenous rural population that was conquered by and subsequently intermingled with a migrating conquering people. The Northeastern settlers brought with them their civilizations established cultures of esquestrianism, iron working, divine monarchy, and trade networks with their former homelands.

As desertification became more pronounced in Northeast Africa around the early part of the first Christian millenium, migration towards West Africa accelerated, and slowly complciated, large cities becgan to bloom. Trade, arts and crafts boomed, and the increasing presence of the camel and the horse brought by the settlers encouraged travel and the linking of cities, towns and villages, the age of empire arrived in West Africa.

source

other source

[kudzu]

kandace -

You're a serious cutie on this board.

Are you as cute in real life ?

[Brohan]

kandace -

You're a serious cutie on this board.

Are you as cute in real life ?

Are you creepy in real life?

[kudzu]

Are you creepy in real life?

No...

[georjec2]

kandace -

You're a serious cutie on this board.

Are you as cute in real life ?

I love Kandace.

[kudzu]

I love Kandace.

I like Kandace.

But she needs a severe lesson in reality.

[kandace]

kandace -

You're a serious cutie on this board.

Are you as cute in real life ?

My husband thinks I am a cutie. I am personally too bashful to comment.

[ms maggie]

My husband thinks I am a cutie. I am personally too bashful to comment.

My husband will be coming home tomorrow after a trip to Malawi. Can't wait to hear about his trip--working w hospital there. My knowledge of Africa is basically nil, really looking forward to his impressions. BTW love your posts, fascinating stuff.

And any husband worth his salt KNOWS his wife is a cutie!!