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An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400
... After this, a total of 18 articles were eventually identified for analysis. These articles were: Filer (1996), Janzen and Green (2008), Utsua (2015), Van-Sertima (1983), Adu-Gyamfi and Anderson (2019), Ehret (2002), Janzen and Feierman (1979), Chifundera et al. (1991), Asante (2010), Maier(1979), Mfengu et al., (2021), Ehret (1998), Wilkerson (2020), Riedel (2005),du Bois (2021) In conducting content analysis, the author first coded the contents of the articles into themes, namely, disease treatment, immunisation, and quarantine and prevention, which emerged in the initial literature review. The themes were then analysed using historical analysis, a method used to examine the evidence that provides an understanding of the past. ...
... Africans also treated wounds using medicines extracted from tree bucks and other plants and bandages of raw meat, white linen, stitches, nets, pads, and wipes that were saturated with honey to prevent infection (Ehret, 1998(Ehret, , 2002. Ancient African surgeons also stitched wounds, set broken bones, and cut off diseased limbs (Green, 2015). ...
... Various diseases were treated at this institution, and others by specialists. Among Egyptian physicians were some who treated only the head or the stomach, while others were eye doctors and dentists (Ehret, 1998). Medicine was also a public good in Africa, and it was provided irrespective of gender, ethnicity, or income (Filer, 1996). ...
Existing medical literature is dominated by descriptions of Africa as a mere consumer of Euro-West medical practices without acknowledging Africa's role in medical innovation and practices. This article closes this gap, which has practical implications. The article aims to highlight the rise of medical practices in Africa from ancient times to the present. The article utilises a historical analysis of the literature available in both grey and academic literature. The sources used include books, reports, and biographies and were identified using terms such as African agency, African medicine, ancient technologies in Africa, and diseases in Africa as key terms. The articles were selected from the Web of Science and Google Scholar databases for standardisation purposes.
... Most problematically, these nationalist historians demonstrated little interest in pastoralists and hunters and gatherers as historical entities. In East Africa, a handful of scholars, including Christopher Ehret on the Nilotes (Ehret 1971(Ehret , 1974a(Ehret , 1974b(Ehret , 1998, Betwel Ogot on the Luo (Ogot 1964(Ogot , 1967 and Richard Waller on the Maasai (Waller 1974) pioneered the historical work on pastoralists and filled some of the void left by earlier nationalist historians. In doing so, these groundbreaking authors emphasized that the Nilotic histories were mainly influenced by migrations, linguistic diversities and interactive histories (E. ...
... Most problematically, these nationalist historians demonstrated little interest in pastoralists and hunters and gatherers as historical entities. In East Africa, a handful of scholars, including Christopher Ehret on the Nilotes (Ehret 1971(Ehret , 1974a(Ehret , 1974b(Ehret , 1998, Betwel Ogot on the Luo (Ogot 1964(Ogot , 1967 and Richard Waller on the Maasai (Waller 1974) pioneered the historical work on pastoralists and filled some of the void left by earlier nationalist historians. In doing so, these groundbreaking authors emphasized that the Nilotic histories were mainly influenced by migrations, linguistic diversities and interactive histories (E. ...
... Most problematically, these nationalist historians demonstrated little interest in pastoralists and hunters and gatherers as historical entities. In East Africa, a handful of scholars, including Christopher Ehret on the Nilotes (Ehret 1971(Ehret , 1974a(Ehret , 1974b(Ehret , 1998, Betwel Ogot on the Luo (Ogot 1964(Ogot , 1967 and Richard Waller on the Maasai (Waller 1974) pioneered the historical work on pastoralists and filled some of the void left by earlier nationalist historians. In doing so, these groundbreaking authors emphasized that the Nilotic histories were mainly influenced by migrations, linguistic diversities and interactive histories (E. ...
... Support for the spread of cowpea cultivation out of West Africa comes in the form of linguistic evidence. In the reconstructed proto-Bantu language from ca. 3000 BCE, the word for cowpea can be reconstructed as "*-kunde" (Ehret, 1974(Ehret, , 1998Vansima, 1990). ...
... Around this time, Bantu-speaking groups began migrating out from the original Bantu homeland in modern-day Cameroon and Nigeria (Ehret, 1998). From that point forward, it is likely that the word refers to the domesticated plant as wild cowpea is not found in the equatorial rainforest areas that the Bantu moved into. ...
... From that point forward, it is likely that the word refers to the domesticated plant as wild cowpea is not found in the equatorial rainforest areas that the Bantu moved into. Interestingly, the Bantu-speaking groups that migrated east to the area of modern South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia did not bring the term "*-kunde" with them and instead adopted the Southern Cushitic term "*salakw-" (Ehret, 1974(Ehret, , 1998. This could indicate that cowpea cultivation in East Africa predated Bantu arrival and could further support the hypothesis of independent domestication in East Africa, with the two gene pools mixing. ...
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp.) was originally domesticated in sub‐Saharan Africa but is now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Utilizing archeological, textual, and genetic resources, the spread of cultivated cowpea has been reconstructed. Cowpea was domesticated in Africa, likely in both West and East Africa, before 2500 BCE and by 400 BCE was long established in all the modern major production regions of the Old World, including sub‐Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, India, and Southeast Asia. Further spread occurred as part of the Columbian Exchange, which brought African germplasm to the Caribbean, the southeastern United States, and South America and Mediterranean germplasm to Cuba, the southwestern United States, and Northwest Mexico.
... This suggests two independent domestication regions, paralleling the domestication of common bean in both Mesoamerica and the Andean highlands (Kwak et al. 2009), likely with a combining of gene pools, such as is believed to have occurred in Asian rice (Fuller 2011;Vaughan et al. 2008) Support for the spread of cowpea cultivation out of West Africa comes in the form of linguistic evidence. In the reconstructed proto-Bantu language from circa 3,000 BCE the word for cowpea can be reconstructed as "*-kunde" (Ehret, 1974(Ehret, , 1998Vansima, 1990). Around this time, Bantu-speaking groups began migrating out from the original Bantu homeland in modernday Cameroon and Nigeria (Ehret, 1998). ...
... In the reconstructed proto-Bantu language from circa 3,000 BCE the word for cowpea can be reconstructed as "*-kunde" (Ehret, 1974(Ehret, , 1998Vansima, 1990). Around this time, Bantu-speaking groups began migrating out from the original Bantu homeland in modernday Cameroon and Nigeria (Ehret, 1998). From that point forward, it is likely that the word refers to the domesticated plant as wild cowpea is not found in the equatorial rainforest areas that the Bantu moved into. ...
... From that point forward, it is likely that the word refers to the domesticated plant as wild cowpea is not found in the equatorial rainforest areas that the Bantu moved into. Interestingly, the Bantu-speaking groups which migrated east to the area of modern South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia did not bring the term "*-kunde" with them and instead adopted the Southern Cushitic term "*salakw-" (Ehret, 1974(Ehret, , 1998. This could indicate that cowpea cultivation in East Africa predated Bantu arrival and could further support the hypothesis of independent domestication in East Africa, with the two gene pools mixing. ...
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp.) was originally domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa but is now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Utilizing archaeological, textual, and genetic resources, the spread of cultivated cowpea has been reconstructed. Cowpea was domesticated in Africa, likely in both West and East Africa, before 2500 BCE and by 400 BCE was long established in all the modern major production regions of the Old World, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, India, and Southeast Asia. Further spread occurred as part of the Columbian Exchange, which brought African germplasm to the Caribbean, the southeastern United States, and South America, and Mediterranean germplasm to Cuba, the southwestern United States and Northwest Mexico.
... Scholars have analyzed the locations of extant languages (which constitute the last stage of language differentiation in the classification) to reconstruct regional settlement histories in very broad terms, a point to which we will return in a moment (for Africa, consider: Nurse, 1997;Ehret, 2010;Dimmendaal, 2011). Such linguistically-derived settlement histories can then be compared to archaeological evidence for settlement, subsistence, political organization, and so forth (among examples relating to this region, compare: Vansina, 1990;Klieman, 2003;Currie et al., 2013;Bostoen et al., 2015;Grollemund et al., 2015; for other approaches, see : Ehret, 1998;Schoenbrun, 1998;de Luna, 2012). Of course, the methods by which languages are compared and classified also yield critical information about contact among related languages and between languages that are not related to one another. ...
... By the 1990s, as critiques of such circular reasoning built up, many scholars, particularly archaeologists, abandoned research on the Bantu Expansion (Schmidt, 1975;Lunyiigo, 1976;Gramsley, 1978;M€ ohlig, 1989;Robertson and Bradley, 2000; see also Eggert, 2004). By the close of the decade, historians were increasingly taking up the methodology of comparative historical linguistics, albeit with very different goals (Vansina, 1990;Ehret, 1998;Schoenbrun, 1998). If the heyday of Bantu Expansions research was the 1960se1980s, novel approaches to early human pasts in the hard sciences are currently facilitating a resurgence of research on the Bantu Expansion. ...
... The results of this project included new linguistic evidence for the multiple introductions of domesticated pearl millet into the subsistence systems of Bantu-speaking communities (Kahlheber et al., 2009;Neumann et al., 2012; see also; Kahlheber et al., 2014). Scholars had long argued that pearl millet, like many other cereals, was adopted by Bantu speaking communities in the eastern region of the continent, from which location the technology spread south and west (Vansina, 1994(Vansina, , 2004Bahuchet, 1994/1995;Ehret, 1998). Bostoen agrees that eastern Bantu languages inherited the term *-b ed e and the technology of pearl millet from their common linguistic ancestors, who learned about the grain from Nilo-Saharan speakers. ...
The state of linguistics research on human settlement in central Africa suggests that rainforest environments were undesirable locations for settlement for many of the early speech communities associated with the extension of Bantu-speaking populations and languages into the region. Explanations for this preference tend to focus on the presumed challenge of adapting the earliest Bantu savanna subsistence system to the new rainforest environment. Recent syntheses incorporating linguistic, archaeological, and paleoclimatic evidence argue that periods of climate change encouraged the growth of wooded savanna, secondary forest, and grasslands at the margins and even in heart of the rainforest; these more open environments may have facilitated the expansion of Bantu languages into the through central Africa. A re-analysis of three previously proposed lexical reconstructions, however, reveals that early Bantu words for generic forms of vegetation (forests, thickets, trees, and the bush) offer key insights into the changing ways that Bantu speakers conceptualized and valued uninhabited spaces and areas of dense vegetation even as the majority of Bantu speakers elected to settle within intercalary zones of wooded savanna, secondary forest, and grasslands located throughout the rainforest.
... See also Carlin (1993) on the other surviving Kuliak language, So. 28 Ehret (1973) sketches out an embryonic version of this classification, developed using the same basic principles. Otherwise it might be noted that Ehret's (1998) history shares much in common Vansina's (1990) overview of Western Bantu history. The histories are very different -as they should be -but the two historians' approaches are broadly complementary (cf. ...
... 31 Cf. Schoenbrun (1998);Ehret (1998). 32 It remains to be seen how this study will relate to Catherine Labroussi's work on the same group of languages (Labroussi 1998;and see Walsh and Swilla 2000). ...
Environmental sciences have contributed significantly to archaeological reconstructions of ancient and traditional agricultural systems in the Sonora and Chihuahua deserts of North America. Diverse agricultural systems have been documented, including a variety of irrigation, floodwater, runoff, and rock mulch systems. Because of unpredictable environmental conditions and highly variable growing seasons, ancient farmers commonly spread their fields over different soils and landforms, using multiple agricultural systems as a
buffering mechanism to ensure adequate food supplies. Soil, geomorphic, hydrologic, and paleoclimatic studies have played a crucial role in assessing the anthropogenic effects of cultivation and environmental effects of drought, flooding, and landscape change on agricultural productivity and sustainability.
... See also Carlin (1993) on the other surviving Kuliak language, So. 28 Ehret (1973) sketches out an embryonic version of this classification, developed using the same basic principles. Otherwise it might be noted that Ehret's (1998) history shares much in common Vansina's (1990) overview of Western Bantu history. The histories are very different -as they should be -but the two historians' approaches are broadly complementary (cf. ...
... 31 Cf. Schoenbrun (1998);Ehret (1998). 32 It remains to be seen how this study will relate to Catherine Labroussi's work on the same group of languages (Labroussi 1998;and see Walsh and Swilla 2000). ...
Research on the Engaruka fields has thus far focused on documenting the distribution of different agricultural features and reconstructing the agricultural technology of this field system. It is now appropriate to apply various soil and environmental studies developed in the American Southwest to evaluating soil productivity and agricultural sustainability of the Engaruka fields. Recent soil studies in the Southwest have found that cultivation can alter physical and chemical soil properties such as bulk density, air and water permeability, pH,
and organic matter content, and that these changes may enhance or degrade soil productivity. The Engaruka fields are well suited for a similar soil study because: (1) soil formation proceeds slowly in this semiarid climate, so soil changes caused by cultivation are likely to persist and be detectable; (2) many field areas have not been cultivated since the fields were abandoned, so modern farming practices have not masked or erased soil properties reflecting ancient use; and (3) the presence of agricultural features and terraces provides important clues for discerning and sampling cultivated and uncultivated soils. Other types of environmental
studies, including paleohydraulic reconstructions of canals, stream flow reconstructions, and geomorphic and dendroclimatological studies, also have strong research potential for modelling agricultural sustainability of the Engaruka fields.
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Key Words: Engaruka, soil chemistry, agricultural history, Southwest USA
... A partir de cerca de 7.000 anos atrás, o advento de ferramentas de pedra polida permitiu que os africanos ocidentais transformassem a copa da floresta tropical fechada em mosaicos de policulturas mistas baseadas principalmente em variedades de inhame (Dioscorea sp.) (Ehret, 1998). À medida que os agricultores desmatavam a floresta para plantar, muitas vezes selecionavam e poupavam as palmeiras-de-óleo-africanas, valorizadas pelos óleos, vinhos, materiais de construção e muitas aplicações espirituais e medicinais. ...
Este trabalho pesquisa o desenvolvimento a longo prazo das paisagens de dendê no nordeste brasileiro no estado da Bahia. Em contraste com as monoculturas agroindustriais que dominam a produção global, o dendê na Bahia emerge de uma paisagem cultural biodiversa construída através de cinco séculos de um intercâmbio socioecológico transatlântico. Nativas da África Ocidental, as palmeiras-de-óleo-africanas (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) se disseminaram no Novo Mundo com a expansão colonial ultramarina, estabelecendo-se na Bahia no século XVII. Ali, as palmeiras ajudaram a formar uma paisagem cultural complexa e biodiversa que continua a suprir as demandas alimentares e espirituais locais pelo dendê - um recurso essencial em muitas expressões culturais afro-brasileiras. Estendendo-se aproximadamente 70 quilômetros ao sul da capital Salvador, as paisagens tradicionais de dendê da Bahia são agora oficialmente chamadas de Costa do Dendê, usando o termo de inspiração afro-brasileira Kimbundu Bantu para o óleo de palma. Historicamente, oficiais coloniais e a elite brasileira mostraram pouco interesse na economia do dendê da Bahia, concedendo-o efetivamente aos afrodescendentes até meados do século XX. Desde então, uma série de intervenções modernas de desenvolvimento tem procurado transformar as paisagens complexas e biodiversas da Costa do Dendê em uma monocultura de dendê, baseada numa variedade híbrida melhorada. No entanto, apesar dos esforços recorrentes de cima para baixo, os dendezais emergentes ou “subespontâneos” e as paisagens policulturais tradicionais continuam a dominar o uso da terra na região. Baseado em etnografia, interpretações da paisagem, arquivos e análise geoespacial, este trabalho analisa o desenvolvimento histórico da economia do dendê na Bahia, relatando cinco séculos das mudanças socioecológicas na Costa do Dendê. O estudo integra obras geográficas recentes da diáspora africana com teorias de legibilidade e complexidade para compreender a contínua proliferação das paisagens tradicionais de dendê da Bahia apesar da promoção de monoculturas modernas.
... Indeed, recent examples have highlighted how the expansion of human farming communities is associated with the co-diffusion of their crops and languages, thereby providing a genetic footprint of this shared history. The dispersal of Bantu farmers from West Africa led to the spread of 'Kafir' sorghum in sub-equatorial Africa, 1000 years BCE (Ehret, 1998). The ancient Persian Empire shaped common walnut (Juglans regia L.) diversity between central and eastern Asia (Pollegioni et al., 2015), while the diversity of sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) in Polynesia (Oceania) might be explained by their pre-Columbian migration from South America (Roullier et al., 2013). ...
Societal Impact Statement
Fonio ( Digitaria exilis —Kippist—Stapf) is a neglected cereal crop that plays a crucial role in the food and nutritional security of sub‐Saharan populations. Currently threatened with extinction in many countries, fonio, like other minor species, could help give insights into the history of African agriculture and provide clues to past social interactions. Highlighting and preserving genetic diversity that can be used to develop improved varieties improves food security. By recognizing the role of indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) in agrobiodiversity creation and management, this study provides support for strengthening the rights of rural communities and promoting their food and seed sovereignty as outlined in the United Nations UNDROP Declaration.
Summary
Fonio ( Digitaria exilis ) is a neglected cereal crop that plays a crucial role in the food and nutritional security of sub‐Saharan populations. It is an excellent candidate to diversify agricultural and food systems beyond Africa because of its adaptability and hardiness. However, fonio is threatened with extinction and the factors that organize its genetic diversity remain unknown, despite the fact that this knowledge is necessary to define conservation strategies and uses to achieve sustainable agriculture.
Here, we combined social anthropology and population genetics analysis of 158 fonio landraces, thereby generating insight into the genetic diversity, population structure and evolutionary history of fonio cultivation in Senegal.
We noted a spatial structure of genetic diversity at two embedded levels, with the first corresponding to the genetic differentiation between ethnic groups and the second to the demographic history of the Mande and Atlantic Congo linguistic families. Selection and seed exchange practices have contributed to shaping fonio genetic diversity at the ethnic level, while the migration of Fulani people over the last 500 years has fragmented the Mandinka kingdom, hence leaving a fonio diversity imprint.
Our study highlighted that social factors are pivotal in structuring diversity and should be taken into greater consideration in research and conservation projects to dovetail local and regional scales. It also showed that neglected species such as fonio—which are seldom used in breeding and dissemination programmes—are key markers of the history of African agriculture.
... Expectedly, subsequent scholarship has revised this schema in south-central Africa and beyond by specifying who or what did or did not "stream" at any given time. Others have questioned what, exactly, the large-scale geographical distribution of patterns of affinity in material culture tells us about human activities in the past (among many different approaches, see Bostoen et al., 2015;de Luna, 2012de Luna, , 2016Eggert, 2005;Ehret, 1998;Gramsley, 1978;Grollemund et al., 2015;Möhlig, 1989;Pakendorf et al., 2011;Robertson & Bradley, 2000;Saidi, 2010). But, it is important to recognize that it was this large-scale pioneering analysis that placed Phillipson's research in the pages of World Archaeology and Scientific American and, thus, in the hands of a much wider scholarly and generalist audience. ...
... Secondly, we include Pogolo and Ndamba from the so-called Kilombero group (the G50 languages, with P15 sometimes included). Finally, we include Kisi (G67) from the Southern Highlands group (Nurse 1988, Ehret 1998, Nurse 1999, Nurse and Philippson 2003. Unlike the other G60 languages, Kisi has a single post-verbal negative particle as a standard negator. ...
This paper examines the presence, distribution and historical development of post-verbal negative particles in a sample of Bantu languages found in Southern Tanzania. It focuses on 12 language varieties found in this area which employ post-verbal negative particles, including an apparent "outlier" in Matengo which employs a pre-verbal negative particle. The paper also draws on comparative data from some 20 additional languages spoken in the direct vicinity. We show that there is a high level of variation in the negative forms used, but, at the same time, a preponderance of the use of post-verbal negative particles as the primary strategy for encoding standard negation. We explore both standard negation and non-standard negation, including non-declarative and non-main clause contexts, as well as instances of non-verbal predication and copula clauses. The use of these forms as negative replies or interjections is also examined. In exploring etymologies we find sources of the post-verbal particles in negative replies, reflects of *-tʊṕʊ́ 'only, in vain', content interrogatives and the negative verb-lepa. We also discuss contact as a possible explanation for the prevalence of this negative strategy in the region.
... Through the comparative approach of linguists, we can access deep, long histories even if the relevant languages were not documented at the time or remain undocumented even today. Although the domain of other disciplines in the study of most historical contexts (notably linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology), in African Studies, this work is undertaken by historians, who use the evidence in unique ways (Vansina 2006; for examples of this approach by Africanist historians, consider: de Luna 2016;Ehret 1998;Fields-Black 2008: ch. 2;Klieman 2003;Schoenbrun 1998;Stephens 2013;Vansina 1990Vansina , 2004. ...
This essay takes as its framework the competing definitions of ‘global’ as a concept through which we can reconsider the scope of global history. More specifically, it advocates for the adoption of truly global archives, such as the historical information embedded in language, by the field. Such a methodological move will generate historical scholarship that better situates the impact of oral societies in global history on their own terms. Cover image caption: Wooden Yokes used in coffles, Senegal, ca. 1789. Thomas Clarkson, Letters on the slave-trade, and the state of the natives in those parts of Africa […] contiguous to Fort St. Louis (London, 1791) plate 3, facing p. 37, detail. Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia. Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
... GROLLEMUND et al. 2015). By and large, the pool of languages (and subgroupings) equals those discussed in the genealogically oriented work of NURSE (1999) or EHRET's (1998EHRET's ( , 1999 grouping of "Mashariki-Kaskazi" under the "Eastern-Savannah subgroup" of "Savannah Bantu". Since most genealogical (sub-)groupings also are geographically coherent (and indeed often carry a geographically based designation) we have taken the liberty of using terminology perhaps mainly associated with genealogically-based studies when helpful. ...
In this article we offer an overview of the use of modal auxiliary verb constructions in East African Bantu (encompassing languages spoken from eastern Congo in the northwest to northern Mozambique in the southeast ; viz. Guthrie zones JD, JE, E, F, G, M, N and P). Modality, here conceptualized as a semantic space comprising different subcategories (or flavors) of possibility and necessity, has traditionally been a neglected category within Bantu linguistics, which has tended to focus instead on the more grammatical(ized) categories of tense, aspect and to a lesser extent mood. Nonetheless, our survey shows that there exists a rich number of different verbs with specialized modal functions in East African Bantu. Moreover, when comparing the variety of modal verbs in East African Bantu and the wider constructions in which they operate, many similar patterns arise. In some cases, different languages make use of cognate verbs for expressing similar modal concepts, in other cases divergent verbs, but with essentially the same source meaning(s), are employed. In addition, both Bantu-internal and Bantu-external contact have played a key role in the formation of several of the languages' inventories of modal verbs. A typologically significant feature recurrently discovered among the languages surveyed is the tendency of structural manipulations of the same verb base to indicate semantic shift from participant-internal to participant-imposed modal flavors.
... Alternatively, it has been proposed that the C −14010 variant could have been introduced ∼1400 ya by eastern African Bantu-speaking populations who acquired the variant through admixture and subsequently migrated along the East coast to southern Africa (25,(124)(125)(126)(127). Genetic studies have also reported the presence of the T −13910 allele in southern African groups with European ancestry, such as the 'Wellington Colored' (17.5%) and Nama Khoisan-speaking populations (6.8%) (20,123,128), reflecting ongoing admixture within this geographic region. ...
Lactase persistence is a genetically-determined trait that is prevalent in African, European and Arab populations with a tradition of cattle herding and milk consumption. To date, genetic analyses have identified several common variants that are associated with lactase persistence. Moreover, data have indicated that these functional alleles likely have been maintained in pastoralist populations due to the action of recent selection, exemplifying the ongoing evolution of anatomically modern humans. In addition, demographic history has also played a role in the geographic distribution of lactase persistence and associated alleles in Africa. In particular, the migration of ancestral herders and their subsequent admixture with local populations were integral to the spread of lactase persistence, alleles, and the culture of pastoralism (i.e. demic diffusion) across the continent. The timing of these demographic events was often correlated with known major environmental changes and/or the ability of domestic cattle to resist/avoid infectious disease. This review summarizes recent advances in our understanding of the genetic basis and evolutionary history of lactase persistence, as well as the factors that influenced the origin and spread of pastoralism in Africa.
... To date, there is no established and agreed upon internal genetic classification of the Narrow Bantu languages (but see the discussion of Nurse and Philippson 2003 below) based on phonological innovations. Authoritative reviews (Nurse 1994, Nurse 1997, Nurse and Philippson 2003, Philippson and Grollemund 2019 indicate that almost all major modern attempts to propose an internal historical classification of Bantu languages are based on lexicostatistics, lexical innovations, or counting of morphological features (see for instance Heine 1972, Coupez et al. 1975, Heine et al. 1977, Nurse and Philippson 1980, Bastin et al. 1983, Ehret 1998, Bastin and Piron 1999). In the last fifteen years, there have also been classification attempts based on phylogenetic methods, many of which entirely rely upon previous lexicostatistical data (see Marten 2006, de Schryver et al. 2015, and Philippson and Grollemund 2019 for detailed reviews). ...
This book it focuses on different clause-level constructions involving reflexes of the Proto-Bantu multifunctional applicative suffix *-ɪd. These constructions, widespread across the Bantu family, show that applicative morphology is not always syntactically valence-increasing. It performs many non-syntactic functions which are often not
addressed in the relevant literature. Besides comparative data from the entire Bantu domain, this work includes a first-ever historical case study of lexicalized, valence-neutral applicative constructions in the southern Bantu language Tswana. The book shows that several non-syntactic functions of applicative morphology in Bantu have parallels in genealogically unrelated and geographically distant language families. Such often-overlooked cross-linguistic data represent a serious challenge for most current operational definitions of
applicative morphology, inside and outside of Bantu, as being ontologically a morphosyntactic valence-increasing device.
... A systematic study of "2/2a" and "4" reconstructions would certainly help to increase PB vocabulary. A further increase of PB reconstructions in a follow-up of BLR3 would be possible if one more systematically incorporated the comparative lexical research output realised by both historians and linguists over the past decades (e.g., Vansina 1990, Philippson & Bahuchet 1994, Mouguiama-Daouda 1995, Schoenbrun 1997, Ehret 1998, Bulkens 1999, Klieman 2003, Vansina 2004, Bostoen 2005, Stephens 2007, de Luna 2008, Bostoen et al. 2013, Ricquier 2013, Bostoen 2014, Koni Muluwa 2014. ...
... Whether due to a more judicious sampling of the languages or to the inclusion of non-lexical characters -which appears unlikely since the tree based on the latter does not differ much from the one based on lexical characters -they were able to remove the uncertainty about primary branching within Bantu and confi rmed the East-out-of-the-West model. They refer approvingly to the classifi cation and expansion model of Ehret (1998 ), which is all the more signifi cant since Bastin has long been known as a supporter of the East-next-tothe-West model. The results show a Bantu expansion in fi ve steps: with an initial radiation from Cameroon (A languages), followed by an expansion through the equatorial rainforest (C and D languages); the third step corresponds to the main radiation in the south-east part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D, L and M languages), followed by a spread westward (K, R, H and B languages) 3 with fi nally a radiation south-eastward in the Eastern area (J, F, E, G, N, P and S languages). ...
... In so doing, they have refined the techniques for drawing history from language and they have sought to correlate their findings in systematic ways with the archaeology of their regions of study and often with the testimony of oral traditions and written records as well. Their works have explored such topics as the political, cultural, and economic history of the vast Congo Basin over the past 5,000 years (Klieman 2003;Vansina 1978Vansina , 1990; the social and economic history of eastern and southern Africa during the early Iron Age (Ehret 1972(Ehret , 1998; and the very long-term social, cultural, and political histories of the African Great Lakes region (Schoenbrun 1998) and of Angola and northern Namibia (Vansina 2003). ...
Historical linguistics studies language relationships and the histories of languages and language families. Using the methods and tools of historical linguistics, anthropologists and historians are able to sketch out the broad histories of the earlier societies that spoke the ancient ancestral forms of modern‐day languages. More importantly, these techniques enable scholars to reconstruct the ancient histories of the numerous culture words of those languages and, from the word histories, to recover a great many details of culture and social relations in those long‐ago societies. This entry describes key ways in which scholars apply these methods and it presents examples of how the findings of linguistic historical reconstruction can be correlated with the discoveries of archaeology and, in consequence, be given solid calendar dates.
... Beginning around 7000 years ago, the advent of polished stone tools allowed West Africans to transform closed rainforest canopy into swidden mosaics of mixed polycultures based primarily on varieties of yams (Dioscorea sp.) (Ehret, 1998). As farmers cleared forest for planting they often selected and spared African oil palms, prized for oils, wines, construction materials, and numerous spiritual and medicinal applications. ...
This paper examines the long-term development of palm oil landscapes in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. In contrast to the agroindustrial monocultures that dominate global production, palm oil in Bahia emerges from a biodiverse cultural landscape constructed through five centuries of transatlantic socioecological exchange. Native to West Africa, African oil palms (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) diffused to the New World during colonial overseas expansion, becoming established in Bahia by the seventeenth century. There the palms helped form a complex cultural landscape that continues to supply local alimentary and spiritual demands for palm oil—an essential resource in many Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions. Extending approximately 70 km south of the capital Salvador, Bahia's traditional palm oil landscapes are now officially dubbed the Dendê Coast (Costa do Dendê), following the Kimbundu Bantu-inspired Afro-Brazilian term for palm oil. Historically colonial officials and elite Brazilians showed little interest in Bahia's palm oil economy, effectively conceding it to Afro-descendants until the mid-twentieth century. Since then, a series of modern development interventions have sought to transform the complex, biodiverse landscapes of the Dendê Coast into a legible oil palm monoculture based on an improved hybrid variety. Yet despite recurrent top-down efforts, emergent or “subspontaneous” groves and traditional polycultural landscapes continue to dominate land use in the region. Drawing on ethnography, landscape interpretations, archives, and geospatial analysis, this paper analyzes the historical development of Bahia's palm oil economy, recounting five centuries of socioecological changes on the Dendê Coast. The study integrates recent geographical treatments of the African diaspora with theories of complexity to comprehend the ongoing proliferation of Bahia's traditional palm oil landscapes despite top-down promotion of modern monocultures.
... During fieldwork in northern Uganda in 2010 and 2011 one phrase recurred in my conversations with Acholi peasants: "our culture is based on food". Historical studies based on linguistics, archaeology and paleoecology bring to light the existence of complex and extremely elaborated food-producing systems in the Great Lakes region (Shoenbrun 1993(Shoenbrun , 1998Ehret 1974;Ehret 1998). At the intersection of different influences from Central and Eastern Sudanese, Southern Cushitic communities and Eastern Highlands Bantu speakers, a set of developed and diverse food systems preceded the Iron Age and developed in the region roughly for a thousands year after 500 B.C. Central Sudanic-speaking societies resided at the Western side of the great lake regions raised and milked cattle and grew sorghum and millet (Ehret, 1974). ...
The new paradigm of food sovereignty offers a series of alternatives to the neoliberal
development mode. It also offers some answers to the emerging food question by proposing
solutions to reduce dependency on purchased food or aid, focusing on territory, community,
autonomy, sustainability, ecology and nutrition. The food crisis, which is widely connected to
both the ecological and energy crises and exposes the contradictions of the corporate food
regime, was manifested in both the deficiency of supply and exponential increase of prices of
staple food. Global food crises bring to the fore a number of responses offering inter-linkages
between questions of access to food, poverty and power, as well as issues of productivity and
the contested debate around technological solutions. The food question in Uganda has been
merely interpreted via the modernization paradigm in purely quantitative terms and codified
through the notion of food security: the idea that the issue is just one of securing certain
availability of food at national and international level through internal production or external
aid. The aim of the paper is to debunk the debate from this productivist paradigm, which in
Uganda agricultural policies coincides with an emphasis on increasing commercialization of
peasant food production. The notion of food sovereignty however cannot be simply read in
epiphenomenal terms or merely the lens of contemporary social movements. Indeed it has
profound historical, ecological and political articulations with the long-term strategies of
peasant households to maintain their relative autonomy, expand their resource base and
ensure social reproduction. The paper explores these dynamics through the case of northern
Ugandan peasants and their struggles to maintain access to land and food production as crucial
instruments to their internal social organization, political authority and economic reproduction.
These social struggles are also to maintain their relative autonomy vis a vis states (pre-colonial,
colonial and post-colonial) and national and international markets. These dynamics acquire
particular relevance in the light of the increasingly unjust, unequal and politically repressive
character of the nation state. They are also important because of the overtly central political
and economic role played by food in geo-political interstate relations and relations between
classes (farmers, peasants and workers) evidenced by amongst other things the current wave of
large-scale land acquisitions, which is altering the patterns of food production at global level.
... Please note that the reference Ehret (2000) has been changed to Ehret (1998) as per the references list. ...
... Please note that the reference Ehret (2000) has been changed to Ehret (1998) as per the references list. ...
... Similar ideas were repeated in a small book on the Cape Herders by Boonzaier et al. (1996). Other major publications which have dealt wholly or partly with this issue include Ehret (1982Ehret ( , 1998, Barnard (1992), Smith (1992Smith ( , 2005, Sealy and Yates (1994), Mitchell (2002) and Phillipson (2005). ...
Recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research in the Ndali Crater Lakes Region (NCLR) of western Uganda provide important new insights into anthropogenic impacts on moist forests to the East of the Rwenzori Mountains. This research significantly changes previous interpretations of paleoenvironmental records in western Uganda and helps to distinguish climate change from human impacts. By drawing on multiple sources such as historical linguistics, archaeological evidence, and environmental proxies for change, a new picture emerges for a region that was a cultural crossroads for early Bantu-speakers and Central Sudanic-speakers between 400 BCE and 1000 CE. Detailed archaeological data and well-dated sites provide fine-grained evidence that closely fits episodes of significant environmental change, including a later and separate phase of forest clearance, soil degradation, and lake pollution caused by the saturation of the landscape by Bigo-related populations between 1300 and 1650 CE.
Fresque de changements environnementaux induits par l’homme et le climat dans l’ouest de l’Ouganda : la région des lacs du cratère de Ndali
Ethnographic data and archeological censuses of cities suggest that sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind tropical America during pre-colonial times. Disease (i.e., environmentally determined pathogen stress) has a negative impact on pre-colonial economic conditions, as measured by the presence of large physical structures in ethnographic data. This negative relationship is seen primarily, but not exclusively in African societies. Using a simple coalitional game, I propose a causal path from disease to ethnic diversity. Ethnographic data suggests a positive effect of disease on ethnic diversity, and persistent effects on long-term economic development. Even today, pre-colonial factors influence income per capita and ethnolinguistic fractionalization.
The first East African pastoralists arrived at the shores of Lake Turkana soon after the end of the African Humid Period, about 5,000 years ago. In the preceding millennia of the Holocene, fishing economies characterized East Africa. The domestic animals of the early pastoralists were not indigenous to East Africa, nor did they spread through the region simultaneously. Early pastoralist archaeological sites around Lake Turkana comprise settlements and remarkable monumental cemeteries. The expansion of pastoralists further south through East Africa was a two-stage process, probably because of the challenges posed by the presence of diseases fatal to livestock. First, caprines spread south and appear to have been integrated into existing forager subsistence systems. Then, starting toward the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, specialized pastoralism began to be established across central and southern Kenya and into northern Tanzania. While analysis of lipid residues on potsherds has demonstrated that these Pastoral Neolithic (PN) peoples milked their animals, the question of whether agriculture was also practiced remains unresolved.
Analyses of ancient DNA have shown there were at least two episodes of demic diffusion associated with the spread and establishment of the PN in East Africa. Considerable diversity is present in the PN, with three distinct cultures generally recognized across East Africa south of Lake Turkana. Moreover, there is even greater diversity observed in the decoration and shapes of ceramics. However, this cultural diversity is not matched by human genetic diversity, at least among the analyzed skeletons from two of the three cultures—the Elmenteitan and the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic.
An indigenous agriculture was developed in Africa, by Africans domesticating African plants. Domestication in Africa started with animals, and moved much later to crops, at about 5000BP in the Sahara and Sahel. An agricultural system evolved with a farming village pattern and spread over much of the continent. The most important to the Africans as food are sorghum, pearl millet, African rice, yams, oil palm, karité, cowpea, bottle gourd, finger millet, tef, enset, and noog. The linguistic evidence consistently indicates a considerable antiquity for agriculture in sub‐Saharan Africa. The African savanna complex did spread out of its hearth in a way similar to the Near East agricultural complex. The most sophisticated décrue agriculture evolved in the great central delta of the Niger in Mali. Modification of the décrue system can be found throughout West Africa. Livestock herding and pottery production were developed long before any trace of cultivated plants occurred.
The concept of “wealth in people” lies at the heart of much of gender history in precolonial Africa. This chapter proceeds through several examples drawn from East, West, Southern, and Central Africa, from times ranging from 3,000 years ago to the early nineteenth century. Gendered histories of early Africa tend to cluster around marriage, motherhood, and kinship. Motherhood existed at the intersections of a woman's role and reputation among multiple households, and the interests of each household in her offspring. Women encouraged a trajectory that placed men at the center of cattle economies, limited access to socially viable masculinity, and located their husbands in subordinate positions with respect to her parents. Households and communities altered ideas about what constituted socially acceptable femininity and masculinity to manage shifting political and economic landscapes during the upheaval of the Atlantic Era.
In this article I discuss the relationship between analytical psychology and theories of human social evolution. More specifically I look at debates in evolutionary studies and anthropology regarding the priority of matrilineal social structure in the emergence of Homo sapiens. These debates were occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and they provide the context for many of the assumptions of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In this essay I will explore these issues in relation to analytical psychology. I will also discuss the work of anthropologist John Layard who proposed matriliny was humanity’s original form of social organisation. Interestingly, Layard’s field work had significant impact on Jung. I will also compare the work of Layard, and other theorists who adopt matrilineal theories of human social evolution, with the theories of Jordan Peterson. Peterson has developed an idiosyncratic evolutionary conception of analytical psychology, one in which he explicitly rejects the notion of matrilineal priority in human evolution. He also adopts certain assumptions about the evolutionary origins of contemporary socio-political hierarchy, assumptions I argue are not supported by data from numerous fields of scientific enquiry.
The key role of the Nyamwezi in the nineteenth-century caravan trade of East and Central Africa is well known. The convergence of rapid change in Unyamwezi, a region connecting areas of economic specialization, is more obscure. The development of agro-pastoralism in Unyamwezi was an adaptation and an opportunity forged by (unequal) partnerships between the Nyamwezi commercial elite and Tutsi immigrants. Patron-client relationships reflected prevailing economic and political forces, reversing the pattern of pastoral dominance in the Great Lakes region. Two different agro-ecological, sociological and political regions – the East African woodland savannah and the Great Lakes zone – were interlinked in a trans-regional cattle, salt, and labor economy intertwined with global capitalism. Human mobility stimulated change but so too did movements of livestock, diseases, agricultural regimes, and ecological boundaries.
This research paper is an analysis of the making of Tanzanian History in the last four decades of the twentieth century.
Gorongosa: a history of an African landscape, 1921-2014, focuses on changes in the Gorongosa ecosystem, in central Mozambique, southeastern Africa. Environmental changes result from natural, non-human causes and from the activities of humans. I describe four socioecological events: African and Portuguese interactions, Gorongosa National Park, the effects of Mozambique’s civil war, and the Park’s restoration in the aftermath of the civil war. Prior to European partition of Africa in 1884-85, Mozambique did not exist as clearly a demarcated territory as it is now. Today, the sense of Mozambicanhood bears traces of Portuguese colonial era experience. The demarcation of Mozambique’s boundaries and the reshaping of the colony until 1975 was a painful process that both the Africans and Portuguese colonialists endured; these physical and social separations from the rest of southern Africa represented the first human-induced changes. The endeavors to reshape Mozambique did not end with political boundaries. Painful processes, including the reshaping of Gorongosa National Park in the Gorongosa ecosystem, continued after border demarcations. Countless Mozambican and Portuguese lives were lost in the long trajectory within the colony as the Africans and the Europeans all developed a sense of unity in diversity while reshaping their attitude of and about Mozambique. After independence in 1975, internal transformations and wars continued reshaping Mozambique and Mozambicans, as different nationalists sought to maintain their colonial experience. These dynamics marked the environmental history of the Mozambican and Portuguese peoples and are often reflected in the prevalence of high sympathy, which the two peoples share toward one another. GORONGOSA: A HISTORY OF AN AFRICAN LANDSCAPE, 1921- 2014, critically celebrates these collective achievements.
This article deals with the development of the English language in South Africa which can be regarded as a historically extraterritorial language. The aim of the investigation is to consider the influence of the specific ethnic environment on the lexical system of South African English in the eco-linguistic perspective. A special focus is laid on indigenous onyms which are considered as a means of maintaining the nation’s identity in the modern globalized society. The analysis was carried out on the basis of the autobiography of Nelson Mandela “Long Walk to Freedom” (1995). The article begins with a brief outline of a historic background for the formation of the South African variant of the English language. Then the researcher singles out the indigenous onyms employed in the text of N. Mandela’s autobiography and classifies them into anthroponyms, nationality names, names of clans, royal houses, and toponyms, including a wide variety of geographical names. After that the chosen onyms are subjected to the analysis in the eco-linguistic perspective, exemplifying the thesis that SAA is not only an extraterritorial, but also a contact-induced variety of English. Methodologically, this paper is grounded on the theory of language ecology as a framework for the study of language as an open synergetic system actively interacting with its environment. The study shows that the English language is in tough competition with the rest of official and national languages of the Republic, which form the unique linguistic environment of English in South Africa.
This chapter discusses the importance of kinship in African history. It argues that kinship and family provided social contexts in which men and women negotiated status and obtained support and assistance from each other. It also argues that the violation of the moral norms of kinship is inseparable from the experience of living within family. It shows that, in the African past, kinship provided a means of creating new social and political institutions. From the beginning of the colonial period it also became a means of dealing with unfamiliar institutions, including courts, chattel slavery, and Christian missions. The chapter considers recent changes in anthropological perspectives on kinship, and describes a number of works by historians who have contributed important insights on kinship in African history.
This chapter reviews the major scholarship on African environmental history. It emphasizes the ways in which environmental history gives agency to the natural world and the ways in which human societies have shaped their environments. Important themes covered include the history of disease in Africa, the origins of food production on the continent, the development of nature conservation, and the causes and effects of growing populations. It concludes with a discussion of Africa in an age of rapid climate change.
This short essay explores Jan Vansina’s contributions to the study of Africa’s early pasts. In particular, it explores the impact of sustained ethnographic fieldwork on Vansina’s narrative style, which often imagined for deeper pasts the sorts of small-scale social interactions definitive of most experiences of fieldwork. This narrative style produced a tension between Vansina’s interest in large-scale institutions and historical processes and the smaller-scale social interactions sustaining them, offering us new research topics. Attention to the historical significance of the sorts of intimate interactions imagined by Vansina requires new approaches to the variety of archives he compelled us to consider in the pages of this journal.
The Bantu Expansion stands for the concurrent dispersal of Bantu languages and Bantu-speaking people from an ancestral homeland situated in the Grassfields region in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon. During their initial migration across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, which took place between approximately 5,000 and 1,500 years ago, Bantu speech communities not only introduced new languages in the areas where they immigrated but also new lifestyles, in which initially technological innovations such as pottery making and the use of large stone tools played an important role as did subsequently also farming and metallurgy. Wherever early Bantu speakers started to develop a sedentary way of life, they left an archaeologically visible culture. Once settled, Bantu-speaking newcomers strongly interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers, as is still visible in the gene pool and/or the languages of certain present-day Bantu speech communities. The driving forces behind what is the principal linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa are still a matter of debate, but it is increasingly accepted that the climate-induced destruction of the rainforest in West Central Africa around 2,500 years ago gave a boost to the Bantu Expansion.
Tanganyika, today Tanzania Mainland, was one of four countries, including Namibia, Cameroon, and Togo, that suffered under German colonial rule in Africa. Formally lasting from 1885 to 1918, German rule over Tanganyika commenced at the peak of slave trading in the region. As such, the politico-economic modes of slavery and colonialism influenced each other variably during German rule. Some of these influences have been better studied and documented than others. Issues regarding hostility between slave traders and Germans as economic competitors exemplify cases that have received better coverage in the region. At the same time, very little is known about responses of enslaved individuals or escapees against the establishment of German rule in East Africa. Using southern Tanganyika as a case study, this article examines the place of slave runaways in the colonial process and diaspora dynamics of the region. This study reveals why and how this group exerted a noticeable force against imposition of German rule in southern Tanganyika through a famous war of resistance, popularly referred to as the Maji Maji War.
This chapter discusses human migrations south of the Sahara during the Holocene, focused mainly on pastoral populations in eastern Africa and the migrations of Bantu speakers during the past 3000 years. The dating provided by archaeology currently places these migrations more recently than that derived from linguistics.
Keywords:
archaeology;
Holocene;
farming;
Africa, Bantu
This volume comprises a selection of chapters by leading scholars on aspects of early exchange between Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world (IOW)—a macro-region running from Africa to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Far East. The rationale for regarding this region as a “world” is the central significance of the monsoon system. Unlike the Atlantic and Pacific, the IOW seas (the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian and China Seas) are capped by a huge continent—Asia. During northern hemisphere summers, as the Asian continent warms up, hot air rises from the land, causing a vacuum that, through the process of convection, sucks in moist air from the oceans to the south. This creates the southwest monsoon. In winter, the opposite process occurs, and air is expelled from the continent over the oceans, creating the northeast monsoon.
This article reviews the character of the world-historical literature from the shared standpoint of Africans and people of the African diaspora. The world-historical literature has achieved strengths in comprehensiveness, disciplinary specialization, and coherence—as well as in its balance of multiple perspectives and its development of “the world stage” as a rhetorical device. Nonetheless, Africans and people of the African diaspora are represented only marginally in the major studies of world history, even though the historical literature on the black past has expanded impressively. The problem, it is argued, is that world historians still give credence to horizontal separations of civilizational groupings and to a vision of initiative relying on vertical distinctions, such that innovations are seen to arise mainly among the elite. To challenge these inherited views, the article offers a narrative of world-historical shifts initiated by black people in subaltern positions, showing ways to link the top-down influences of the elite to the bottom-up history of ordinary people. It argues that world historians should emphasize a global social history that balances top-down and bottomup approaches and should balance discrete civilizational history with cross-cutting diasporic history.
In recent years the literature in world history has continued to grow and thrive. There is no shortage of exciting new contributions. World historians, in addition to publishing increasingly confident studies of global historical themes and patterns, have come to identify themselves as a group, and to establish institutions providing more solid support for teaching and research in their field. A more compelling indication of the changes came with decisions by academic and educational leaders in the United States—if not yet in other countries—to give formal recognition to the field of world history by choosing to require its instruction in many institutions at secondary and college levels.
Women in vaKaranga society of the 15th to 17th centuries have been portrayed as oppressed by an "extremely patriarchal" system, but the reality, while still fitting the simple classification of a 'patriarchal' monarchy, indicates quite a bit more negotiation of gendered powers than women, as a class, experienced in the Mediterranean or East Asia. The vaKaranga were the architects of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of a growing state, colonizing their cousins of the Zambezi river, which their Kusi-Mashariki Bantu forefathers had traversed southward a millennium before. Civil war had (apparently) split one nation into two states, Mutapa (Monomotapa) and Khami (Torwa, Toroa, Changamire) immediately before Portuguese ships arrived at Sofala in 1502. Statements like "women are dust, one does not count dust" have been used to illustrate the traditional social outlook of the Shona, descendants of the vaKaranga and a major population in present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and central Moçambique. However, close reading of early Portuguese-language sources on women in vaKaranga society suggests that, prior to influence from these original European colonists, vaKaranga women negotiated everyday and political power in a near-even exchange with men, predicated on the imbalance of power women held in the metaphysical dimension, their control of industries from gold production to staple crop production and a strategy for minimizing economic risk for a king transacting a brideprice or 'rovora' exchange. In this, vaKaranga women are exceptions to the theory that societies must become more gender imbalanced as they begin to form classes and state-level monarchies.
After two decades of research in East and East Central Africa on early precolonial history, the authors of this article began a collaborative project focused on gender and identity with an aim of addressing and rectifying categories that commonly appear in anthropological and historical studies. Our position is that present day gender and identity categories applied to the deep past are problematic because they too often miss the nuances of gender, identity, and power dynamics in Africa. This has resulted in a common perception that African women have been perpetual victims and that identity is universal and static. We acknowledge that the corpus of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropological and historical works are a rich resource for researchers if critically reexamined in light of more recent research on gender and identity. We posit new approaches that might inspire a conversation to create more culturally germane categories for particular African contexts. Anthropology and history have greatly influenced public understandings of women and ethnicity in Africa. Thus it is well worth a more vigorous reexamination of how we can construct more accurate historical representations both of African women’s statuses in societies and identities as represented in ethnicity, traditions, or other relevant expressions.
Résumé Le peuplement ancien de la Cuvette Centrale du Congo est un problème historique à la solution duquel différentes disciplines scientifiques peuvent contribuer. Le présent article approche la question d’un point de vue linguistique. Il présente les résultats d’une étude comparative du vocabulaire de la poterie dans les langues bantoues locales. Étant un artéfact qui unit une visibilité archéologique et une importance ethnographique à un vocabulaire technique assez bien documenté, la poterie représente un domaine privilégié de recherche interdisciplinaire. Pour ce qui est de la Cuvette Centrale du Congo, tant les données linguistiques que les données archéologiques suggèrent un long développement isolé de langues et de communautés. D’un point de vue plus général, cet article propose une manière alternative d’exploiter les données lexicales pour la reconstruction historique. Dans le domaine des études africaines, ce sont les historiens, et non les linguistes, qui furent les premiers à s’appuyer sur l’étude historique et comparative des vocabulaires culturels et à développer la méthode dite « Des mots et des choses ». Cependant, certaines lacunes dans leur méthode linguistique peuvent compromettre la solidité des hypothèses historiques qu’ils ont élaborées. L’introduction de cet article propose une critique méthodologique de l’approche que certains historiens font des données lexicales.
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