Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE African Studies Centre, Leiden University Leiden, the Netherlands 12-13 April 2012 organising committee Marieke van Winden, Gitty Petit & Wim van Binsbergen funding: African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASC) and Leiden University Foundation (LUF) for ALL conference details, please contact Marieke van Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl )
The Great Enclosure of the Great Zimbabwe complex, one of the most contested sites in the study of Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory	this conference is to mark Wim van Binsbergen’s retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden, after 35 years OBSERVERS. Specialists, interested non-specialists, and all people associated with Wim van Binsbergen in the course of his career are welcome to attend the first day of the conference with observer status (attendance fee EUR25). Considering the expected massive interest it is important to register beforehand. Please contact Marieke van Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ) for details.	a contemporary Chinese depiction of a giraffe presented to the Chinese emperor in the context of Admiral Zheng He's voyages, early 15th c. CE

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Anselin, Alain

In search of the sketch of an early African pool of cultures as homeland from which the pre-dynastic Egypt came to light.

Editor in chief of the peer reviewed journal The Cahiers Caribéens d’Egyptologie and the electronic papyrus i-Medjat

Referring to the historical mapping of the African populations inside the light of genetics studies, and taking into account recent archaeology of Upper Egypt and its wider Saharan and Sudanese hinterland, this paper outlines the geographical location and movements of early peoples in and around the Nile Valley. So, primarily linguistic resources are used in this view for comparative studies of natural phenomena names, and that of the material culture, as worship places or key-artifacts in Ancient Egyptian and contemporary African cultures, are sketched out. The paper pursues by a comparative overview of the immaterial culture by the way of a short but basic conceptual vocabulary shared by the contemporary Chadic-speakers, Cushitic-speakers peoples and contemporary Nilo-Saharanspeakers within Ancient Egyptian-speakers one. This cultural and linguistic enlightenments suggest firstly that ancestors of these peoples were able to share in ancient times a common cultural homeland - perhaps a saharo-nubian area of ethnic and linguistic contact and compression; and secondly that the earliest speakers of the Egyptian language could be located to the south of Upper Egypt or, earlier, in the Sahara. As a matter of fact, the marked grammatical and lexicographic affinities of Ancient Egyptian with Chadic languages are well-known, and consistent Nilotic cultural, religious and political patterns are detectable in the formation of the first Egyptian kingships. The question all these data raise is the historical and sociological articulation between the languages and the cultural patterns of this pool of ancient African societies from which emerged Pre-dynastic Egypt.

Berezkin, Yuri

Prehistoric cultural diffusion reflected in distribution of some folklore motifs in Africa

Though the very first human myths were probably created in Africa and brought to other continents with the "Out-of-Africa" migration of early Homo sapiens, many, if not most of the stories recorded in Tropical Africa by missionaries, ethnologists and linguists can have Eurasian and not African roots. In some of such stories animals like sheep, goat and dog play crucial role and because these species were domesticated in Eurasia and spread into Africa rather late the African origin of the stories themselves is also under doubt. I mean first of all some versions of the "muddled message" and interpretation of the stars of Orion as a hunting scene. Another large set of stories is related to fairy-tales and have extensive parallels in Eurasia. The existence of North American (though not South American) cases means that the plots in question were known in Eurasia at least 12-15 millennia B.P. The complete lack of Australian cases means that these stories were hardly known to the early modern humans. Both Eurasian and African origin is possible for these stories but the former is more plausible. The Eurasian parallels are more numerous in West Africa where the myths that most probably have African origin are just rare. Some animal stories unite Africa and Europe being unknown anywhere else (a hare or a bird who refused to dig with the others a well or a river is an example). Here the direction of the diffusion is unclear. All the plots that I write about have wide distribution in Tropical Africa and hardly could spread recently thanks to the modern European influence. If we "delete" possible Eurasian influence in Tropical African folklore, we would get an idea of what the worldview of local hunter-gatherers could be before spread of productive economy and emergence of trade connections with North African and Near Eastern societies.

Blažek, Václav

Afroasiatic migrations: Linguistic evidence

The Afroasiatic migrations can be divided into historical and prehistorical. The linguistic evidence of the historical migrations is usually based on epigraphic or literary witnesses. The migrations without epigraphic or textual evidence can be linguistically determined only indirectly, on the basis of ecological and cultural lexicon and mutual borrowings from and into substrata, adstrata and superstrata. Very useful is a detailed genetic classification, ideally with an absolute chronology of sequential divergencies. Without literary documents and absolute chronology of loans the only tool is the method called glottochronology. Although in its ‘classical’ form formulated by Swadesh it was discredited, its recalibrated modification developed by Sergei Starostin gives much more realistic estimations. For Afroasiatic G. Starostin and A. Militarev obtained almost the same tree-diagram, although they operated with 50- and 100-word-lists respectively.  

Afroasiatic (^S = G. Starostin 2010; ^M = A. Militarev 2005)

Rather problematic results for Omotic should be ascribed to extremely strong influences of substrata. Various influences, especially Nilo-Saharan, are also apparent in Cushitic, plus Khoisan and Bantu in Dahalo and South Cushitic. Less apparent, but identifiable, is the Nilo-Saharan influence in Egyptian (Takács 1999, 38-46) and Berber (Militarev 1991, 248-65); stronger in Chadic are influences of Saharan from the East (Jungraithmayr 1989), Songhai from the West (Zima 1990), plus Niger-Congo from the South (Gerhardt 1983).

To map the early Afroasiatic migrations, it is necessary to localize in space and time the Afroasiatic homeland. The assumed locations correlate with the areas of individual branches:

Cushitic/Omotic: North Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea between the Nile-Atbara and Red Sea - Ehret (1979, 165); similarly Fleming (2006, 152-57), Blench (2006). Hudson (1978, 74-75) sees in Greater Ethiopia a homeland of both Afroasiatic and Semitic.

Area between Cushitic & Omotic, Egyptian, Berber and Chadic: Southeast Sahara between Darfur in Sudan and the Tibesti Massiv in North Chad - Diakonoff 1988, 23.

Chadic: North shores of Lake Chad - Jungraithmayr 1991, 78-80.

Berber-Libyan: North African Mediterranean coast - Fellman 1991-93, 57.

Egyptian: Upper Egypt - Takács 1999, 47.

Semitic: Levant – Militarev 1996, 13-32. This solution is seriously discussed by Diakonoff (1988, 24-25) and Petrácek (1988, 130-31) as alternative to the African location.

These arguments speak for the Levantine location:

Distant relationship of Afroasiatic with Kartvelian, Dravidian, Indo-European and other Eurasiatic language families within the framework of the Nostratic hypothesis (Illic-Svityc 1971-84; Blažek 2002; Dolgopolsky 2008; Bomhard 2008).

Lexical parallels connecting Afroasiatic with Near Eastern languages which cannot be explained from Semitic: (i) Sumerian-Afroasiatic lexical parallels indicating an Afroasiatic substratum in Sumerian (Militarev 1995). (ii) Elamite-Afroasiatic lexical and grammatical cognates explainable as a common heritage (Blažek 1999). (iii) North Caucasian-Afroasiatic parallels in cultural lexicon explainable by old neighborhood (Militarev, Starostin 1984).

Regarding the tree-diagram above, the hypothetical scenario of disintegration of Afroasiatic and following migrations should operate with two asynchronic migrations from the Levantine homeland:  Cushitic (& Omotic?) separated first c. 12 mill. BP (late Natufian) and spread  into the Arabian Peninsula; next Egyptian, Berber and Chadic split from Semitic (the latter remaining in the Levant) c. 11-10 mill. BP and they dispersed into the Nile Delta and Valley.

The present scenario has its analogy in the spread of Semitic languages into Africa. The northern route through Sinai brought Aramaic and Arabic, the southern route through Bab el-Mandeb brought Ethio-Semitic.

References

Blažek, Václav. 1999. Elam: a bridge between Ancient Near East and Dravidian India? In: Archaeology and Language IV. Language Change and Cultural Transformation, eds. Roger Blench & Matthew Spriggs. London & New York: Routledge,  48-78. 

Blažek, Václav. 2002. Some New Dravidian - Afroasiatic Parallels. Mother Tongue 7, 171-199.

Blench, Roger. 2006. Archaeology, Language, and the African Past. Oxford: AltaMira.

Bomhard, Allan R. 2008. Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, I-II. Leiden-Boston: Brill.

Diakonoff, Igor M. 1988. Afrasian languages. Moscow: Nauka.

Dolgopolsky, Aaron. 2008. Nostratic Dictionary. Cambridge:

<http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/196512>

Ehret, Christopher. 1979. On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia. Journal of African History 20, 161-177.

Fellman, Jack. 1991-93. Linguistics as an instrument of pre-history: the home of proto Afro-Asiatic. Orbis 36, 56-58.

Fleming, Harold C. 2006. Ongota. A Decisive Language in African Prehistory. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Gerhardt, Ludwig. 1983. Lexical interferences in the Chadic/Benue-Congo border area. In: Studies in Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics, ed. by Ekkehard Wolff, Hilke Meyer-Bahlburg. Hamburg: Buske, 301-310.

Hudson, Grover. 1978. Geolinguistic evidence for Ethiopian Semitic prehistory. Abbay 9, 71-85.

Illic-Svityc, Vladislav. 1971-84. Opyt sravnenija nostraticeskix jazykov, I-III. Moskva: Nauka.

Jungraithmayr, Herrmann. 1991. Centre and periphery: Chadic linguistic evidence and its possible historical significance. Orientalia Varsoviensia 2: Unwritten Testimonies of the African Past. Proceedings of the International Symposium (Warsaw, Nov 1989), ed. by S. Pilaszewicz, E. Rzewuski. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 61-82.

Militarev, Aleksandr. 1991. Istoriceskaja fonetika i leksika livijsko-guancskix jazykov. In: Afrazijskie jazyki 2. Moskva: Nauka, 238-267.

Militarev, Aleksandr. 1995. Šumery i afrazijcy. Vestnik drevnej istorii 1995/2, 113-127.

Militarev, Alexander. 1996. Home for Afrasian: African or Asian? Areal Linguistic Arguments. In: Cushitic and Omotic Languages. Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium (Berlin, March 1994), ed. bz C. Griefenow-Mewis, R.M. Voigt. Köln: Köppe, 13-32.

Militarev, Alexander. 2005. Once more about glottochronology and the comparative method: the Omotic-Afrasian case. In: Orientalia et Classica VI: Aspekty komparatistiki, 339-408.

Militarev, Aleksandr, Starostin, Sergei. 1984. Obšcaja afrazijsko-severnokavkazskaja kul’turnaja leksika. In: Lingvisticeskaja rekonstrukcija i drevnejšaja istorija Vostoka 3: Jazykovaja situacija v Perednej Azii v X-IV tysjaciletijax do n.e. Moskva: Nauka, 34-43.

Petrácek, Karel. 1988. Altägyptisch, Hamitosemitisch und ihre Beziehungen zu einigen Sprachfamilien in Afrika und Asien. Praha: Univerzita Karlova.

Starostin, George. 2010. Glottochronological classification of Afroasiatic languages. Ms.

Takács, Gábor. 1999. Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, Vol. I: A Phonological Introduction. Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill.

Zima, Petr. 1990. Songhay and Chadic in the West African Context. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress (Vienna, Sept 1987), Vol. 1, ed. by Hans Mukarovsky. Wien: Afro-Pub, 261-274.

Coquery-Vidrovitch, Cathérine

Rethinking Africa’s Transcontinental continuities

Professeur émérite, Université Paris Diderot Paris-7

This paper intends to demonstrate, by the way of an historical overview of Africa’s centrality from the beginnings of mankind, that all over successive historical globalisations, Africa South of the Sahara (we may roughly take it as a geographical subcontinent) was no more no less than other “worlds”  (Indian Ocean world, Mediterranean world, Far East Asia, Europe, etc.) at the centre of the other worlds. Europeans have built “their” idea of Africa, which they believed and still believe they had “discovered”, while they were by large the last ones to do so. Africa and Africans developed a long history before Europeans interfered.  Moreover, they played a prominent role at different stages of world globalization before Western intervention.

Needless to remind that mankind began in Africa and diffused from Africa all over the world.

Geographically, Africa is located at the core of three worlds. Africa allowed them to be connected one with the other: the Mediterranean world (from Ancient times), the Indian Ocean World, and (quite later) the Atlantic world.

Therefore, from the beginning of Ancient history, Africa played a major worldwide role:

-                      Africa was for long the major provider of gold, either to the Indian Ocean world (from Zimbabwe), as to the Mediterranean and European world (from western sudan). It was already known by Herodotus (fifth century BC) and was superseded only in the 18^th century when gold began to be imported from Brazil. African gold was a major incentive to help develop the rest of the world. Of course Africans did not know it, but African gold, transmitted to Europe by the Arabs, financed Marco Polo’s travel to China in the 13^th century. African gold payed for the Portuguese fleet in the fifteenth century, and for the creation of the first sugar plantations in Canaries islands, Saõ Tome then Brazil.

-                      Africa was a major world provider of force of labor, sending slaves to the rest of the world, as well to the Muslim world, to India, as to the Americas. Plantations, whose economic importance was prominent in the premodern era, were possible only thanks to African manpower

-                      With the industrial Revolution, Africa was a major provider of raw materials for British and French growing industrialisation: tropical vegetal oil seeds and tinted wood conditioned lightening, oiling of machines and textile industry all over the nineteenth century, as long as electricity and chemical dyes did not yet exist. It went on with rubber, coffee and cocoa at the turn of the twentieth century

-                      Useless to remind that today, Africa is a leader in sources of energy (gas) and precious minerals again. South African gold renewed with the ancient gold streams, providing 60percent of the gold in the world (80percent of the western gold after the soviet revolution)

The question is not so much to demonstrate it, which might (and should) be relatively well known, but to understand why these evidences were let aside, forgotten, or even denied. Of course we may (negatively) assert that others confiscated African gold, African men and African raw materials. But it may be as instructive to (positively) look at the process by which Africa afforded so many wealth and products without which other continents could not develop.  Africa was necessary to world development and Africans were actors and unceasingly adapting partners to be studied as such, and not to be just reduced to passive victims (no more no less than others, for other reasons; plantations could not develop without planters, but also without slaves; industry could not develop without industrial discoveries and steam machines, but it could not produce without African raw materials).

Why was it denied only for Africa, which was just made a “periphery” by the will of Western knowledge as early as European believed to have “discovered” Africa? Let us rather say that Africans “discovered” Europeans, long after they had already met Arabs, Indians, and even Chinese. Africa was not marginal to capitalism: like others, it was a major condition for world development, i.e. for the making of capitalism.

Dick-Read, Robert

Pre-Islamic Indonesian contacts with sub-Saharan Africa

 It is an undisputed fact that at some stage in the distant past Austronesian-speaking mariners from the Indonesian islands crossed the Indian Ocean to Africa and Madagascar.

But this poses many questions: Was this crossing a single event? Or were there ongoing crossings over many years … even centuries? Did these mariners settle in Africa? If so, where? How far inland did they penetrate? In what ways, if any, did they influence the cultures of Africa? Precisely who were the Indonesian mariners who came to Africa? Why did they come? Were they driven by opportunities to trade … or was there some basic urge to explore the unknown as must have been the case with their brethren in the Pacific? Was their interest restricted to the East coast of Africa? Or did they sail round the Cape and up to the Bight of Benin and beyond? How did the settlement of Madagascar feature in this geographic puzzle? What was the relationship between Austronesian-speaking Madagascar and mainland Africa?

 This paper endeavours to answer these questions on the strength of the available evidence, with particular focus on the Zanj of East Africa, and evidence of Indonesian influences in Western Africa including a speculative flurry as to how Mahayana Buddhists of SEA may have left their mark on important aspects of Nigerian culture.

Ehret, Christopher

Matrilineal descent and the gendering of authority: What does African history have to tell us?

There has long been a widespread historical and anthropological idea that, up till very recent times, women everywhere—whatever the kin structure of their society—were always, in the last analysis, under the authority of the men of their society.  Whether in societies with matrilineal or patrilineal descent, women’s position was the same.  Under patriliny the husband has that authority; under matriliny, the mother’s brother.  But is that universally true?  The vast majority of historians come from and write on societies, from China and Japan in the east to Europe in the west, characterized by long histories of often outright patriarchy.  Male dominance tends to be woven into the understandings that historians grow up with and confront in their personal lives.  But what if we shift our historical attention to regions outside the long “middle belt” of the Eastern Hemisphere?  Does matriliny equally entail male dominance over the course of time, or might matriliny have significantly different consequences for the roles of women in history?  Two very long-term histories from widely separated parts of the African continent offer arresting perspectives on this issue.  One of these histories involves the peoples of the southeastern regions of central Africa; the other, the ancient societies of the northern Middle Nile Basin.

Hromník, Cyril A.

Stone Structures in the Moordenaars Karoo:  Boere or “Khoisan” Schanzes or Quena Temples?

Historian/Reseacher, INDO-AFRICA, Rondebosch, South Africa.

            Just after midnight on the 15^th of September 2006, this historian, ETV crew, a journalist, a number of interested academics from the University of Stellenbosch, a government minister and several interested laymen together with the farm owner Mr. David Luscombe and his and my sons gathered on the summit of a small rantjie (little ridge) in the Moordenaars Karoo (South Africa, 300 km NE from Cape Town), where a 530 m long stone wall running the full length of the rantjie reached its summit. The mixed gathering came to witness the Moon Major Standstill at its rising that would be observable on a fixed line marked in the veldt by three stone built shrines. I predicted this event with reference to my research of 27 years in hundreds of stone structures of this kind all over South Africa and Zimbabwe. Should it work, as I was sure it would, though not all of the present observers shared the unequivocal sentiment with me, the question to answer would be: who, when and for what purpose built this kind of structures in southern Africa. My answer was simple: The Quena or Otentottu (commonly known as Hottentots), who inherited this astronomical knowledge and the religion that called for it from their Dravida ancestors, who, searching for gold in Africa miscegenated with the Kung or Bushman women and produced the Mixed (Otentottu) Quena (Red People worshipping the Red God of India) owners of pre-European southern Africa. None of the archaeology departments at South African Universities was interested. The Moon at its rare and extreme distance from the sun rose precisely as predicted on the line of the three stone shrines, which were marked by burning fires, plus one fire marking the monolith of the true East shrine. The event was filmed and photographed, and was shown the following day on ETV as well as in the local newspapers the following weekend (16Se2011).  A feat that has never been witnessed and recorded on the continent of Africa (ancient Ethiopia)!

            The following Weekend Argus of 23 September 2006, p. 39, brought a comment from Prof. Andy Smith, the Head of Archaeology Department at the University of Cape Town, under the title: “No evidence for India star-gazing heritage: Archaeologist Andrew Smith challenges interpretation of origins of Karoo stone walls.” Smith opened his article with: “THE ENTIRE story of the Indian origins of alignments in the Karoo to ‘read’ lunar events is a complete fabrication by Dr. Cyril Hromník.”, Weekend Argus, September 16. His only explanation of these stone walls in the Karoo and elsewhere was that they “may have been constructed by Khoisan [a fictitious archaeological name for the genuine Quena] people defending themselves against Boer expansionism in the 18^th century.”

            This paper will present and explain some of the stone temple structures in the Moordenaars Karoo in their Indo-African historical context. Cheap Marxist archaeology is no longer sustainable.

Lange, Dierk

The Assyrian factor in Central West African history:The reshaping of ancient Near Eastern traditions in Sub-Saharan Africa

For more than two decades historians endeavour to reconstruct the past of ancient Africa in terms of World History but they often do this in general and speculative frame of mind. They insist on economical and cultural developments and mostly neglect the formation of states and dynastic history. The reason for this one-sided approach to the history of ancient Africa is the supposed dearth of sources. In fact, traditions of origins as well as oral and written king lists and chronicles in Arabic contain, if properly analysed, surprisingly rich material for the reconstruction of state foundations in sub-Saharan Africa during the pre-Christian era.

In order to illustrate the validity of this approach we will concentrate on the founding of the major states in Central West Africa by refugees from the collapsed Assyrian Empire towards 600 BCE. On the basis of recent scholarly work, we will try to show that these states were established by people belonging to various communities formerly deported by the Assyrian authorities and resettled by them in Syria-Palestine. When after the defeat of the Assyro-Egyptian coalition in 605 BCE, these people were up-rooted by their aggressive local neighbours, they followed the Egyptian army in its flight to the Nile valley and they continued to Central West Africa. Here they must have confronted the local inhabitants, expelling some and subjecting others. Unfortunately, the traditions are too vague on these encounters between the foreign invaders and the autochthones to allow firm conclusions.

The evidence provided by the dynastic traditions of Kanem-Bornu, the Hausa and Yoruba states is more precise with respect to the different ancient Near Eastern groups participating in state-building process. Contrary to what might have been expected, the members of the Assyrian elite were largely excluded from the leading positions in the new states. In their stead the available dynastic sources in the different states bear witness to strong reactions against them. In the traditions of the individual states these early antagonisms are expressed in different terms: in Kanem tradition by the Babylonian-led Duguwa opposition against Sefuwa domination, in Hausa tradition by the rise of the proto-Israelite followers of Magajiya and the marginalization of Bayajidda and in Yoruba tradition by the Babylonian-led revolt of Abiodun against the tyrannical Gaha. In all these cases ancient Near Eastern traditions were profoundly reshaped in accordance with the fierce opposition of the people against any restoration of an oppressive Assyrian state on African soil.

Other aspects of anti-Assyrian attitudes in Central West Africa are reflected in the rise of states in which the kings were systematically deprived of effective power and in which queen mothers and queen sisters were instead given considerable responsibilities. In conjunction with state-building, ancient Near Eastern influences can also be suspected in other dimensions of social complexity: the spread of metal-working and other handicrafts, urbanization, intensive agriculture, well-digging and even the proliferation of slavery. In view of the considerable impact of the Assyrian factor on sub-Saharan history, it is quite conceivable that even the great Bantu expansion was a distant consequence of the upheavals produced by the Near Eastern invaders in Central West Africa towards 600 BCE.

Li Anshan

Contact between China and Africa before Da Gama: Historiography and Evidence

This is a study of the history of long contact and cultural exchange between China and Africa during the pre-modern time. The article will be divided into three parts. The first part deals with the historiography of Chinese literature regarding the transnational and trans-continental activities, including the Chinese classics, such as the ancient official historical documents as called “24 Histories”, the non-official historical studies, and the study by the modern Chinese scholars. The second part will cover the historical evidence including the archeological discovery in China and Africa, the data and interpretation of the cultural contact between China and Africa in early time, and the summary of the historical study by scholars worldwide. As some Chinese scholars indicate, the early exchange of commodities occurred in pre-Han Dynasty while the archeological discovery in Egypt indicates that such contact may occur as early as the the 1000s before Christ. The third part illustrates the possible resource of the future study, which might provide more sources of the historical study of China-Africa relations in the ancient time.

Njoku, Ndu Life

Africa's Development in the Minds of Her Children in the Diaspora: Aspects of Diaspora Social Impact on Africa

Ndu Life Njoku, Ph.D
Department of History/International Studies

Faculty of Humanities

Imo State University

Owerri, Nigeria

In the context of anti-imperialism and area studies, colonial and post-colonial African cultural and development experience have benefited tremendously from a popular aspect of African diaspora education and culture, namely: the intellectual consciousness aroused by academic discourses on Africa. Through the "expository" and radical works of scholars and writers like W.E.B Dubbois, Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, to mention just these, disciplinary approaches have crystallized and have been adopted to enable each discipline identify its relevance to the theme of development, and from the perspective of that discipline propose ideas, offer new visions, and make meaningful contributions to social develop- ment thinking in/on Africa. This paper investigates the depth and relevance  of this strong cultural impact from across the Atlantic. The paper shows that, in both the short and long terms, varying degrees of not just literary but also socio-cultural benefits are accruable to the African experience from the "African-African diaspora intellectual multi-nationalism" that underlies the African experience. But, more importantly, the paper asks whether the social and intellectual climate in Africa today makes for an enabling environment which would continue to animate and sustain the Pan-Africanist intellectual cooperation, and make for a revival and re-invigoration of the fading concern for Africa's development in a rapidly globalizing world. 

Osha, Sanya

Interrogating Afrikology?

Tshwane University of Technology,

South Africa

African discourses on Egyptology are becoming more and more established and they often seek to counter the common Eurocentric bias that Africa had no history or culture worth talking about. African scholars of Egyptology in addition to some North Atlantic intellectuals are now claiming that Africa is in fact the Cradle of Humanity and hence the foremost vehicle of civilisation. Increasingly, research is deepening in this respect. But Dani Nabudere, an eminent Ugandan scholar is taking the project even further. Rather than stop with the task of proving the primacy of the Egyptian past and its numerous cultural and scientific achievements, Nabudere is strenuously attempting to connect that illustrious past with the African present. This, remarkably, is what makes his project worthy of careful attention. And this is essentially what his philosophy of Afrikology is about; tracing the historical, cultural, scientific and social links between the Cradle of Humankind and the contemporary world with a view to healing the seismic severances occasioned by violence, false thinking, war, loss and dispossession in order to accomplish an epistemological and psychic sense of wholeness for African collective self. Of course, this proposition has considerable importance as a philosophy of universalism and not just as an African project. Afrikology intends to transcend the dichotomies of inherited from Western epistemology that maintains a divide between mind and body or heart and mind and revert back instead to an earlier cosmology perfected in ancient Egypt that conceives of knowledge generation as a holistic enterprise where the fundamental binarisms of the Western universe do not really apply.

This paper interrogates the viability of Afrikology as both a philosophy of action and consciousness.

Oum Ndigi, Pierre

Le dieu égyptien Aker, le dieu romain Janus et le paradoxe d’une histoire préhistorique de l’Afrique subsaharienne

HDR, Egyptologue, linguiste et politologue

Université de Yaoundé I / Cameroun

De l’histoire comme « Janus de la vie moderne » (J . Capart, 1945 : 15), donc continuité entre le passé et l’avenir, à l’histoire conçue comme rupture entre un passé qui ignore l’écriture et un passé qui en procède, il y a toute une différence de conception qui soulève la question de la pertinence épistémologique d’une histoire paradoxalement appelée préhistoire .

Dans le cas de l’Afrique, il y a lieu d’admettre avec certains auteurs que l’étude de sa préhistoire est absolument indispensable à la compréhension de son histoire, d’autant plus que c’est dans celle-là, en particulier dans la connaissance du Sahara « humide » néolithique que se trouve la clef de la naissance de la civilisation égyptienne et en même temps celle de l’unité culturelle du monde noir (R. et M. Cornevin, 1970 : 6).

A cet égard, l’égyptologie apparaît aujourd’hui, de plus en plus, comme une source majeure et primordiale de la nouvelle historiographie africaine inaugurée par le déchiffrement des hiéroglyphes en 1822 par J.’F. Champollion, de par la diversité, l’originalité et l’abondance de sa documentation.

Dans le cadre de l’étude des rapports réels ou supposés que l’Afrique semble avoir entretenus avec d’autres continents dans un passé reculé dit préhistorique ou protohistorique, l’objet de notre communication s’inscrit dans une démarche qui consiste à réfléchir sur l’éclairage que peuvent apporter certaines sources mythologiques, iconographiques et linguistiques dans l’intelligence de l’histoire africaine dont les époques les plus reculées sont évoquées en égyptien ancien par des expressions caractéristiques telles que »le temps du dieu », « depuis le temps de Rê », « les années de Geb – ou Koba, le dieu du Temps, équivalent du grec Chronos (Oum Ndigi, 1996, 1997 : 383) – que l’on retrouve dans certaines langues bantu (basaa, duala, ewondo) : Koba « autrefois », « temps anciens » ; ndee Koba « temps de Koba » ou « temps anciens » ; mbok Koba « monde ancien » (Oum Ndigi,2009 : 20-21

C’est ainsi que le dieu égyptien Aker, le dieu romain Janus et le dieu nubien Apedemak, en tant que représentations symboliques de la double face de l’histoire, font partie de l’imaginaire des Bantu comme le révèlent leur art, d’un côté, et certaines de leurs désignations temporelles, en l’occurrence, akiri et yani signifiant à la fois « hier » et « demain ». Autant d’éléments suggestifs qui semblent consacrer l’universalité d’une conception de l’histoire comme projection d’un même esprit, l’Être-Temps, à la fois dans le passé et dans le futur, comparable au dieu Yahvé des Hébreux ou de la Bible, l’Omniscient, qui se définit comme étant l’Alpha et l’Oméga, et dont une expression caractéristique basaa du Cameroun rend compte de manière inattendue. 

Rowlands, Mike

Abstract: Rethinking Civilisation as Cosmocracies in African and Eurasian interactions

In the paper I will follow Wim van Binsbergens' recent discussions of the nature of large scale and long term interactions and connectivities in African prehistory. First I will summarise some of the most recent archaeological evidence for long-term interractions between Africa and Eurasia in terms of exchanges and movements of crops and food technologies over last four thousand years. Second I will suggest that a theorising of civilisation by Mauss provides us with a more flexible framework within which some of the aspects of regional flows and connectivites and long term continuities can be understood. Third the suggestion that boundaries between 'house cultures' and 'body cultures' as cosmocracies sustain both interactions and connectivites between Africa and Eurasia but also suggest the presence of long-term 'civilisational' identities’.

Tauchmann, Kurt

Abstract: Transcontinental continuities around the Indian Ocean during the last 3 millennia.

Space and maritime context. Forces of marin orientation and maritime migration. Terrestric and maritime lifestyles. Sedentarisation and terrestrism. Mobility as historical stigma. Present division between Land and sea resulted from the last ice age around 10.000 years ago.

Political leadership in Southeastasian societies was not bound to territory and had moving centres with occasional reunion of people ( amphictyonia ). Rounding up people and concentrating them in a certain place within systemic clientelism. Resistance to oppression resulted in ikut strategy or flight. Far away „colonies“ were won for the many princes (Vak) within polygyny of kings. Economy of plunder, whereby furage was used to increase and satisfy the clientel. Maritime migrations were manyfold and did not be a one way afair. North-South and West-East migrations through the Indian Ocean. Out off and into Africa, Europa, India, Indochina and Australia.  Indian Ocean culture and society established as a continuum between three continents. Chinese cultural objects were transmitted into Africa, Europe and vice versa from Africa and Europe to the Far East. The central role of Same/ Bajo/ Bugis. The Cham of Lin-ye and Funan in present Vietnam, the Iban and Ngaju in present Borneo/Kalimantan and the Segeju/Bajun of Eastafrica. The monsuns and appropriate technical innovations for sailing and crossing oceans. The emergence of the Malay world and expansion of the Austronesian group of languages eastwards up to the Southamerican coast, southwards to Northwest Australia ( Melville Island and Carpentaria Bay ) and Northwards up to Taiwan and Japan (Okinawa). The space of dibawah and diatas angin and Malay as lingua franca in the harbours around the Indian Ocean until the eight century. Traces of Same/Bajo serpentines from East and Westafrica up to the Indonesian Archipelag, Taiwan and Japan. The „masters of the mountains“ in Nordostafrika and the  Federation of Sungaya. The Etymon Somal, Boran and Pokomo (Oromo) and the Galla Phratry represent the Austronesian category of serpentines (dragons) and demonstrates Austronesian  space categories related to status. The Shaka appear as „red“ kings in Northeast-Afrika down to the Zulu of Southeastafrika and the Sakalava and Anteisaka of Madagaskar. Malays appear as Kalanga in Mocambique. The colour „white“ is not a somatic but a ideological category since the serpentine (dragon) is symbolised by the milky way and in Hindu/Buddha context denotes within the varna category ritual purity of the Brachman elite against the impure „blacks“, like traders, even one finds some Brachman’s within international trade in early times, and „red“ characterizes the habit category of the warrior class among the Indo-arians. This proofs that colours are not somatic categories, but ideological ones out of varna und guna classifications.

We can now trace ethnic similaritis between the Somali of Northeastafrika and the Samal of the Central-Philippines,  the Temuru as foreigners arriving in Eastafrica und the Anteimoro. Among the migration legends of the Anteimoro, who start at the Mekkan sands, is one place, called Ussu, which also is the toponym of origin of the Bajo-Bugis at the bay of Bone in the island of Sulawesi/Indonesia. The toponyms Bédjaya (Vidjaya) und Bugia in Nordafrika and their economy of plunder directed up to South Italy demonstrate former Austronesian identity. In Kiwayu and Shanga in the Lamu area of present Kenya we found traces of remote pre-Islamic and pre-Bantu Austronesian context which can answer the question of a speculative pre-Bantu language niveau in that area. The Etymon Wadebuli and Wadubuki in Songo Menara near Kilwa refer to Austronesian space and status categories. In Swahili Madagaskar is called Buki, and the Etymon Buques and Ubuque, as their language, stand as names of reference for Madagaskar before the Cazi’s arrived and confirm with the Eastcoast of Sulawesi/ Indonesia from where the traces moved towards the Straits of Malacca, the Indian Ocean South of Sri Lanka, the Maledives, the Comoro Archipelago or the island of Reunion to Eastafrica or Madagaskar. The Wak-Wak armadas mentioned during the 10th century in East African waters  as arrivals from the Far East had their local base on Comoro islands from where they plundered Islamic trading cities along the East African coast. Beginning in the 13.Century traces of Austronesian people at the coast of Eastafrica disappear and can be found later only around Lake Nyassa in the Hinterland, around the Niger in Westafrica and in Madagaskar. At the same time migrations into the Indonesian Archipelago prevail and transmit African cultural heritage.  

(due to serious illness Prof. Tauchmann will not be able to attend the conference; in addition to the above abstract, Wim van Binsbergen will use the present slot in the programme to report on 'the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann hypothesis of extensive South and South East Asian impact on sub-Saharan Africa in protohistorical times´)

Wim van Binsbergen: A note on the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann thesis on extensive South and South East Asian demographic and cultural impact on sub-Saharan African in pre- and protohistory

Thornton, Robert

Glass Beads and Bungoma: The link between southern India and southern African traditional knowledge known as bungoma

Anthropology Department, School of Social Sciences & Chair, Wits University / Human Sciences Ethics Committee (Non-Medical), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

The paper examines possible links between the southern African practices of ‘traditional healing’ (known as ‘bungoma’ as practiced by initiated practitioners called sangoma) and trance and healing in southern India. The paper is based on archaeological evidence and artefacts in southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique) and southern India, and on new archaeological analysis of these materials, especially the material culture associated with this. It also utilizes a reading of South Indian iconography, but is not primarily based on historical reading of texts or oral evidence. Evidence for an early link—perhaps dating from 600 CE to 1600 CE—is developed by comparing instances of material culture from traditions of the sangoma in the southern Africa and the iconography of southern India, especially of Ganesha and Hanuman. In particular, the ritual use of metal tools and glass objects, specifically beads (ubuhlalu, insimbi, made of metal and glass), the ‘mace’ (sagila), ‘axe’ (lizhembe), ‘spear’ (umkhonto, sikhali), the knife (mukwa), and the ‘fly whisk’ (lishoba, made either of tails of hyaena [impisi] or of blue wildebeest [ngongoni]). All of these items are found in the ritual practices and iconography of the sangoma and of iconography and practices of devotees of Hanuman and Ganesha, among other gods, in south Indian Hinduism. This material culture, especially the ‘weapons’ of the southern African sangoma and the south Indian icons and ritual practices, show strong similarities that suggest more than trade was involved in early links between the southern Indian region and the southern African region.

van Beek, Walter

Smithing inAfrica: The enigma

African Studies Centre, Leiden

A fierce debate reigns in African archaeology over the origin of iron production and iron work in Africa. New dates of early iron sites keep pushing the first dates of iron production farther back in history, well into the First Millennium BCE, and gradually, the earliest African dates seem to be approaching the inception of iron production in the Middle East. Thus, an increasing number of scholars posits an independent invention of iron smelting on the old continent itself, and for some good reasons: the rather sudden appearance of iron smelting in various areas south of the Sahara at roughly the same time; the sheer diversity of oven types used in Africa; and finally the fact that the traditional diffusion routes, such as along the Nile valley, seem have been discredited. On the other hand, the absence of a preceding bronze technology still forms a considerable obstacle, as it is hard to imagine how a full-fledged iron smelting could develop without that intermediary phase.

            This contribution will not try to formulate a definitive position on this debate, as that has to be solved by new diggings and thus new findings, especially better dating. I will approach this problem from an anthropological perspective, and explore the ways in which the iron smelting and smithing – as two distinct occupations – have developed into integrated positions within African societies. Africa-wide, several patterns of smith integration into the societies can be discerned, ranging from a fairly business-like arrangement of specialists, to deep caste-like divisions in society, and from strictly iron tdechnology to a clustering of specialisations. This pattern of smith-integration then will be compared to selected examples from South East Asia and the Middle East, to ascertain whether there are systematic differences. The guiding notion of this contribution is that there are indeed structural differences between the larger regions, and that these differences may shed some light on the early phases of the adoption of iron.

van Binsbergen, Wim

A. Key note: Rethinking Africa's transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory

ABSTRACT. Why should we study Africa’s transcontinental continuities, and how could this be a surprising and counter-paradigmatic topic, more than a century after the professionalisation of African Studies? Let me introduce this topic by explaining how I myself came to study Africa’s transcontinental continuities. My interest here is not to engage in autobiographical self-indulgence, but to help lay bare the structures and preconceptions of Africanist research to the extent to which they determine our view of these transcontinental continuities. In the process we shall also address the important issue of why transcontinental continuities were obscured, not only from the (potentially hegemonic) view of Western scholars but also from the consciousness of historical actors in Africa and Asia. After a few methodological considerations, we will end with the question of what a fuller awareness of transcontinental continuities brings to Africa, and what it risks to take away from, Africa -- finally considering the interplay between empirical regional Area Studies, and Intercultural Philosophy.

B. (main conference paper) The relevance of Buddhism and Hinduism for the study of Asian-African transcontinental continuities

ABSTRACT. The argument considers selected aspects of South and South East Asian culture and history (the kingship, musical instruments, ceramics and gaming pieces), against the background of the results (here briefly summarised in Section 2) of the author’s earlier results into transcontinental continuities between Asia and Africa in the field of divination and ecstatic cults. After posing preliminary methodological questions, the leading framework that emerges is that of a multidirectional global transcontinental network, such as appears to have gradually developed since the Neolithic. Having argued the possibility of Hinduist and Buddhist influences in addition to the well-acknowledged Islamic ones, the next question discussed is: what kind of attestations of possibly transcontinental continuities might we expect to find in sub-Saharan Africa? From a long list, in addition to divination three themes are highlighted out as particularly important: ecstatic cults, kingship, and boat cults. The discussion advances conclusive evidence for the Hinduist / Buddhist nature of the state complex centring on Great Zimbabwe, East Central Zimbabwe, as a likely epicentre for the transmission of South-East-Asian-inspired forms of kingship and ecstatic cults. A provisional attempt is made at periodisation of the proposed Hinduist / Buddhist element in sub-Saharan Africa, and the limitations of transcontinental borrowing in protohistorical and historical times is argued by reference to an extensive prehistoric cultural substratum from which both South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are claimed to have drawn and which becomes manifest, for instance, in the tree cult. On the basis of future research advocated here, new insights in transcontinental continuities are to be expected, that throw new light on the extent to which Africa has always been part of global cultural history, and should not be imprisoned in a paradigm that (out of a sympathetic but mistaken loyalty to African identity and originality) seeks to explain things African exclusively by reference to Africa.

Note: initially Wim van Binsbergen was scheduled to present the following argument, a summary of his book of the same title, which is now nearing completion; however, this would have been too large a scope for a mere paper, and would have taken us into a technical philosophical discussion of the Ancient Greek Presocratics, while the above replacement paper has more immediate Africanist content.

Before the Presocratics: Cyclicity, transformation, and element cosmology as a likely pre- or protohistoric substrate in Africa, Eurasia and North America (cancelled)

This argument seeks to contribute to the study of the global history of human thought and philosophy. It calls in question the popular, common perception of the Presocratic philosophers as having initated Western philosophy, and particularly of Empedocles as having initated the system of four elements as immutable and irreducible parallel components of reality. Our point of departure is the puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, which turns out to evoke a cosmology of six basic dimensions, each of which consists of a destructor, something that is being destroyed, and a third, catalytic agent. This is strongly reminiscent of the East Asian correlative systems as in the yì jing cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams two taken at a time; and particularly of the five-element cosmology of Taoism in general, in which the basic relations between elements are defined as an unending cycle of transformations by which each element is either destructive or productive of the next. Further explorations into Ancient Egypt, India, sub-Saharan Africa and North America suggest, as a Working Hypothesis, that such a transformative cycle of elements may be considered a prehistoric substrate, possibly as old as dating from the Upper Palaeolithic, informing Eurasian, African and North American cosmologies; but possibly also only as recent as the Bronze Age, and transmitted transcontinentally in (proto-)historical times. With this Working Hypothesis we turn to the Presocratics and especially Empedocles, whose thought is treated in some detail. Here we find that the transformative and cyclic aspects of the putative substrate system also occasionally surface in their work and in that of their commentators (especially Aristotle and Plato), but only to be censored out in later, still dominant, hegemonic and Eurocentric interpretations. This then puts us to a tantalising dilemma: (1) Can we vindicate our Working Hypothesis and argue that the Presocratics have build upon, and transformed (as well as misunderstood!), a cosmology (revolving on the cyclical transformation of elements) that by their time had already existed for many centuries? Or (2) must we altogether reject our Working Hypothesis, give up the idea of very great antiquity and transcontinental distribution of a transformative element system as an Upper Palaeolithic substrate of human thought – and in fact revert to a Eurocentric position, where the attestations of element systems world-wide are primarily seen as the result of the recent transcontinental diffusion of Greek thought from the Iron Age onward. Both solutions will be considered. Typologically, but with considerable linguistic and comparative mythological support, our argument identifies essential consecutive steps (from ‘range semantics’ to binary oppositions to cyclical element transformations and dialectical triads), in humankind’s trajectory from Upper Palaeolithic modes of thought towards modern forms of discursive thought. It is here that the present argument seeks to make a substantial contribution to the theory and method of studying the prehistory of modes of thought worldwide. On the one hand we will present considerable linguistic arguments for the claim of great antiquity of the most rudimentary forms of element cosmology. On the other hand, we will apply linguistic methods to identify the origin, in West Asia in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, not of the postulated substrate system as a whole but at least of part of the nomenclature of the Chinese yì jing system. The region indicated constitutes a likely environment from where the ‘cross model’ as a mechanism of ‘Pelasgian expansion’ (van Binsbergen 2010 and in press; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011) might allow us to understand subsequent spread over much of the Old World and part of the New World – including the presence of the transformative element cycle among the Nkoya. However, in the penultimate section of the argument a strong alternative case will be presented: that for direct, recent demic diffusion from East or South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa in historical times.

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