William Tanski 2/7/2021

Midterm African History

Lifestyle changes throughout human history have invariably been embraced only

inasmuch as they better people’s lives as a whole. The manner of this betterment varies case to

case and ideology to ideology; but generally, people change their way of life when a new way

allows them to live more securely, comfortably, and easily than another way; this is the case with

the development of agriculture in Africa. At the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 BCE,1 the

climate changed rapidly, and most places in the continent became much wetter; this created for

the first time environments very well suited to the cultivation of plants and animals. For some

areas, hunting provided for needs in a way agriculture could not, or the latter was not sufficiently

superior to justify a cultural shift. In others, agriculture provided an opportunity to grow and

thrive against which hunting could not compete, and it is in these regions that agriculture first

spread. Over time, peoples that developed adaptations that made life easier saw their influence

spread across the regions in which these adaptations were effective; their language and culture

blossomed and expanded as others joined with them and profited from their new technologies.

In Western Africa around 9000 BCE, the Niger-Congo people initially thrived in the open

savannah; their primary food source came from hunting, some fishing, and grain collection.2

With increased rainfall, the savannah became more productive, and around 6000 BCE, the Niger-

Congo people began to cultivate the grains they boiled, allowing them to spread across the

expanding savannah;3 in time, their range continued south until it began to cross into the wetter

wooded savannah and rainforest. In this region they found yams, a much denser nutrient source

than grains; and accordingly, this southern group, the Benue Kwa, began to cultivate these

yams.4 Between the fourth and sixth millennium BCE, they moved further into the forests,

assisted by the use of stone axes, claiming new land to cultivate. These stone tools, along with
the diffusion of the Niger-Congo language family, provide crucial evidence of this group’s

movements.5 In the woods they grew yams, raffia, and oil palms; the high nutrient density of this

food made cultivation attractive, and transition to farming allowed for the establishment of fixed

settlements; out of these villages grew a clan-based social system, largely centered around family

ties; these communities offered a far more stable lifestyle than hunting, and their influence

spread throughout the forests.6

In the Eastern Sahara, there were two civilizations, separated by their favored climates;

Erythraites in the Mediterranean climate, closer to the sea, and the Sudanic peoples in the

steppes; both initially hunted and collected grain.7 Around 9500 BCE, an increase in rainfall

extended the steppe into the Sahara, allowing the Sudanic people to expand further into the

continent; simultaneously, the Mediterranean environment grew, and with this change, cattle

began roaming farther south; by 8000, it became viable, by virtue of increased access to water,

for the Sudanic people to raise cattle on their steppe lands, and due to of the rich opportunity that

meat raising provided, so they did.8 Devotion to pastoralism from ~8000-7000 led Sudanic

settlements to be temporary, moving about the Sahara to keep resources from dwindling with

overgrazing; but around 7000, further increase in rainfall made the active cultivation of grains

such as sorghum more lucrative; the Sudanic people put down roots, literally and metaphorically,

and between 7000 and 3500 BCE, their settlements became permanent and grew in population,

taking more crops under cultivation as they did.9 By digging wells, they were able to care for

cattle year round in one place. The combined use of livestock and plants allowed the Sudanic

people to settle and thrive across the Sahara as no other group did.

The neighboring Erythraite people’s Mediterranean environment lent itself much less

readily to growing crops, and much more so to the cultivation of livestock; by around 9000 BCE,
this group had already begun to herd cattle.10 Over the next several millennia, sheep and goats

found their place in the Erythraite pastoral tradition, first domesticated in the Northeast, then

spreading southwest, with goats gaining popularity because of their ability to thrive in arid

environments, and ultimately diffusing into the Sudanic lands.11 The Erythraite peoples

subsidized their diets with grain collection; but it wasn’t until around 5000 BCE that they began

to pursue grain growing in earnest, when grasslands expanded with a drier climate. However,

these people remained predominantly pastoral, with less fixed settlements than their neighbors.12

A much smaller cultural group also developed in East Africa around this time: the

Omotic peoples of the Ethiopian highlands began cultivating the enset along with other

indigenous species around 6000 BCE,13 a practice that increased over time; much less is known

about this culture, but they seem to have spread over the ensuing millenia, growing in size as all

civilizations that embraced agriculture did.14

Not every civilization in this time period was initially inclined towards agriculture,

though; early in the Holocene, wetter conditions created a large network of lakes, streams, and

rivers across central Africa; around these water sources, the Aquatic civilization flourished,

following the rivers to find new waters around which to build their lives. The Aquatic tradition

was centered intensely around hunting and fishing, and from around 9000BCE to 6000BCE,

Aquatic peoples were sustained by the rich bounty of the rivers, and did not join with the

neighboring Sudanic peoples in the switch to cultivation; they had little need to, able to obtain all

they needed from the water.15 This changed around 6000; a drying climate greatly reduced the

prevalence of lakes and rivers across the continent, and the Aquatic lifestyle became less tenable,

leading to a decline of the culture as a whole;16 in Aquaticism’s place, Sudanic agripastoralism

spread; cultivation proved more stable in a changing environment. Similarly, though much
longer lasting, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Batwa people long maintained their hunting and

gathering methods.17 In these lands, agriculture failed to gain footholds.

The birth of agriculture in Africa had profound impacts on the lives of people on the

continent. Shifting away from hunting allowed for the construction of permanent settlements, as

food sources became stationary and controllable, and agricultural food sources supported an

increasing population in a way that hunting could not.18 Clustered, permanent settlements created

the foundations for new, more complex social systems, including the development of clans

among the Niger-Congo and Afrasian people.19 The new daily lifestyles offered by agriculture

would have been quite distinct from those of previous traditions; reliable food sources probably

led to an increase in leisure time, and with it, a brilliant expansion in the arts. While ceramics

and woodcarving existed before the agricultural expansion,20 this era saw the development of

cotton weaving among the Sudanic peoples, which sprung from the cultivation of the cotton

plant21; and it saw the development of raffia weaving and woodcarving among the Niger-Congo

people whose predominance in West Africa serves, along with linguistic dispersion,22 as a mark

of the civilizations influence, and was directly aided by the cultivation of the raffia tree. This

period was a time of captivating cultural and linguistic dispersion, as civilizations who managed

to dominate in an environment saw their ideas and ways of life gain new adherents from less

successful peoples. It is in this manner that much of our knowledge of this time period is derived;

by looking at the modern distribution of the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afrasian, and Khoesan

languages, we can track the cultural movements and divergences of each civilization over time.

Some of the most intriguing elements of this era arise from evidence of the interaction

that occurred between separate civilizations; the transference of various species of livestock

cultivation in the Eastern Sahara suggests that as agriculture, and populations, grew, the overlap
of different cultures grew more common; particularly interesting are the ways in which

languages overlapped and influenced each other, easily seen in the names of livestock animals

throughout the northeast of the continent.23 The foundations for cross-continental trade were

established in this era; the production of commodities like cotton and raffia weaving set the

scene for trading relationships in coming millennia, as the relative sedentary bounty of

agricultural life allowed individuals to devote thought and time to wants, not exclusively needs.

In short, agriculture in Africa served exactly as it did elsewhere in the world; it provided the

backbone societal growth, and provided an ease of living that supplanted the benefits of past

subsistence strategies. This was the key to the success of cultivation; its worth ultimately

outweighed the effort it entailed, and over the course of 7000 years, it became clear that those

peoples that embraced agricultural technology had an advantage over those who did not; and in

time, the latter fell in line, and joined in the bounty.

Citations

1. Kreike, Emmanuel. "Environmental History." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African

History. 20 Nov. 2018; Accessed 7 Feb. 2021.

2. Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa (University of Virginia Press, 2016), 55-97.

3. Ehret, Civilizations, 60.

4. Ehret, Civilizations, 61.

5. Ehret, Civilizations, 62.

6. Ehret, Civilizations, 61.

7. Ehret, Civilizations, 71.

8. Ehret, Civilizations, 72.

9. Ehret, Civilizations, 75.

10. Ehret, Civilizations, 84.

11. Ehret, Civilizations, 83.

12. Ehret, Civilizations, 85.

13. Ehret, Civilizations, 88.

14. James Newman, The Peopling of Africa: A Geographical Interpretation (Yale University,

1995) 58.

15. Ehret, Civilizations, 77.

16. Ehret, Civilizations, 80.

17. Ehret, Civilizations, 94.

18. Ehret, Civilizations, 68.

19. Ehret, Civilizations, 57.

20. Ehret, Civilizations, 76.

21. Ehret, Civilizations, 75.

22. Kreike, “Environmental History”, 12.

23. Ehret, Civilizations, 83.