How Africa's Extreme Environment Shaped its History

There was a thesis by a British student that connects African history to its extreme environment. It was right on the mark. Anyone who wants to understand how and why the African kingdoms grew must understand Africa's immense scenery.

Many thesis papers on Africa would point out that this second-largest continent (after Asia) is a domain of harsh beauty, terrifying emptiness and unparalleled topographic extremes. The present geography follows an orderly pattern, beginning with strips of fertile land at both ends. Then the great deserts followed: Kalahari in the south, and the vast Sahara in the north. Bordering the deserts are narrow, more hospitable bands of shrub and bush forest and rolling grassland. Then comes the tropical forest, which some European colonizers once described as great and impenetrable.

This isn't how the continent looked like, as some thesis papers on climate change suggested. Between 5500 B.C. and 2500 B.C., the continent's climate went from dry to wet, turning the upper half of Africa into a well-watered prairie. The present Sahara and the dry savannas were lush and green; mountains were clothed in fine trees, fish and game were plentiful. There laid the principal nurseries of later African culture. Many generations of hunters, and later of farmers and herdsmen, roamed these broad plains and found shelter in the caves of the hills. Archaeologists reconstructed the lives of these people through the hundreds of superb rock paintings which they left behind.

Then the climate changed. The rivers dwindled, the forests died, and the grass gave way to scrub and sand. Nothing was left but fossilized seeds and a handful of stunted trees in a howling, sand-blown wilderness. These conditions forced the men to seek greener pastures. As most thesis papers would shown, they dispersed in three directions. One led north into the Mediterranean coastlands, where they merged with the local peoples to form the Berber culture. Others, later to be known as Libyans, settled in the fertile land along the Nile, and eventually supplied some of the princes who reigned over southern Egypt. Still others pushed slowly southwards into the heart of the continent, where presumably they merged with indigenous people.

The Sahara's long climatic disaster, with its consequences of human movement, helps to explain why the history of Africa, after about 2000 B.C., goes in two different directions. The desert remained a daunting barrier. North of it emerged the high civilization of Egypt, nourishing and nourished by an interchange of ideas with the whole Mediterranean community. The people of south worked out their destiny alone. Their history is a record of accomplishments achieved in isolation against tremendous odds; it is a record that can be understood only against the background of the physical environment.

PROFILE:

Franz Lipnicki grew up in South Africa. His thesis was about the history of the Zulu language. He's passionate about history and traveling; he dreams of visiting the ruined pyramids in Meroe, Sudan.