The Penguin History of the World

Why this is so we cannot say, but one primary force may well have been a change of climate. Even recently, say in about 3000 BC, the Sahara supported animals such as elephants and hippopotami, which have long since disappeared from there; more remarkably, it was the home of pastoral peoples herding cattle, sheep and goats. Today, the Sahara is the fastest-growing desert in the world. But what is now desert and arid canyon was once fertile savannah intersected and drained by rivers running down to the Niger and by another system 750 miles long, running into Lake Chad. The peoples who lived in the hills where these rivers rose have left a record of their life in rock painting and engraving very different from the earlier cave art of Europe which depicted little but animal life and only an occasional human. This record also suggests that the Sahara was then a meeting place of African and Mediterranean peoples, those who were among the ancestors of later Berbers and Tuaregs. One of these peoples seems to have made its way down from Tripoli with horses and chariots and perhaps to have conquered the pastoralists. Whether they did so or not, their presence (like that of the African peoples of the Sahara) shows that Africa’s vegetation was once very different from that of later times: horses need grazing. Yet when we reach historical times the Sahara is already desiccated, the sites of a once-prosperous people are abandoned, the animals have gone, even though the coastal landscapes remained much larger and more fertile than they are today.

Perhaps, therefore, it is climate which drives us back upon Egypt as the beginning of African history. Yet Egypt exercised little creative influence beyond the limits of the Nile valley. Though there were contacts with other cultures, it is not easy to penetrate them. Presumably the Libyans of Egyptian records were the sort of people who are shown with their chariots in the Sahara cave-paintings, but we do not know for certain. When the Greek historian Herodotus came to write about Africa in the fifth century BC, he found little to say about what went on outside Egypt. His Africa (which he called Libya) was a land defined by the Nile, which he took to run south, roughly parallel to the Red Sea, and then to swing westwards. South of the Nile there lay for him in the east the Ethiopians, in the west a land of deserts, without inhabitants. He could obtain no information about it, though a travellers’ tale spoke of a dwarfish people who were sorcerers.

Given his sources, this was topographically by no means an unintelligent construction, but Herodotus had grasped only a small part of a complex picture. The Ethiopians, like the old inhabitants of Upper Egypt, were members of the Hamitic peoples who make up one of the groups in Africa at the end of the Stone Age later distinguished by anthropologists. Others were the ancestors of the San people (in the past often called Bushmen), inhabiting, roughly, the open areas running from the Sahara south to the Cape, and the Bantu group, eventually dominant in central, eastern and parts of southern Africa. As we know from prehistory, Africa is a mosaic of genetic diversity, far greater than anything found in other parts of the world before recent waves of migration. To judge by the stone tools, cultures associated with Hamitic or proto-Hamitic peoples seem at most times to have been the most advanced in Africa before the coming of farming. This was, except in Egypt, a slow evolution and in Africa the hunting and gathering cultures of prehistory have coexisted with agriculture right down to modern times.

The same growth which occurred elsewhere when food began to be produced in quantity soon changed African population patterns, first by permitting the dense settlements of the Nile valley, which were the preliminary to Egyptian civilization, then by building up the African population south of the Sahara, along the grasslands separating desert and equatorial forest in the second and first millennia BC. This seems to reflect a spread of agriculture southwards from the north. It also reflects the discovery of nutritious crops better suited to tropical conditions and other soils than the wheat and barley which flourished in the Nile valley. These were the millets and rice of the savannahs. The forest areas could not be exploited until the coming of other plants suitable to them from South-East Asia and eventually America. None of this happened before the birth of Christ. Thus was established one of the major characteristics of African history, a divergence of cultural trends within the continent.