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New discoveries on Afrikan history?

rasta leh we reason...

EXCERPTS

New discoveries in Africa change face of history
October was "Black History Month" in Britain. As part of the celebrations, we asked Prof Richard Greenfield to look at the significance of recent breakthrough to scholarly research on the early history of northeastern Africa. New discoveries there have provided incontrovertible evidence of settled pastoral and agricultural communities dating way back to 800 BC - earlier by far than hitherto envisaged.

The early history of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia will have to be rewritten in the light of dramatic new discoveries. And they have relevance to the worldwide demand for balanced historical and cultural studies freed from arrogance, prejudice and racism.

Up on the mountainous plateau of northeastern Africa, Eritrean scholars and their international colleagues at the University of Asmara have been conducting new excavations and utilising the latest carbon-dating techniques to revolutionary effect. This research has already revealed incontrovertible evidence of settled pastoral and agricultural communities dating way back to 800 BC - earlier by far than heretofore envisaged.

Together with revised linguistic evidence, it seriously and probably finally challenges assumptions, dating from the colonial era and earlier, that it must have been immigration of Sabaens crossing the Red Sea into Africa, that introduced Semitic and related languages and gave rise to the emergence of complex societies and cultures such as that of Aksum. In noting this, we must now set this revision in context and also ask why it has not occurred earlier.

It has been an eventful half-century since a Regius professor at Oxford could openly assert that Black Africa had no history. The 18th International Congress of Oriental Studies, meeting in Moscow in 1960 had many panels. Egyptologists from East and West were there in force but, as usual, only the last, the 19th panel was entitled "Africa".

This afterthought was occasioned only by the view that Semitic studies - largely linguistic - at their very margin extended from the "Middle East" and Arabia into Ethiopia. Rebels on that panel decided to call for the future establishment of a new and separate International Congress of African Studies. It fell to your correspondent, then a dean at the then "University College of Addis Ababa" and the junior member of a four-man delegation, otherwise composed of Ethiopian diplomats, to offer Addis Ababa as the initial host.

The resolutions went forward. Later academic and wider politics intervened but to no great lasting effect for eventually the first congress was held in Accra, Ghana.

The ensuing struggle to have the vital role of Sudan and Black Africa properly recognised in the origins and development of Ancient Egypt has been long and arduous. The colonial legacy and in particular its denigration of Black history, dies hard.

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African studies

It is surely no coincidence that in West Africa, wider recognition of the value as historical sources of indigenous oral traditions, such as Stool histories, or of the role of Arabic and other writing in local languages employing that script, had to wait for the auspicious opening of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah on 25 October 1963.

When he opened the Institute, Nkrumah warned that "until recently the study of African history was regarded as a minor and marginal theme within the framework of imperial history". He called for new and fresh initiatives.

Also, very significantly, he cautioned: "But you should not stop here. Your work must also include a study of the origins and culture of peoples of African descent [in the Diaspora]... Seek to maintain close relations with their scholars so that there may be cross fertilisation between African and those who have their roots in the African past."

Black studies were born

Communication systems using drums or printed and woven patterns on cloth were not until then seriously studied, except as anthropological curiosities. Heads and limbs were indeed measured and vainly compared to seek justification for spurious racial theories, but at the same time it was hardly acceptable, for instance, for such as Professor Nketia of Ghana to point out, that African music is structurally much more complex than most Western music.

"The study of African languages," Nkrumah urged, "must serve much more than...the practical objectives of the European missionary and the administrator."

That liberated history has had to follow national liberation in Africa is a universal truth. Take the late 1950s and 60s, when a new generation of "sons of the soil" first began to transform traditional resistance to settler colonialism in former Southern Rhodesia into a modern liberation struggle. But neither the European nor any specific race has held any lasting monopoly of empire creation or imperial attitudes.

Ethiopia

In northeast Africa, when the Ethiopian or Abyssinian empire was constructed or reconstructed, for centuries it suited its imperial authorities not to question assumptions of a supposed "natural superiority" stemming from identity with the descendants of non-African invaders whom, it was conveniently accepted, had first introduced civilisation and state framework into the highland areas. In the 13th century, the Christian highlanders even borrowed from Arabia and adapted the fable of the Queen of Sheba with which to further their own conquests and political tale. They developed what was to become known as the Solomonic myth.

Whether or not they personally believed in its literal truth, together with other factors, it greatly helped sustain the political psyche of supporters of the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia and the expansion of the empire roughly about the time of the European scramble for Africa, right up until the demise of the last sovereign in 1974.

The concept of a continuous history for an ancient empire based on the city of Aksum has been central to what Donald Levine, an influential Ethiopicist scholar, has termed Greater Ethiopia. It underpinned the political philosophy, conquests and hegemony practised by Emperors Menelik II and Haile Sellassie.

Moreover, it has remained significant when more modern forces overthrew the monarchical system and questioned the nature and in some regions - including the Ogaden, Eritrea, Oromo and Sidama - the whole concept of the Ethiopian empire-state.

Even today, the well publicised history and legacy of Aksum remains fundamental to the wider pretensions of an essentially Tigray-based regime in Ethiopia.

Substantial remains of the city - its residencies, dams, tombs and famous stelae (popularly known as obelisks) - survive to this day.

The Aksumite state was indeed important in the ancient world. It has been dated from early in the first millennium AD and is known to have been overrun in circa 900 AD, probably by the Beja. The names of many of its emperors are known from inscriptions and a coinage and there are near contemporary accounts of its adoption of Christianity in the 4th century - 300 years before St Augustine came to England - and its subsequent initial hospitality to Islamic leaders.

That Aksum was preceded by earlier pre-Christian cultures has also been well known to scholars although that has attracted less attention. Certain of these earlier sites, including Metera and Kohaito in modern Eritrea and Yeha and Aksum just across the border in northern Ethiopia, have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO - but their supposed origin as Sabaen colonies established in pre-Islamic times has not previously been questioned.

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