“Africa is a big country.”
-George W. Bush
The term, the idea of “Africa” creates
more confusion than clarity. Africa is a continent, one that covers 11.73
million square miles. North America, by contrast—and this includes Greenland,
Canada, the United States, and Latin America to the border between Panama and
Colombia—covers 9.54 million square miles. In the present day, there are
fifty-four sovereign nation-states and ten non-sovereign territories on the continent,
and almost 2,000 languages and dialects that represent at least that many past
cultures. Geographers divide Africa into eight major regions—Sahel, Sahara,
Savannah, Swahili Coast, Ethiopian Highlands, Rain Forest, Great Lakes, and
Southern Africa.
Generalizing
about “Africa” now, then, is comparable to generalizing about all of Eurasia.
Generalizing about Africa’s history is even more problematic. Because there was
a sort of continuity of record-keeping in the Judeo-Christian West, not least
because of conquests, we have more access to “Western” history than we so to
“African” history, except beginning with the violent Mediterranean and Western
colonization of large portions of Africa—which presents a whole new set of
problems, those histories themselves written from the limited points of view of
a few conquerors.
This
set of problems impinges with special force on any speculation about the many
different forms of organization of kinship, gender regimes, and political
structures that preceded colonization. Speculations about how “African” customs
were imported into and modified by the institution of commodified slavery in
North and South America, then, are highly tentative. Patricia Hill Collins rightly generalizes about pre-colonial Africa engaging in widespread subsistence agriculture, a fairly safe
conclusion for many peoples living throughout Africa, for the same reason that
we can speculate beyond the various European “histories” of kings and generals,
that tend to ignore the overwhelming majority of peoples (also with many subcultures,
languages, and dialects) throughout Europe and West Asia as being subsistence economies, too. Subsistence was the
only means of survival that was available to the majority. Even early
proto-states and states were unable to administer most territories in any
detail. And they exercised political authority in ways that were more or less
compatible with the plethora of prevailing customs. So what Collins says also applies to most “Europeans” prior to nation-state formation,
capitalist development, and its attendant industrialization/urbanization.
The
history of “Africa’s” lack of “history” pivots on the trans-Atlantic slave
trade inaugurated in the sixteenth century. Any study now of the importation
and modification of “African” customs into slave populations has to pass through
these catastrophes. And North American slavery differed in several key respects
from slavery elsewhere. For example, by the time of manumission in the United
States, no slaves had been born in Africa, and few if any knew their own
genealogies. By contrast, when the Haitian Revolution began, in which former
slaves successfully gained independence, around seventy percent of Haitians had
been born in the African continent. During my own numerous travels to Haiti, it
was no uncommon for a Haitian to know that he or she was, e.g., Kongo, Fulani, Yoruba, etc.
US
slavery accounted for only around six percent of the total slaves born in the
African continent, because after the trans-Atlantic importation of slaves was
prohibited in 1804—a direct response to the Haitian Revolution that succeeded
that year, provoking terror among US slave holders—US slave owners “bred”
slaves. Over the next six decades of selling, re-selling, and general
suppression, US slaves were effectively cut off from their own histories in any
significant detail.
What
we can know is that more than half of all US slaves’ ancestors originated in
the Western continental area generally now known as Senegal, Cameroon, Gambia,
Guinea Bissau, Mali, Angola, Gabon, and Congo. The rest came variously from the
zones that include modern Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Eastern Nigeria.
These same areas, prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade were kingdoms and
empires including the Wolof (who were the first to cooperate with the
Portuguese in the trans-Atlantic slave trade), Songhai, Ghana, Kangaba, Mali,
Akan, Yoruba, Benin, Hausa, Kongo, Lundy, Musumba, Fulani, Nri/Igbo, and Luba.
While there were, just as in Medieval and pre-Medieval Europe, many conquests
and cultural interchanges that defy clear lines of demarcation between many of
these earlier social entities, there were also distinct, and now largely
unknowable, distinctions between them with regard to kinship, gender regimes,
and political structures.
The
first thing in history that gave any coherence to the notion of “Africans” was
the diaspora created by colonization and slavery, which began to homogenize
slaves through the horrific experiences of that practice and institution, a
homogenization that corresponded, in the United States after its independence,
to the systematic erasure of the cultures and histories of the enslaved.
There
were certainly matrilineal (not matriarchal) groups, as Collins also notes, and
there are many East and Central African cultures that are matrilineal to this
day (our reason for making educated guesses about pre-“history”). The same kind
of educated guess applies to marriage forms (in some areas) that include
monogamy, polygamy, levirate/sororate, (rarely) polyandry, and even in a few
instances woman-woman marriage.
I'm working on a book about gender relations and race, ergo this preoccupation with kinship and gender, that will concentrate first on Western
social evolution of family, gender, and marriage in light of the public-private
distinction, because the history of the Roman and post-Reformation churches is
largely Western,[1]
and the hegemonic global Western-designed economy we have now grew directly out
of Christendom.
As
is evidenced by the contradictions between Black and White experience, even
those who were not of “the West” (white capitalist Atlantic state patriarchies)
have been pulled into the orbit of the West by conquest, military and economic.
On the other hand, we cannot incorporate the invention of race and Black
experiences without incorporating speculations about this general pre-“history”
of people’s who were swept up in the slave trade. The invention of Whiteness as
normative is, in too many ways—note the example of Haiti, absolutely dependent
on the corresponding invention of Blackness as definitive of what White (or in
liberal evasions, normative) is not.
And while we can but speculate based on what evidence there is about the
unrecorded past,[2] we
have ample evidence from historical records with regard to the actual
adaptations and accommodations that have been made, with regard to family,
gender, marriage, and law, by African Americans during and after slavery, up to
the present conjuncture.
The
purpose of this particular constellation of subjects in the book draft, from an interdisciplinary
standpoint, is twofold: to begin unpacking the public-private dichotomy with
attention to how the idea has differed in our racialized society, and to
denaturalize the subjects of family, gender, marriage, and even law as seen
through the public-private lens(es?). Gender, as custom and structure dividing
power, remains the core issue for the book, and it cannot be separated out from
kinship, marriage, law, and, in the case of the capitalist metropoles,
especially the United States, race.
[1] With the spread of neoliberalism
through globalization, what was once Western ideas and culture are growing in
influence around the world, especially through consumerism. Urban Chinese, for
example, are experiencing an explosion of childhood obesity and diabetes rates
with the increasing popularity of McDonalds and other junk-food outlets. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5129322/
[2] All pasts are selectively recorded,
at any rate.
