African Beginnings

At last the long-awaited volume I of the Cambridge History of Africa is out, four years after volume II and five years after volume III. It seems it ran into the well-known difficulty of a cooperative work of this kind, that the tardiness of those contributors who fail to meet the deadline make the writings of the earlier ones out of date before they are printed: some chapters have references up to 1980, others nothing after 1976. Another difficulty stems from the fact that, while Africa may be a geographical entity on a map of the world, in other respects it is an abstraction: Egypt cannot be treated in isolation from the rest of the Middle East, and Africa has never been and never will be a single ecological or cultural unit. The ' idea of Africa', however, does have a certain reality as an emotional image, as a focus for powerful feelings. The writing of African history in the last quarter-of-a-century has not escaped the effect of these feelings. We are all familiar with Trevor-Roper's oft-quoted extravagance, of the many emotional counterblasts to it, and of Ochieng's appraisal of the battle, pointing to Africa's poverty and its causes as the most important topic of contemporary African historiography. One can place today's writing of African history on a kind of scale with continuing Europocentrism (usually unconscious) at one end of the scale and at the other the most extreme and exaggerated reactions against it. We now have two cooperative attempts to produce a detailed general history of Africa, the second being the Unesco General History of Africa, and it is impossible not to compare them. On our imagined scale from extreme Europocentrism to ardent demonstration of African achievement, many of the authors of the latter must be judged to stand fairly far over towards the latter end of that scale. The Cambridge volume would be placed pretty much in the middle. Naturally, this volume is predominantly archaeological, and in the detailed reporting of archaeological evidence there has to be a great deal of matter concerned with artifacts of one sort or another. To describe this, archaeologists have to use the terminology of their discipline which they have had to develop to define their entities more precisely and in order to communicate with each other. A series of footnotes in the chapter on the Earlier Stone Age gives some help with the terminology of stone artifacts, but in his preface the editor says that in general no attempt has been made to provide an explanation of the archaeological terminology involved, though he suggests where this can be found. Many historians of Africa find archaeological terminology irritating, but this is because they have the wrong attitude to archaeology, regarding it as an 'adjunct to history'. Even if in the end archaeology aims to contribute its own constructions of the human story, it must be remembered that the nature of its raw material is fundamentally different from that of history, imposing upon it different constraints, different questions, different answers. Archaeology is a discipline in its own right, and if historians wish to make use of archaeological concepts and entities they must learn the language, and learn to use it correctly, just as they would expect to have to do if they needed the concepts, entities and language of mathematics or physics.