Reflections on an African Experience

Abstract

Professor Roland Oliver is regarded as one of the leading pioneers of African history. For forty years, he taught African history and supervised many research students at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He organized many seminars and international conferences where African historiography was discussed. Along with J. D. Fage he was founding editor of The J7ournal of African History. In I962, also in collaboration with J. D. Fage, he produced A Short History of Africa, which covered more or less the same time span as the present book (except that the latter also covers the post-colonial period). And before he retired, he was General Editor (again with Fage) of The Cambridge History of Africa. He has now distilled all this experience into what he terms 'a work of reflection, written for sheer pleasure during the first four years of my retirement from the first Chair of African history ever created in the University of London'. In less than three hundred pages of lucid and readable prose, he has covered the history of continental Africa from the emergence of hominids about five million years ago to the release of Nelson Mandela in I990. He has achieved this by concentrating on what he regards as significant themes, each of which has been treated chronologically. The themes discussed in the book include human origins, the origins of food production, historical linguistics, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, the spread of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to Africa, slavery and the slave trade, the caravan trade of pre-colonial Africa, African political systems and urbanization, the colonization of Africa and the experience of postcolonial Africa. The first two chapters deal with the story of early man, which is derived mainly from archaeological and palaeontological evidence. It starts with hominid evolution, which he traces back to the earliest known remains of an omnivorous, bipedal creature called Australopithecus, dating back some four million years in Africa, to modern Homo Sapiens sapiens which emerged only within the last 40,000 years. Oliver is at his best in these chapters, in which he has digested extremely complex concepts to present a readable, exciting and insightful narrative, free from the usual dry jargon of the archaeologist. There are, however, two shortcomings. First, Oliver paints a linear picture of human evolution, with one stage leading inevitably to another, where many writers now see a more complex mosaic. Secondly, his story begins with the Australopithecus for no apparent reason. We know that the period prior to four million years ago represents an important gap in the fossil record. Should the uniquely human hominid line, for example, be extended back into the late Miocene epoch (about 8-9 million years ago)? What happened to Ramapithecus (I4 million years ago)? Did his line continue to join that of Australopithecus? Oliver next deals with the Stone.-Age, during which hunting and gathering was the universal mode of human subsistence until the domestication of plants and animals some I2,000 to I5,000 years ago. These virile Stone-Age peoples are the