Towards a History of Lost Corners in the World

Abstract

There are large areas of the world whose pre-industrial economic and social history virtually remains a blank. Even in Europe some historical periods remain almost unexplored. The most conspicuous cases, however, are found outside that continent. In Africa, for example, there is an area, almost the size of West Africa, or the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, for which not even a general historical survey of the pre-colonial period exists. This huge equatorial region-mostly covered by the tropical rain forestextends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, between lat.4.N. and lat.4.S. In this article it is used as a case-study to document a more general argument. 1 Lack of knowledge has been the main reason adduced to account for such big gaps in the historical record. I shall argue, however, that while conventional sources are indeed often scarce or even absent, nevertheless knowledge about the past is often more substantial than is commonly realized, and statements can be made with confidence about such blank periods or areas. It is a matter of finding the traces of the past where they are: in unconventional places. Historians have not found many conventional written, or even oral, sources in Equatorial Africa. They were discouraged, moreover, by the prevalence of an anthropological model that presented the societies of that area in static terms. According to this model, kinship groups were the basis of society. They grew, split, grew again and so on without any institutional development at all. This theory of segmentary lineage organization practically precluded any social