A Cultural Timeline of West African History

From 500 A.D. to the present day, courtesy of New York's Metropolitan Museum. Check out this and this if your knowledge of African history and culture consists only of images from Live Aid appeals and Discovery Channel Safari specials. 

An interesting fact mentioned in the timeline which ought to challenge quite a few preconceptions about Africa is that the founding of Ife, traditionally regarded as the mother city of all Yoruba, predates that of Kyoto, Japan's traditional capital, by approximately 1000 years, and even Rome's founding predates Ife's by only 300 years or so.* Also interesting is this page on the favorable assessments of West African cities made by Portuguese traders - a far cry from the "wandering tribes" picture painted by Tarzan movies and still common till this day. It took the descent of large swathes of West Africa into chaos (thanks to the slave trade) to revise opinions drastically downwards.

Civil wars aside, though, a big part of the problem with the picture Westerners have of Africa is the tendency to assume that what is true of one part of this vast continent is also true of all of it, so that the migratory Bantu groups white settlers encountered in Southern Africa are held to be typical of the "African" condition, while emigres whose sole contact with black Africa consists of short tours fighting with the SADF in Angola and Mozambique pompously consider themselves authoritative "Old Africa Hands" ... One can see this "Africa as single country" mindset at work literally every day in the pages of even supposedly cosmopolitan newspapers like the Guardian or the New York Times: it's always "famine in Africa", "African women suffer abuse", "African children sold into slavery", etc., and invariably one starts reading only to see that the article is about, say, Eritrea, Mozambique or some other small corner of the continent. No one would write about goings on in Bangladesh or Manchuria as if it were all of Asia under discussion, but with Africa, over-generalization is always the order of the day.

*Here I discount the Romus and Romulus legend and refer to the earliest date attested by archeological findings, i.e, around 625 B.C.

Comments

[clo]

Interesting. I certainly didn't know Ife was so old. Any speculation about whether at that time it was a Yoruba-speaking town? I.e., were today's Yorubas, or rather their ancestors, largely the original inhabitants of the land, or relative newcomers? I thought that Oduduwa didn't arrive until 800-1200 AD. As he is seen as the ancestor/founder of the Yorubas, I wonder how to reconcile the stories with Ife's age.

[Abiola Lapite]

"were today's Yorubas, or rather their ancestors, largely the original inhabitants of the land, or relative newcomers?"

Yes. The cultural continuities are pretty clear.

"I thought that Oduduwa didn't arrive until 800-1200 AD."

I'd never seen anyone try to put a date on the arrival of what I've always taken to be a purely mythical individual. "Oduduwa" is no more than a fairy tale the various Yoruba royal houses use to legitimize their rule, by claiming common descent through him with the Ooni of Ife.

[Pearsall]

Also interesting is this page on the favorable assessments of West African cities made by Portuguese traders - a far cry from the "wandering tribes" picture painted by Tarzan movies and still common till this day.

True. Also, the British were quite impressed with the Ashanti kingdom as they encountered it, and they certainly didn't have an easy time taking it over.

[dearieme]

"the tendency to assume that what is true of one part of this vast continent is also true of all of it": when we lived in Australia, we found that the same idiocy seemed to flavour their view of Asia. The journalists and politicians even talked of "Asian culture".

[ogunsiron]

Abiola ,

More and more I think that large areas of Africa have undergone a process of barbarization ( "ensauvagissement" en francais) as a result of the slave trade. It's even possible that a lot of what we consider "traditional african culture" in various places is a degenerated, rudimentary shadow of how things were in the year 1000, for example.

I really have to find some time to read several books on the civilizations of the Yoruba, Igbo and their neighbours. I even hope to read about the Hausa, in their pre-islamic incarnation at least :)

[Chuckles]

What is especially interesting in the case of Africa is that one cant even speak of "Nigerian" culture in the sense that one speaks of "Japanese" culture; talk less of speaking of "African" culture in the sense that one speaks of "Asian" culture - both being very simplistic generalizations of course. Speaking of political goals and orientation, is of course, a different matter.
The irony then is that it is the languages of Africa and Asia that are "dialects" while the Latin offspring of Europe are "Languages".

Here are some good links:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/history/giblinstate.html
The complete online text of "The Yoruba Today" by JS Eades written in 1980 so some of the information is quite outdated, in other places, Eades is just wrong: http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/YorubaT/yt.html

According to the Oduduwa story, the Ooni was not one of his children, but a caretaker of the throne of Oduduwa. Oduduwa reportedly had seven children or grandchildren? Interesting stuff. You will of course notice that over the past 20 years, archeaological dating for Ife has been steadily pushed back. The consensus for Ife just a couple of years ago was around 900 A.D. The reason is simple: There is a marked lack of Archeaological interest in subsaharan Africa. Hardly any serious work has been done since Graham Connah (some decades ago) - a group was doing some work in the Ijebu area about 3 years ago but I dont know what became of it. Chalk this up to the "can anything good come out of bethlehem" mentality. Even work that has been done rarely receives the exposure it deserves.