Like My Mother

Jane Austen quipped that it is every woman's misfortune to become like her mother. My mother, if you do not know her, is undaunted by anything, least of all by teaching subject matter with wich she is unfamiliar. She loves to recount how my acerbically witty little sister one morning upon being summoned to class quired, "are you going to teach us something else you know nothing about?"

Thus, it was merely the natural course of events that in my teaching career I be assigned a subject of which I am almost completely ignorant: African History.

I had, without ever really consciously thinking about it, assumed that aside from Egypt, Carthage, and the north coast in general, Africa had remained in the stone age and thus historyless until the dawn of empires. (Feel free to cringe at the above statement). I could not have been more wrong.

I have found myself enthralled and impressed by the empires and civilizations that flourished in various regions of this very large and diverse continent. 

Down here in neighboring Zimbabwe there was a people who built in stone leaving behind them the elusive ruins of Great Zimbabwe. When European explorers first discovered it, they could not believe that it had been built by Africans as all the Africans they had encountered lived in primitive huts. 

Europeans, however, were not the first outsiders to encounter and seek the natural riches of the continent. On the East coast there was trade with India and China as well as the Arab world. In fact, the ubiquitous banana is not native to Africa, but was brought from Asia!

In the 15th C., the Arabs began settling along the coast and building independent trading cities. They married locals and these people became the Swahili, a coastal people Arab in culture and religion, but largely Bantu in language and personnel. Their cities include Mogadish, Mombassa, Zanzibar (originally Zanj I Bar, coast of the black people), Kilwa, and Sofala. There main object was trading for gold, ivory, and slaves. 

For much of history, Africa was much better connected with the Arab world than Europe and trade routes criss crossed the continent. The raw materials sought had to be easily portable and with a high value to weight ratio, as frequently the mode of transportation was head portage (there are different words in Chichewa for carrying something on your head and carrying something with your hands!).

Aside from gold and ivory, salt was another sought after commodity. There are natural salt beds that were mined as well as salt flats were dehydration of shallow pools was used to extract the salt from the soil. This is still done today. I haven't seen sea salt in stores, rather it is "natural salt mined from the heart of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans." I got this picture from a Facebook post by Daily News about illegal salt mining in the national park!

The book pictures are from a lovely volume called African Kingdoms, lots of lovely pictures although it is more of a coffee table book than a detailed history.

The classroom pictures are from classes on the 19th and 20th Century Migrations in Central Africa of the Yao, Lomwe, Ndebele, and Ngoni peoples. The later two were highly militarized peoples who fled as refugees from the Zulu State. Shaka Zulu, to whom some attribute the entire cause of the Mfecane or "Crushing" that disturbed southern Africa from 1816-1819, was really quite a person! As must have been Mzilikazi who opposed him and had to flee with his people who became the Ndebele, and did I mention the female Ngoni general who Mzilikazi met and married as they were both searching for homelands for their people? It is the material for an epic movie.