History Summarized: Africa

so red spent the last six months in a course on African civilization in history and since history is my jam we decided to put together a video about it luckily for me it was pretty easy for red to do most of the scripting for this video since African history is nice and simple with no moral gray areas clear-cut good and bad guys and not a whole lot going on over all right red fantastic let's take a look Africa is complicated and it's rife with misconceptions most people still think that it's some kind of giant mud pit full of clay huts and savages but really it's because the concept of Africa even having a history or being developed in any substantive way is less than a few decades old and that conveniently segues into misconception number one Africa is one big thing Africa is actually home to more than 50 nations and over 200 distinct languages but it gets treated like some kind of super country where everyone knows everyone and everyone acts the same it's like getting confused as to why Canada and Mexico are so different when they're part of the same landmass no Africa is freaking enormous it's over the size of three Europe's and everyone agrees that European societies are diverse so it's silly to think that Africa could possibly be home to one single culture West Africa had huge empires the East African coast had a giant trade network that stretched all the way to China Nubia had a lot of contact with Egypt but they have their own Empire to hell even the central rainforest had several distinct societies living within it Africa is about as far as you can get from one big thing adding on to that is misconception number two which is that Africans live in tribes now the concept of a tribe is originally greco-roman and it pretty much just a notes of voting unit later on that convention got adopted to describe the twelve tribes of Israel and just became a word that meant a smallish group of people but the notion of Africa being tribal is European during colonization in the late 1800s the tribal label was used to distinguish Africa from the nationalized urbanized and big air quotes to civilized Europeans so it took on a more derogatory meaning ie they're not civilized they're tribal the idea of a tribe is also problematic because it assumes a static quality that the tribes have are and will be the same but this couldn't be farther from the truth as things were constantly dynamic to illustrate this a little better let's do some climate signs right off the bat Africa is really bloody big and in general on large land masses like Africa deserts tend to form and land at around 30 degrees off from the equator which is in part why we have the Sahara and the Kalahari deserts meanwhile on the equator there's a giant rainforest basin in part due to the fact that there's pretty much a continuous band of storms and rain along the equator fostering deep forest growth and in-between the rain forests and the deserts there are savannas and then in the regions between all of these regions there are intermediate areas and relatively constant flux one example is the Sahel a band of relatively arid land between the Sahara and the savanna the Sahel drifts north and south every year and is populated by various nomadic hurting populations and for linguistic fact Sahel means shore in Arabic because given the difficulty in crossing it the Sahara was functionally in ocean separating sub-saharan Africa from Egypt but the thing is all of these environments are affected by yearly rainfall and rain is the one unpredictable aspect of the environment in Africa since Africa has basically no mountains there's no predictability to when and where the rains fall the savanna regions starve if there's insufficient rainfall for whatever reason while the central rainforest erodes and the soil loses its nutrients if there's excessively heavy rainfall in a given year this means that nearly every ethnic group in Africa adapts on a year-to-year basis for the ever changing climate around them and this environment of constant adaptation does not create static urbanized societies it's straight up can't you might imagine that such an environment doesn't quite lend itself very well to large-scale agriculture since an ideal plot of land one year could be a barren dry wasteland the next the one exception to this are the river valleys of which there are a few the most notable river valley is of course the Nile which we've discussed elsewhere but there's also the Great Lakes region to the east these areas are more conducive to agriculture and stereotypically civilized build up where people can settle semi-permanently but they're rare Europe by contrast has steady and regular rainfall so maintaining a society in one place was always a no brainer it wouldn't even occur that rain patterns could change massively on-the-fly unfortunately for most of Africa it's almost impossible to farm the same land for multiple years in a row so sustaining a city in one place simply isn't feasible now this conveniently leads directly into misconception number three Africans didn't build anything it's true that there are large parts of Africa without much in the way of agriculture for reasons we've described above but there are at least two regions that defy this misconception completely Great Zimbabwe and killakee Suwannee these were two ends of a trading network that stretched all the way up the East African coast and traded with the Middle East and even China between the 11th and 15th centuries Great Zimbabwe was sitting on a gold mine no like a literal gold mine with gold and stuff while kilwa was right off the coast and facing some very useful trade winds now both of these places are archaeologically impressive for different reasons Great Zimbabwe is put together entirely without mortar which for its difficulty is an old favorite when it comes to ancient awesome architecture and just look at the architecture in kilwa it's gorgeous and the cool thing is the Somali coast doesn't have much in the way of stone that's viable for construction so Kilwa is built almost entirely from coral and I think we can all agree that's just flat-out cool it may or may not surprise you to learn that there have been furious debates over whether or not these grand feats of architecture were actually built and designed by Africans short answer yes long answer yes detailed answer the architecture of Great Zimbabwe strongly mirrors the small-scale architectural designs of the Shona people including symbolically significant arrangements of living spaces such as the king being physically elevated and more and in case anybody forgot there's also all of Egypt to consider Egypt kicked ass culturally architectural II and in all sorts of other ways because it was afforded a stable climate in the favorable River take Egypt as an example of what amazing stuff Africa and Africans can do when they had the chance to stay in one place and make it fantastic and before anyone questions whether Egypt counts as African basic geography would indicate yes essentially when Africans could build man did they next up there's a small misconception that nonetheless is much more pervasive than some of the more dramatic ones we've discussed so far which is that African villages and groups all had Chiefs now societies in Africa had a huge variety of power structures some of them had personified leadership and others were led by councils while some had entirely different systems altogether when Britain rolled into town and decided to take up the old white man's burden in the late 18-hundreds they decided that flat-out conquering Africa wasn't quite their speed not to mention impractical given its size and many unfamiliar diseases so they set up what's called indirect rule which is a system that's been around in many forms from Alexander to the Romans and beyond what they do is maintain the existing power structures but have those structures effectively report back to England and even that didn't often work out all that well because social administration in England and in any given African society often worked differently and since Africa has a large internal variety of cultures not all societies had a power structure that fit that mold and in those cases the British would simply impose it so the notion of all African societies having a chief much like the idea that all Africans live in tribes is an artifact of colonization and a gross oversimplification the reality is as always rather more complicated now let's move on to misconception number four Africans had slaves - no that one's actually true what it is they did but blue I thought you were all about unjustly flattering cultures that people nowadays tend to treat negatively to the comments section of your Islam video lied to me well maybe a little but that's not the point look anthropology and history aren't about glorifying one culture or another it's about trying to learn and learning as accurately as you can I'm trying to present you with perspectives that you likely haven't seen before and in my case that usually means showing a flattering side to things that's often overlooked but if all I'd talked about were the clean pretty parts of African history I'd be misleading you that way too because there was and is some pretty nasty stuff going on on that continent that doesn't negate or devalue all the other stuff but it did happen and in some cases is happening and it's important to understand it as completely as we can because the whole point is to understand so back to the point at hand before we get all oh every site is equally guilty there's some substantive differences between the systems of slavery in Africa and in Europe and especially if we're considering America first of all Africa generally didn't have a slave based economy and especially not a transcontinental slave trade there were slaves but they were mostly used for things like small amounts of additional labour an extra pair of hands the house or an additional life without the complications have been laws very few African civilizations actually relied on slaves for most of their labor also anyone can become a slave regardless of background ethnicity or whatever people became slaves as a result of being taken prisoner in the aftermath of a war or in some cases on account of crimes they did or they were just randomly kidnapped one day slavery had nothing to do with someone's background most of the time and it certainly didn't have the same imposed inferiority as say the American slave system it was something that just kind of happened if you want a more detailed breakdown of the differences between enslavement in Africa and America you might want to look up a lauda equiano's memoir called Africa remembered that criolla was born in West Africa in 1745 enslaved at age 11 sold up the West African coast and after changing hands several times ended up on a slave ship headed for America his memoir is a very comprehensive breakdown of his experiences as a slave both in Africa and in America and which one he felt was objectively more nightmarish spoiler alert it was America but he tells it a lot better than I do now this misconception is a doozy Africa is poor short answer yeah kind of but also not really you see poverty is a weird concept and not one that transfers clearly from culture to culture to the hurting pastoralists wealth was in cows but to the Europeans wealth was in money lands and gold each consider the other to be hilariously impoverished but there's no denying that there are parts of Africa that are poor by any standards where the standards of living are just kind of god-awful and since there's no denying that I won't but I will deny the idea that Africa is just somehow naturally poor so let's rewind for a quick recap of colonization there were African slaves in China and Portuguese sports in Africa centuries before Europe officially set their sights on full-on colonization in the late 18-hundreds colonization went into overdrive when all of Europe wanted in during that time the British discovered massive stores of gold and diamonds under some of South Africa's finest farmland and what were they to do besides the victim opals from their prime farmland and start constructing mines for the stuff we've already discussed that farming in Africa is hard because rains can be unreliable but now people were getting thrown off the farmland that actually worked and being stuck with lame desiccated Badlands that didn't produce anywhere near as much food that's step one of the push into poverty step two was taxes see those mines were full of gold and diamonds but the Europeans couldn't and didn't want to dig it all up themselves so they started taxing the local Africans for money what money well if they didn't have money they had to earn money by working in the mines and here we actually see the roots of the system of apartheid because the colonists wanted to keep things efficient specifically they didn't want to have to financially support anyone who wasn't pulling their weight by working in the mines so the mining cities were totally closed off only people will the work pass could actually get in and live there African men would come into work and they'd get paid just enough to live in the city and eat stuff but their families would be kept out of the city living in second and third rate farmlands trying desperately not to starve this was already a system of controlling who was allowed to live where and who was allowed to work where it's easy to see how this later evolved into the system of apartheid the other way the colonists got workers for the mines was by building prisons and locking people up for crimes both real and imagined wherein they would be put to work in the mines again fun fact making this extensive prison system and throwing in both really bad criminals and total innocents had the unfortunate side effect of leading to the creation of a very scary underworld / gang thing called the unko suez in Taba also known as the Ninevites which basically wreaked havoc through South Africa for the better part of 40 years so long story short parts of Africa are very poor but for the most part they're poor because of colonization and speaking of colonization if you take a look at Africa's modern borders you'll notice something unique to Africa and parts of the Middle East straight lines most societies find natural borders like mountains rivers Plains or other places where you just naturally stop in the absence of any such natural borders societies will often mark territorial bounds based on cultural groupings instead the fact that Africa has multiple straight borders means that those were drawn by people who weren't familiar with local politics or cultural groupings the post-colonial boarders left Africa a mess with friendly groups being separated from each other parts of a group being separate from itself and unfriendly groups being lumped together this is by far the most effective way to leave a continent predisposed to a century of various civil wars people were thrown together into new nations with little rhyme or reason and were largely forced to adopt entirely new political structures these borders were drawn jealously by people who just didn't know but even if the borders were drawn with an eye to ethnic and cultural groupings the inherent unpredictability of African weather and the necessity of regularly mild to moderate migration would make those borders obsolete within years colonialism forced a set of constructs and rules that flat-out don't work with the way Africa is and that's a huge reason that Africa's recent legacy is one of severe political strife and economic adversity and here's misconception number six Africa didn't have technology now here's where stuff gets tricky because very few cultures in Africa actually wrote much stuff down instead relying on oral tradition to transmit information through the ages in fact in West Africa especially storytellers and other such history keepers were almost revered and considered absolutely vital to the workings of a healthy Empire the act of telling a story itself was very delicate and ritualistic in some rare cases a carefully guarded written document would record the most essential aspects of a story but for the most part an oral tradition was the basis for information and this means that unfortunately all it takes is a cultural disruption big enough to cut off one generation from the next just one to destroy any and all information exclusively transmitted by in-person teachings and wouldn't you know cultural disruption is just about the best phrase possible to describe what happened in Africa from the 1400s onward this makes archaeology anthropology and other such history finding fields rather more difficult than in parts of the world that wrote stuff down more regularly back to the point since the methods by which various technologies were crafted were also passed down orally a lot of them got lost in the colonization process too and in the absence of any written records it was easy for everyone to assume that there just wasn't anything there in the first place for quite a while we didn't actually know what kind of stuff was invented in what tech the various civilizations in pre-colonial Africa had lying around because Europe had muddled our chances of ever finding out in fact part of the reason why those advances don't have any physical evidence lying around is because a lot of them were in medicine in the West African city of Janee for instance cataract removal surgery was a surprisingly common practice at a time where Europe had no such thing and in a similar vein Africans in what is currently Uganda Andrew were reported to have been performing consistently reliable c-sections in at least the 1800s with an expertise that implied the practice was in fact much older and this was at a time when it had made global news that British doctor James Miranda Stewart berry who fun fact was also biologically female had managed to perform the first successful c-section in the entire history of the British Empire another medical advance happened in southern Kenya at some point were the Masai people one of those herding societies I mentioned earlier figured out how to suture blood vessels and intestines using ants of all things and another fun Medical News the akan people in West Africa figured out how to immunize themselves to smallpox this news reached America in the early 1700s at a time when smallpox was tearing through both the Native Americans and the colonists Cotton Mather first learned about the inoculation procedure by way of his slave Onesimus who explained the procedure he remembered undergoing as a child in West Africa that had made him immune to the disease Mather proceeded to go on an inoculating campaign through Boston and get elected to the Royal Society for his quote unquote innovation while an Decimus fell out of the history books in 1717 after attempting to buy his freedom other fun advances in technology included metalworking and we only found out this one recently because a professor of brown had actually tracked down a few members of the highe people who had managed to preserve the oral tradition containing the information for building furnaces and smelting iron when he analyzed the furnace in the iron had produced he found that it reached temperatures of 1800 degrees Celsius which was around 200 degrees hotter than anything contemporary European smelting practices could produce they had been using this to make carbon steel for 2,000 years which meant that they had it at a time when the only other producer worldwide was Sri Lanka and they were only able to hit those temperatures because they were powering their furnaces with won-soon winds now here's one last misconception that I think might actually be at the heart of all the other misconceptions I've talked about so far Africa is just less developed than the rest of the world now what does that mean real question I'm not just being snarky here how would you redefine some places being less or more developed well the concept is actually grounded in an idea that's surprise-surprise a couple centuries old and that idea was that civilization was a sliding scale in this model societies evolved like Pokemon rather than like you know actual evolution it happened in stages and if he found a civilization that seemed way worse than yours it was just because it hadn't gotten enough sweet XP yet to make the jump from subsistence farming to sleeping on a bed of futile peasants from England's perspective the single goal of humanity was to become an urbanized society just like England and everyone else through no necessary fault of their own simply hadn't caught on yet now in this model unglamorous lifestyles like subsistence farming or nomadic hunting and gathering was just a social precursor to proper society which is what was meant by less developed Africa was still doing things that the colonists societies had for the most part stopped doing centuries ago the theory was that stuff like multi-story buildings and irrigation din giant sprawling metropolis would naturally arise from those precursor societies and they just hadn't figured it out yet but of course nowadays we know that societies develop and evolve like organisms do they form in a given circumstance change with the environment and sometimes a new development in the society propels it up the chain and makes it easier for it to thrive but if you just plop down a European city on the edge of the Sahara the lack of supporting agriculture will have it starving within a week but those quote-unquote primitive hunter-gatherers will survive just as well as they always have in that exact same environment stuff develops and survives where it can survive and there's no universal model for society that can survive equally well anywhere now I'm not gonna lie that it is definitely comfier for me to live in a city than it would be for me to practice subsistence farming on a plot of land that might be totally desiccated by next year but you work with what you've got that doesn't make a society inherently better or worse or more or less developed the fact that we still refer to all non-urbanized societies under the blanket term the developing world is an artifact of colonialism but development isn't even a useful measuring stick to scale the world against and thanks to Britain we have centuries of wildly diverse evidence to support the notion that dropping your culture on top of an existing one and expecting everything to work out more often than not leads to catastrophe for everyone involved less-developed isn't the same thing is simply different to sum up a killer whale might be an untouchable apex predator in the ocean but it doesn't do so hot in the savanna now for all the reasons described above and more it would be next to impossible for me to even attempt to provide any type of canal of Africa so I hope to be able to go in-depth with specific civilizations in the future but for the sake of not making this already 20-minute video over an hour long I think it's best that I call it a day here the point of this video wasn't to be definitive by any stretch quite the opposite in fact I wanted to try and provide a rough outline of an alternate angle on Africa that statistically you probably haven't seen before Africa has gotten the short end of the stick a lot in the past couple centuries and as a result the popular conception of it tends to boil down to either pity per its current state or a mix of disdainful dismissal and Dinis and ignorance of its accomplishments I made this video to show how Africa is so much more than those reductionist assumptions as well as how those assumptions came to be a narrow perspective is woefully insufficient when we're talking about a place this being and especially when we're dealing with so much cultural variety but for the perspective of someone far more qualified to talk about this than me please do yourself a favor and listen to this excellent talk by novelist and speaker Chimamanda Adichie on the danger of a single story and remember that just because Africa doesn't fit some neat linear chronology like the Greeks or the Romans or whoever which remember will be because it's too long in too diverse in the first place doesn't mean that it doesn't have history [Music] [Music]

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 1,581,112

Rating: 4.6234322 out of 5

Keywords: YouTube Editor, funny, summary, OSP, overly sarcastic productions, analysis, literary analysis, myths, legends, classics, literature, stories, storytelling, africa, african, zimbabwe, kilwa kisiwani, british empire, england, english, colonies, colonialism, mines, developed, slaves, slavery, tribe, history, egypt, Britain

Id: Jk3iOqKOD7g

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

the narrator is really patronizing

[u/peace_love17]

I thought this was gonna be about history and talk about like which civilizations popped up when and where, but I guess not.

[u/VanDeGraph]

The guy starts by saying "Africa is not just one big thing" and then says Egypt is African.

Egypt might be geographically part of Africa, but it is culturally distinct, and has much more in common with other near eastern civilizations during the classical period, and with islamic civilization afterwards.

It contradicts what he said about the Sahara desert acting like an ocean in separating the north from the south.

I don't understand why people keep pushing the egypt is african meme because there are plenty of civilizations in west africa such as the Songhai to use for examples of African civilization.

The insistence that Egypt is African just makes it wrongly seem like there are no African civilization because you constantly focus on a civilization which is clearly not African.

[u/[deleted]]

problematic

closed

[u/Dreaming_Desires]

He contradicts himself a lot. It also feels like he is talking down to the listener on some parts instead of giving information.

[u/roastbeeftacohat]

"are the comments alt right assholes"

"why yes, yes they are"

[u/Putin_Official]

That Age of Mythology soundtrack is my jam