How Africa Developed the World

BY

Halford H. Fairchild and Dipannita Basu
The Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies
The Claremont Colleges

“Today, we see America as a rich and powerful country.  Many Western European countries, too, including Australia and South Africa, are correctly viewed as controlling massive resources and a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.  A proper understanding of this (mal)distribution of resources can only be had in the history of European expansionism and the stealing of land and people.  Along with the indigenous populations in America, the South Pacific, and Asia, Africans developed the world.”

 The idea of an undeveloped Africa dies hard.  Contemporary discourse includes phrases such as “undeveloped,” “under developed” or “developing” to characterize the “Third World,” particularly Africa.

 A Black Studies perspective, however, recognizes the strange perversion of The Truth when it comes to Africa.  Far from being underdeveloped or developing, it is more accurate to recognize that human development began in Africa and has continued there for a much longer period of time than anywhere else on the face of the earth.

European scholars have portrayed Africa as a continent of “stagnated development.”  Captain Richard Burton, the nineteenth century British explorer, suggested that Africans had failed to develop from the primitive to the civilized; that they had reached a point of “helplessness” that could not be improved (Davidson, 1969, p. 24).  Sir Samuel Baker, in 1866, suggested that the African “…mind is as stagnant as the morass which forms its puny world” (cited in Davidson, 1969).

The First People

 But Basil Davidson (1969) and other scholars in the African-centered tradition, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Jacob Carruthers, John Henrik Clarke, and many others (see Karenga, 1993) have thoroughly debunked the idea of “stagnated development” in Africa.  Indeed, the fact of monumental human development in Africa comes from (White) archeology in the highly regarded research of Louis and Mary Leakey and their colleagues.  This research established, without equivocation, the origin of the human species on the continent of Africa.  The forerunners of homo sapiens sapiens (the thinking being) were in Africa as were our nearest phylogenetic antecedents.  Today, there is no debate that all human beings have African ancestry.  (This fact may lead to a collective identity that may eventually defeat racism and nationalism.)

 For many thousands of years, the human race progressed in Africa.  The challenges confronting early humans were daunting:  a fierce environment with extreme climates, a huge land mass, and myriad predators that posed life-and-death dangers (see Davidson, 1969).  African people, undoubtedly dark skinned and superficially similar to Africans today, not only survived these rigors of existence, but they thrived.  Their population mushroomed from a mere handful to many millions.  They invented language, the use of tools, fire, agriculture, and community organization.  These great leaps forward in human achievement laid the basis for the development of human culture:  the arts, literature, religion and science.

 Many seek to credit the ancient Greeks with establishing civilization out of thin air, but the historical record clearly situates these achievements in Africa, many thousands of years before the first Greek learned the alphabet.  Ancient Africans provided the foundations on which all other human cultures are based (cf. Davidson, 1969).  Africa developed the world.

The Ancients

 From this head start, ancient Nubian and Ethiopian cultures flourished in the Nile River Valley.  Following the northerly flow of the 3000-mile-long Nile River (the Great African Highway), African civilization reached its apex in Egypt (Karenga, 1993).  This south-to-north movement was enhanced through reciprocal influences in West Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere.  Evidence of the African influence on world cultures may be seen in creation myths, linguistics, music and the arts (see Davidson, 1969).  The oldest scripts are of African origin, as are the oldest books (Karenga, 1993).

 The Greeks had a head start from the development that took place in Africa for tens of thousands of years before they crawled from their frigid caves in Central and Southern Europe.  That they would rob Africa of its storehouse of knowledge, and claim it as their own, is a story that is yet to be fully appreciated (see George G.M. James’ Stolen Legacy, and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena).

 Africans explored and settled the world, as all the world’s people are of African descent.  Can you imagine the surprise on the deified European explorers’ faces when they found dark skinned peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and damn near everywhere?  As Peter Fryer (1984) noted, Africans were in Britain before the English.

The African Maafa

 The Maafa is a term, recently advanced by Marimba Ani, Wade Nobles and others, that refers to the 400-year period of African enslavement, degradation and dehumanization.  It is an experience that is unprecedented in human history.

 But, even during their centuries of enslavement, Africans continued to develop the world.  It was the rapacious appetite of the Europeans who raped and pillaged people and places, and whose greed demanded free (or near free) labor to maximize their accumulation of capital.  When they encountered indigenous people in the Caribbean and the Americas, they killed the men, raped the women, stole the land, and destroyed their culture (Shepherd, 1999).  The resistance of Caribbean women was so great that they sacrificed their children—through infanticide—so that they would not have to suffer the dehumanizing treatment of the colonizers (Shepherd, 1999).  Who, here, are the true barbarians?

 Plantation economies in the Americas demanded a ready supply of land and labor.  As Eric Williams noted, “Negroes…were stolen from Africa to work the lands stolen from the Indians in America” (Williams, 1994, p. 9).  It was a strange case of “survival of the fittest”:  African laborers were superior to native American or White laborers, and therefore contributed to the strengthening of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery throughout the Americas (Williams, 1994).  The White captors acted as parasites on the Black masses and depended on them for their own survival.

 For another three hundred years (including the present), Africans developed the world through their stolen land and their stolen bodies.  Africa (both material and human) fed the coffers of the European capitalists.  Their labor, forced through captivity, created enormous wealth for those who maintained human bondage and chattel slavery.  It was this great accumulation of capital that gave impetus to the Industrial Revolution and other hallmarks of Western “achievement.”

 Today, we see America as a rich and powerful country.  Many Western European countries, too, including Australia and South Africa, are correctly viewed as controlling massive resources and a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.  A proper understanding of this (mal)distribution of resources can only be had in the history of European expansionism and the stealing of land and people.

Along with the indigenous populations in America, the South Pacific, and Asia, Africans developed the world.

References

Davidson, Basil.  (1969).  The African Genius:  An introduction to African social and cultural history (Part 1, Pp. 23-41).  Boston:  Little, Brown & Company.

Karenga, Maulana (1993).  Black History (chapter 2.1 – 2.3). Pp., 69-108 in Introduction to Black Studies.  Los Angeles, CA:  University of Sankore Press.

Fryer, Peter.  (1984).  'Those kinde of people.'  Chapter 1 (pp. 1-13) in Staying power:  The history of Black people in Britain.  London:  Pluto Press.

Shepherd, Verene, A.  (1999).  Indigenous Caribbean women.  Chapter 1 (pp. 1-19) in Women in Caribbean women history.  Oxford: James Curry.

Williams, Eric.  (1994).  The origin of Negro slavery.  Chapter 1 of Capitalism and Slavery.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press.

Correspondence should be addressed to Halford H. Fairchild, The Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies, The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA  91711 or Hfairchild@pitzer.edu .