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| Map of Africa 1729 http://www.waado.org/NigerDelta/Nigeria_Facts/NigerianMaps/Africa-HistoricMaps/WestAfrica-1729.html |
When I was a child, Tarzan movies represented Africa. Of course, when I got to college, I met Africans from the east and west of that continent and they told me that’s how they imagined African Americans. As my education continued, the massacres in Sharpesville, RSA and Soweto, RSA represented African life. I found myself caught in shifting sands with regard to Ethiopia, because I knew Haile Selassie as a king, in much the same way Elizabeth II is a queen, because he resisted the Axis in World War II. When I think of Ethiopia today I think of a fallen dynasty, and wonder about the monarchies in today’s Africa and all over the world. When I finally got to the continent, I found myself in Senegal; then later, I found myself on Lobombo Mountain considering the Shakespearean tenor of the history of the Lobombo district in Swazi history. Indeed there is something epic about the history and literature of Africa. The Stone Age of Africa, I think, is a place to begin; however, there are other world views than suggested here, but the possibility of ‘a slippery slope’ is imminent, if one is not careful. When one begins to think in epic terms, one begins to think about remote history of which we have only signal posts about everyday life at the time this epoch was happening.
While the Greeks were smearing their crops in the blood of young men to insure successful harvests in Medea, we are barely given time to breathe to consider the practice of ritual murder, when we must contemplate Rome. Again the western canon comes to mind because I am trained to think in terms of the western world view first; and when dissatisfied, search for other answers. Both Plaatje and Tutuola cause us as readers to demand more information, although my job is to hector you off the easy path of just waiting for me to show you everything. (joke)
Batswana author, Bessie Head repeated a tale of human sacrifice to rain gods to intervene in droughts that lasted seven or ten years. She also told of ritual murder by the ruling class? I ponder these things because of Shakespeare and my belief that my African ancestors were early agronomists. They were much like those who lived outside the cities in townships like today’s designed or ill-designed cities on the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe. Readers fail to imagine life before imperialism because Americans do not have an urban world view, or even think in terms of someone unlike themselves. Some perceive urbanity as code language for ‘black’. The concept of an urban/black world view was rejected in the eighteenth century; many of the founding fathers, like Jefferson and Madison e.g., defined urban as a place where the people did not share the same customs and cultural referents. However the aforementioned should have us all nattering over our commonalities. How can we not know these commonalities in this age of information? It is world view and all that these two simple words encompass as it is put on paper. A world view that presents a continent as seen in the maps that accompany this lecture should be suspect. If the reader searches maps made during the period of the mfecane that opens Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, one will find the maps may as well have been written on sand (Mackaness, 2006, 1). When one opens Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, it takes the reader away from mapping on paper onto a topography that anticipates GPS, et alia. The lost boy, who finds himself lost after a slave raid, presents us with the need to follow the child to see to his safety, as well as the safety of Plaatje’s victims of the mfecane. The anticipation of discovery of new information opens another path unexplored in this the quest to know more about Africa. Nonetheless, remember social/spatial practices constitute cultural production developed from its everyday actions, which may be written on stone or passed in novels, stories, dramas, and poetry. Your western world view may not be enough.
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17th century Southern Africa, 1747 Study Skills Questions: 1. Identify all the italicized words. Write a paragraph on each question. They are important, right? Try to trace the flight pattern in Mhudi. Is it possible using the map included in the lecture titled A new & accurate map of the southern parts of Africa: containing Lower Guinea, Monoemugi, Zanguebar, and the Empire of Monomatapa, county of the Cafres &c. and the Island of Madagascar. 2. Can you plot the adventures in Tutuola on the map identified in the lecture, as Map of Africa 1729, in following Tutuola’s narrative? Why? Explain in three to five paragraphs and include a minimum of two citations (MLA, unless you have spoken with me concerning writing across the curriculum.) |
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