African Literature: Lecture 2

At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth… JosephConrad    http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ConDark.html



Imperial Boundaries 1914

www.fsmitha.com/h2/map02af.htm



As discovered in our earlier readings, not all cultural practices are founded in the ideal of human security. Male chiefs, like Mzilikazi, taxed and slaughtered Ra-Thaba and Mhudi’s people. However the texts left on the ceiling of a cave suggests a culture less nomadic in this discussion of the earlier observations from the southern cape (Nsangwini Bird Men Cave Art, Photographer: Bob Forrester). The mfecane has been historically cited for the nomadic bands that were met by the European bearers of the three c’s outside the cape settlement and dispersed by war. However war is not the only factor in settling or being unsettled.

As discovered in our earlier readings, not all cultural practices are founded in the ideal of human security. Male chiefs, like Mzilikazi, taxed and slaughtered Ra-Thaba and Mhudi’s people. However the texts left on the ceiling of a cave suggests a culture less nomadic in this discussion of the earlier observations from the southern cape (Nsangwini Bird Men Cave Art, Photographer: Bob Forrester). The mfecane has been historically cited for the nomadic bands that were met by the European bearers of the three c’s outside the cape settlement and dispersed by war. However war is not the only factor in settling or being unsettled.



South African Native National Congress

Chinua Achebe criticized Conrad for not going far enough in his description of the abundance in the Congo, Conrad wrote about.  Achebe suggests that Conrad is hegemonic in his description because of the cultures of Africans throughout the continent prior to Christianity and after Islam. Texts like Conrad’s do not go far enough in their exploration of ‘Christianity, civilization, and commerce’ or the three c’s, as I refer to them. Either the South African Native National Congress or the eighteenth century publication of Olaudah Equiano’s memoirs anticipated the cultural imperialism that followed in the division of Africa by European cultural imperialists. According to Conrad’s observations, what is present all around him is “abundance”. [1] According to Equiano, commerce and Christianity was apparent, but civilization as he had known it in southeastern Nigeria was not.          

African Rock Paintings
http://www.commonground191.com/journal/swaziland.htm

 Africans all over the continent were introduced to commerce in the form of corn and/or sheep, e.g. and slavery. Furthermore not all religious conversion was Christian, there was Islam carried along with commerce, including slaving, from the Arab peninsula southeastward to Delgoa Bay. This invasion took its tolls as Tutuola describes in The Palmwine Drinkard.  Other Africans, knowing that change is inevitable, were sending their children to Europe to learn this new language of trade, which the Europeans brought in force when the European nations divided the continent. What one wonders focuses upon cultural/spatial practices of the epoch that preceded the map that the Europeans met to divide amongst themselves. 

African Rock Paintings

http://www.sntc.org.sz/photo.asp?pid=111

Study Skills:

1. Identify the italicized terms. Identify all the italicized words.  Write a paragraph on each. Some are names, some are not. 
2.  You can see how the continent was divided. Can you identify the players? When did they meet and where? 
3.  What spatial practices are discussed in the rock paintings? Why did these Africans prefer not to become agronomists?  Why was animal husbandry preferable to agronomy?
4.  I included a footnote from the reserved reading in the Lakeland library. Can you explain why one would use a footnote?

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[1]    Thompson, Leonard. A history of South Africa. 3rd edition. New Haven,CT: Yale Univ Pr, 2001. 1-29. Print. This text discusses South African history from many perspectives in the first chapter in order to put today’s South Africa into perspective.