Africa: Referenced as It Came To Be What It Might Not Have Been

Usually I try to write about things I know at least a little something about, or things I have researched enough to write generalities (make conclusions about.) I have never been to any great extent a specificist (I would rather learn how to saw boards, than saw specific boards.

In fact, Karl Popper suggested, one of the first methodological indications of a pseudoscience is that it attempts to find answers for as many questions as possible so that there is nothing left whereas true sciences remain open-ended and subject to falsifiability.

The problem with human intelligence is it discovers specifics by making generalities about specifics but when we reverse this process and the generalities disappear under the weight of ideologies that support themselves on too many specifics that wipe out generalities into a fully developed specificity for every question; and now we have a ”conspiracy theory”.

But let’s not call the believers “dumb” when our educational system itself is based on learning to fill in the blanks with the right answers.

Such I found, when I was hired to research the societies of the first Africans (actually the limitations of the project were really only to research African communities that remained post the dispersals of some communities from Africa and not including sub saharan.)

What I discovered (that led to a failure to complete the project and someone else was turned to for the research, I suppose) was that before Africa became Africa the only history was pseudo-history that employed too many specifics without any specific evidences.

Africa had large empires—but only after they were introduced from outside. At first they were all concentrated in northeast Africa. What we have discovered of recent is that their were a great deal of farming communities in the upper nile that were usurped from those outside the region who forced themselves onto the community and the undeciphered “Narmer” who united upper and lower Nile was probably a light-skinned group of migrant horse-herders.

But history rewrites these encounters as settling the wild migrant hunter-gatherers who were settled by benign kings who united them to make them “better off”. Why they became “better off” never made too much sense…but the interactions of the usurpation altered not only the culture via usurpation but via interactions that altered the culture that was before Africa became historical Africa.

My supposition, supported by genetic evidence and contemporary archaeology of sites out of Africa, while archaeology within what became Africa has been focused on pre sapien hominids (to an overwhelming extent).

So the Dahomey kingdom or the Zulu kingdom were well within the transference of cultures that were now Africa, and have multi-interpretive variations to promote variant interpretive perspectives. Because, after all, most of what had been the diverse cultures and history of those that lived on the continent did not see themselves as being anything more than a family or expanded kin-groups formed into tribes.

Becoming Africa therefore can not be history but an alteration of history by imposition of too many specifics that can lead only to negative generalities that support the specifics and is all, therefore, pseudo.

I suppose if the truth was Alkebulan, when their cultures were varied, that ended when history was filled in and the continent became Africa. Alkebulan might have been the generalities, Africa became the specificity of its history.

Africa began, of course, in Northeast Alkebulan in the very fertile Sahel valleys. Like many other regions around the globe, the Sahel was well-farmed and populous for many hundreds of years; new evidence indicates it might have been populous and agrarian as far back as the paleolithic, but certainly throughout the mesolithic.

But because that bountiful Alkebulan culture was overrun and turned into a supporting culture for the invading “Narmerians” who became the Pharaohs of the era. To support their claim of leadership they had to be “Egyptian”.

And that of course led to kingdoms of resistance, Nubia (Kush) and Axum. And in the northeastern continent the Alkebulans lost their history and became African. Eventually this descended along the eastern shoreline, and especially when continental Indians discovered the Alkebulans were making tools of iron nearly a thousand years before the brilliantly civilized warriors discovered its technology.

Central and western Alkebulan remained “without history” for quite a many eons longer until the Muslim incursion began to again form resistance that became the kingdom of Ghana, coincidently showing no evidence of existing before the Amazigh (Berber) organized to resist, the converted and became agents of assistance to the spread of Islam.

Shortly thereafter, the Songhai and Mali kingdoms emerged. But the famous Dahomian kingdom is well within “history” and while there are two perspectives of extremes, since they didn’t leave us with their own internal perspective, we know something about its rise. It came about as an organized defense against people being rounded up by the Malian Muslim kings and sold to the Portuguese.

Whether or not the Dahomians themselves began selling slaves I’ll leave to you.What I am trying to say here is that whatever might have been the cultures of Alkebulan became history only upon conquest and/or resistance to conquest and their are really almost no specifics of history anywhere before the conquistadors sweep and create (sometimes) dueling histories of conquered and conqueror.

As long as people conquer, people will attempt to resist. Competing histories of the good guys and bad guys will fill in more specifics than they have to prove their own cause or ideology and the other side will always be lying about the truth.

While there is probably no era of history that was not on this factual dualistic treadmill, we certainly seem to be on such a collision here in America, at the moment.

What I am hoping for, but may not live to see, is that we emerge not as winners and losers, but with a recognition that for all of us to win, no one can lose.