A Conversation with Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret, UCLA Interviewed by WHC Co-editor Tom Laichas

Editor's note: Apart from the Nile Valley, Ethiopia, and the Bantu migration, African

history before 1000 CE hardly appears in world history classrooms and texts. Most of us

assume that there simply isn't enough documentary or archaeological evidence to say

anything about social and technological change.

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Christopher Ehret wants to change that. Among the most innovative and provocative

scholars working in African history, Ehret has made a career of studying the development

of African languages, teasing from the linguistic history evidence for ancient social,

economic, technological, and religious development. Ehret acknowledges that some

readers may have trouble "getting comfortable with language evidence."1 The effort is

worth the trouble. Languages "contain immense vocabulary resources that express and

name the full range of cultural, economic, and environmental information available to

their speakers."

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Want to know when a particular people first domesticated animals? Take a look at

their vocabulary for breeding and raising the animals. Look for similar vocabulary in

languages spoken by related groups. If you can determine how long it has been since all

these groups shared a common language, you may be on your way to dating the origins of

stock raising. This is not easy work; it means applying a fine-grained knowledge of

linguistic structure, while avoiding coincidental or misleading relationships. One test of

the work is how well it predicts later archaeological discoveries. By that measure, Ehret

has done well.

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The Africa Ehret reveals cannot be described as unchanging or peripheral to world

history. Among his most exciting ideas is that of an "African classical age," from about

1000 BCE to about 300 CE. During this period, he argues, peoples from four language

families Khoisan (sometimes known as Khoi-San and best known for the "clicks" in their

languages), Afrasan (a.k.a., Afrasian or Afro-Asiatic), Nilo-Saharans and Niger-Congo

peoples—encountered one another in the African Great Lakes region and along the

eastern Rift Valley. That encounter helps account for the southward expansion of Bantu-

speaking Niger-Congo communities, who adopted cattle-raising from Nilo-Saharan

groups and independently worked iron. Recently, Ehret summarized much of this work in

The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800.2

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WHC: How did you get interested in African history?

Ehret: There are two things that moved me toward African history. One was that, when I

was quite young, African nations were seeking independence. As a kid in elementary

school and junior high, I was thinking "Yeah, the American ideal is independence, so

Africans should throw out British colonialism! "I think that this idea of throwing off

colonial rule just hit a core of just being American.

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Connected with that was the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision which, to me,

was startling. I went to an integrated school in California and had no idea that you could

get away with segregation in America. I thought, well, obviously the Supreme Court had

to make that decision. Only later I found out that the country had been doing the wrong

thing for a long time.

Of course, I was interested in history all along. I started at Cal Tech finding that apart

from math, it was what I loved best. And I was very interested by that time in Africa.

What I found was that I could not find much African history in the libraries. The raw

materials were there, but none of it was getting to any of the books that I read. So why

was Africa being left out? Everything was wide open to new discovery for me.

I liked history, but I don't know that I would have been an academic historian without the

real intrigue and interest and vast newness of African history.

WHC: You did your undergraduate work at Cal Tech?

Ehret: University of Redlands. Well, I started out in math at Cal Tech, but I decided that I

could have more fun if I went someplace else. At Redlands I could drive off on the

weekends and go out to the desert. At that time, Redlands was out on the edge of things,

beyond the smog. Whereas Cal Tech was deep in the smog. I did have the math

department people at Cal Tech try to convince me that I could do history and still stay

there. It was nice that they cared. But I had a lot of fun at Redlands. And going to

Redlands gave me a lot more time to go exploring libraries to discover Africa. That's

when I began discovering just how faulty a lot of thinking about Africa history really was.

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WHC: How did you get into linguistics?

Ehret: That was another hobby of mine as a child. I saw what people had done with Indo-

European, and eventually encountered things people had done with American Indian

studies using language to reconstruct things a long way back. The language evidence was

appealing to me because it was mathematical.

Because languages change their phonology [i.e., their sounds] regularly, you can set up a

historical sequence of phonological changes. You can then ask some interesting

questions: what words were in this language before the sound change?

When I got into my junior year, towards the beginning of the senior year, several

universities were starting up African Studies programs. I thought, wow, let's see, can I get

away with doing linguistic stuff with this Africa? I got into a program where they said, if

you want to do this cross-disciplinary interests, go ahead. That was Northwestern

University.

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WHC: What about the other programs? 8

Ehret: At Wisconsin, they had a Tropical History program, comparing various parts of

the world that had been neglected. But they didn't really have the linguistic piece of it. At

Northwestern there were people who could understand the method, who could handle it.

WHC: What kind of problems did you find in the received wisdom on Africa?

Ehret: The presumption in mainstream literature was that African history didn't exist, that

Africans were like Andaman Islanders, people cut off from the rest of the world. But it

was immediately obvious, once you started looking, that there was were empires and

states, that there was long-distance trade. I also saw that this was a really good place for

using non-literary types of analysis and evidence.

Students still come to my classes and are surprised about all these names they've got to

know! Well, I tell them, you wouldn't say that about European or United States history

classes. Why haven't children learned enough of these names along the way so you can

take it up in college with as much fluency and ease as they take up French history—and

France is, compared to Africa, such a tiny little place!

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WHC: Is that the major problem for students new to African history?

Ehret: That would be the only major problem, unfamiliarity.

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WHC: What are the most important things world history teachers might teach their

students about Africa?

Ehret: Africa sometimes seems to students off the edge of the world. The first thing is to

realize is that it's an integral part of what's going on in the rest of the world. If you are

going to integrate Central Asia into your history, you can absolutely integrate sub-Saharan

Africa into your history. You just can't talk about the Indian Ocean unless you talk about

eastern Africa. And you can't talk about Mediterranean history unless you know what's

going on in West Africa. You can't talk about the Red Sea and the Middle East unless

you're talking about Ethiopia actually, for the Middle East, you need West Africa and

East Africa too. If you're doing world history, you need to connect up all these places.

And then too, students just do not know that Africa is a seminal area of innovation in

world history.

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WHC: Describe that innovation.

Ehret: You can of course begin with the fact that all our ancestors were fully human

before any of those ancestors left Africa 60,000 years ago. The first places that you see

artistic or symbolic representation are in eastern Africa. You see the first backed stone

tools, the first shaped and reshaped bone tools. It's after 60,000 BCE or so that real

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humans finally leave the continent. So we're all Africans. Face up to that fact.

But people who do world history usually begin with the origins of agriculture. There are

at least seven or eight maybe eleven to thirteen world regions which independently

invented agriculture. None in Europe, by the way. One, of course, is in the Middle East,

and many people still believe that this was the first, from which all the others developed.

The idea of diffusion from the Middle East still lingers.

That idea really can't be sustained.

You have, for instance, one independent invention of agriculture in East Asia, maybe two.

You have it more widely accepted now that there's an independent invention of

agriculture in the interior of New Guinea. People argue about what to make of the Indian

materials, but certainly India saw one of the three separate domestications of cattle; there

are enough uniquely Indian crops that we might end up with India as another center of

independent agricultural innovation. There are different ideas about the Americas, but I

think we have two for sure: Mesoamerica and the Andes. There may also be a separate

lowland tropical South American development. It also seems that there might be a few

things domesticated in the southeastern United States even before there was

Mesoamerican stimulus or diffusion. So that makes four.

Here's the point: agriculture was invented in Africa in at least three centers, and maybe

even four. In Africa, you find the earliest domestication of cattle. The location, the pottery

and other materials we've found makes it likely that happened among the Nilo-Saharan

peoples, the sites are in southern Egypt. There is an exceptionally strong correlation

between archaeology and language on this issue.

A separate or distinct agriculture arose in West Africa around yams.

A third takes place in southeastern or southern Ethiopia. I've got a student working this

year in Ethiopia to see whether we can pin this down more precisely. The Ethiopians

domesticated a plant called enset. It's very unique: Ethiopians use the lower stem and the

bulb; not the tuber, the fruit, or the greens. Enset grows in a climatic zone distinct from

that where cattle were first domesticated; that was further north.

The possible fourth area of agricultural invention would involve people who cultivated

grain in Ethiopia. They seem to have begun cultivation of grain independently, but

adopted cattle from the Nilo-Saharans of the middle Nile region. To pin this down, we

need archaeology from a whole big area, but so far it's missing.

There's another really interesting innovation in Africa: pottery. There are two places in the

world which develop pottery really early. One is Japan, where you find pottery before

10,000 BCE, going back to at least 11,000 or 12,000 BCE. And then you've got pottery by

10,500 BCE in the eastern Sahara, and it spreads widely in the southern Sahara. Unlike

the Middle Eastern ceramics, where you can see the development of pottery at every

stage, the stuff we find in the southern Sahara is already great pottery. So there's probably

500 years we're missing from the archaeological record. So let's say that pottery develops

in the southern Sahara 2,500 years before Middle Eastern pottery. The Middle Eastern

stuff does look like it was developed independently of the African, but hey, this is really

interesting! Africa is not too far away; there may have been some diffusion.

So, in a world history class, I would be talking about the development of agriculture in all

the different parts of the world. I'd look at how people developed different kinds of

agriculture in response to their particular environmental or demographic challenges. Then

I'd look at the independent invention of pottery. In the Japanese case, it's not even

connected with agriculture. One could argue that it turns up with cattle-keeping in the

Sahara, but it also turns up with people who don't keep cattle, for fishing. So you can open

up people's minds to technology: why do you need pottery?

WHC: Why do you need pottery?

Ehret: It has to do with sedentarism. You need to store and prepare food. But that doesn't

mean that people start with agriculture. When you look at pottery, you are talking about

the different ways people responded to the end of the Ice Age, developing more intensive

ways of collecting food, or using a more productive method of hunting. Africa gives us

particularly good examples. We can see cattle raisers juxtaposed with people who

intensively exploited an aquatic resource base. The aquatic resource base works for 2,000

or so years, before the climate gets drier.

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WHC: You associate the development of agriculture and intensified hunting with four

major cultural groups. You call these groups "civilizations." Why?

Ehret: This question comes down to the problem of what the word "civilization" really

means. Unfortunately, the idea that comes most often to people's minds is to contrast

"civilization" to "disorder." So it becomes a value judgment about behavior. Because

being civilized is a good thing, we tend to credit ourselves with being civilized. This is

unexamined baggage.

The word, of course, goes back to the Latin civis, and the idea of living in a town. So,

again, we often think of a civilization as consisting of people who were urban, with more

art, more culture, and more of the things we associate with towns and cities. So you can

say, okay, let's say "civilizations" have towns and cities. This is the tack that Graham

Connah takes in his book, African Civilizations.3 That book is very informative, because it

reminds people of just how old urban life is in Africa. It develops long, long before

European colonialism.

But there's a third meaning of civilization. We talk about "Islamic Civilization" or

"Ancient Near Eastern Civilization" or "Western Civilization." But what are we talking

about? We're talking about a bunch of different peoples who somehow have a something

in common culturally, something which allows us to think of them as part of a wider

grouping.

If we take this model of civilization and apply it to Africa, we quickly discover that there

are big groupings of people across Africa which share in underlying historical

commonalities. If we go really deep, we have four traditions which diffused throughout

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large regions of Africa. What we can see that each of them has its roots in some particular

transition that gave that group some material or economic advantage.

WHC: How did these groups spread across Africa?

Ehret: If you look at early history, languages spread with social identity. It doesn't mean

that a whole group of people come in and wipe out all the people who were there before

them. Now, it may be that with the invention of metal working, some groups may develop

the military advantage and the political or economic structure for conquest. But even then,

the conquerors and the conquered have to accommodate one another..

In earlier eras, it's not going to be conquest that expands the frontiers of a language

family. Something to keep in mind too is that always in early history, people didn't leap

long distances, like the English leaped from Britain to Australia. Languages expanded

directly from previously established bases of population. You had to have enough of a

base to build a population outward from.

So why does this happen? Well, agriculture allows more people to be supported on the

same amount of land. In the long term, the agricultural frontier will expand. That means

that a language family with agriculture will tend to spread.

The African invention of agriculture is often poorly attested in the material evidence,

because we're missing important archaeology. In the case of West Africa, it's hard to get

archaeology which would prove early cultivation.

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WHC: Why?

Ehret: Because wood tools would not have survived. And because yams don't have seeds

which might be burnt and preserved so that we could know that they're domestic rather

than wild cultivars. Also, there's a stage it might have lasted 2,000 years when African

peoples moved between the wild and the cultivated crops. You don't necessarily go

straight to domestic seeds; it's an uneven transition.

Well, the language evidence says that there was early agriculture. You go back to the

word for "cattle-raising" in Nilo-Saharan. It's not in the proto-language, it's in one of the

branches. A few hundred years later, you get words for "cultivation," so you know they're

cultivating, not long after they begin to raise some cattle. All we have after the first cattle

are some sorghum seeds, and people argue whether those were domestic or wild. But the

language evidence says that they were cultivating the sorghum. And the archaeology

indirectly supports the language evidence. The Nilo-Saharans have granaries, we know

that. By 7200 or 7300 BCE, they've got sedentary sediments. Yeah, you can have people

collecting wild grasses really intensively and putting the grasses in a granary. However,

the intensive grass collectors we know about didn't have granaries this big. So the

language evidence and the archaeology both provide evidence of cultivation.

In the case of the rainforests of West Africa, you have the language evidence and the

development of polished stone axes. It looks like they're having to clear the land; the

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yams they're raising need the sunlight. There are yams in the rainforest that don't need

much light, but the yams they're cultivating at this stage are from the savannah. There's a

verb to "cultivate" pretty far back so, yeah, we've got the evidence there, and we've

certainly got the words for "yams," thought they could be wild yams.

The older generation of scholars have trouble seeing that the archaeology is there. They

try to find reasons that it's not there. They say, well, you don't have enough cattle bones. I

want hundreds of cattle bones, not tens of cattle bones. They have all kinds of excuses,

but I think it's the remnant thinking based on early western European racism and just the

general assumption that African history didn't begin as early. People believe that

everything in Africa had to come from somewhere else.

WHC: Can you talk about the way this approach works for the four African peoples you

have explored?

Ehret: Well, first of all, there were surely other peoples besides these four, peoples who

have been lost to history because they were assimilated and absorbed into agricultural

societies. We're left with these four today, but there may well have been others, of course.

Anyway, we can start with the Nilo-Saharan languages. The Nilo-Saharan languages are

spread across drier areas, with better preservation of archaeological materials. They're

among the earliest inventors of pottery, so their archaeological sites have material that

would survive even in tropical rain forests. When you make ceramics, that's a real lasting

material.

So what we do is to go back in the Nilo-Saharan language family and try to reconstruct its

linguistic history. What we find is the kind of evidence I mentioned a minute ago.

Then there are the Niger-Congo speaking peoples. In their language family, we can

reconstruct a word for "yams" right back to the very earliest stage of the language. There's

a deeper level, by the way, Niger-Kordofanian. There's a branch of that family over

towards Sudan. There's no word for yams in that branch, but there is in the Niger-Congo

branch. It also looks like they had a word for "cultivate," but it's not tested in enough

places yet to feel very strongly about it. It could be that the word "to dig" became "to

cultivate" in two separate places. I think that farming came very early in their history.

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WHC: So most of the distinctions are based on agriculture.

Ehret: There's something else here too. One of the things I found most valuable for

dividing up these distinct civilizations is religion. One of the most fascinating things is

that a couple of these African civilizations were probably monotheistic before any other

people, at least in the Middle East or European world, so far as we know.

The way we look at these religious beliefs is that we have two categories I find useful.

One is, how do people categorize the realm of spirit. The second is how they deal with the

problem of evil: why bad things happen to good people—or good things happen to bad

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people.

Let's look at the realm of spirit for Niger-Congo people. It seems that anciently -

linguistically we can demonstrate this back 6,000 or 7,000 years anciently there was a

Creator God, a single god that created the world. On this level, it looks like God the

Creator was much like the Deist god of the 18th

century. Got his world going, or got her

world going, and then sat back to look at it.

Interesting thing about Niger-Congo thinking, by the way: they have a single pronoun for

he, she, and it. They don't make gender distinctions in the third person. So you don't know

whether they're talking about the Creator God as a female or male. They've got

subordinate names for Godattribute namesthat may be female. And they've got other

subordinate names that may be male. They don't see God as inherently gendered. For

them, God is male in this context and female in that context.

But the earliest term we have isn't only non-gendered, it's not even human. They're not

thinking of the Creator God as analogous to human beings.

WHC: How would you reconstruct the religious beliefs from linguistic evidence?

Ehret: The case of this oldest word for God in Niger-Congo is instructive. This word for

God was nyambe. The amb was the verb. The e was a suffix you needed in order to make

the verb into a noun. The category of noun, the singular/plural marker, was the ny-. In the

Ashanti kingdom, it was nyame. In the kingdom of Kongo, it was zambe. These were

sound changes, but it was the same word. Now, ny- signified a category for animals and

things that don't fit into any other category. So we have here is a word that means "the

beginner of things." Literally, God is the origin of things. The verb it comes from tells us

these people already had the creator god concept.

Other terms for God come later. You get a term which means "the one who arranges and

puts everything in order" in eastern Africa. In some languages, the word for God is the

same word as for "potter"; the idea is of someone who molds human beings out of clay. It

sounds like the Biblical story, though there's no historical connection.

Something that we don't have as well pinned down linguistically, but it seems to be across

the area, is a second level of spirit, a spirit who had a territorial region of authority: some

sort of lesser spirit, but not God. That particular spirit may originally have been associated

with a particular watershed or with the source of a particular stream. Sometimes, though

not always, this idea exists in an area where there aren't so many streams.

The third and most important level was the level of the ancestors. They were the people

you had to show respect for. They were the people you might go to for help. God is

distant. When Catholicism comes in, the ancestors may be viewed as saints. They were, in

some sense, intermediaries. But they weren't only intermediaries. They had their own

power. You had to pay respect to them and conduct rites to them, both communally and

individually.

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WHC: You describe two other groups. One of them is the Afrasans. Can you talk about

them for a moment?

Ehret: These are people who have been called Afro-Asiatic and also Afrasian. I'm saying

"Afrasan" because I'm trying to get "Asia" out. There is still this idea that the Afro-Asiatic

family had to come out of Asia. Once you realize that it's an African family with one little

Asian offshoot, well, that itself is a very important lesson for world historians.

We actually have DNA evidence which fits very well with an intrusion of people from

northwestern African into southwestern Asia. The Y-chromosome markers, associated

with the male, fade out as you go deeper into the Middle East.

Another thing about the Afrasans: their religious beliefs. Anciently, each local group had

its own supreme deity. This is called "henotheism." In this kind of religion, you have your

own god to whom you show your allegiance. But you realize that other groups have their

own deities. The fact that they have deities different from yours doesn't mean their deities

don't exist.

This kind of belief still exists. It's fading, maybe on its last legs, in southeastern Ethiopia,

among people of the Omati group. They descend from the earliest split in the Semitic

family. Way up in the mountains, they have this henotheism. They have a deity of their

clan, or their small group of closely related clans. They have their priest-chief who has to

see to the rites of that deity.

We see the same kind of thing in ancient Egypt. If we go to there, we discover that the

Egyptian gods began as local gods. With Egyptian unification, we move from this

henotheism to polytheism. To unify Egypt, after all, you have to co-opt the loyalty of

local groups and recognize their gods. We have no direct evidence, but it's certainly

implied by the things we learn about the gods in the written records we do have.

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WHC: You seem to be suggesting that the Semitic monotheism Jewish, Christian and

Islamic monotheism descends from African models. Is that fair?

Ehret: Yeah, actually it is. Look at the first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other

gods before me." It's not like the Muslim creed, which is "There is no God but God." It's

doesn't say "there is no god but Yahweh, and Moses is his prophet." It is an admittance

that there are other gods. It is an example of henotheism. And the Hebrew tribes are like

the Omati clan groups. The tribes are clans writ larger. Like the Omati clans, they track

their ancestry back ten or fifteen generations to a common ancestor. And these common

ancestors were twelve brothers. (Actually, there are thirteen. They have to turn two of

them, Ephraim and Manasseh, into half tribes, because thirteen wasn't a good number. I

always loved that. There are really thirteen tribes, but you have to combine two of them).

The Canaanite cities have an alternative Semitic structure: polytheism. There's Astarte

and Baal and the various gods that you'll find in South Arabia. So it looks like in the early

Semitic world, you have two coexisting religions. You have polytheism among the ones

who are really more urbanized. Then you have henotheistic groups.

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What I see here is that earlier Middle Eastern polytheism is influencing Semitic religion.

After all, the early Semites were just a few Africans arriving to find a lot of other people

already in the area. So they're going to have to accommodate. Some groups, maybe ones

who live in peripheries, in areas with lower population densities, may be able to impose

the henotheistic religion they arrived with.

WHC: How does a small group of Semites coming in from Africa transform the language

of a region in which they are a minority?

Ehret: One of the archaeological possibilities is a group called the Mushabaeans. This

group moves in on another group that's Middle Eastern. Out of this, you get the Natufian

people. Now, we can see in the archaeology that people were using wild grains the Middle

East very early, back into the late glacial age, about 18,000 years ago. But they were just

using these seeds as they were. At the same time, in this northeastern corner of Africa,

another people the Mushabaeans? are using grindstones along the Nile, grinding the

tubers of sedges. Somewhere along the way, they began to grind grain as well. Now, it's

in the Mushabian period that grindstones come into the Middle East.

Conceivably, with a fuller utilization of grains, they're making bread. We can reconstruct

a word for "flatbread," like Ethiopian injira. This is before proto-Semitic divided into

Ethiopian and ancient Egyptian languages. So, maybe, the grindstone increases how fully

you use the land. This is the kind of thing we need to see more evidence for. We need to

get people arguing about this.

And by the way: we can reconstruct the word for "grindstone" back to the earliest stage of

Afrasan. Even the Omati have it. And there are a lot of common words for using grasses

and seeds.

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WHC: You emphasize the importance of the Great Lakes as a cultural hearth for much of

the rest of Africa…

Ehret: In the last thousand years BCE?

WHC: Right… and you focus particularly on the Bantu-speaking Mashiriki people. In the

textbooks most of us use, the Bantu migrations start about 3,000 years ago, and end about

a thousand years ago. The Bantu push the Khoisan southwest into African deserts. What

does your work do that changes that picture?

Ehret: It's not just my work. Everyone who has worked on the Bantu language family

more recently knows that it's a family that splits off from other Niger-Congo languages

four or five thousand years ago, something in that range. It takes the first 2,000 years of

expansion just to cross the equatorial rainforest. It's the arrival of certain Bantu in the

Great Lakes area and the whole western Rift Valley, a geologically and environmentally

varied area, which leads all kinds of varied adaptations. That encounter leads to what

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people have thought of as the Bantu expansion.

That's only eastern Africa. There's also a southern expansion from the rainforest in

Cameroon at the same time. So it only looks like it's one migration. And in a way, they're

interconnected.

WHC: You call this a "classical period" in African history.

Ehret: I call the last thousand years BCE a classical period.

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WHC: Why?

Ehret: It is a classical age because it shapes all that follows it, even when people who

come later aren't conscious of its influence. These ideas, then, get reshaped to create

kingdoms in this area, town life in another area.

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WHC: Was this classical era in the last millennium BCE a consequence of Bantu-speaking

people encountering new environments, or encountering other peoples?

Ehret: The syncretism is very, very important. It shows up more strongly in the material

culture. But often, this syncretism takes place because of the environmental context.

Some changes in material life had to take place, or Bantu peoples would be limited to a

particular environment. However, as you adopt material things, you may also adopt other

ideas that go along with the material culture you've adopted. Maybe, because you have

adopted new farming techniques from neighboring peoples, you also adopt their

agricultural rituals and ceremonies as well.

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WHC: What about the Khoisan? Didn't the Bantu expansion push them into the Kalahari,

into Botswana and Namibia?

Ehret: "Push." This is a good term to bring up. I don't believe people ever "pushed"

anybody else. The Bantu moved into areas that were good for farming. People didn't get

pushed out. If you go back to the previous Bantu stage, about 3000-1000 BCE, in the

rainforest, it looks like their expansion is a lot slower. Their farming technologies took

that long to increase their populations enough. In the rainforest, there's a long interaction

with the BaTwa—the so-called Pygmies. (You shouldn't use that word, by the way. It

comes from a Greek myth, not from real people). Anyway, the BaTwa have a real impact

on the rainforest Bantu, a long-term impact. The relationship between the Bantu and

BaTwa show that two groups can coexist in the rainforest not only in different regions,

but even in similar regions next to one another.

In East Africa, you've got areas where hunting and gathering leads to low density

population, because the land won't support a lot of people. Hunter-gatherers want to keep

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down the population, so there's always plenty. Only in the worst years do things get

problematic. This, at least, is what we've learned about Khoisan hunter-gatherers and

what we've seen in later periods.

Bantu farmers move initially to areas in East Africa that are particularly favorable to

agriculture—more rainfall, better soil and so on. As their populations grow, they're going

they settle in villages with a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people. The hunter-

gatherer band in the adjoining territory will include twenty-five or forty people, or maybe

live in several bands that add up to forty or so.

The hunter-gatherers are increasingly going to be faced with pressure on their lands. One

option: adapt and become farmers. If you do that, then your children grow up speaking a

Bantu language and become part of the Bantu population.

In Southern Africa, it was a little different. The Khoisan adopted cattle and sheep-raising

ahead of Bantu arrival. So the Cape Khoekhoe began growing in population too. If you

look today at Nelson Mandela, you see this man has some Khoi-San ancestry.

So in some areas the Khoisan assimilated over a long period of time. In others, marginal

to farming, hunter gatherers survived independently. But the Khoi-San were not "pushed"

out, not then.

WHC: There are still a couple of Khoisan groups in Tanzania.

Ehret: Yes.

28

WHC: How do you explain that?

Ehret: One is the Sandawe. They lived in an environmental belt where a new disease

vector, east coast fever, would have slowed the advance of agriculture. Otherwise, it's

perfectly good highland grazing land. The Sandawe survived in an area that's more

marginal than others, but agriculture was still possible. Even today, the Sandawe's cultural

values are very strongly committed to hunting and gathering, but they now make a living

with farming and stock raising. They gradually adapted this.

The Hadza are interesting. They're in a drier area with more tsetse fly. It's sort of low

bush. The tsetse fly needs shade. With thirty or forty inches of rain, you get shade trees;

with fifteen or twenty inches, you sometimes get low bush. Farmers came to this area late.

The Hadza are now being threatened by people who are having problems finding

farmland.

Now, the Hadza language shows layer upon layer of contact with other farmers, going

back to the last four thousand years. They're in this little environmental niche. They know

about farming, and they do trade for farm goods. These days, they are settling. But even

twenty or thirty years ago, they were still, basically, hunter-gatherers.

29

WHC: Let's talk about Martin Bernal. His Black Athena has raised quite a controversy.4

What do you think?

Ehret: Well, Martin Bernal has done fine work. There's really nothing the matter with it.

His grandfather was Alan Gardner, a famous and important Egyptologist. He went into

other things, but has always been, at heart, an Egyptologist. He knows his Egyptian

materials very, very well. And as he started looking at these materials, he became

interested in the history of literature dealing with Greek-Egyptian connection. He saw

that, as you moved into the 19th

century, histories became increasingly distant from what

the Greeks themselves said about their Egyptian connections. People imagined that

Greece had this wonderful sort of Enlightenment before the Enlightenment. In many

senses this wasn't wrong; the Greeks really had tremendous breakthroughs in thinking.

But they didn't come up with all of this in isolation. We can't ignore, for instance, Euclid

saying that he stayed in Egypt and, after he returned, wrote the Geometry.

A whole bunch of people in the Classics departments have made their careers - and they

deeply feel this - the wonder of the Ancient Greeks. They get great joy and happiness

from doing this. If you make any connection between Africa and what the Greeks were

doing, our Western upbringing can come back to surface in a way people don't realize is

taking place.

They don't realize it because they feel they have eliminated racism from their thinking.

They're sure that Africans, given different circumstances, would have been just as

advanced as everyone else. They don't realize that, actually, Africans were just as

advanced. They have, maybe, more continent to move into; they have less dense

population and only some areas move into urbanization. Societies develop more oral

literature, so they don't have the written documentation—people choose alternative modes

to develop their history. And then there's the thought of Egypt was this place that got

great but then just stopped, stagnated. And that's not a correct reading of history either.

The New Kingdom was doing things that were far different from the Old and Middle

periods. Now, beyond the New Kingdom, nobody pays much attention. I want to fix up

Civilizations of Africa to go into 7th

century Egypt. There are important things, new

things, happening there.

Anyway: the idea of all this Egyptian influence on Greece is threatening to people who

fear that it challenges Greek uniqueness and originality. I don't think it does at all. After

all, human societies invent new patterns through encounter with other societies. What

Greeks achieved is all the richer if we understand that they were grappling with ideas

from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere.

And then you have a very different reaction from Afrocentrists. Some Afrocentrists are

really out there, far beyond left field. Martin and I don't mind that they use our work, as

long as they are grounded in the evidence. But Classicists say, well, Bernal is just an

Afrocentrist. And he isn't. He's someone who's got real evidence, and who's got a valid

critique of European scholarly understanding of Greece over the last century and a half or

so. Of course, some of the people he criticizes are among the founding fathers of Classics.

But, yeah, it does look like the Middle Kingdom did have a big impact on the

Mediterranean. Maybe there wasn't a circum-Aegean conquest from Egypt, but there was

a cultural impact that was later remembered. I think basically Martin has really enriched

30

things.

Now, as for the linguistic materials: some Greek words are going to turn out to be early

borrowings. I want to get together with Martin on this issue. There are definitely word

borrowings from Egypt into Greece, and there's certainly a lot vocabulary that comes

from ancient Semitic languages.

WHC: Do you find connections between contemporary events and the work you've done

in ancient Africa?

Ehret: There are immense connections. For Nilo-Saharan peoples, God is the source of

good and evil. Evil is judgment or retribution for something done in the past. There are no

other levels of divinity, there's just God. But in Niger-Congo thinking, good and evil are

much more personal. The creator-god doesn't bring evil, though it's conceivable that you

did things so horrible that they reached up to the level of the creator-god and must be

answered for. But it's much more likely that you've neglected the ancestors.

31

WHC: So you seek the help of people you call "doctor-diviners."

Ehret: Yeah. These are the people called "witch doctors," but that's not really accurate.

What the doctor does is divine diagnose—the cause of an illness. The cause may be

witchcraft. It may be neglect of the ancestors. You divine the cause and you offer

medicines to heal it. The doctor-diviner may have to dance or sing to make the medicines

efficacious. There a man in Ghana who knew and used twelve hundred different plant-

based medicines. Now, that's an extremely able person, but people often know four and

five hundred different medicines. Everyday people know two or three hundred.

The medicine can heal. But there's also the question of why you were the one afflicted

with the disease. Today, you may know that the disease was caused by a microbe. Still

there's the question: why were you the one who got the microbe, while others didn't. You

go to a diviner, and work out the religious or magical medicines you'll need.

32

WHC: Do you see this affecting political decisions at all?

Ehret: Certainly it did in the 18th

and 19th

century. Some kings manipulated these ideas,

for instance, to get rid of their political opponents.

33

WHC: Do you find contemporary examples?

Ehret: Yeah. It's still relevant in a lot of the countries that are Bantu or generally Niger-

Congo. It's not relevant in countries with other religious traditions. So in Sudan, they don't

see the causes of illness in quite the same way.

34

WHC: You came to the field out of an intellectual and emotional excitement about

independence. What do you make of what's happened since then?

Ehret: Colonialism lasted a very short period. Was it long enough to give people in each

colony a sense of being in one country? No. Before colonization, a lot of northern Nigeria

was under the Caliphate of Sokoto. And then, in southwestern Nigeria, there were a bunch

of Yoruba city-states, all at odds with one another like the Greek city-states. The Igbo

were the most important people in southeastern Nigeria. They had rather small city-states,

which really were sort of town-states with various alliances among them. And within each

of these three regions were other independent groups, some of whom were in city-states

or even rural chiefdoms or small kingdoms. And now they've all got to go together as one

country. So you've got a tremendous internal problem.

When these countries got independence, they needed, really, a lot of capitalization.

They're starting to get it, but these societies are wide open for demagogues who want to

manipulate the system, to become wealthier and to play people off against each other.

To succeed, you've got to have truly idealistic people to really work in the community.

That's what Tanzania had. They had Julius Nyerere. He got a group of people to carry his

ideals through. So Tanzania is well on its way to the creation of a common identity.

Young people are growing up not really knowing their parents' language, even way out in

the rural areas.

Also, when people became leaders traditionally, they remained leaders until they died.

They weren't elected for a short term. Well, they were in certain Ethiopia areas, where

you have the age grade system. There, leaders were elected for a short period. But in most

areas, no. The community decided that you were the person who should inherit or move

into this position. Or, with your particular partisans, you seized the power.

One problem, then, is that you've got people who can't give up power, like Robert

Mugabe. Mugabe should have given it up. If he had, that country would be thriving. He's

just driving Zimbabwe into the dirt.

Mozambique and Angola had problems because South Africa meddled to make sure there

would be rebel movements. The South Africans wanted to prevent Mozambique and

Angola from making problems for South Africa. So the South African apartheid

government kept the mess going.

35

WHC: And Congo?

Ehret: Congo was the greatest human disaster of any African country at the beginning of

colonialism.

Before colonialism, Congo was divided up into many areas. Long distance trade linked

them. Agreements to carry goods over vast distances, following the rivers, had developed

over hundreds of years. There were institutions established to do this. In eastern Congo,

for instance, there were secret societies—that is, their rituals were secret. You could go

36

way down the river, 500 miles, and you could find somebody of your particular society,

and that person would offer you hospitality and introduce you to others. Some of these

others might belong to a different organization but share your ethnic identity. That would

give you the basis for expanding your trade. The person who shared his contacts then got

a share of your profits.

All along the Congo, there were a lot of different kingdoms, small chiefdoms, big

chiefdoms, big kingdoms, highly centralized kingdoms, and very loose kingdoms. None

of them had independent firepower. The crucial thing in world history is that Europeans

developed repeating guns, and then Gatling guns and Maxim guns. That transition just

blew everything out of the water. For at least a little period, Europeans create colonies.

So: The King of Belgium wanted to set himself up as an emperor. He couldn't do it in

Belgium, where he was a constitutional monarch. But he was incredibly wealthy, so he

could capitalize his own little armies to violently take power over areas. What you see in

Heart of Darkness is not Congo, but European culture shock and European violence.

Also, by the way, there were Arab-speaking Swahili war lords in Eastern Congo who

really screwed things up in the 1880s to the end of the 1890s. King Leopold it's really

Leopold's Congo made alliances with these people.

The idea was to turn all the Congolese laborers to increasing rubber production and

export. The Belgians forced local people to work. This was slavery. The Belgians cut the

hands off anyone who didn't work for them. Over a twenty or thirty year period, the

population dropped, as diseases like sleeping sickness increased. Previously, people had

known how to build their settlements so that they wouldn't get sleeping sickness. The

Belgians, however, moved people around.

Congo became a great scandal of the early twentieth century, forcing the Belgian

government took to take control from Leopold. They tried to make it a nice paternalistic

colony. But they didn't have the wherewithal. Congo has a huge area. In the end, the

Belgians didn't do anything to move people towards independence. While the French and

British were granting independence to some of their colonial peoples, there were no such

opportunities in Congo. So when the country gained its independence, in 1960, it was

controlled by people with a secondary education. So it was a disaster … a disaster.

WHC: And Rwanda?

Ehret: That is inter-caste conflict. You had people without any of the political perks, any

of the really good things that made for wealth. They were, maybe, 90%, of the population

in both Rwanda and Burundi. Just 12-15% of the population owned all the cattle.

37

WHC: Weren't these two different peoples?

Ehret: Historically, maybe in deep history. But not in recent history. You have people

belonging to the same clans, some being Hutu, some being Tutsi. Some clans are Tutsi or

Hutu, but there are cases where both people belong to the same clan. Basically, the

38

precolonial period starts with feudalism, but it's caste-based feudalism.

WHC: Weren't these two different peoples?

Ehret: Historically, maybe in deep history. But not in recent history. You have people

belonging to the same clans, some being Hutu, some being Tutsi. Some clans are Tutsi or

Hutu, but there are cases where both people belong to the same clan. Basically, the

precolonial period starts with feudalism, but it's caste-based feudalism.

39

WHC: Apart from Tanzania, where do you see the greatest opportunities for change?

Ehret: Nigeria has an opportunity. We'll have to see. There is a problem: the rise of

Muslim-Christian conflict in the North. We've had Muslims attacking Christians, with

thousands being killed. In the last few years, we've had Christians killing Muslims in

areas where Christians are the majority. Nigeria is going to have to work out

accommodations. It depends on patience. They do have enough oil, if it's distributed right.

40

WHC: So you're hopeful.

Ehret: Yes.

41

Biographical note: Christopher Ehret is professor of History at UCLA, where he teaches a variety of courses

on African History. He is the author of numerous books and articles on early African history, including The

Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (2002).

1 Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World

History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001 [first

published 1998]), 23.

2 Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 2002).

3 Graham Connah, African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

4 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. I: The

Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

1987) and vol. II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (London: Free

Association Books, 1991). The Black Athena debate has generated a substantial literature.

Most notable are Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an

Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Mary R. Lefkowitz

and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1996); and Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin

Bernal Responds to His Critics (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001).