Miniatures notes from When We Ruled

[petrea_mitchell]

In English-language histories of Africa, there is Basil Davidson and then there is everyone else. Davidson's Lost Cities of Africa opened my eyes to the fact that there is actual recorded history in sub-Saharan Africa predating European contact. Unfortunately, Davidson died in 2010 and his main published works are considerably older than that (my copy of Lost Cities of Africa dates to the 1960s).

"Everyone else" includes a vast number of books which either give pre-colonial Africa only two or three chapters, and a few more which are more comprehensive but even more spectacularly out of date. So I was very excited to stumble across When We Ruled, which is both restricted to pre-colonial times and printed recently (2011 for this edition). As a bonus, it's by actual descendants of the African diaspora. Hooray, #ownvoices!

The catch is that it's... not very good.

For a start, it approaches history the way that turned me off of the subject in every history class I took before college: as a pile of facts, rather than a series of connected events. The presentation of facts is framed with an appeal to authority, where any authority will do-- actual archaeology, primary historical sources, secondary sources, tertiary sources from hundreds of miles away, experts of dubious provenance, newspaper opinion columns, random musings from European travellers looking at ruins that predated them by centuries.

It also tends to take a very art-museum perspective, with lots of oohing and ahhing over fancy ancient artworks and ruins, and rather less interest in the why and how or the cultural context they come from.

It also turns out to have a great deal of material that is extraneous to my needs, although not for the usual reasons. Much time at the beginning is devoted to convincing an apparently skeptical readership that African civilizations were, in fact, primarily built by and comprised of people that modern society would categorize as black. Ancient Egypt gets a chunk of the book out of all proportion to its territory, and then the last few chapters of the book collapse completely into woo as the author tries to find evidence to support African origins for various western Asian civilizations.

It does, however, contain some of the information that I am looking for (provided I can verify any of it), and it provides copious footnotes. And it has one huge point over any of Davidson's books: any time it focuses on a new area, it provides an actual map.

So, a few notes:

• Ann Nzinga's campaign against the Portuguese, 1623-1629. On becoming Ngola (technically, "king") of Ndongo, she made regional alliances to fight them and liberated the neighboring state of Matamba.
• "In 1438 [Abdullah Burja] was crowned Sarki of Kano ... Within a few years, he became the most powerful sarkuna in the Hausa Confederation. His general led military campaigns for seven years in the regions to the south. The campaigns attempted to open the trade route to Gwanja on the edge of the forest belt."
• "In 1576 Amina became the undisputed ruler of Zazzau. ... She had walled forts built as area garrisons to consolidate the territory conquered after each campaign. Some of these forts still stand today. Amina subdued the whole area between Zazzau and the Niger and Benue rivers, absorbing the Nupe and Kwararafa states."
• Siege of Old Dongola (in Nubia) in 652 by the Arabs. "The Makurians put up a determined resistance under King Qalidurut and fought the Arabs to a stalemate." leading to a new peace treaty (Baqt) specifying mutual tribute.

Comments

[delosharriman]

"Mutual tribute", eh? That sounds like a special case of the self-eating pancake.

I'm sorry to say, there seems to be a non-trivial extent to which Black American culture is still caught up in reacting to Flinders Petrie. Everyone else has completely forgotten his futile attempts to prove that all Egyptian culture was degenerate borrowings from & imitation of some unknown higher European culture. Complete nonsense of course, & even in a fairly squishy science that seems to go by the wayside eventually. But even the easily-provable fact that Cleopatra VII Philopator was ethnically Greek still arouses such indignation in some circles as to set off wild counterclaims. (The most moderate of these was an assertion that she should be regarded as mixed-race, which alas falls down because the Ptolemies were infamous for inbreeding. She didn't have as many grandparents as normal people.)

[petrea_mitchell]

Well, I can at least say that When We Ruled does not try to persuade anyone that Cleopatra was black. It also notes that Egypt had other foreign rulers from time to time. OTOH, it also doesn't spend a lot of time extolling any great achievements in those periods. The Greek and Hyksos regimes are mostly skipped over, and the Romans are only mentioned in the context of border conflicts with the Nubians.