NewAfrican Magazine, November Issue.
http://www.africasia.com/

BLACK HISTORY
COVER STORY

October was "Black History Month" in Britain. As part of the celebrations, we asked Prof Richard Greenfield to look at the significance of recent breakthrough to scholarly research on the early history of northeastern Africa. New discoveries there have provided incontrovertible evidence of settled pastoral and agricultural communities dating way back to 800 BC - earlier by far than hitherto envisaged.

The early history of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia will have to be rewritten in the light of dramatic new discoveries. And they have relevance to the worldwide demand for balanced historical and cultural studies freed from arrogance, prejudice and racism.

Up on the mountainous plateau of northeastern Africa, Eritrean scholars and their international colleagues at the University of Asmara have been conducting new excavations and utilising the latest carbon-dating techniques to revolutionary effect. This research has already revealed incontrovertible evidence of settled pastoral and agricultural communities dating way back to 800 BC - earlier by far than heretofore envisaged.

Together with revised linguistic evidence, it seriously and probably finally challenges assumptions, dating from the colonial era and earlier, that it must have been immigration of Sabaens crossing the Red Sea into Africa, that introduced Semitic and related languages and gave rise to the emergence of complex societies and cultures such as that of Aksum. In noting this, we must now set this revision in context and also ask why it has not occurred earlier.

It has been an eventful half-century since a Regius professor at Oxford could openly assert that Black Africa had no history. The 18th International Congress of Oriental Studies, meeting in Moscow in 1960 had many panels. Egyptologists from East and West were there in force but, as usual, only the last, the 19th panel was entitled "Africa".

This afterthought was occasioned only by the view that Semitic studies - largely linguistic - at their very margin extended from the "Middle East" and Arabia into Ethiopia. Rebels on that panel decided to call for the future establishment of a new and separate International Congress of African Studies. It fell to your correspondent, then a dean at the then "University College of Addis Ababa" and the junior member of a four-man delegation, otherwise composed of Ethiopian diplomats, to offer Addis Ababa as the initial host.

The resolutions went forward. Later academic and wider politics intervened but to no great lasting effect for eventually the first congress was held in Accra, Ghana.

The ensuing struggle to have the vital role of Sudan and Black Africa properly recognised in the origins and development of Ancient Egypt has been long and arduous. The colonial legacy and in particular its denigration of Black history, dies hard.

In turn, recognition of Egypt's own substantial contributions to the civilisations of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean has also been strongly resisted until very recently.

But, as Basil Davidson once commented, "liberated history will out" and unmistakably and inexorably it will move on, deeper into Africa.

The whole pattern was of course closely related to the passing throughout Africa of the colonial era and the wretched mentality it has so often bequeathed.

African studies

It is surely no coincidence that in West Africa, wider recognition of the value as historical sources of indigenous oral traditions, such as Stool histories, or of the role of Arabic and other writing in local languages employing that script, had to wait for the auspicious opening of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah on 25 October 1963.

When he opened the Institute, Nkrumah warned that "until recently the study of African history was regarded as a minor and marginal theme within the framework of imperial history". He called for new and fresh initiatives.

Also, very significantly, he cautioned: "But you should not stop here. Your work must also include a study of the origins and culture of peoples of African descent [in the Diaspora]... Seek to maintain close relations with their scholars so that there may be cross fertilisation between African and those who have their roots in the African past."

Black studies were born

Communication systems using drums or printed and woven patterns on cloth were not until then seriously studied, except as anthropological curiosities. Heads and limbs were indeed measured and vainly compared to seek justification for spurious racial theories, but at the same time it was hardly acceptable, for instance, for such as Professor Nketia of Ghana to point out, that African music is structurally much more complex than most Western music.

"The study of African languages," Nkrumah urged, "must serve much more than...the practical objectives of the European missionary and the administrator."

That liberated history has had to follow national liberation in Africa is a universal truth. Take the late 1950s and 60s, when a new generation of "sons of the soil" first began to transform traditional resistance to settler colonialism in former Southern Rhodesia into a
modern liberation struggle. But neither the European nor any specific race has held any lasting monopoly of empire creation or imperial attitudes.

Ethiopia

In northeast Africa, when the Ethiopian or Abyssinian empire was constructed or reconstructed, for centuries it suited its imperial authorities not to question assumptions of a supposed "natural superiority" stemming from identity with the descendants of non-African invaders whom, it was conveniently accepted, had first introduced civilisation and state framework into the highland areas. In the 13th century, the Christian highlanders even borrowed from Arabia and adapted the fable of the Queen of Sheba with which to further their own conquests and political tale. They developed what was to become known as the Solomonic myth.

Whether or not they personally believed in its literal truth, together with other factors, it greatly helped sustain the political psyche of supporters of the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia and the expansion of the empire roughly about the time of the European scramble for Africa, right up until the demise of the last sovereign in 1974.

The concept of a continuous history for an ancient empire based on the city of Aksum has been central to what Donald Levine, an influential Ethiopicist scholar, has termed Greater Ethiopia. It underpinned the political philosophy, conquests and hegemony practised by Emperors Menelik II and Haile Sellassie.

Moreover, it has remained significant when more modern forces overthrew the monarchical system and questioned the nature and in some regions - including the Ogaden, Eritrea, Oromo and Sidama - the whole concept of the Ethiopian empire-state.

Even today, the well publicised history and legacy of Aksum remains fundamental to the wider pretensions of an essentially Tigray-based regime in Ethiopia.

Substantial remains of the city - its residencies, dams, tombs and famous stelae (popularly known as obelisks) - survive to this day.

The Aksumite state was indeed important in the ancient world. It has been dated from early in the first millennium AD and is known to have been overrun in circa 900 AD, probably by the Beja. The names of many of its emperors are known from inscriptions and a coinage and there are near contemporary accounts of its adoption of Christianity in the 4th century - 300 years before St Augustine came to England - and its subsequent initial hospitality to Islamic leaders.

That Aksum was preceded by earlier pre-Christian cultures has also been well known to scholars although that has attracted less attention. Certain of these earlier sites, including Metera and Kohaito in modern Eritrea and Yeha and Aksum just across the border in northern Ethiopia, have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO - but their supposed origin as Sabaen colonies established in pre-Islamic times has not previously been questioned.

What kind of mindset is it that can still find all developments in Africa to be of foreign instigation? Likewise, ancient African harbours on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden - including Suakin in modern Sudan, Adulis on the Bay of Zula east of Massawa in Eritrea, and Zeila and Berbera in Somaliland - are well known from inscriptions in Egypt and elsewhere and from mention in manuscripts. Some writers have suggested the ports themselves were actually of Egyptian or Greek origin but modern research shows that Egyptian contacts with the Horn of Africa or Punt, though early, were very sporadic.

The simple explanation is the more likely true, namely that visitors came to trade and, as travellers have often done, some recorded their impressions. More recently, certain cartographers and not only Ethiopians, have presented all these ports as outlets for the Aksumite Empire. And this has gone largely unquestioned but it too is pure speculation.

Eritrea

Continuing with Eritrea, this year celebrating the 10th anniversary of its liberation, a certain Periplus - a guide to the Red Sea and parts of the Indian Ocean, written in Greek early in the first millennium AD - whilst describing the trade of Adulis, comments that a ruler named Zoscales was "learned in Greek literature" but "mean and miserly in his ways".

That may well suggest that he ran an efficient taxation or customs revenue service. But a few years ago, the writer cautioned a lecturer at the British Museum - no less - for following certain Ethiopicists in not hesitating to assume that he was emperor of Aksum and quating him with the monarch Za Hakale, known from other sources.

The lecturer went back to the Periplus and soon afterwards returned to admit his surprise that the original referred merely to a ruler "of these parts". In truth, brainwash is invariably insidious but it must be worked out why it comes about at all.

The fact is that recent surveys reveal that far from being an insignificant forerunner of Aksum, the ruins on the Kohaito plateau in Eritrea indicate very extensive settlement. Documented archaeological sites there to date number more than 1,000.

Very considerably larger and older than Aksum, Kohaito is much nearer and is located on the direct hinterland of Adulis. Moreover, to date no evidence whatever has emerged of Sabaen or any other non-African influences on this society.

Nor are these startling revelations the whole story. Far from it. Peter Schmidt, a professor from the University of Florida, who with several younger colleagues all presently working with the University of Asmara's archaeology department, recently addressed the first international conference on Eritrean studies held in Asmara. He and his colleagues revealed that between 800 BC and 400 BC, the highlands around Asmara supported the earliest settled pastoral and agricultural community known in the Horn of Africa: an indigenous culture.

Scientific excavation has begun at Sembel, a site on a hillock beside fertile farmlands near the international airport first identified by a group of Italian amateur archaeologists. Once a village just outside the capital Asmara, today Sembel is almost part of the conurbation. Any remains of stone structures above the ground level have already been lost as building material to the expansion of the adjacent city. A new International Hotel has been built almost directly over one such site, so there is urgent need for formal Eritrean government protection if further excavations are to bear fruit.

Permanent villages and towns around Asmara predate, and were also contemporaneous with, even the pre-Aksumite settlements in the highlands of southern Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. Dating from 800 BC, it is they - not sites in Arabia - that were the vital precursors to urban developments in the southern highlands of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia later in the first millennium BC.

Likewise, students of evolution and distribution of languages now believe that Semitic and Cushitic languages are of African origin. Yes, a lot of revision and rewriting of textbooks is called for!

The bloody war

Clearly, the scholarly findings of modern archaeology, linguistics and history can prove to be most sensitive economically as well as politically. And sadly, that problem has been greatly accentuated by setbacks resulting from the recent and widely unexpected, but
very bloody, military conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. So there is a debit side and all the news is not good.

In July this year, your correspondent ventured inside the 25 km-wide UN security zone along the Eritrean side of the border - from parts of which Ethiopian forces have yet to totally withdraw. Beyond the refugee tents and the town of Senafe - where all permanent structures have been blown up by the invading Ethiopian military - lie fantastically sculpted mountains. At their foot, a short track leads past even more pre-Aksumite ruins at Metera, one of Eritrea's World Heritage sites. Like Sembel, they are adjacent to productive agricultural land. Dressed stonework, artistically designed courses, a covered tomb chamber and several substantial walls of this early settlement survive.

At Metema, a unique pre-Christian inscribed stele (or obelisk) once stood 4.68 metres above the ground (and another metre below it). But today its base, 80 x 28 cm, lies shattered and scattered up to 40 metres by high explosives clearly deliberately and carefully attached by the retiring Ethiopian army. Was this malicious vandalism authorised by higher authority angered at revised views on the origin and extent of Aksumite "empire"?

This is not an Afghan scenario nor does the Addis Ababa regime normally react to world opinion like the Taliban. Conspiracy theorists are not lacking in Eritrea and elsewhere but this writer is not convinced if only because such a tragedy cannot reflect well on Ethiopia's ongoing campaign to recover an Aksumite obelisk which Benito Mussolini had shipped to Rome and erected near the Gate of Constantine.

But one fact remains. Dr Yosef Libsekal of the Museum of Eritrea, who is also head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Asmara, sadly commented: "The protection of cultural heritage in times of armed conflict was supposed to have been guaranteed by international treaty in 1907 and in the instruments governing UNESCO. The Hague Convention of 14 May 1954 also includes a comprehensive code for the protection of the cultural heritage of mankind worldwide." Africa has been shamed and someone should be severely disciplined.

Let us trust that Africa's enlightened governments will increase support for the efforts of the former OAU, its successor the African Union, and the United Nations to create the lasting peace, stability and scholarly balance so necessary for a complete cultural recovery throughout Africa and the Diaspora. The root causes of prejudice and conflict have to be comprehended and addressed sooner rather than later. As Kwame Nkrumah put it on that October day back in 1963:

"The personality of the African...can only be retrieved from ruin if we make a conscious effort to restore Africa's ancient glory. [Then] the aspirations of our people will see real fulfilment and the African genius again find its best expression."