brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

Created 02/03/2006 2:54 am

Because humans evolved in Africa, their parasites and diseases
are uniquely prevalent there too. Disease spreads rapidly among
people congregating in large numbers and has been a major
constraint on the establishment of urban centers in Africa. —
throughout the grater part of its evolutionary history, the human
population of Africa has lived in relatively small groups.
demonstrating that people are perfectly capable o living
peacefully in small communities for millennia without establishing
cities and states.

— Subsistence farming in Africa often demands more labor than can
fed with the food that farmers produce, but where conditions have
been amenable, innovative agricultural practices have overcome
this problem and established a highly successful community. Until
comparatively recently recent times, elephants have been a major
constraint on agricultural developments in Africa. — ukara is
an island lying off the south-eastern shore of lake victoria
Bambara-Nuts — Crops, cattle and iron formed the matrix around
which African society and economy developed. A gerontocratic
social order prevailed. Salt probably stimulated the first
instances of long-distance trade between groups, camels
facilitated the exploitation of Sahara deposits. — The ancient
settlement of Igbo-Ukwu in Nigeria was an outpost of West Africa’s
long-distance trade routes. The inroads of the trans-Saharan gold
trade stimulated the inception of centralized states in the Sahel;
environmental constraints predicated their demise. — Chinua
Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart 1958 — The idea that generations
of Africans enjoyed congenial lives in well-integrated, smoothly
functioning societies prior to the era of European exploitation is
widespread but wrong. Few communities had sufficient labour to
satisfy their needs. Life was arduous and unpredictable. Slavery
was commonplace. — A history of slavery in Africa claims that
between 30 and 60 per cent of the entire population were slaves
during historical times. If this is correct, the number of people
enslaved in Africa far exceed the number taken from the continent
by the slave trade. In fact, given the volume of the demand of
slaves within the continent, the shipping of slaves across the
Atlantic should be seen as an extension fo the internal market. —
Bananas and plantains, introduced to Africa from southeast Asia
more than 2,000 years ago, produce high yields with minimal
labour. They revolutionized food production throughout the
equatorial regions and rapidly became a staple food–most
especially in Uganda, where cattle simultaneously became valued as
symbols of prestige and wealth. — Cattle converted grass into
times of wealth that could be owned, exchanged and inherited. In
the extensive grasslands of southern Africa a new order of values
emerged, characterized by a degree of social stratification that
is epitomized at Great Zimbabwe. The gold trade initiated by Arabs
calling on the East African coast introduced a disruptive dynamic
to the region. — Chinese fleets visited East Africa in the early
fifteenth century and took a giraffe back to Beijing in 1415;
Portuguese caravels began exploring the coast of West Africa
during the same period. The Portuguese sought gold, but found
Africans willing to supply slaves as well. Nearly 1,000 African
men, women an children were shipped to Portugal between 1441 an
1446. — The Portuguese outflanked the trans-Sahara gold trade
when they reached the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in 1472. The first
European buildings in Africa were erected in El Mina (the mine)
with materials imported from Europe; gold and slave-trading
contacts were firmly established in east Africa while the Portuguese
carried European influence around the southern tip of the
continent: the Cape of Good Hope. — Though Europeans first
Visited Ethiopia in 1407, Ethiopians had been visiting Europe since
1306 at the latest. These early visitors told of a great Christian
king, Prester John, who ruled Ethiopia. Portuguese voyages around
the continent were intended to make contact with Prester John and
gain his support for the Christian crusade against Islam. — The
Portuguese harnessed Africa to Europe. The continent and its
people were assessed in terms o their significance to Europe, but
the stress of ecological imperatives on human society in Africa
remains strikingly evident fro documentary evidence, which joins
archaeology as the principal sources on African history. —
European descriptions of rich and densely populated kingdoms
notwithstanding, the exigencies of human ecology kept Africa
thinly populated. Rural settlements were dispersed, urban centres
small, population growth rates low–but the foreign demand for
slaves became relentless. — Over nine million slaves were shipped
across the Atlantic between 1431 and 1870. Another million or more
did not survive the voyage, wile untold numbers died on the
journey from their point of capture to the coast. Europe’s taste
for sugar was the principal incentive of the trade. — island
Goree off-present-dat Dakar stories of white men from the ships
eating their black captives were legion in the slave homelands.
huge copper kettles stood boiling on the foredecks, they had been
told; African meat was salted, and fed to the crew; red wine was
African blood; cheese was made from African brans; the victims’
bones were burned and became the ashlike, lethal grey powder that,
when placed in iron tubes, transformed itself back into the flames
from which it had come and spewed pain an destruction against any
who tried, unprepared, to resist their demands… — African
entrepreneurs grew prosperous on the slave trade; slaves were
exchanged for European goods by barter–a fickle method of trade
to which the cowrie shell brought a standard measure of value when
it was introduced from the Maldives n the 1510s. — African
chiefs and wealthy elites took people whom customary practice ha
enslaved within the indigenous economy, where the practice
bestowed at least a measure of benefit on all parties, and sold
them abroad for goods that brought little benefit ao anyone other
than the traders themselves–the inflow of foreign goods
seriously disrupted the development of indigenous economies. Like
asset-strippers on Wall Street, African slave-traders plundered
the accumulating human resources over which they had gained
control wit no thought for the wider implications and long-term
consequences of their actions. They sold their brothers, their
cousins, their neighbors, the only conceivable justification
being that slaves were a commonplace feature of African
society–chattels, valued less highly than the goods offered by
European traders. — The significance o the slave trade for Africa
lay less in the number of people lost than in the changed social
patterns an reproductive capabilities of those who remained behind.
The importation of firearms had a profound effect on these
developments/ — The slave trade commercialized African
economies; after abolition indigenous slavery kept the economies
turning–throughout the continent the incidence of slavery
increased. — french island of Saint-Domingue

Climate exercised a major influence on the slave trade, with both
good and bad conditions serving to maintain the trade. The effect
continued in the aftermath, when African economies relied upon a
work force of about 6 million slave in total, and annual
recruitment was ten times the number shipped form the continent
each year while the Atlantic trade was at its height. — When the
Dutch established a permanent settlement at the Cape in the 1650s
the introduction of European land-use strategies clashed with
those of the indigenous population. Conflict was inevitable. —
The British took control of the Cape form the Dutch in 1806, and
in 1820 shipped 4,000 settlers to the eastern frontier as a buffer
against advancing Xhosa populations. The Xhosa wanted land, the
settlers desperately needed labour–a conflict of interest that
was exacerbated by treachery. — Massive population movements
which convulsed southern Africa in the early 1800s have been
attributed to the formation and expansion of the Zulu state in
Natal. The predations of slave-traders shipping captives from
Delagoa Bay to Portuguese plantations in Brazil are a more likely
cause. — Edit | Delete | Back to Notepad

Created 01/27/2006 2:15 am

almost always seven vertebrae in the neck
Pangaea

The processes which created the configuration of the continents
and the prevailing terrestrial landscape are exceptionally well
demonstrated in Africa, where the particularities of ancient
geology have endowed the continent wit immense deposits of mineral
wealth — Some of the earliest-known forms of life have been found
in Africa, and its ancient rocks are the repository of evidence
from all stages in the evolution of life forms. Africa was the
‘keystone’ from which tectonic forces drove the other continents
on their global wanderings. Dinosaurs and the earliest known
mammals were present on the continent 200 million years ago. — A
landscape of tropical rainforest and meandering rivers that
existed 40 million years ago in what is today the Sahara region of
western Egypt was the cradle of the primates from whom the human
line evolved. Tropical rainforests preserve the greatest plant
diversity on Earth, but they never have been permanent
fixtures–their extent and location varies with climatic change.
— Climatic change undoubtedly has a major effect on the
distribution and population size of all living species, but
evidence from Africa indicates that competition for resources has
had more influence than climate on the origin and evolution of
species. — The upright bipedal gait of humans is a unique and
highly inefficient mode of locomotion, but the anatomy of modern
apes, with 60 per cent of their body weight carried on the
hind legs, indicates that the common ancestor of apes and humans
was pre-adapted to bipedalism. Environmental circumstances in
Africa provide an explanation of why and how the fully upright
stance and bipedal gait evolved in humans. — The ancestors of
modern humans were bipedal nomads and scavengers who discovered
that sharp stone flakes were more efficient than teeth at
detaching meat from a carcass. Tools were teeth in the hand.

— The demands of stone-tool manufacture were significant among
the aspects of early hominid life which stimulated the development
of cognitive abilities and the evolution of anatomically modern
humans–homo sapiens sapiens–in Africa. — Thermoregulation and
access to water were crucial determinants of human survival in the
African cradle-land–and important preconditions for the evolution
of the species’ highly developed brain and social behavior. —
Genetic, palaeontological and linguistic evidence indicates that
anatomically modern humans existed only in Africa until about
100,000 years ago, when some migrated from the continent and
progressively populated the entire globe. — …a greater
time-depth of mutation was preserved among people in Africa, while
everyone else shared a predominance of mutations which had
accumulated in the relatively recent past. Setting these measures
of difference against the calculations of the rate at which
mutations occur, the geneticists concluded that the entire
population of the modern world was descended from a relatively
small group of people that left Africa about 100,000 years ago.
Extrapolating still further they from the present into the past,
they claimed that the distinctive form of modern humans had
evolved between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago in Africa… —
African environments demonstrate the universal relationship that
exists between soils, rainfall and vegetation in a natural
environment, and the extent to which biological adaptations enable
animals to take advantage of what is available. —

Though the fossil record of human evolution in Africa is unique
and extensive, it is also tantalizingly incomplete. Crucial stages
are still a matter of speculation. — Edit | Delete | Back to
Notepad

Created 02/03/2006 4:25 am

Africa’s colonial boundaries were decided upon in Europe by
negotiators with little consideration for local conditions. The
boundaries cut through at least 177 ethnic “culture areas”
dividing pre-existing economic an social units and distorting the
development of entire regions. — The “thin white line” of
colonial authority in Africa was tested at several points but
never broken. The newly invented machine-gun was formidable
instrument of colonial power, but the devastating onslaughts of
drought, disease, and rinderpest (cattle plague) in the 1890s were
no less harmful. — Oppressive policies inspired rebellions
against German colonial rule in SW Africa and German East Africa
(present day Tanzania). Both were crushed, giving Africans a
sobering foretaste of the ruthless methods they would see employed
in the Boer War (1899-1902) and the FirstWorld War (1914-1918).
— acephalous group -headless

Between the First and the Second World Wars , colonial governments
accepted more responsibility for the welfare of the African
colonies than ever before. Establishing effective administrations
tacitly amounted to redefining the continent, however. The
constantly changing institutions of ono-literate societies were set
in the written word of law; origin myths were transformed into
tribal histories; socio-economic distinctions made one tribe
better than another. — the colonizers claimed that they were
merely confirming the significance of existing traditions,but
traditions in Africa and elsewhere are merely accepted modes of
behavior that currently function to the benefit of society as
a whole. they persist so long as their benefit is evident and fade
away when it is not. no tradition lasts for ever. change and
adaptability is the very essence of human existence– nowhere
more so than in Africa. The paradox is painfully evident: by
creating an image of Africa steeped in unchanging tradition, the
colonizers condemned the continent to live in a reconstructed
moment of its past, complete with natives in traditional dress,
wild animals and pristine landscapes. The paradox could not stand
unresolved for ever, but it hindered development for decades.

ethnic thinking: the perception of unity as the inevitable
outcome of common origin

Education stimulates people “to want what they do not have” In
Africa, those whose aptitude qualified them for education to
university level studied abroad, where contact with political
activists taught them to want independence for their countries.
Their numbers were small, but the gulf that education opened up
between the elite and the majority of Africans was very large
indeed. —

an urban population amounting to 20 per cent o the total is an
average for the entire continent (the precise UN figure is 18.4
per cent)

The second world war foreshadowed the end of colonialism in Africa,
though experts believed that decades of preparation would be
required before self-government was merited. In the event,
nationalist pressure and unrest (such as the Mau Mau rebellion in
Kenya), brought independence much sooner–long before the
proposed[posed standards of preparedness had been attained.

— The Belgian Congo was among the least prepared of th nations
that became independent in the 1960s. Chaos and rebellion erupted
within days of the independence ceremonies. But the Congo was
strategically important, and America’s meddling in the Congo’s
affairs typifies the manner in which African countries thus became
pawns in the Cold War. CIA agents planned to assassinate the
Congo’s first prime minister, the Soviet-leaning Patrice Lumumba,
and US support for Joseph Mobutu was designed to frustrate Soviet
ambitions in the region. — The dreams and Africa becoming a
continent of peaceful democratic states quickly evaporated. More
tan seventy coups occurred in the first thirty years of
independence. By the 1990s few states preserved even the vestiges
of democracy. One-party states, presidents-for-life and military
rule became the norm; resources were squandered as th elite
accumulated wealth and the majority of Africans suffered.
Nigeria an Rwanda exemplify the nightmare; South Africa preserves
a flickering hope of transforming dreams into reality. — People
live behind a mask, which the winds of history
occasionally blow aside,