notas livros africa

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· “For the Greeks, the term ‘Libyans’ (Libyes) seems to have had a vague racial connotation, as it was used to distinguish the peoples of the Mediterranean coast from darker-skinned ‘Ethiopians’ (from Aithiops, lit. ‘burnt-faced’) to the south”
· Slavery had been a prominent feature of the classical Mediterranean world and had continued in various forms in medieval Europe. It also existed in the Muslim world, including North Africa, and in sub-Saharan Africa itself. Yet it was the Atlantic slave trade, which between the 16th and the 19th centuries involved the forced migration of some 12 million Africans to the Americas, that forged an explicit link in European minds between racial inferiority, enslavement, and Africa
· “A diáspora africana é o nome dado a um fenômeno caracterizado pela imigração forçada de africanos, durante o tráfico transatlântico de escravizados”
· In early pan-Africanist thought, Africa – or ‘Ethiopia’, as the continent continued sometimes to be called – was seen as the home of a distinctive people, the ‘Negro race’. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that these ideas began to develop within Africa itself, emerging first among the literate, English-speaking communities of the trading towns of coastal West Africa. By then, the continent stood on the cusp of European colonial conquest, a condition that would further consolidate for many what it meant to be African
· North Africa became an integral part of the Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, while the region across the Sahara desert to the south lay in the Dar al-Kufr, the abode of unbelief, sometimes called the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war.
· Both books, as is conventional, include the huge Indian Ocean island of Madagascar as part of Africa – although both, as is also conventional, have very little to say about it
· Environmental history has been very much in vogue in recent years. Its prominence is due in part to escalating concerns about global climate change, population growth, famine, and ecological crisis
· Famously, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the foundation stones of modern history writing, has been interpreted as reflecting late 18th-century anxieties about the decline of the British empire. Perhaps. But there is no doubt that the field of African history has been influenced by the fluctuating fortunes of the continent over the last 50 years.
· Inspired by the 10 African History liberation struggles against colonial rule and by the building of independent nations, the pioneering generation of historians in the 1960s tended to focus their attention on political history – especially that of indigenous African states. In the 1970s, as political turmoil and economic decline became the order of the day, economic history came to the fore. This in turn was succeeded by a growing interest in social history, that is, the lived experience of ordinary people rather than a narrow focus on the actions of ‘great men’
· The historiography of Africa has, of course, been more complex than that: more a set of overlapping and contested perspectives than the linear evolution outlined here. Yet it reminds us that ways of thinking about Africa continue to evolve. And this goes for something as apparently solid as the physical environment itself. As James McCann writes in a recent survey of the topic, ‘environmental and landscape history is also, to a large degree, the history of ideas, perceptions, and prescriptions about what historical African cultures and colonial governments felt about how land should look’. We haven’t yet finished, in other words, with invented or imagined ideas about Africa
· But few historians these days would argue that the environment actually determined the course of human events. This was not always the case. Indeed, ‘environmental determinism’ was central to European perceptions of Africa in the imperial age – as it was to older Muslim perceptions of the tropics. That is, racial characteristics were widely believed to have arisen from environmental conditions, with the ‘enervating’ tropical climate being a root cause of black African backwardness
· Not only are Africa’s ecological zones hugely diverse, they have also changed – and continue to change – over time, both in long-term linear fashion and according to the rhythms of the yearly seasons. Localized landscapes, moreover, are ‘anthropogenic’, that is, they have been shaped by human action. The introduction of exotic food crops has transformed farming systems: barley and wheat arrived in the northeast from Asia thousands of years ago, bananas from Southeast Asia in the first millennium, and maize and cassava from the Americas in the 1500s. Modern Africa also includes cityscapes constructed of concrete, glass, wood, and corrugated iron, in which nearly half of the continent’s people now reside
· Perhaps the most dramatic example of environmental change is the drying out of the Sahara desert. About 10,000 years ago, tropical Africa’s climate entered a period of high rainfall, which for some five millennia created a Saharan landscape of lakes, rivers, and lush grassland. This environment supported human habitation throughout much of the region. Archaeological evidence has shown that by the end of this epoch, Saharan populations had begun to move from hunting, fishing, and gathering to the domestication of livestock and the cultivation of grain. They also began to produce some of Africa’s earliest art, in the form of striking rock paintings that can still be seen on the mountainous desert outcrops of the Adrar des Iforas in Mali, and Ahaggar and Tassili in Algeria.
· About 5,000 years ago, rainfall began to decline and over succeeding millennia the Sahara became the great desert that we know today. The process of desiccation impacted in a variety of ways on human settlement, pushing pastoralist and agriculturalist peoples, together with their new food-producing techniques, southwards into East Africa and into the forest fringes of the west. It forced others from the drying plains down into the fertile Nile Valley, creating a concentration of population that facilitated the emergence of Africa’s first centralized kingdoms in upper and lower Egypt. Most profoundly, desertification threw up a formidable barrier between sub-Saharan Africa and the Eurasian landmass, whose cultures developed in relative isolation from one another until the Sahara began again to be traversed following the domestication of the camel by the beginning of the first millennium.
· By extending the recoverable history of the Middle Niger back over 2,000 years, it also demonstrates the possibilities and the problems of applying to Africa the insights of the so-called Annales school of history pioneered in France in the first half of the 20th century: the importance of deep-rooted currents over the longue durée (the long term) and of mentalité, the distinctive ‘mentality’ of a particular time and place
· Trans-Saharan exchange and Islamic statecraft underpinned the process of sudanic empire-building, giving rise to Ghana’s successors and to the entrepôt cities that emerged along the desert fringe: Jenne, to the south of the inland delta, and, to the north, the legendary Timbuktu
· For sympathetic colonial administrators, as well as for pioneering African American scholars, it was these great empires that most clearly emerged from the mists of time. For the first, so-called ‘nationalist’ generation of professional historians, too, it was states that were all-important. Their concern was to ‘decolonize’ the past by demonstrating that Africa, far from being the primitive tribal realm of European imperialist mythology, had a long and noble tradition of state-building.
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