Africa, the Novel

So Geographers in Africa-maps

With Savage Pictures fill their Gaps

And o'er uninhabitable Downs

Place Elephants for want of Towns 

  — Jonathan Swift

Aksum, Mali, Songhai, Oba, Oyo, Aro, names of empires and cities from Africa's past. Imohtep, architect and physician; Ibn Battuta, world traveler; Ahmad Baba, scholar of Timbuktu; Al-Hassan, father of gifts; Mansa Musa, emperor of gold; Sonni Ali Ber, river conqueror; Nzingha Ndongo, a queen who was called king, names of men and women who saw the sun rise on the sands of Africa in times bygone...

 

Jonathan Swift's “savage pictures” still fill the gaps, now painted over with stark images of war, disease and famine. Swift's elephants thrive in the huge ignorance that persists, rooted in racist perceptions, blinkered by views of a green Eden, perpetuated in silence about common truths.

 

The epic of Africa has never been told in a single novel. Africa, the Novel is the story of the continent and its people from the beginning of the human family in the Great Rift Valley. Over the millennia, the first hominids make the passage from Olduvai and Hadar to a thousand points where the light of their fires glows in the forest depths and on the grasslands of the green Sahara 50,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The hunter-artists are adorning the rocks from Tassili 'n Ajer in the north to the Drakensberg massifs in the south, when the river people begin their migrations along the Congo, Niger and Nile, which they call Iteru, “Great River.” Greatest of all rivers for it transforms the valleys of Kemet, “Land of the Blacks,” and Ta-Meri, “Beloved Land,” names for the ancient soil of Egypt.

 

Around 2500BC, the African kingdom of Nubia rises in the Kerma basin on the banks of the Nile in the Sudan, built on the riches of, gold, ivory, ebony and cattle traded with Egypt to the north. — On his death one vaunted ruler of Kerma takes four hundred retainers to the afterworld accompanied by four thousand five hundred cattle massed for slaughter in a horn-shaped crescent facing the royal tomb. — Egyptian invasions of their southern neighbor, Ta-Sety, “Land of the Archers' Bow,” begin in 1950BC.

“I carried off their women. I carried off their men-folk. I captured their wells, killed their bulls and reaped or burned their crops,” wrote Pharoah Senusret III. Even then, the Nubians hold out for three hundred years more. A Nubian renaissance at Napata beginning in the 11th century BC leads to the conquest of Egypt and founding of the 25 th dynasty that rules for a hundred years.

 

South-east of Sudan where the Blue Nile flows from Lake Tana, a third kingdom flourishes at Aksum in the highlands of Ethiopia, established by Ibn-al-Malik, “Menelik.” His mother was Saba, queen of the Ethiopians, who we know as Sheba, his father said to be King Solomon.

As a young man Menelik spent three years at his father's court learning the law of Moses. Legend holds that he returned home with the Ark of the Covenant, still said to rest in Aksum. In the fourth century AD, the Solomonic Dynasty converts to Christianity, initiating a powerful Christian realm that survives Islam's sweep across North Africa.

 

The Nubians and to a lesser degree, the Ethiopians – “Burnt Faces,” to the Greeks and Romans – were dispatched to the bottom drawer by white scholars when they began to unearth their monuments in the nineteenth century unwilling to accept that black monarchs ruled at Kerma and Napata and black Aksumites built the wonders of Lalibela and not Knights Templars. In fact, even as the dynasties of Nubia rose and fell, three thousand miles to the west, the kingdoms of the Mandé and the Nok begin to emerge along the Senegal and Niger Rivers.

 

The second focal point of Africa,the Novel lies in the Mandé-speaking empires of ancient Ghana and Mali, where the first African gold rush took place in the eighth century, a treasure from the mines of Akan and other diggings that made the fortunes of warrior kings and fabled emperors.

The Ghana, or king, of Wagadou, “Land of Herds,” musters an army of 200,000; Emperor Mansa Musa goes on haj to Mecca in 1324 with 60,000 porters carrying 180 tons of gold, so much riches that the Egyptian dinar plunged. Mansa Musa's route along the Sahel was pioneered by the sons of Islam who four centuries earlier left the Arabian peninsula and penetrated the desert sea with the one beast fit for the voyage: the camel.

Bustling markets rose at Awdaghast, Walata, Timbuktu, Gao and Kano for the trade in gold, salt and slaves, millions of women and men carried across the Sahara (and from the shores of East Africa) centuries before there was a Middle Passage. More benignly, caravans brought scholars to the African universities of Sankore, Jingaray Ber and Sidi Yahya, and offered bright young converts the chance to study at the seats of learning in Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba.   

 

The third major group in Africa, the Novel originate east of the Niger mouth in the Benue-Cross rivers region. In the second millennium BC, the Bantu (the word means “people,”) began their long migration east and south, pressed forward as others fled the desertification of the Sahel.

By the first millennium AD, the Bantu reach the area of modern day Zimbabwe, where the empire of the Mwena Mutapa is established with its capital at the citadel of Great Zimbabwe, House of Stones. As in Ghana and Mali, gold brings riches to Mwena Mutapa through trade with Arabs, Persians and Indians active on the East African coast since the seventh and eighth centuries.

The rise of Great Zimbabwe coincides with the Golden Age of Swahili city-states like Kilwa, Sofala and Mombasa. It also heralds the Bantu push into the last frontier of Africa below the Limpopo River, opening the ancient iron mines of Mapungubwe and Phalaborwa.

 

... All before the first caravel sent by Prince Henry the Navigator rounded Cape Bojador in 1433 beginning Portugal's age of exploration. Half a century later a ‘factory' is built on the Gold Coast, São Jorge del Mina, St. George of the Mine. Elmina was the first Portuguese outpost on the shores of   sub-Saharan Africa, Europeans advancing along the coast like crabs for two centuries more before their first permanent settlement on what they saw as the “dark continent.”

 

A proper balance for Africa, the Novel suggests 1) 5 percent of the book covering the story of Near-Man in the Great Rift Valley and San hunter-gatherers 2) 70 percent for the core African story from 10,000 BC to the beginning of the 19th century 3) 25 percent for the two centuries of colonialism and the modern era.

   
The colonial segments fit into the “big picture” of Africa and follow a)an English story line that includes the Boer/Afrikaner narrative and unfolds in the south and east b)a French story line set in the north and west with a side-bar to the Leopold/Congo story. The passage of fictional English and French characters encompasses traditional phases of European involvement in Africa: slaver, explorer, missionary, settler.

 

The story of the enslavement of 29 million Africans – 17 million transported to the Americas on the Middle Passage; 12 million taken by Arab slavers – begins long before the European competition for possession of the continent. As does the so-called scramble for Africa, the 1884 Berlin Conference only the final play in setting the rules of the game: No less important were effects of the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, so that by 1914 only two African nations, Ethiopia and Liberia, remained independent.

 

English ambition in Africa is epitomized by Cecil Rhodes's dream of a red line from south to north, Cape-to-Cairo. French hopes run west to east, from Senegal on the Atlantic across the Sahel to the Red Sea. In 1898, Anglo-French rivalry is on the verge of full-scale war at Fashoda (Kodok,) a small fort on the Blue Nile below Khartoum: a French expedition under Jean-Baptiste Marchand makes a 14-month trek from Brazzaville; British gunboats under Horatio Kitchener arrive fresh from crushing the Mahdi at Omdurman. France backs down avoiding a war that could smash a future Entente Cordiale, the source of the Nile and the Congo Rivers agreed upon as the frontiers of the two nation's African possessions.

 

Less than a year later, the British are at war with the Boers. The story of English-Boer rivalry in South Africa begins with the abolition of slavery and the Great Trek, the Boer exodus from the Cape. The southward migration of the Bantu that ultimately saw the rise of Shaka and the Zulu set the scene for the Battle of Blood River and other clashes in which the Boers prevailed.

In 1902 the Boers lose their Republics in a bitter war fueled as much by British ambition to paint the map of Africa red as possession of the gold of the Witwatersrand. In 1936, even as the Afrikaners begin their new trek to power, a five-month Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg celebrates a “roaring African metropolis,” the high-water mark of British rule on the continent.

 

In Africa, the Novel, the climactic 20th century is a story of horror and hope, beginning as the century opens with the unspeakable crimes of Leopold in the Congo exposed by Morel and Casement in 1904 and ending ninety years later with the end of apartheid. Until World War II, English and French ambition is mostly unchallenged by the Africans and seen as a burden of “civilizing” the continent, or to the French, rayonnement, “lighting the way,” a path made brighter for the missioners by the dazzling wealth beneath Africa's soil. – Of course, the colonial experience should not be seen as one of greed and exploitation alone, but also embodies the story of truly noble settlers who sought to do their best for Africa and did.

Even as the Europeans consolidate their hold, the Pan-Africanist movement begins in places as far afield as Philadelphia, Paris, London. Between the two world wars, Africa's “independence” generation grows up, leaders and intellectuals like Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Senghor, Diop, Jaja Wachuku. In 1945, as Europe lies in ruins, the Africans meet in Manchester to set the agenda for post-war decolonization. -- In the short view, the story since the winds of change swept Africa is a dismal record of coups and assassinations, despots and dictators, plunder and genocide. In the long view, which goes back thousands of years, the pain and sorrow is part of the chaos of progress on a continent where humankind was born.

 

Africa, the Novel is exactly that – a novel, not a history – and these beginning notes make no attempt to outline the fictional characters or stories that carry the epic of Africa. Absent, too, from the notes is the beauty and splendor of Africa, from Mosi-oa-Tunya , the Smoke that Thunders, to the cathedral silence on the Serengeti plains, from the Cape where two oceans meet to the Great Desert – a unique environment shaping the lives and destinies of the men and women living there, past and present.

 

Proposals