East and South Africa in the Ancient World

Date: 8000 b.c.e.-700 c.e.

Locale:East Africa, modern Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania; South Africa, modern Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa

East and South Africa in the Ancient World

The ancient history of East and South Africa is complex, involving different peoples interacting with one another and developing specialized economies, technologies, and cultures. Because of the lack of written records, information comes from archaeology and historical linguistics.

East Africa has long been inhabited by Khoisan hunter-gatherers who developed sophisticated, microlithic tools that were combined into specialized kits by savanna hunters, forest honey gatherers, and lakeside fishers. The first herders and farmers, peoples speaking Cushitic languages (specifically Southern Cushitic), spread slowly from Ethiopia down the Rift Valley, where they raised cattle, sheep, and goats and cultivated sorghum. Later, Sudanic speakers spread south into western Uganda, where they raised cattle, sorghum, and millet.

The first Eastern Bantu speakers edged east from the Congolese rain forest into the highland forests west of Lake Victoria, where they raised yams, oil palms, beans, and groundnuts; they were also fishers and raised goats. They expanded around the lake, displacing many of the earlier populations in the process. Bantu speakers in East Africa were able to combine forest root crops from western Africa with savanna grains and stock from Ethiopia and Sudan in a potent combination that enabled them to expand explosively throughout the diverse environments of eastern and southern Africa.

Agriculture

From their earliest years, East and South African communities had lived by gathering plant foods and hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat. Later, people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. In areas where rainfall was adequate, such as in the east, crops were grown and cattle, sheep, and goats were raised near permanent villages and towns. In the west where the climate was arid, Africans cultivated plants that would withstand such conditions, and nomadic pastoralists, who moved from one location to another, raised domestic livestock.

Linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a center of origin for pastoralism in southern Africa. Archaeologists have found sheep bones dating to about 150 b.c.e. that show evidence of sheep being herded extensively in the eastern and western cape provinces. The people in this area herded cattle and sheep and also grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes. They gathered wild plant food, engaged in some hunting, and collected shellfish. Villages grew to include hundreds of people, and different groups engaged in trade. For example, salt makers in Mapumalanga traded with the hunter-gatherers who continued to occupy most of the parts of South Africa. By 1000 b.c.e., ceramic-producing and grain-farming complexes were present all over Uganda, in the Serengeti Plains, and in southern Kenya.

Settlements

As the early societies of East Africa became economically specialized, they became culturally and ethnically distinctive, leading to a division between specialized highland farmers such as the Kikuyu (Gikuyu) or Chaga and forest hunter-gatherers. They divided the varied eastern African environments among themselves while interacting with one another in interdependent regional economies and cultures. Most societies were organized locally, focused on the land they farmed or the stock they herded. They centered on families and kinship groups, the elders who led them, and the age groups that facilitated interaction with other local groups. Other societies, especially those around the Great Lakes, developed centralized chiefdoms or kingdoms.

Early Iron Age settlements in East and South Africa shared common features, many of which continued though the Later Iron Age to modern times. Settlement was normally in villages of round houses with walls of poles and with clay and grass roofs. Villages were scattered within fertile lands, with little concern for establishing defensive positions. Pits were made for burial or for storage. Hunting and food gathering supplemented a mixed agricultural base.

Bantu people settled in the wetter areas of the savannas and in the fertile bottomlands of river valleys. Their settlement was facilitated by new food crops such as bananas and tubers introduced from Southeast Asia at the beginning of the common era. The drier savanna lands were left vacant until the Bantu speakers learned food production involving intensive pastoralism and dry-grain agriculture—hardy cereal crops that would grow in all but the driest conditions. Those responsible for the pastoral tradition were Nilotic-speaking peoples, the vanguard of whom began pushing down the natural migration corridor of the Rift Valley by the early centuries of the last millennium b.c.e. from their homeland along the Upper Nile (Sudan). Southern Cushitic speakers and the Eastern Cushites from Ethiopia settled in the Rift Valley and in adjacent highland and plains areas of Kenya and Tanzania. These were some of the earliest settlers in the region.

Toolmaking

Around 8000 b.c.e., the savanna zones of southern Africa and much of eastern Africa underwent modifications in their tool kits and adaptations. Microlithic tools were added, and a particular hunting-gathering subsistence pattern, oriented primarily toward land animals and plants, was developed. The resulting complex, referred to as Wilton industry, is very similar to that of many of the San and similar hunter-gatherers that existed in the savanna and semidesert areas of southern and eastern Africa. Many have concluded that the Wilton and related complexes of southern and eastern Africa represented the prehistoric ancestral pattern of the modern San.

The Bantu speakers absorbed earlier Khoisan populations during their expansion. In the lake area of Eastern Africa, the early Iron Age tradition, distinguished archaeologically by pottery style, was established by 400 b.c.e. The pottery, handmade and fired in an open hearth, was very conservative in form and in decorative technique. At Lydenburg in the Transvaal, sometime between 500 and 700 c.e., clay was molded into head shapes, mostly for ceremonies. The early Iron Age peoples also built tall, cylindrical clay furnaces for the smelting of iron from ore, the basis of the smelter form used into modern times.

Iron

Ironworking first appeared among Bantu speakers in the western Great Lakes around 800 b.c.e. and was established in western Tanzania about 500 b.c.e. Bantu speakers manufactured and used iron for tools and weapons. They cleared the area’s forests to obtain charcoal, which opened the land for farming. The early Iron Age tradition spread southward between 300 and 400 c.e. Its limits on the west were the rain forest and desert edge, but to the south, the tradition penetrated to the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. By the first century c.e., ceramics, grain farming, and ironworking had reached the vicinity of the cape. Three different migrations took place southward from Tanzania: one over Mozambique to Natal and beyond, one over Malawi to Zimbabwe, and one within Zambia. This spread reflects population expansion made possible by the advantages of iron technology and mixed agriculture in areas previously occupied by hunting bands. Although there is debate on the tributaries of dispersion, there is ample evidence that the diffusion of various technologies in eastern and southern Africa was very complicated.

By 500 c.e., ironworking techniques had spread east to the coast and south into southern Africa. Many East African innovations also spread among Western Bantu speakers, facilitating their expansion south into Angola and Namibia.

Language differential

The spread of the East Bantu languages occurred in different circumstances. The ancestral vocabulary shows that Bantu speakers borrowed a whole farming complex, including grain farming and also cattle and sheep herding, from neighbors they met in the Great Lakes area. Foraging and, in most cases, fishing became much less important to them. The farming complex had first taken shape in northeast Africa in the sixth millennium b.c.e. and was established in the Horn of Africa and Kenya before 1000 b.c.e. The beginning of farming among Bantu speakers dates the first dispersal of their languages to later than 3000 b.c.e. Cattle bones have been found near Luanda, indicating that the intrusion of the Mashariki Bantu farming complex into western central Africa had reached the Atlantic before 800 c.e.

South Africa rock art

Engravings found in the rock surfaces in the interior plateau and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions of southern Africa—for example, the Drakensberg and Cedarberg ranges—date as far back as 25,000 years. Southern African rock art is believed to be the product of medicine people, the shamans. The shamans were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance in rituals involving death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Stanley H. “Archaeology and Linguistics in East Africa.” In The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, edited by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Leakey, Richard E. Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

Martin, Phyllis M., and Patrick O’Meara. Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Oliver, Roland, and Michael Crowder, eds. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Africa. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.