We are reading one chapter a week of Guns Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. This book is an attempt to find out why the Eurasians have all the stuff, and the Africans, native Americans, native Australians and c. have so little.
I encourage this to be slow blogging. Post a comment any time during the week.
The next book will be Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson
This week we are up to Chapter 19: How Africa became Black. In this penultimate chapter, Diamond gives another example of how the same process that he discusses throughout worked in yet another place: Africa. But his main emphasis here is on the pre-history of Africa, rather than on the depredations suffered by Africa at the hands of the Europeans, starting in about the 15th century.
After noting some of the many problems with the concept of race (he avoids that word, and uses "major divisions of humanity"), Diamond says that it is nonetheless a useful shorthand. He then notes that, although most Americans associate "Africa" with "Blacks", Africa is home to five of the six major "divisions of humanity" (loosely - Blacks, Whites, African Pygmies, Khoisan and Asians - the only one missing is Aboriginal Australians) and that three of them are native to Africa (Blacks, Pygmies, and Khoisan). Diamond's focus in this chapter is how the Bantu (who are Black) came to dominate Africa. He also covers how Asians (specifically, people from Borneo) came to Madagascar, 4000 miles from where they started, long before modern times. (In a memorable phrase, he says "it's as Columbus, on reaching Cuba, found it occupied by blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandinavians speaking a language close to Swedish".
The reasons for Bantu domination of Africa are somewhat harder to determine than for Eurasian domination of Australia and the Americas, because much of it was done by people who were not literate. However, by combining archeological and linguistic evidence, he shows that the same processes played out here as elsewhere: The people with better crops "won".
I found this chapter somewhat hard to follow, so I'm not going to attempt to summarize further, and will await the comments of people more knowledgeable about Africa than I am.
For today's poll - who do you know from Africa?