Modern Mind

conference, suggested that a tribe of only thirty mammoth hunters (say) could increase in 500 years to as many as 12,500 people in perhaps 425 tribes. The Clovis hunters, who comprised the third wave, distributed their characteristic spearheads (first found at Clovis, New Mexico, near the Texan border) all over the continent. According to Haynes they would have needed to migrate only four miles to the south each year to reach Mexico in 500 years. Thus the geological and ethnographicalevidence for early man in America fits together very well. It also fits neatly into the ‘one story’ narrative.
    The recovery of the American past was matched by developments in Africa. Here, the seminal work was Basil Davidson’s book
Old Africa Rediscovered,
first published in 1959, which proved so popular that by the early 1960s it had gone into several editions. 9 The book followed an explosion of scholarship in African studies, with Davidson pulling the picture together. His achievement was to show that the ‘dark continent’ was not so dark after all; that it had its own considerable history, which a number of well-known Western historians had denied, and that several more or less sophisticated civilisations had existed in Africa from 2000 BC onward.
    Davidson surveyed all of Africa, from Egypt and Libya in the north to Ghana, Mali, and Benin in the west, the coast of Zanj (or Zinj) in the east, and the south-central area around what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He covered the appearance of ‘Negro’ peoples, about 3,000–5,000 BC, according to an analysis of some 800 skulls discovered at a site from predynastic Egypt, and the evidence of early migrations – for example, from the Nile area to West Africa (‘The Forty Day Road’). He described the Kush culture, emerging from the decadence of imperial Egypt, the enormous slag heaps of Meroe (‘the Birmingham of Africa’), about a hundred miles from modern Khartoum. Besides the palaces and temples, only a fraction of which has been excavated, the slag heaps are evidence of Meroe’s enormous iron-smelting capability, on which its great wealth was based. 10 Having described the great coastal civilisations of Benin, Kilwa, Brava, Zanzibar, and Mombasa, Davidson’s most remarkable chapters concern the great inland civilisations of Songhay, Jebel Uri, Engaruka, Zimbabwe, and Mapungubwe, mainly because such places, remote from foreign influence, most closely represent the African achievement, uncomplicated by international trade and the ideas such trade brings with it. Engaruka, on the borders of Kenya and Tanganyika, as it then was (now Tanzania), had been first discovered by a district officer in 1935 but excavated later by Louis Leakey. He found the main city to consist of nearly seven thousand houses, supporting a population, he thought, of at least thirty to forty thousand. The houses were well built, with terraces and engravings that he thought were ‘clan marks.’ 11 Three hundred miles from the coast, Engaruka was well defended on a steep escarpment of the Rift Valley and, Leakey felt, dated to the seventeenth century. There were stone structures he took to be irrigation channels and evidence of solitary burials. Later excavation showed that the city was surrounded by eight thousand acres that were once under grain, producing a surplus that was traded via roads to the north and south – villages of up to a hundred houses were grouped along these roads. Iron-using techniques spread south through this area of Africa from about 500 AD.
    Great Zimbabwe is a vast group of stone ruins a few miles off the main road which links what is now Harare (Salisbury when Davidson published his book) and Johannesburg in South Africa, featuring an ‘acropolis’ and an elliptical ‘temple.’ All the buildings are made of local granite, flat, bricklike stoneschopped from ‘leaves’ of exfoliated rock. The form of the defensive work, terraced battlements, shares some features with the building at Jebel Uri several hundred miles away, raising the possibility of commerce and the exchange of ideas over large distances. Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe both lie near the centre of a vast mining area – gold, copper, iron, and tin – which stretches as far north as Zambia and the Belgian Congo (now Zaïre) and as far south as Pretoria and Johannesburg in the Transvaal. Some scholars believe that Zimbabwe is as old as 2000 BC, with the main period of inhabitation between 600 and 1600 AD.