Modern Mind

12
    Mapungubwe is less well known than Zimbabwe and even more mysterious. It is found on a small table mountain about 200 miles to the south, just across the Limpopo River. It was regarded as ‘a place of fear’ by the locals, but when it was finally visited (via a narrow ‘chimney,’ found to have holes cut in it opposite one another, so that a ladder could be built into the walls), the top of the flat mountain proved to contain thousands of tons of soil imported from the surrounding countryside, clearly evidence of a crop-growing civilisation. But what most attracted the attention of the people who found the site were the gold artefacts they discovered – and the skeletons. 13 One skeleton (twenty-three were unearthed) was covered in gold bangles. Analysis of the skeletons showed an absence of Negroid features; they were, rather, ‘pre-Negro.’ The burial practices were Bantu, but the skeletons were partly Hottentot and partly similar to those found on the coast. They buried their own dead and their cattle, evidence of religion.
    Davidson took care to emphasise that much remained to be discovered in Africa. But he achieved his aim, adding to the contributions of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, who were showing that Africa had a voice and a history. More, Davidson was helping flesh out the greater history of mankind across the globe – his book also explored the way stone tools and metal technology spread. The history of Africa, like history elsewhere, was shaped by larger forces than mere individuals. 14
    The extent of those larger forces of history – economic, sociological, geographical, and climatological – rather than the actions of significant individuals, has been the main shift in history as an academic discipline throughout most of the century. And within this overall paradigm the two most prolific schools of thought have been the French
Annales
historians and the British Marxists.
    The 1960s saw the publication of three enormously influential books from the so-called
Annales
school of French historians. These were:
Centuries of Childhood,
by Philippe Ariès (1960);
The Peasants of Languedoc,
by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie (1966); and
The Structures of Everyday Life,
by Fernand Braudel (1967), the first volume of his massive, three-part
Civilisation and Capitalism.
The 1960s were in fact the third great flowering of the
Annales
school – the first had been in the 1920s and the second in the 1940s.
    Of the three authors Fernand Braudel was by far the most senior. He was older and was a close colleague of the two founders of the
Annales
school, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. These two men came together at the University of Strasbourg in the 1920s, where they founded a new academicjournal, the
Annales d’histoire économique et social.
As its name implied,
Annales
from the first sought to concentrate on the social and economic context of events rather than the deeds of ‘great men,’ but what set it apart was the imagination that Febvre and Bloch brought to their writing, especially after they both returned to Paris in the mid-1930s. 15
    Bloch (a resistance hero in World War II) wrote two books for which he is remembered today,
The Royal Touch
and
Feudal Society. The Royal Touch
was concerned with the belief, prevalent in both England and France from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, that kings – by the mere act of touching – could cure scrofula, a skin disease known as ‘the king’s evil. 16 But Bloch’s study ranged much further than this curious belief; it drew on contemporaneous ideas in sociology, psychology, and anthropology in search of a context for what Bloch called the
mentalité
of the period. In
Feudal Society,
published on the eve of World War II, he attempted to re-create the historical
psychology
of feudal times, something that was completely novel. 17 For example, he explored the mediaeval sense of time, better described perhaps as an ‘indifference’ to time, or as a lack of interest in the exact measurement of time. In the same way, Febvre’s
Rabelais
explored the
mentalité
of the sixteenth-century world. By an analysis of letters and other writings, the author was able to show, for example, that when Rabelais was denounced as an atheist, his critics didn’t mean what we would mean today. 18 In the early sixteenth century,
atheist
had no precise meaning, simply because it was inconceivable for anyone to be an atheist as we would recognise the term. It was,