Ancient Africa & African empires timeline

New Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2000 by Agatucci, Cora

Regarding the question of cultural/ "genetic" identity linguistically Linking Egypt and the rest of Africa, U. Chicago Prof. Gene Gragg offers an interesting 1996 summary of the Oriental Institute's AfroAsiatic Index Project: "Around the same time that they were discovering IndoEuropean, scholars were becoming aware of the existence of other major families like Semitic (uniting, among others, Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Arabic, South Arabian, and Ethiopic)...To make matters worse [for historical linguists trying to establish whether languages are "genetically" related], evidence has been accumulating that Semitic is not an isolated family, but is itself part of a superfamily, probably older than Indo-European, which stretched over large parts of Northern and Eastern Africa and Western Asia. This family, sometimes still called `Hamito-Semitic,' but now more often `Afroasiatic' or 'Afrasian' includes: Semitic-Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic (a heterogeneous group of dozens of languages, including Somali, centered around the Horn of Africa), Omotic (a large group of languages in Southwest Ethiopia), and Chadic (more than a hundred languages, including Hausa, spoken over a large sub-Saharan area centered around Lake Chad). Relationships are still being established within the last four groups, many individual languages are very poorly known, and new information is coming in on an almost daily basis."

CAN WE GENERALIZE ABOUT A COMMON "AFRICAN CULTURE" AMID THE CONTINENT'S GREAT DIVERSITY? Yes, argue some Africanist scholars. Consider that there are ways other than language by which common ethnicity and cultural identity can be defined: for example, by a group's belief in a common origin (e.g., the Mande peoples trace a common origin to Sundjata Keita, legendary 13th century founder of the Mali empire). Increasing cultural similarities among groups can also develop over centuries of contact and exchange. Kwame Gyekeye points out (1 ) that "a number of Africa's ethnic groups are small" and their "cultures have been so greatly influenced by those of neighboring large groups that they...share the culture of the large groups"; (2) that "a seemingly distinct ethnic group may in fact...be a subdivision...of a larger ethnic group"; and (3) that common cultural patterns extend across African states because "arbitrary and unrealistic boundaries drawn a century ago by Africa's [European] colonial masters" found single ethnic groups [bound by kinship, language, and cultural ties] in two or more neighboring countries (in Asante and Abarry 297-298). Thus, Gyekeye and others believe it is possible to generalize, cautiously and respectfully of local and regional cultural diversity, about common and pervasive features of African cultures. In any case, some oral arts genres, such as praise poetry, are common to most African peoples (see Judith Gleason's Leaf and Bone). Kofi Awoonor, respected African poet and oral arts historian, calls Africa's oral poetic tradition one of the oldest and most continuous of all African oral arts (Kofi Awoonor, African Writers: Voices of Change).