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PEOPLES AND ORIGINS Africa Institute of South Africa | Africa A-Z: Continental and Country Profiles 23 Recording Africa’s history has occupied the attention of historians since the rise of the early civilisations around the Mediterranean Sea. Until the enormous expansion of source materials brought about by the information explosion of the 20th century, historians relied on the written accounts of travellers, traders, scribes, administrators and students of indigenous African societies, such as the preachers of the Christian and Islamic faiths. Owing to the absence of written languages in much of Africa, especially south of the Sahara, knowledge of African history also depends on the study of indigenous oral traditions , which have transmitted knowledge of the past from generation to generation. Not only historians, but also specialists in many other fields of study – archaeologists, physical and cultural anthropologists, and linguists, to mention just a few disciplines – have helped reconstruct African history and prehistory, and are still doing so. Whereas the study of the continent’s history was traditionally the preserve of non-Africans, contributions by African academics have increased significantly since the restoration of Africa’s independence in the second half of the 20th century. This chapter provides a brief overview of the chronology of events in Africa as a whole from Stone Age times until the annexation by European powers of almost the entire continent, a little more than a century ago. However, as African history is also the story of a bewildering complexity of peoples, cultures and religions, this introduction to Africa’s past starts with a broad classification of the human groups inhabiting the continent at the present time. (Topics such as languages, ethnic groups and religions are also dealt with under the country headings in Part Two.) Human Groups in Africa Languages It is generally agreed among social scientists that linguistic classification is the most valid way of identifying human groups. Language is the foundation of all human behaviour and the most obvious and consistent feature of any culture. With few exceptions, African countries have multicultural populations speaking different languages. Figure 16 is a simplified map showing the main linguistic groupings and some of the individual languages. This map is based on the Atlas of the world’s languages (editors Christopher Moseley and R E Asher), published in 1994. Figure 17 shows where Arabic and the languages of the former colonial powers are used as official languages. Twenty indigenous languages enjoyed official status in 1997, ten of which are languages spoken in South Africa. The other indigenous official languages, besides Arabic, are Amharic (Ethiopia), Chichewa (Malawi), Creol (Seychelles), Kirundi (Burundi), Kinyarwanda (Rwanda), Kiswahili (Kenya and Tanzania), Malagasy (Madagascar), Somali (Somalia) and Tigrinya (Eritrea). Some of the African languages have developed into lingua francas, that is, languages adopted as a medium of communication by speakers of different mother tongues. A good indication of a lingua franca is when the speakers using it as a first language are outnumbered by those CHAPTER 2 Peoples and Origins AFRICA Physical Area: 30 million km2 Percentage of world land area: 22% Arable land: 7 Population Total (2011): 1.032 billion Percentage of world total: 15% Population growth (2000–2011): 3% Persons per km2 : 26 Urbanised population: 42% PEOPLES AND ORIGINS 24 Africa A-Z: Continental and Country Profiles | Africa Institute of South Africa speaking it as a second or third language. Official languages are chosen as such because they are lingua francas, facilitating cross-cultural communication. Lingua francas spoken across international borders – the European languages, for example – are also known as transnational languages. Among the indigenous languages lingua francas are relatively few, with Arabic, Kiswahili, Hausa and Fulani, spoken by ■ Nowhere in the world is there such a vast area with so many different cultures and tongues as in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa. The map reveals that language zones throughout the continent bear scant relation to the international borders of the countries. ■ By grouping together distantly and closely related languages and their dialects, the more than 2 000 individual languages and dialects spoken in Africa are reduced to a considerably smaller number of related, though not necessarily inter-intelligible, groups of languages. The map shows that, despite their diversity, most African languages ultimately belong to three great linguistic groupings: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo. Only their largest sub - divisions, north of the equator, appear on the map, eg Mande, Kwa, Chadic, Nilotic, Cushitic, etc. ■ To the south of the...

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