History and the Testimony of Language (review)

Ehret’s book summarizes a method for the comparative analysis of language—primarily vocabulary and semantics but also phonology and morphology—as a source for writing the early history of Africa. With the exception of the opening chapter, the book rests in key ways on the author’s earlier publications. Yet, each of the chapters has received a thorough revision and often a major expansion.

In addition to glossing Ehret’s method, the book also offers several major historical conclusions. First, the Afrasian language family (to which the Semitic languages belong) took shape in Africa and has deep roots there. Second, in the last millennium b.c.e., Ethiosemitic languages spread into the Horn of Africa because their speakers held an advantage in production and exchange relations over their Eastern Cushitic hosts. Third, a now-extinct branch of Southern Cushitic was spoken in the highlands of southeastern Kenya until sometime within the last few centuries. Finally, American crops spread into East Africa much more slowly than they spread into West Africa, largely because ecological zones in East Africa run north to south, impeding spread, and not west to east, as they do in West Africa.

These findings represent a tiny slice of Ehret’s massive oeuvre. He has done more than any other historian of Africa to classify Africa’s current languages: detailing and documenting the history of phonological and morphological changes that support those classifications, locating the earlier communities of speakers from whom they descended, tracking the residue of lexical transfers that mark contact between entirely different and fairly similar groups, presenting hypotheses about the earlier phonological shapes and semantic loads of transferred and inherited lexical material, dating sequences of the formation and dissolution of those groups, and setting those sequences alongside others generated from archaeological and, occasionally, oral evidence. Historians might find the logic of the method irresistible but wonder about the particular kinds of narratives that it sustains.

Ehret’s method delivers powerful results by generating chains of historical inferences about the timing, location, and material practices of food production that complement other such chains developed by archaeologists and environmental historians. Because the same rigor of analysis cannot be applied to oral tradition or ethnographic evidence, the sorts of issues central to those sources—ideology of all stripes, translational politics, etc.—evade his methodology. Yet, material culture and agriculture—even though their contents have enormous political moment—have fields of meaning amenable to Ehret’s methodology largely because their material contents are familiar to us. We recognize a hoe when we see one. The translation of that meaning into another language as a third term of equivalence between the two realities (the English term hoe and the material object that the term signifies) seems clear. That clear equivalence does not include other meanings that the people who used the (reconstructed) translated term gave to hoes.

Ehret views the arbitrary relationship between sign and referent as constituting a tight bond: “Transformative change in a particular area of economy, customs, cultural knowledge, or material circumstances of life inevitably leads to fundamental changes in the vocabulary of those areas of life and livelihood” (51). The inevitability that Ehret finds stands in marked contrast to a lament by Feierman when writing about East Africa’s precolonial past: “It was difficult, however, to explain the fact that the forms of political action had changed drastically, while the words in which they were explained remained static.”¹ Competent speakers, in “following the rules yet creating new forms at the same time,” introduce incremental change in language just as interested historical actors do for their domain of creative tradition. Ethnographers and many historians find these figures in their sources. Because historian-linguists working with Ehret’s method cannot find such figures, they fall back on an ethereal capacity for change and continuity residing in the relationship between a “speech community” and the various forces that emanate from sociological categories like “the economy” or “material culture.”

This tendency...