Africa’s Past, Our Future by Kathleen R. Smythe (review)

“African history is in a unique position to make significant contributions to a new view of humans’ place in the world” (3), writes Kathleen Smythe in Africa’s Past, Our Future. This book is an innovative, important, and courageous addition to African and world history scholarship. Most of Africa’s Past is dedicated to African history prior to the arrival of colonialism as well as to the concepts and ideas found in this history that could and should be applied to modern world problems. This is a paradigm-changer, since much of scholarship on Africa implies, sometimes subtly, that there is a need for advice from outside to guide this continent toward “progress.” Smythe contends that the opposite is true. For example, she cites the ability of African peoples to live in relative peace for long historical periods, without a state apparatus, as a major and instructive contribution from Africa to world history.

Africa’s Past is a much-needed text for teaching African history. Smythe not only provides an excellent survey of the latest research on Africa’s past, she also presents a concise and clear argument as to why this history is relevant today. The text is divided into three sections: “The Longue Duree”; “African Institutions in the Middle Time Frame”; and “Recent History and Politics.” The first section begins with the evidence for human origins in Africa. Smythe then describes the “Grandmother Hypothesis,” which proposes that the largest part of modern human DNA came from a family unit of a healthy grandmother beyond child-bearing, her children, and grandchildren. Smythe uses the earliest African history to show the fallacy of assuming that Western social and political institutions are “natural” to all humans or biologically determined. In the next chapters on African subsistence strategies, she criticizes popular books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel that ignore the significant early African agricultural innovations—including the first domestication of cattle—in their analysis of key contributions to the creation of the modern world. To innovate new agricultural technologies and settle the entire continent, Africans from early times until the modern era maintained a symbiotic relationship with the natural world. In a part of the world where rain could often be capricious, they learned to adapt to harsh and differing environments, understanding both the potential and the limitations—issues the entire world is grabbling with currently.

The second section examines African ideologies and institutions such as heterarchy, matriliny, and “wealth in people.” Smythe uses the term “heterarchy” to describe most African communities prior to colonialism, in which there were multiple and overlapping centers of authority and status. The title of the next chapter is “Matriliny,” which is significant since the latest linguistic and genetic data indicate that matrilineages were among the first forms of social organization in large parts of Africa. But even more important, the ideology of matriliny tends to promote extensive social relations and widespread distribution of food and goods, which may have laid the basis for the final chapter in this section, “Forms of Economic Thought: Wealth in People and the Entrustment Economy.” Wealth in people, contends Smythe, is an African economic perspective based on the fact that Africa has always had a small population and a great deal of land. Land was plentiful and not owned privately, but collectively by clans and lineages. Labor was in short supply; therefore social relations were also economic ones. The entrustment economic system of the Luo is an example Smythe uses to show how Africans created social safety nets, since those participating in entrustment institutions were responsible for mutual support in times of crisis. These relationships were based on manifold contingencies and were much more complex than just repaying a loan. Remnants of these affiliations are still found in modern Africa, as people, against all odds, survive hard times without government support.

In the third section...