African Diversity - Culture, Ethnicity, Art

Some facts about Africa (including North Africa)

  • It is the second largest and second most populous continent after Asia.
  • It covers 30,300,000 sq.km, including adjacent islands, which is 5.9% of Earth's total surface area and 20.3% of the Earth's total land area.
  • Its population in 2005 was over 840,000,000 which is over 12% of the world's total population!
  • It covers 61 territories stretching approximately 8,000km (5,000 miles) from Ras ben Sakka (Tunisia) south to Cape Agulhas (South Africa) and approximately 7,400km (4,600 miles) from Cape Verde east to Ras Hafun (Somalia).
  • The coastline is approximately 26,000km (16,100 miles) long. 
  • The largest country in Africa is the Sudan; the smallest is the Gambia  or the Seychelles, off east coast.
  • The country with the largest population is Nigeria with 130,000,000 people
  • The country with the smallest population (apart from St Helena) is the Seychelles with a population of 80,000

What is culture?

‘Culture' is broadly made up of:

  • Language (in Africa originally no indigenous scripts except for Nubian with written texts of the medieval period)
  • social structure and organisation (including descent and inheritance, division of labour between the sexes)
  • government
  • religion and religious practices
  • music and musical instruments
  • oral history and tradition (including stories of origins)
  • literature, art (e.g. Nuer body decoration; Bushmen/Khoisan rock art; contemporary art)
  • craft
  • technology
  • (indigenous) knowledge regarding the environment and climate
  • agricultural techniques and animal husbandry
  • housing and architecture
  • survival strategies
  • beliefs on child rearing
  • games
  • education
  • dress (including ceremonial)
  • warfare
  • and more!

How can we think about populations?

Populations can be described as rural/urban; sedentary/nomadic/seasonal migration; traditional/modern and changing.

Occupations and skills (many overlap traditional/modern, rural/urban, and in individuals) can be divided into:
Traditional: farmers, nomadic pastoralists, blacksmiths, weavers (baskets), weavers
(cloth), potters, ‘priests', leaders, builders, canoe-makers ........
Modern: as per contemporary societies plus some traditional skills
Urban: mixed populations (languages, origins, social groups)
Rural: may consist of the same language groups, but specialised trades can be brought in from other linguistic groups, and also employment, migration

Language Groups

For more information on language families, languages and corresponding social groups:

AFRICAN DIVERSITY

Africa is the second largest continent, and the second most populated, after Asia. It is home to thousands of ethnic groups, some similar, some very different, in language, social organisation, physical appearance and in the environment in which they live.

Africa is where men and women as we know ourselves today first evolved, on the eastern side of the continent stretching from Ethiopia to South Africa. But new discoveries are still being made as research continues, finding parts of skeletons from different geological times, both south and north of the Rift Valley where, in the Olduvai Gorge (now in Tanzania), Mary and Louis Leakey first discovered early hominids, in particular Homo habilis. It is believed that small groups of humans who lived by hunting and gathering gradually migrated north as bands grew and split, and moved out of the continent to other parts of the world. There are many gaps in this research but slowly a picture is being built up of human evolution and dispersal.

Today, the population of the whole of the continent is about 840 million people (in 2005 12% of the total world population). Nigeria in West Africa has 130 million, while Western Sahara has about 256,000. South of the Sahara Desert, which stretches across a wide band of the continent's northern part, many different languages are spoken and different life-styles have developed as people have adapted to the environment in which they live, and acquired skills and techniques through trade and contact with others. This adaptation has continued as people have migrated because of wars, or in search of food, or more fertile land for their crops and herds of domestic animals, or to urban areas. Today such migration in vast numbers - there are millions of refugees - is usually because of civil war. In smaller numbers it is in the search for employment to survive (as to ‘Fortress Europe').

More than 800 (possibly over 1000) languages are spoken and hundreds more which class as dialects (local variations). Some 50 are spoken each by at least half a million people, while others by a few thousand. Many of these are dying out, as in many other parts of the world, affected by the introduction and wide use of ‘lingua franca' such as English, French, Portuguese (the languages of the colonisers and of modern education). Movement of thousands of people to urban areas also means they have to use the language that most other people speak, and consequently forget their own: minority languages therefore gradually die out.

Languages of Africa are grouped into four main ‘families' and these show how and where people are linked by their past history and movements: the study of languages is a specialist subject in itself, but by tracing similarities it can indicate relationships. Afro-Asiatic languages to the north of the continent (about 240 languages, 285 million people) show links to the Middle East/Southwest Asia. The Niger-Kordofanian family includes Bantu languages in central and southern Africa, other Niger-Congo languages in a band across western Africa (these are characterised by their use of tones), and Kordofanian tongues of small groups in Sudan. The Nilo-Saharan language family has six branches (more than 100 separate languages) scattered in Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Uganda and other countries, and is spoken by more than 30 million people. There are about 50 Khoisan languages spoken in southern Africa (and two in East Africa) by only about 120,000 people; some of these languages are spoken by the original inhabitants of this part of Africa who used to populate much greater areas, and are particularly endangered. They are famous for their ‘click' sounds, which have been ‘borrowed' by the neighbouring South African languages Zulu and Xhosa.

There is a fifth language family, Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian (the main languages in this family are found in Indonesia, Australia, and the southwest Pacific), represented by the language Malagasy of Madagascar. This indicates the movement of people with their languages from far across the sea in the area of Indonesia. The building style of canoes in Lake Victoria also hints of this connection, being of planks sewn together, a technique also found in the southwest Pacific.

Vernacular African languages were originally not written down so orthographies have had to be devised in order to use the languages in education and to help them survive, but this is expensive and many remain without written texts. This means that much oral tradition has been forgotten unless researchers have deliberately recorded individuals (mostly the elderly before they die). The Bible has been written down in some languages. Only one language, Nubian in Sudan, is unique in having written texts of the medieval period (8th to 14th centuries), with an alphabet derived from Coptic. Swahili (Bantu) was written before the European conquest of Africa, and an indigenous script for Vai (Niger-Congo group) was developed in the 19th century.

Today some main vernaculars are used across the continent in newspapers, magazines, publicity campaigns, radio broadcasts, film soundtracks and subtitles so their survival is assured, but English and French in particular are essential for mass communication. Frequently it was forbidden to use vernacular languages in education during colonial times, but depending on the knowledge of the teachers and where the schools are (rural or mixed urban locations), today they are used verbally if not in writing. All African states now have one or more ‘official' languages for government use and international communication: sometimes this is English (Zambia), other times it is the vernacular language which is most widely spoken (Amharic in Ethiopia), or it can be two or more joint national languages (English and Swahili in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania).

The Indo-European languages of English, French, Portuguese and Afrikaans in some countries count as a ‘native' language, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and for instance in Liberia where African Americans settled in the 19th century. Also in the 19th century, slaves repatriated to Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, developed from English a ‘creole' or pidgin, now called Krio.

Just as the pattern of languages in Africa is complex, so is the variety of economies and ways of life that have evolved, depending on the physical environment and the ways human communities have adapted to their surroundings and local resources. Mountains, desert, semi-desert, grasslands, forests, coast, rivers and flood plains (for example, the Sudd of southern Sudan), lakes (like the great lakes in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda), all offer different challenges and opportunities for living, but now new problems are being presented throughout the continent by global warming and climate change.

There used to be, and to some extent there still is, a link between language group and traditional occupation. For example, the Nilotic peoples are tall, slim cattle-herding people who travel with their herds and flocks in search of fodder and water (there are no fences in rural Africa, except where commercial companies have set up estates). Their tall slim physique has been seen as a genetic adaptation to their hot environment and the need to walk vast distances. Their legs are long and their stride enables them to cover the ground hunting or following their animals relatively tirelessly, quickly and efficiently. It has been established that the ratio of their body mass to surface area reduces exposure to the sun and therefore minimises water loss (their shadow area is considerably smaller than that cast on the ground by a shorter, squatter person). Examples of such people live in Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, and the northern areas of Sub-Saharan West Africa.

Although in more recent history African cultures have been influenced by colonial powers (French, British, Portuguese, Belgian, and American ‘colonisation by proxy'), and now by ‘globalisation', the continent was never isolated and there has always been social change. In earlier times, ideas and techniques came in by land and by sea. Arab traders came to the east coast of Africa before Europeans and established communities (Lamu off the coast of what is now Kenya, Zanzibar off Tanzania). The continent is criss-crossed by trade routes, the ones across the Sahara (which was never a barrier to human movement) being the best known. Salt was traded, animals, people, crops, pots, cloth, weapons, and in some areas special forms of currency were developed for exchange (metal ‘manillas'). Today, too, guns and ammunition are traded, sometimes for the valuable mineral commodities such as gold and diamonds. (In West Africa about 3.7 million people have died in diamond-fuelled wars; many others have lost homes and livelihoods). This trade feeds civil wars across the continent which have proved hard to stop.

Many countries in Africa are affected by these wars and migration which put further pressure on land and resources: refugees number in millions. They have fled for example into Uganda from Sudan and Congo; into Kenya from Somalia; into Chad from Sudan; from Zimbabwe into South Africa and Zambia. These refugees fleeing violence, death, theft or destruction of land and property, often arrive with few material goods, but may bring with them sometimes different social organisation, ‘culture' and values. Across some borders, however, the people may be the same on both sides, speak the same language and have the same ‘culture'. Many such borders are colonial introductions or impositions and do not reflect social divisions between populations.

The localised wars also show how important land is to the people, land where they can build homes, grow their crops, gather wild produce or graze their animals. Traditionally land is not ‘owned' but people have had a right to use it over generations, and may recognise a particular authority over an area of land, for instance an Emirate as in northern Nigeria. In some cases colonial governments variously introduced land registration and possible ‘alienation' or legal sale of land. In British ‘Protectorates' (for instance Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda) alienation and sale were not allowed. "Customary" land was vested in the traditional heads on behalf of their people, or in urban areas it belonged to the local government, while all mineral resources under the ground belonged to the national government.

Local attacks over territory and resources, like raiding for cattle in Ethiopia, northern Kenya and across the borders of Uganda and Kenya reflect the struggle for survival in some areas, and also the expectations of young men to prove themselves as adults. In urban areas, such traditional practices disappear in a modern context, as people are absorbed into a money economy and depend on employment to earn cash, rather than rearing stock, growing crops and trading goods.

Bushmen or Khoisan were (and some still are) a hunter-gatherer peoples who populated much of southern Africa and lived in small extended family groups, catching wild animals and searching for edible plants. Their detailed knowledge of the environment is impressive: their lives depend on it. The optimum upper limit for such hunter-gathering groups which move frequently in search of food is thought to be about 150 people. Above that it is difficult for social management and groups split, as scientists have observed: they have paralleled this optimum size with the communal life of villages elsewhere (and possibly as an ideal number for human communities as a whole, which implies that urban society is far from manageable). The Khoisan people were pushed out by Bantu-speaking people from the north, and left behind many rocky outcrops decorated with paintings and signs in areas far away from the areas they now inhabit. In Botswana it is the government that is pushing the Bushmen out of their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. In squalid settlement camps denied access to their traditional sources of food and a life of walking in open spaces, they have become depressed and desperate: some of their elderly members have already died. More than 200 Bushmen are now taking their government to court to allow them to return.

Although rocky outcrops are still occasionally decorated in a traditional context by isolated groups of young men, unrelated to Bushmen, the concept of ‘art' has moved on, and running parallel with the work of craftspeople, potters, weavers, and woodcarvers who produce both items of ‘airport art' for tourists, and ritual sculpture unique to their area, there are many women and men whose contemporary creative artistic output is recognised and sold on a global scale. Their work appears in art galleries and museums (both modern introductions themselves) in many urban centres in Africa and abroad. While some museum departments help families not to forget the past traditions of their grandparents, galleries provide an arena to show artists' interpretations of and reflections on ‘culture' today, how it has changed, what it has gone through over the past few hundred years, and how it has absorbed, utilised and adapted some European ideas and influences from other parts of the world. In spite of a history of colonialism, the introduction of religions, the effect of modern economies and ‘globalisation', however, the varied and numerous societies that live in very different parts of this vast continent still retain their core identities and cultural distinctiveness.

For more information and examples of African art

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