We live in a global world, whether most people acknowledge it or not. Even the states which reject it – North Korea, China in its more silly moments, Bhutan until recently – reject a globalised structure which, in their rejection, they acknowledge the universal reality. But as we slowly dismantle the liberal arts – not just those of the Western Enlightenment, but those of Confucian tradition, or of the Vedic sagas, or the stone inscriptions of the Mayans – we run the risk of forgetting that this global world is still new, and indeed, is not consistent in what it is to be global.
It is in this spirit that I wish to challenge Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, a professor at Cornell University, who recently wrote a piece in Aeon.co rejecting the idea of “pre-colonial” Africa. On the one hand, I understand what he’s talking about: he’s rejecting a historiographical tradition which privileges Western concepts of history – of primary sources in written form, of histories primarily of organized states or their equivalent, and in dealing with non-Western societies, in particular only their engagement with the West as being worthy of the concept of “history” at all. I’m not sure that’s worth argument: he’s right, that’s lousy historiography, but we’re not arguing with Hegel anymore. Hegel’s conception of racial identity has been dead for a long time, and using him as a straw man is child’s play, and I don’t think Taiwo is engaging in child’s play. However, the idea of a pre- and post-“history” is an important one, especially as we sit in 2023 looking at our imperfect and clearly incomplete global project as a human species.
It may be important first off to emphasise what I mean by “globalisation.” It’s not the interconnection of nation-state economies via increasingly all-inclusive trade agreements like GATT. It’s also not the increasingly unavoidable influence of social and media constructs across national, cultural, and linguistic borders: the universality of Disney and BBC and K-Pop and Latin American magical realism. Globalisation, rather, is the seemingly inexorable trend towards the human species being fungible across the surface of our planet. That process has been accelerated of late – by things like electronic media, and increasingly safe and easy transoceanic and transcontinental travel and trade – but it’s been going on for longer than our supposedly historical sources can remember.
It started through some sort of a diaspora which we only really can uncover today via mitochondrial RNA evidence found in ancient tombs or, more regularly, just ancient corpses who show up randomly. Hominids exploded out of Africa in multiple pulses over hundreds of thousands of years, and because of climate changes, varying levels of social organisation and curiosity, and who knows what else, modern Homo sapiens developed and settled in more or less isolated groups, isolated enough to develop unique and mutually incomprehensible language groups and folkways, with enough tenacity and wanderlust to populate every arable corner of the planet no matter how tenuously arable, and with enough sheer stubbornness to stick it out, everywhere.
We have no real knowledge of how long that took; it seems like the last bits of the New World in Patagonia were probably settled, or at least discovered, around 4000 years ago – the last bit of footwork, as it were – and the islands of the Pacific were finally taken over within the last 800 years. But the fits and starts in between, well, we’re pretty unsure. And the ebbs and flows in regional and local contexts are even more mysterious: to the early humans who lived in a valley, or ranged over what they thought of as “their” steppe, surely every encounter with another group was fraught.
Sometimes, it was simply a matter of moving into a new area which had been recently vacated; many of the non-Latinate Indo-European tribes who moved into Northern Europe merely displaced the waning elements of Rome, for example. In other cases, genocide did the trick: Mongols displacing the late classical Scythians and Bactrians. And sometimes it was a mix of both: the Aryans, the Greeks, and the Mongols represented waves of peoples who invaded, but ultimately intermixed and blended into, the world of South Asia.
But it’s somewhat hard to dispute that by the Axial Age – around 2400 years ago all over, in the river basins of East Asia, the isolated peninsula of modern India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Fernand Braudel’s greater Mediterranea, and the three distinct regions the New World, North, Meso, and South America, if you’ll excuse the anachronism of calling it by the name of a 16th century Italian guy; and the three African core kingdoms of the West, Ethiopian, and Great Lakes – the world had sort of settled into segregated cauldrons of humanity that only very, very peripherally knew of one another’s existence. Was there contact? Yes, sort of, but it was rare and strange enough to be in the realm of magic and myth, of the “there be dragons” kind of legend even as coins and spices and the occasional slave was shifted across the sands or seas or mountains that separated these cauldrons of human development.
I use that term deliberately: these areas were isolated cauldrons and human development was taking place in all dimensions: social, moral, ethical, military, technological, whatever. They were hotbeds, moving forward the potential of what it was to be “human” in the way that complex, isolated systems anywhere play out the evolutionary potential of said system. Their isolation – which lasted in all cases for centuries or, more relevantly, for scores of generations – allowed social and ecological absurdities to play them selves out to exhaustion, and also to play themselves into a kind of local optimisation. The sense of regret we now experience for the disapperance of those local optimisations – whether Renaissance era European notions of beauty, or Song Dynasty notions of beauty, or Poiynesian conceptions of celestial navigation – sing to the idea that we, as generalised human beings, can still recognise that perfection can have been achieved locally even if it failed to be transmitted globally.
And that, indeed, is the real revolution we’ve experienced as a species in the last millennium. Starting with the first basic navigational revolutions of what to the West was the late Middle Ages (and to the Chinese was the Song Dynasty, and to the real originators was the Mamluk Sultanate), the peoples of Eurasia slowly eroded their cauldrons, and gradually became aware of one another. Words were exchanged, goods, eventually peoples; with the technology of sail it accelerated, and the contemporary revolution of moveable type accelerated it even more, on different dimensions.
The New World and Africa lagged in this bubbling over of the cauldrons, purely because of transportation issues. Until long-distance over-the-horizon sailing became reliable, sub-Saharan Africa, the New World, and even Japan were far more isolated from the other cauldrons than, say Europe or India or the Far East. And so Eurasia became our reference point – by the time of the real wall-tearing-down events of the 15th and 16th centuries, Eurasian globalisation was already self-referential.
So then the Columbian Exchange happened: a massive trade of humanity, culture, art, wealth, disease. Perhaps the purest anthropological cliff event in human history, recognising that by the time Austalasia and New Zealand were settled, the pathology of most human disease was widely distributed in the genomes of the people who made the rough sea journeys to get there. The New World’s intersection with a global humanity is defined not by a colonial event but by a holocaust. A group of people in the Western Hemisphere, isolated for hundreds of generations, had fewer deadly pathogens to which they were immune compared to the Petri dishes of people coming from the Eastern Hemisphere (which, even if only the Europeans were the initial contacts, were already a homogenous global sub-species with shared immunities).
Compare this with Africa: the equivalent of the Columbian Exchange was decisively against the Eurasians in terms of disease and immunity, even if the advantage of technology and tools were decisively in favor of the Eurasians. That is to say, the boundary event of globalisation for Africa – the historical century or so where they were both forcibly, gradually, and violently introduced to a global human experience – is both distinct, and unique. And therefore worthy of study – just as the Columbian Exchange is worthy of study, and just as the late classical / early medieval / Song / Mamluk / Mongol event is worthy of study.
Which is to say, Taiwo is correct rhetorically – this is not pre-colonial or post-colonial as an event, and to speak in terms of colonialism incorrectly privileges a subsequent political event, the subjection of African societies by European military powers, over and above the really interesting anthropological event, the final tearing down of the pre-modern barriers between regionalised peoples. But he’s wrong to think that something didn’t really happen here, and that isn’t worth an independent – and yet also cross-cultural – exploration. The pots and kettles that, for millennia, bubbled up the dominating and yet essentially irrational social mores and folkways of human society really did exist, and over a shockingly short period of centuries, the lids came off and the stew of humanity boiled into the strange (and often distasteful) brew of our 21st century experience. When, and how, and why those pots boiled over is an essential topic for human exploration. Admittedly, it should be examined from every perspective – not just that of some white guys on the western edge of Eurasia who had a slight edge in small group organisation and firepower. But understanding how those guys got the edge, even as all of humanity plunged into a truly new world order of constant and unstoppable intermixing, and how and what happened when others got sucked into the fray, is surely central to how we can understand who were are today and where we might go in the future, for good or for ill.
Professor Taiwo wrote a phenomenal thought piece; I hope he can see, as he reflects on it, that in eliminating a colonial foundation, it is essential to lose the mystery of what happened when the barriers between an isolated Africa and the rest of the world – whether it be Eurasia or the New World – came down. The emergence of colonialism and imperialism are of separate interest, and if only for the moral damage they caused, demand further critical examination – but the real question is why Africa, and the New World, and India, and Han China, and Japan, and Europe, remained separate for as long as they did, remained independent and isolated cauldrons for as long as they did, and what caused them to spill and to create the messy global world in which we live in 2023.