Women invented both African ceramic traditions

The comparative evidence on who makes pots in Africa is close to uniform. Except in a few places where men took over commercial production in recent centuries, women have long been the potters, and they have held the knowledge, the practices and the rituals that go with the craft. In the southern savanna belt, potters were specialists who described their work as a calling, and senior potters who had borne children carried out observances at the clay deposits themselves, asserting authority over the whole business of manufacture. Read backwards, that pattern points to women as the inventors of both early African ceramic traditions, the tinkerers who worked out what fire does to clay. This matters well beyond Africa. The first sophisticated pyrotechnology on the continent was almost certainly women's work, and the line of invention it opens runs all the way to modern materials science. The history of technology as it is usually taught is a history of men and machines, and it starts in the wrong place.

After the pre-proto-Semitic speakers left Egypt for the northeast, the ancestral Boreafrasian language stayed behind and then split in two. One branch became proto-Chado-Amazigh, the common ancestor of the Chadic and the Amazigh languages. The other ran down to ancient Egyptian. The westward departure of the Chado-Amazigh speakers fits the early Holocene, about ten thousand years ago, when a shift to wetter conditions let people settle across much of the northern and north-central Sahara, and the archaeology of that period shows them doing exactly that. The communities that remained on the Nile kept speaking the tongue that would become early ancient Egyptian several millennia later. Egyptian was the last branch of the Afrasian tree still growing in Egypt. It is what was left after seven thousand years of departures, northeast into the Levant and west into the grasslands, by a population that kept shedding daughter communities while staying on the river that would carry its name.

Across the societies that speak Nilo-Saharan languages, the divine is understood as a single pervasive Spirit Force. Anthropologists working in a range of these communities settled on the word Divinity for it. The names used follow a consistent pattern: they tie Divinity to the sky, and through the sky to rain and often to lightning. People do call on particular named spirits for help, and they understand those spirits as manifestations of the one Divinity rather than as separate beings with standing of their own. Western theology has a term for exactly that relationship between the one and its appearances, hypostasis, and it took several centuries of argument to arrive at it. The Nilo-Saharan conception traces back to the ninth millennium BCE. It is a complete system with its own internal logic, and it sits alongside the Creator God of the Niger-Congo tradition as the second monotheism worked out in Africa long before comparable ideas surface anywhere in the Middle East.

The third independent invention of ceramics in the world belongs to Africa. By eleven and a half thousand years ago, around 9500 BCE, people in what is now Mali were making pots. The country in question lies south of the great bend of the Niger, and it falls inside the region where the ancestral form of Niger-Congo would have been spoken, the homeland of the largest language family on the continent today. Twelve thousand kilometres separate it from the Yangtze, which rules out anyone carrying the idea across. This is a dated, located archaeological finding and it has been available for years. Potters in western Africa were firing clay thousands of years before anyone in the Near East or in Europe did. The interesting question is no longer whether it happened. It is why a world history syllabus that has had this information for a generation still opens the story of ceramics in Mesopotamia and never gets to Mali at all.