Istwa Nou

The stretch from about 9700 BCE to about 5500 BCE opens with the Holocene and with climate swings big enough to remake natural environments and force people everywhere to rework how they fed themselves. The response that mattered most came in as many as eleven or twelve widely separated regions, where communities moved by stages out of hunting and gathering and into growing crops and keeping livestock. Africans living far apart on their own continent accounted for at least three of those separate inventions. Three, in a story usually told as one. The agricultural revolution is narrated in most classrooms as a Near Eastern development handed outward to a waiting world. It was polycentric, and Africa was one of its principal laboratories. The peoples that nineteenth century European race science would later pronounce incapable of civilisation were among the first to build one, cultivating crops and managing herds while much of Europe was still following reindeer across tundra.

Between roughly 6000 and 3000 BCE the farming systems of the world stopped developing in isolation. Peoples who had worked out their own crops and their own herds moved into new country and carried their methods with them, and systems that had been invented separately in distant regions came into contact. What followed was traffic. Seeds, livestock, tools and techniques passed between communities with no common ancestry and no shared language, and every transfer changed the economy that received it. Christopher Ehret calls this the era of agricultural exchange, and he puts African farmers inside it as suppliers. The Sahara, the Sahel, the Ethiopian highlands and the West African forests each sent domesticated plants and herding practice outward into neighbouring economies while taking in crops from the Near East and East Asia. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the received account still runs agriculture outward from one Fertile Crescent hearth into a waiting world, and that story trains people to expect Africa at the receiving end of everything.