Experimental Blog # 190

Quotations from and comments on "Africans" - The History of a Continent{New Edition} by John Iliffe

"The story begins with the evolution of the human species in Africa, whence it spread to colonise the continent and the world, adapting and specializing to new environments until distinct{?} racial{?} and linguistic groups emerged."
"The skull of the first known hominin, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, was discovered in 2001 by an African student examining the shores of an ancient Lake Chad. Apparently some six or seven million years old < > During the following five million years, a wide variety of other hominims, mostly known as Australopithecines, left remains chiefly in eastern and southern Africa."
"Found at Rift Valley sites < > from 2.6 million years ago < > with remains of a hominim known as Homo habilis."
"Some 1.8 million years ago, a more clearly human creature entered the archaeological record. Homo ergaster{from a Greek word meaning work} was to survive with remarkably little development for over a million years. < > Homo ergaster is also found in Eurasia."
"Scientists have therefore compared the mitochondrial DNA of living people to estimate the point in the past at which human beings shared a single female ancestor. < > most researchers believe that this was between 250,000 and 150,000 years ago, or in the broad period when the first anatomically modern people appear in the fossil record. Initially, these ancestors of modern humans spread within the African continent < > a subsequent expansion took them to parts of Asia by at least 40,000 years ago and from there to Europe.

From 1519 to 1867 there were 11,061,800 slave departures from Africa to the Atlantic.
"In 1807 the British Parliament resolved to abolish the Atlantic slave trade." But "parliamentary resolutions had little impact in Africa."
"In all, the navy captured 1,635 ships and freed just over 160,000 slaves, landing many at the colony in Freetown created in 1787. Yet no fewer than 3,446,800 slaves left Africa for the Atlantic during the nineteenth century ..."

"Whereas in 1948 the National Party{South Africa's apartheid party} had won only 40 percent of votes, in 1977, at its peak, it won 65 percent .."
"Within little more that a decade of the electoral victory in 1977, apartheid lay in ruins."
" ..Prime Minister P.W. Botha had dismissed apartheid in 1979 as 'a recipe for permanent conflict.' Recognising the impossibility of controlling an advanced industrial society by police methods.."
"  the new president, F.W. de Klerk, explained in 1990, 'The decline and collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia put a new complexion on things. < > We had to seize the opportunity.'
He legalized the ANC{African National Congress}and released its imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela, to provide a negotiating partner.
   De Klerk had underestimated the ANC. It proved more popular with Africans, more united, and less easy to marginalize ..."
The historical connection and coincidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa went unnoticed by many people, but is very thought provoking and instructive.