subject: Africa And Human Development [print this page] Professor Eugen Weber, who taught history at the University of California in Los Angeles, has developed a series of public lectures on the Western Tradition. The series is comprised of 30 minutes videos which they are presented in a classroom format and then there are illustrations of historical records or evidences shown on the videos. The main emphasis of the series as the title suggest is the western tradition or civilization. But then as we know that the western civilization has affected the most part of the earth this video series is really about how the world eventually became what we know it today. Professor Eugen Weber, being a brilliant noted historian succinctly pieces together information to project the view of the western civilization. A visual feast of over 2,700 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art portrays key events that shaped the development of Western thought, culture, and tradition.
Weber starts first by going into the Stone Age, the age of reptiles "" the evolution as God or the Creator of the Universe started creating tiny unicellur creatures, moving to reptiles, to mammals up to the human being.
The second video lecture series he places the development of man by bringing in ancient Egypt in Africa. With the ancient Egypt Eugen Weber compares the culture of the ancient Egyptians, the black Africans as we know them today with the western world or Europe.[Evidences or historical records which professor Eugen Weber bring about on the video screen all direct the viewer to one point: that ancient original Egyptians were Black people of Africa as we know them today].
Eugen Weber compares early ancient Egyptians with the western traditions this way;
The Egyptians were relatively passive, they did not think much about progress. They were more interested in stability, regularity, repetition and conservation. We [meaning Western people] are dynamic aggressive, curious, interested in change and novelty and progress.
Weber as he narrates the ancient Egypt relates to gigantic tombs, a religion dedicated to immortality, and a ruler who was believed by his subjects to being a god in that he made the sun to rule each day. Eugene Weber asks, why did the ancient Egyptian civilization lasted longer than all other civilizations, an extraordinary 3000 years?
Weber notes that some books consider ancient Egypt as the cradle of civilization, that also covers Mesopotamia and Egypt. Weber does not argue this point though as he seems to be interested only to elaborating the area that is called the fertile crescent (mostly Egypt and Mesopotamia) to bring about his points on ancient Egypt and how Egyptian cultures differed to that of Mesopotamia which Eugen Weber considers to be similar in culture with the western people). Most of the Fertile Crescent is Arid.
The people living in those lands were found next to the river or one of the springs that did not dry up. Agriculture was largely depended on flood control and irrigation. First you need to drain the land and then you need to keep it watered. But if you did all that, you have a tremendously rich soil which could bear regular crops not once but several times a year. So the land promised a lot, but it also imposed special conditions on the people who worked it. Digging irrigation channels and keeping them up were social tasks, which needed a tight knit community to achieve throughout the year.
Eugen Weber then dwells on the early degree of organization, effiency and coordination among the ancient Egyptians, (the Black Africans as we know them today). He notes that these people provided one of the best organized civilizations but then Weber notes it does not mean that the ancient Egyptian civilization was necessarily the earliest. He describes Egypt as an oasis in the desert. This relative isolation of Egypt gave ancient Egyptians more unity than their neighbors in the Mediterranean. It helped make ancient Egyptians secure, stable, complacent and very different from western culture or tradition. The Western people are dynamic aggressive, curious, interested in change and novelty and progress.
For the ancient Egyptians geography was destiny. The Nile alone made life possible in a desert that surrounded it. Perhaps it is because of the harsh conditions facing those living in the desert that Egypt was able to impart to humanity a cultured that is centered on nature.
And it was the then President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki who, during the eve of the birth of the African Union composed and sang this poem in part:
I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld. My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
About ten thousand years ago, the native population in the Nile swampy valley, switched from hunting and fishing to sowing crops. Over thousands of years, they figured how to drain some of the swamps and turn them into farm lands. So the Nile River served as a lifeline and also provided the need for corporative organised effort. And this as we know is part of the culture of black people that still remain intact even today. In the 1960s in Tanzania Julius Nyerere tried but unsuccessfully to fully revive this corporative culture through the African philosophy of ujamaa. Ujamaa comes from the Swahili word for extended family or familyhood and is distinguished by several key characteristics, namely that a person becomes a person through the people or community.
Eugen Weber notes that cooperative agriculture in ancient Egypt let to a number of crucial developments sometimes around 3000 BC. There were the charts "" the calendar so that you can keep track of seasonal irregularities for your crops. They was the development of the hieroglyphics. This was not writing as we know it but drawings. As we even know today Africans during the ancient Egypt used sounds to represent something described. Like vuvuzela sound coming from vuuuvuuu "" as you you blow the pipe in South Africa even today.
The ancient Egyptians as we know them today as black Africans were literal people, they always used pictures to the alphabet symbols on the hieroglyphics. They found something simple and practical to write and draw on, paper like material which was made from the papyrus plant that grew all over the Nile.
The papyrus reed will then give the basic design of the Egyptian column or capitals which you can see today in their ruins in Egypt. Their culture was shaped by their environment in a hundred different ways. The Nile River supported a static society, where life is pretty secure and reasonably happy if we judge it with the conflicts and strife we experience in the western tradition. Above the Nile they stands even a more powerful force, that is the sun. The sun perfects the Nile River and which burns so fierce that it appears to be divine. The sun denoted to the ancient Egyptians that a single power rules the world.
From the first warrior king who called himself a pharaoh about 3000 BC to Cleopatra the last Egyptian queen (who was not necessarily African as we shall see as we go by) who died 30 years before Christ, there are 31 different dynasties of pharaohs. To the Egyptians, it was pharaoh who made sure that the sun was going to rise journeying through the night and arriving safely at dawn. It was pharaoh who guaranteed the harvest by being the first to reap the fruits and vegetables through a ceremony. It was pharaoh who threw a written order into the Nile as to when should the floods should come to water the crops.
Pharoah was a god, he was also the state. He owned everything his people owned. And he even owned the people themselves. This tradition was held intact all over Africa where kings were (and some parts of Africa still) regarded so deeply with godly fear, where all people act in the name of the king and live through his divine pleasure. In this African way of life, law is not codified, it was based on custom, it was held as simply the king"s word. Today even in modern South Africa, President Jacob Zuma upkeeps customary life. It is alleged he is only legally married to one wife and the rest of his wives he maintains and upkeeps through customary way of living through a typical African environment and rural village of huts.
In ancient Egypt Law was not codified because it was held as the king"s personal interpretation of the divine will and divine justice. In African cultures, this persisted through that you cannot codify the king"s decisions, everyone on the king"s decisions was right for its particular context and moment where it was made. And besides, once you write down a law, it acquires an impersonal authority of its own. An authority that might compete with the authority of the king"s will and whims who alone could be the law.
Only Pharaoh expressed the ultimate truth and justice and goodness of cosmic force of harmony and order. The power of pharaoh was so absolute in fact that he not only controlled the laws of life but also access to eternity. And this explains the reasons on the cultures of Africans of believe in ancestors "" people who are dead are held in high regard. And during funerals a lot of lavish imposing elaborative procession is carried out.
In the first four Egyptian dynasties, Egyptian culture flowered. Trade expeditions went abroad to Lebanon for cider, to Crete for olive oil and into the deserts to mine copper and the whole nation moved forward economically and intellectually.
After the first four dynasties, there was need a whole series of transformations erosion. The pharaoh"s word was no longer law. Laws begun to be written down. And pharaoh himself is accepted only as he is powerful. It was only a matter of time before the royal family loosed its grip and power. This signals the intrusion of another culture into Egypt that will take over Egypt and bring to what we know it today in its current settlers, culture and composition. So there are two Egypts, the ancient one and the current one that came slow through a series of wars, disunity and disorder from 1700 to 1500 BC.
This time foreigners from the northeast broke in, warlike people much better armed with horses and chariots, and stronger boats. These are the shepherd kings from Asia. And so beginning with Egypt, Africa was no longer an oasis but a battlefield. For the first time, part of its territory was conquered by foreigners. The deep sense of security from attack which was the cornerstone of the Egyptian system was fractured. So then on you have warrior pharaohs. Still under this new kingdom, Egypt was going to have more periods of glory and more years of peace roughly from the 1500 to a 1000 BC. And from then, the new kingdom was faced with new invasion. This was the time when the power of the king was eroded, replaced by stiff formalistic hierarchy and bureaucracy based on less on tradition and custom than on rules and laws.
Unfortunately for the new kingdom, Egyptians would rather indulge in pleasure than to fight. And when Egypt went to war it usually came back defeated. After Egypt was conquered in 330 BC by Alexander the Great it was ruled by the Ptolemy , descendents of one of Alexander"s generals, until the last dynasty came to a glorious end with the suicide of Cleopatra and colonization of Egypt by Rome.
Eugene Weber finally comments that throughout these years of Egypt mutations and changes, he is fascinated by the fact that the image of pharaoh remained the same. The Egyptian ideal, the conventional style and model established 3000 BC endured longer than anything in the western world. And is also the traditions and cultures of Africa. And yet, while the form of Africa remained the substance has changed, the relative security and serenity of the ancient Africa had fractured. Africa does not mean anything more. And now we refer to the golden age of Africa longer ago and far away 3000 BC.
by: Dr Chris Kanyane
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