African History: Earliest Times to 1780

Catalog description

To understand Africa's dynamic early history, this course will begin by giving students a sense of the diversity of environments on the continent. It will also discuss how African societies have adapted to the constantly fluctuating environments through domesticating plants and animals and specializing in farming, fishing, herding, and hunting. The course will show that these economic specialties and identities are fluid. African societies adopted them but also discarded them depending on their changing environment and their relationship to it. It will trace the outgrowth of this sustainability to the birth of regional, then long distance trade networks, political centralization, and Islamization. The course will end at the point where people, once the continent's greatest and #8212;and scarcest in many regions and #8212;resource become commodities for trade in the trans-Atlantic market. Even today, African societies are often depicted as static and unchanging before the cataclysmic trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet, throughout the continent, African societies were socially, politically, economically, and culturally dynamic for millennia before the first Europeans arrived in the 1460's. Historians' over-reliance on conventional historical sources has hindered them from understanding Africa's early history from the inside out. We will explore a variety of inter-disciplinary sources for reconstructing history for periods pre-dating written sources. This course meets the Dietrich Gen Ed "Humanities" requirement.