African Social Evolution

The dangers of discrediting other ways of living
Besides the history of African civilisation, there is also a substantial ‘pre’ history to Africa that predates European contact by thousands of years in some cases. These are what ‘civilised’ people tend to think of as primitive societies. And, there are ways of living that have survived civilisation from within Africa, and the colonial onslaught from without. The people who have maintained these ways against all odds now face perhaps their greatest challenge in the attitude that civilisation is the only way of life worth living.

This attitude is prevalent throughout Ghana. The President of a well-reputed tour company in Ghana, whom I found to be a very enlightened and progressive thinker on many broad subjects, told me and a small group of tourists, “These people around Mole [National Park] are still whining about their primitive way of life when they could make more money off tourism than hunting.”

In purely financial terms he is probably right, but his statement says nothing of their right to choose how they live, or even how they acquire sustenance. For centuries the 27 villages surrounding what is now Mole National Park have made their living using a combination of subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering. Contrary to official Ghanaian propaganda, Canadian and Ghanaian researchers have found mistrust, resentment and antagonism in some of these villages toward the government of Ghana and the management of the park. Many of them used to reside within park boundaries and were forcibly removed in the 1960s, being cut off to important, even sacred, hunting, gathering and farming land.

Communities such as these have lived in ways that were more successful, peaceful, and sustainable, for tens of thousands of years at least, than has the new way of ‘civil’isation. Civilised people live in large-scale agricultural and urban societies, tend to have short-term memories of their own histories (going back a few hundred years at best), and tend to think that their way of life is the best if not the only way. As the Ghanaian propaganda points out, it is these ‘civil’ised ways of life that have encroached on traditional hunting lands and made the old ways untenable.

While Mole National Park has done wonders for the elephant and bird populations and provided valuable foreign income for its staff and for the Government of Ghana, the communities surrounding the park now live in abject, hand-to-mouth poverty, separate from eons of tradition. They can often be seen swarming tourists begging for hand-outs to supplement their meagre sustainable farming operations, carved out in an unforgiving savannah.

Similar suppression of a group of people who live largely by hunting and gathering is happening in many other parts of Africa, most famously in Botswana (the current African darling of the development community in the UN, EU, and USA), where the San (commonly called Bush People) have been forced off their land and then granted access to it again by the Supreme Court on the condition that they don’t bring any herd animals with them.

The backward logic at play in this caveat is that if the San are going to live a traditional way of life, it has to be a hundred percent, no behaviours learned from colonialists (African or otherwise), such as herding. It is a fine illustration of one of the most prevalent conflicts in the world today: civilization versus everyone else. The Supreme Court of Botswana, like most members of civilised societies, were incapable of understanding that a culture can adapt new ways of attaining sustenance without completely changing the way they live.

The challenge faced by Africa, and by everyone else, is: can we not reconcile our civilizations with other ways of living and organizing our societies? If not, civilization will probably win out in the short term – it always has before. In the long term, humanity will either find other ways of living or destroy itself.

This is indeed also the challenge for the discontents of society, be it civilised or otherwise. Kertscher writes of a well-travelled Masai man whom he meets in Kenya, “He was unable to integrate what he had seen of the world into his own culture and so he was a man without a country, without a real home.”

The man had told him, “I do not even know if I really am a Masai any longer.” Like this man, those of us who have become disenchanted with civilisation’s delusions find ourselves unsure where we belong, traversing two worlds, comfortable in neither. Except in our case we are the descendents of the ‘civil’ised, totalitarian agriculturalists, convinced of our rightness, disconnected from our roots, with no more land, off to colonize more land or serve the factory owners manufacturing toys for the top of the hierarchy. In our generation, some of us have acquired the resources to take to the road again, this time for pleasure, the ultimate nomads as alluded by scholar and filmmaker Hugh Brody.

But perhaps on both sides we expect too much. In critically self-examining our own histories, we can see the flaws in the ways we have organized, the ways our societies have lived. Botswana can thus see that civilisation is enormously flawed, but that the San have taken a useful practice, herding, and incorporated it into their way of being. This does not make them part of the mainstream civilisation. Rather than go whole hog and live like the majority of this planet’s population, they have simply taken what is useful.

For the discontents of civilisation, there are many excellent examples, inspirations to choose from, people who, as Hugh Brody wrote in his 2001 book ‘The Other Side of Eden’:

Consciously choose low levels of material comfort and small numbers of children to avoid the need for large incomes, thereby pursuing lives in which they may survive without regular jobs and devote themselves instead to creative work and family life. This way of being encompasses a concern about the destruction of the natural world by the ever-growing pressures to reshape it in the interest of surplus and profit.

Personally, the most resource-consuming thing I ever did was take a year to travel much of the Eastern Hemisphere, five months of it in Ghana, as one of those interfering and annoying ultimate nomads, analysing everything with an outsider’s eye, making and writing (not always well informed) judgements along the way. Who am I to tell Africa what to do?

So, lacking the insider knowledge of Africa, I’ll go even bigger; I’ll offer my advice not to Africa but to the world: re-tell history, honour the truth. Celebrate and take pride in the places where your respective peoples fought injustice or simply lived well without taking from others. Doing so inherently means not celebrating just your civilisation’s achievements, but also acknowledging what came before it, those traditional ways of living, which were localized, connected to the land, and in tune with the vast and complex web of life. Such ways of being are never colonial. They are ways at peace with and respectful of the earth. And it is in these traditions that come emerging ways that, in writer Daniel Quinn’s words, move beyond civilisation.

We might also, as Hochschild advises, acknowledge and learn from the uglier places of the past and present, in order to break the pattern observed as long ago as the 14th century by Ibn Khaldun, in which “Those who are conquered always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics.” By not recreating such forms of hierarchical oppression, by not mimicking the colonialist so that the oppressed become oppressors, we can break civilisation’s cancerous cycle, and new and exciting ways of living will emerge all over the world.