Negro States
Old Africa Rediscovered. By Basil Davids0 (G ollancz, 25s.) MR. DAVIDSON'S 'Old Africa' consists mainly various `civilisations' that flourished in the and south-east of the continent round ab Al) 500 to 1500: Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Monon tapa, and the like, Those civilisations, he mai tains, all had a purely African origin, and Neg African at that. Their subsequent growth NA much stimulated by the development of an expo trade in gold and other valuables—with No Africa from the western Sudan, and with Arab India, and even China, from the east coast. l the source from which they are all deriv directly or indirectly, was Meroe (about 100 mil. north of Khartoum). Here there flourish immediately before and after the dawn of I Christian era, an extensive iron-smelting indust and from here knowledge of the craft spread due course to other parts. With it came riot only new mastery over soil and forest,' but also impulse to conquest and centralised governm that led to the creation of elaborate States, cities towns of impressive architecture, and magnifi works of art.
The histories of those `mediaeval' States fairly well known; Westermann's summary, pt lished in German in 1952, in fact tells us far about them than the present book does. But to Davidson, able to rely upon recent archzeologl findings not available to his predecessors, succa, both in establishing a reasonably satisfact0 chronology and in advancing a series of plausi hypotheses about the origins and ultimate de). of the States. In his anxiety to avoid the roma' cism that made many previous writers postuls: intrusive influences—Egyptian, Phoenician, Ore Hittite, even Chinese—he tends at times to unduly generous in his appraisal of the Negi` Twentieth-century accounts of Zande warfare' Lozi conceptions of justice are, for exam hardly adequate evidence that brutal destruc of life and inhuman punishments were relay,/ rare in earlier times and at other places. And preoccupation with archzeology has led him to little or nothing about various Central Afri States which, although not yet studied by archeologist, have been described in great de by ethnographers and other observers. Nevertheless, what he does say, notably ab° Zimbabwe and the `lost cities' of East Africa, both readable and intelligent. His hook sho convince all but the most bigoted believer in I doctrine of White supremacy that Africa south' the Sahara has not always been inhabited sot by ignorant and superstitious savages, and that, political organisation at least, Africans on t own have shown a capacity for development I beyond what many of their detractors are e now willing to concede.
1. SCHAI)
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