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black Africans, along with Asian Indians and Javanese in Suriname).
In parts of Central America and the Andes, the Native Americans were originally so numerous that, even after epidemics and wars, much of the population today remains Native American or mixed. That is especially true at high altitudes in the Andes, where genetically European women have physiological difficulties even in reproducing, and where native Andean crops still offer the most suitable basis for food production. However, even where Native Americans do survive, there has been extensive replacement of their culture and languages with those of the Old World. Of the hundreds of Native American languages originally spoken in North America, all except 187 are no longer spoken at all, and 149 of these last 187 are moribund in the sense that they are being spoken only by old people and no longer learned by children. Of the approximately 40 New World nations, all now have an Indo-European language or creole as the official language. Even in the countries with the largest surviving Native American populations, such as Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Guatemala, a glance at photographs of political and business leaders shows that they are disproportionately Europeans, while several Caribbean nations have black African leaders and Guyana has had Asian Indian leaders.
The original Native American population has been reduced by a debated large percentage: estimates for North America range up to 95 percent. But the total human population of the Americas is now approximately ten times what it was in 1492, because of arrivals of Old World peoples (Europeans, Africans, and Asians). The Americas' population now consists of a mixture of peoples originating from all continents except Australia. That demographic shift of the last 500 years—the most massive shift on any continent except Australia—has its ultimate roots in developments between about 11,000 b.c. and a.d. 1.
CHAPTER19
How africa became black
NO MATTER HOW MUCH ONE HAS READ ABOUT AFRICA beforehand, one's first impressions from actually being there are overwhelming. On the streets of Windhoek, capital of newly independent Namibia, I saw black Herero people, black Ovambos, whites, and Namas, different again from both blacks and whites. They were no longer mere pictures in a textbook, but living humans in front of me. Outside Windhoek, the last of the formerly widespread Kalahari Bushmen were struggling for survival. But what most surprised me in Namibia was a street sign: one of downtown Windhoek's main roads was called Goering Street! Surely, I thought, no country could be so dominated by unrepentant Nazis as to name a street after the notorious Nazi Reichskommissar and founder of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering! No, it turned out that the street instead commemorated Hermann's father, Heinrich Goering, founding Reichskommissar of the former German colony of South-West Africa, which became Namibia. But Heinrich was also a problematic figure, for his legacy included one of the most vicious attacks by European colonists on Africans, Germany's 1904 war of extermination against the Hereros. Today, while events in neighboring South Africa command more of the world's attention, Namibia as well is struggling to deal with its colonial
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past and establish a multiracial society. Namibia illustrated for me how inseparable Africa's past is from its present.
Most Americans and many Europeans equate native Africans with blacks, white Africans with recent intruders, and African racial history with the story of European colonialism and slave trading. There is an obvious reason why we focus on those particular facts: blacks are the sole native Africans familiar to most Americans, because they were brought in large numbers as slaves to the United States. But very different peoples may have occupied much of modern black Africa until as recently as a few thousand years ago, and so-called African blacks themselves are heterogeneous. Even before the arrival of white colonialists, Africa already harbored not just blacks but (as we shall see) five of the world's six major divisions of humanity, and three of them are confined as natives to Africa. One-quarter of the world's languages are spoken only in Africa. No other continent approaches this human diversity.
Africa's diverse peoples resulted from its diverse geography and its long prehistory. Africa is the only continent to extend from the northern to the southern temperate zone, while also encompassing some of the world's driest deserts, largest tropical rain forests, and highest equatorial mountains. Humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else: our remote ancestors originated there around 7 million years ago, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens may have arisen there since then. The long interactions between Africa's many peoples generated its fascinating prehistory, including two of the most dramatic population movements of the past 5,000 years—the Bantu expansion and the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar. All of those past interactions continue to have heavy consequences, because the details of who arrived where before whom are shaping Africa today.
How did those five divisions of humanity get to be where they are now in Africa? Why were blacks the ones who came to be so widespread, rather than the four other groups whose existence Americans tend to forget? How can we ever hope to wrest the answers to those questions from Africa's preliterate past, lacking the written evidence that teaches us about the spread of the Roman Empire? African prehistory is a puzzle on a grand scale, still only partly solved. As it turns out, the story has some little-appreciated but striking parallels with the American prehistory that we encountered in the preceding chapter.
378 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
The five major human groups to which Africa was already home by a.d. 1000 are those loosely referred to by laypeople as blacks, whites, African Pygmies, Khoisan, and Asians. Figure 19.1 depicts their distributions, while the portraits following page 288 will remind you of their striking differences in skin color, hair form and color, and facial features. Blacks were formerly confined to Africa, Pygmies and Khoisan still live only there, while many more whites and Asians live outside Africa than in it. These five groups constitute or represent all the major divisions of humanity except for Aboriginal Australians and their relatives.
Many readers may already be protesting: don't stereotype people by classifying them into arbitrary "races"! Yes, I acknowledge that each of these so-called major groups is very diverse. To lump people as different as Zulus, Somalis, and Ibos under the single heading of "blacks" ignores the differences between them. We ignore equally big differences when we lump Africa's Egyptians and Berbers with each other and with Europe's Swedes under the single heading of "whites." In addition, the divisions between blacks, whites, and the other major groups are arbitrary, because each such group shades into others: all human groups on Earth have mated with humans of every other group that they encountered. Nevertheless, as we'll see, recognizing these major groups is still so useful for understanding history that I'll use the group names as shorthand, without repeating the above caveats in every sentence.
Of the five African groups,– representatives of many populations of blacks and whites are familiar to Americans and Europeans and need no physical description. Blacks occupied the largest area of Africa even as of a.d. 1400: the southern Sahara and most of sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 19.1). While American blacks of African descent originated mainly from Africa's west coastal zone, similar peoples traditionally occupied East Africa as well, north to the Sudan and south to the southeast coast of South Africa itself. Whites, ranging from Egyptians and Libyans to Moroccans, occupied Africa's north coastal zone and the northern Sahara. Those North Africans would hardly be confused with blue-eyed blond-haired Swedes, but most laypeople would still call them "whites" because they have lighter skin and straighter hair than peoples to the south termed "blacks." Most of Africa's blacks and whites depended on farming or herding, or both, for their living.
In contrast, the next two groups, the Pygmies and Khoisan, include