HOWAFRICA BECAME BLACK • 387
Origins of African crops, with examples
(sorghum, pearl millet) S
Figure 19.3. The areas of origin of crops grown traditionally in Africa(that is, before the arrival of crops carried by colonizing Europeans),with examples of two crops from each area.
As one travels south in Africa across the Saharan desert and reencoun-ters rain in the Sahel zone just south of the desert, one notices that Sahel rains fall in the summer rather than in the winter. Even if Fertile Crescent crops adapted to winter rain could somehow have crossed the Sahara, they would have been difficult to grow in the summer-rain Sahel zone. Instead, we find two sets of African crops whose wild ancestors occur just south of the Sahara, and which are adapted to summer rains and less seasonal vari-
388• GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
ation in day length. One set consists of plants whose ancestors are widely distributed from west to east across the Sahel zone and were probably domesticated there. They include, notably, sorghum and pearl millet, which became the staple cereals of much of sub-Saharan Africa. Sorghum proved so valuable that it is now grown in areas with hot, dry climates on all the continents, including in the United States.
The other set consists of plants whose wild ancestors occur in Ethiopia and were probably domesticated there in the highlands. Most are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Americans— including Ethiopia's narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog, its finger millet used to brew its national beer, and its tiny-seeded cereal called teff, used to make its national bread. But every reader addicted to coffee can thank ancient Ethiopian farmers for domesticating the coffee plant. It remained confined to Ethiopia until it caught on in Arabia and then around the world, to sustain today the economies of countries as far-flung as Brazil and Papua New Guinea.
The next-to-last set of African crops arose from wild ancestors in the wet climate of West Africa. Some, including African rice, have remained virtually confined there; others, such as African yams, spread.throughout other areas of sub-Saharan Africa; and two, the oil palm and kola nut, reached other continents. West Africans were chewing the caffeine-containing nuts of the latter as a narcotic, long before the Coca-Cola Company enticed first Americans and then the world to drink a beverage originally laced with its extracts.
The last batch of African crops is also adapted to wet climates but provides the biggest surprise of Figure 19.3. Bananas, Asian yams, and taro were already widespread in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1400s, and Asian rice was established on the coast of East Africa. But those crops originated in tropical Southeast Asia. Their presence in Africa would astonish us, if the presence of Indonesian people on Madagascar had not already alerted us to Africa's prehistoric Asian connection. Did Austronesians sailing from Borneo land on the East African coast, bestow their crops on. grateful African fanners, pick up African fishermen, and sail off into the sunrise to colonize Madagascar, leaving no other Austronesian traces in Africa?
The remaining surprise is that all of Africa's indigenous crops—those of the Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa—originated north of the equator. Not a single African crop originated south of it. This already gives us a
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hint why speakers of Niger-Congo languages, stemming from north of the equator, were able to displace Africa's equatorial Pygmies and subequato-rial Khoisan people. The failure of the Khoisan and Pygmies to develop agriculture was due not to any inadequacy of theirs as farmers but merely to the accident that southern Africa's wild plants were mostly unsuitable for domestication. Neither Bantu nor white farmers, heirs to thousands of years of farming experience, were subsequently able to develop southern African native plants into food crops.
Africa's domesticated animal species can be summarized much more quickly than its plants, because there are so few of them. The sole animal that we know for sure was domesticated in Africa, because its wild ancestor is confined there, is a turkeylike bird called the guinea fowl. Wild ancestors of domestic cattle, donkeys, pigs, dogs, and house cats were native to North Africa but also to Southwest Asia, so we can't yet be certain where they were first domesticated, although the earliest dates currently known for domestic donkeys and house cats favor Egypt. Recent evidence suggests that cattle may have been domesticated independently in North Africa, Southwest Asia, and India, and that all three of those stocks have contributed to modern African cattle breeds. Otherwise, all the remainder of Africa's domestic mammals must have been domesticated elsewhere and introduced as domesticates to Africa, because their wild ancestors occur only in Eurasia. Africa's sheep and goats were domesticated in Southwest Asia, its chickens in Southeast Asia, its horses in southern Russia, and its camels probably in Arabia.
The most unexpected feature of this list of African domestic animals is again a negative one. The list includes not a single one of the big wild mammal species for which Africa is famous and which it possesses in such abundance—its zebras and wildebeests, its rhinos and hippos, its giraffes and buffalo. As we'll see, that reality was as fraught with consequences for African history as was the absence of native domestic plants in subequato-rial Africa.
This quick tour through Africa's food staples suffices to show that some of them traveled a long way from their points of origin, both inside and outside Africa. In Africa as elsewhere in the world, some peoples were much "luckier" than others, in the suites of domesticable wild plant and animal species that they inherited from their environment. By analogy with the engulfing of Aboriginal Australian hunter-gatherers by British colo-