Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. A longtime specialist in labor history, he has written a number of books including History of the Canadian Peoples. His latest book, which is the subject of the Perspectives article below, is titled Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality. Here Finkel challenges the traditional idea that global history can best be taught through the lens of European civilizations and argues that early African communities that developed structures for internal democracy, equality, and peace are the true models for the current world. See his argument below.
World history courses in North America and Europe continue to emphasize the history of the West to the detriment of histories of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Global African history, which for millennia was marked by the persistence of egalitarian, peaceful societies, is particularly given short shrift because of a distorted notion of civilization that is embodied in a definition provided by National Geographic on its website. That definition claims that civilizations are characterized by “large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes.” World historians focused on societies that emphasized social hierarchies, inequalities, and monument-building that involved oppressive forced labor regarded Africa, with its dispersed, clan-based societies organized on reciprocal principles as outside their concerns. Rather than begin and end with the hundreds of thousands of years of human history in Africa, they take as their starting point the European empires of the past 5,000 years and relegate the African continent, where most of the history of Sapiens occurred, to minor status.
My book Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality corrects that imbalance. Its starting point is early African communities, civilizations that developed elaborate measures for creating both internal harmony, democracy, and equality as well as close, reciprocal relations with external communities. The book begins by introducing today’s San of the Kalahari Desert and the Mbendjele Pygmies of Central Africa, societies closely studied by anthropologists that have maintained continuous histories of foraging for tens of thousands of years. What they have found today are communities with egalitarian, pacific values, gender equality, and mass participation in decision-making. Deeply spiritual, they view the spirits in nature as guiding their lives and deserving of worship in return. Having chosen to separate themselves from post-foraging communities, these African foragers have preserved lifestyles and values that date back millennia. Their history and their present lives together refute the claims of imperial-minded Western scholars who denigrate early human societies as “savage” and warlike, using such claims to justify the murders and mayhem that European imperialism has been responsible for. That is also true for the African peoples who lived as foragers in Australia beginning about 55,000 years ago. Having mastered knowledge of the plants and animals on that continent, they created peaceful, sharing, egalitarian societies. But the Europeans who arrived among them in the late 1700s wrote them off as “primitive” because they did not farm, and because their generally small communities were focused on sharing and leisure rather than on accumulation of capital and building of monuments..
After analyzing the historical record and current status of foraging societies, Humans explores the history of agricultural societies. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, claims that the transition from foraging to agriculture resulted in a swift replacement of egalitarian, democratic, peaceful communities by socially stratified, authoritarian, warlike societies. Humans demonstrates the fallacy of that claim. In Africa both community and clan traditions of social organization persisted in the transition to agriculture. Indeed, right to the time when the European scramble for Africa began in the 1850s, the archaeological record demonstrates that most of southern and western Africa and parts of eastern Africa remained model societies of egalitarian decision-making and distribution of wealth.
Though imperial masters made every effort to destroy existing institutions and to create tribal enmities to make rule by foreigners easier to impose, many traditional institutions survived and have reasserted themselves in the post-colonial period in opposition to neo-colonial forms of governance and economic organization. In Burkina Faso and Mali, for example, village-level assemblies resist control by central governments while dispersed kinship communities also protect the interests of members when difficulties arise. The Igbo of Nigeria, the Zanaki of Tanzania, and the people of Ghana, among others, have also preserved egalitarian power relations within decentralized communities that often clash with efforts by national governments organized on European models to insist upon centralized decision-making.
The Indigenous peoples of Northern Africa faced earlier challenges from migrants from the Fertile Crescent of Asia and were unable to prevent the creation of empires such as Egypt. But the Nuer of Sudan, semi-nomadic pastoralists, while uniting behind chiefs to provide a uniting force for increasing populations, balanced the chiefs’ powers with popular control of kinship-based assemblies.
Both the slave trade and the scramble for Africa scarred African peoples. Humans describes the horrors of both but attempts to give as much coverage to the resistance of African peoples both in Africa and in enslavement abroad. The Zulu defense of their kingdom against a British invasion, slave revolts on the coast of Guinea, the establishment for several decades of Laminyah as a heavily-fortified community for formerly enslaved people in Guinea, and the many slave revolts in the American South and West Indies, including the liberation of Haiti in 1791 by formerly enslaved people are important parts of the “struggle for equality” that is the focus of Humans.
All too often, the same histories that treat European imperialism as beneficial for its victims, and that ignore the extent to which the exploitation of the labor of conquered peoples and the slaves stolen from their homelands built capitalist riches for European and colonial elites, downplay or dismiss the role of enslaved people in freeing themselves. Abraham Lincoln, who led a party that accepted slavery but, because of policy differences between Northern capitalists and Southern slave plantation owners, wanted to prevent the expansion of slavery to new states, is treated as the slayer of slavery in America. That removes from the historical stage the African American revolutionaries who were the leading fighters against the right of anyone to own another person, including the followers of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, and Underground Railroad leaders such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. If the slavers feared Lincoln, who guaranteed them in the 1860 election that made him president the right to keep slavery in their states, it was because his opposition to slavery being expanded beyond their region gave further encouragement to African Americans determined to shut down “the peculiar institution.”
Similarly, Africans took advantage of the colonial powers reducing their military presence on the continent during World War I to focus on battles inside Europe to attempt to overthrow British, French, and Portuguese colonialism. In Burkina-Faso, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, and Mozambique, the colonialists faced organized efforts to overthrow their rule or at least to force the occupiers to cede basic human rights to Indigenous people. While brutal retaliation by the colonial regimes prevented any immediate successes, the battles for liberation resumed during and after World War II, and the Western occupiers were forced to retreat.
The United States, replacing the European powers as the guarantor of Western control, used military intervention to topple nationalist governments and put in place comprador regimes to continue the exploitation of the African continent. Where that approach appeared logistically too difficult, manipulation by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank served a similar purpose. The efforts of nationalists to restore earlier egalitarian traditions and to save their countries from a neocolonial fate are my focus in Humans. Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana were both early post-independence socialist leaders overthrown with American arms by American puppets.
By contrast, Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania from 1961 to 1985, was unhindered for a time in his efforts to recreate pre-colonial cooperative villages that combined self-government and kinship ties with other communities. Central government subsidies allowed each village to offer free health services and primary education. A three-year Ugandan war against Tanzania from 1976 to 1979, however, left the country in ruins and requiring aid from the IMF. IMF demands included that Tanzania impose steep fees for health and education and grant the right of foreign investors to purchase land and establish mines at will. What was developing as an egalitarian country that was re-establishing its pre-colonial norms became just another neo-colonial nation.
Similarly, in the Maghreb in the 1970s, state-owned companies ensured that healthcare, public transit, and utilities were affordable while government subsidies for housing and education made both the right of citizens. But drought in the 1980s led to dependence on the IMF which insisted that all commodity subsidies had to disappear. This led to popular riots and political repression.
The liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies and in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia faced similar onslaughts. Movements influenced by both Marxism and traditionalist African thinking as they fought against colonial rule found themselves pulled into the American imperial orbit once independence had been won. In Angola and Mozambique, the Americans supported genocidal opponents of the liberation movements that had freed these countries from centuries of Portuguese rule until the liberation movements agreed to American neo-colonial trade and investment rules. In South Africa, the African National Congress agreed to implement a neo-liberal economics program to avoid a similar fate at the hands of the United States. The negative impacts of neo-liberalism in the period after 1980 were experienced across Africa and indeed globally. But that neo-colonial turn should not be allowed to erase the efforts that had been made earlier across much of Africa to recreate egalitarian traditions.
While traditional global histories do mention the civil rights movement in the United States, they tend to downplay that movement’s demands for economic rights for African Americans, demands that dated back to the Reconstruction period when African American leaders called for plantation lands to be divided up among the former slaves whose work had made them productive. Martin Luther King’s support of Black trade unionism and the Black Panther breakfast programs for children and healthcare for all, among other radical movements, are generally subordinated in global histories to the successful calls for voting rights for African Americans and an end to formal racial segregation. The FBI effort to eliminate the Panthers by all means, including murdering leaders in shoot-outs, is rarely mentioned. Nor is the imposition of a prison-industrial complex in which a highly disproportionate number of African American men were incarcerated and police brutality reigned over Black communities.
There are histories of African Americans and of Africa that cover the themes that Humans deals with, and in more detail but Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality places the history of people of African ancestry in the context of a broad global people’s history of efforts to create more socially just societies and demonstrates that African societies both of the foraging and agricultural periods offer significant models of social organization to those today seeking to establish more egalitarian and democratic societies.
