The Human Story Begins in Africa
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: The Human Story Begins in Africa
This week’s focus: Racial Literacy 101, or facts we should know about race or culture, but likely weren’t taught.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,000 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
The Why For This Week’s Topic
Africa is the birthplace of humanity, it’s where our collective human story begins.
And yet, for many students, especially in the United States, their introduction to Africa is often taught through the lens of chattel slavery.
This perspective may reinforce a single story — one that overlooks rich chapters of world history, including a shared history that all of us can connect to, which dates back 150,000 years and beyond.
Learning about Africa — as both a place of common origin, and as a vast, diverse continent — can create a much-needed, humanizing lens for children across racial, ethnic, or cultural identity.
The Need for an Expansive Shift
Africa is overlooked in school curriculum, as are other continents and regions.
A report by Johns Hopkins School of Education states, “There is insufficient attention paid to Central American, South American, African, and Asian history.”
An Edutopia article titled, “Teaching African History and Cultures Across the Curriculum,” also speaks to the continent’s erasure: “Africa is much more than pyramids, slavery, and colonialism, and incorporating deeper study of the continent has many benefits for students.”
Rather than a deficit lens or narrative, we can approach the teaching of this colossal continent with an expansive lens.
Africa is Immense
Africa is a sizable continent, with striking, varied geographical features that have — like other continents and regions across Earth — changed over time.
At nearly 12 million square miles, Africa is the second largest and second most-populous continent (Asia is the first).
In the text, The Webs of Human Kind: A World History, McNeill writes, “Africa accounts for one-fifth of the world’s land area. It is 4,000 miles from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean Sea, and almost as far from the coast of Senegal to Somalia’s. Africa stands astride the equator: most of it lies within the tropics, and none of it extends further than 37 degrees north or south. So except at altitude, it is usually warm or hot. The great ice sheets of the last ice age never touched Africa.”
Dramatic geographical changes have occurred. In the past century, the Sahara desert has expanded by about 10%. Scientists have pointed to human-made climate change, as well as naturally occurring climate patterns as contributors to this expansion. While the desert has expanded in the last century, scientific evidence suggests that as recently as 6,000 years ago, the Sahara desert was actually covered in grassland, and was likely a tropical, “rainy place.”
According to a Texas A&M study, “the world’s weather patterns abruptly transformed the vegetated region [of the Sahara] into some of the driest land on Earth.”
Over time, as geography dramatically transformed, it would also change people’s access to food and other ecological resources, greatly impacting generations to come — as, if they stayed in the region, people who once lived in a tropical climate would have to evolve into people who learned to live in the largest hot desert on Earth.
Though Africa is immense, various mapping projections have reduced the size of Africa.
For example, the Mercator Projection Maps, which became the standard map projection for navigation in the 1500s onward, “distorts the size of geographical objects far from the equator and conveys a distorted perception of the overall geometry of the planet.” It was a helpful map for navigation, but perhaps not for cultural neutrality or visual equity.
This GIF, or moving image illustrates this distortion, as the mercator projection maps exaggerate some land masses, such as those located in the Northern Hemisphere. For example, it creates the illusion that North America is similar in size or even larger than Africa, when the reality is, as noted in Scientific American, “Africa is bigger than China, India, the contiguous U.S. and most of Europe combined.”
Africa is Diverse
Not only is Africa an incredibly large, geographically complex continent, it is impressively diverse.
Since anatomically modern humans originate in Africa, and populations of humans evolved across varied geographic environments, the continent is home to the greatest genetic diversity on the planet.
A study published in the National Library of Medicine states: “Africa is where modern humans evolved and is the starting place for the global expansion of our species. African populations also have the highest levels of genetic and phenotypic variation among all humans.”
Additionally, Africa is regularly considered the most linguistically diverse continent in the world. While some estimates suggest Africa is home to 1,000-2,000 languages, and others estimate about 3,000 languages are spoken across the continent, it is generally accepted that 1 out of 3 of the world’s languages lives in Africa. According to Harvard’s African Language Program, there are “75 languages in Africa which have more than one million speakers.”
Africa is the Birthplace of Cultural & Technological Innovation
Highlighting the immensity and diversity of Africa may offer a needed paradigm shift, especially for those who didn’t learn about the deep history of Africa — the continent with the longest timeline for human history.
If Africa is where our human story begins, it’s also where human art, science, and culture begin. Over time, it would be home to numerous ancient kingdoms and empires.
Throughout the month, we’ll continue to examine Africa for its complexity, including learning more about Mitochondrial Eve, the common ancestor all of us are widely believed to share. We’ll review ways to bring nuanced discussions about skin color and identity into the classroom for children. And we’ll unearth an archaeological site in Africa that provides evidence for early human science and art — which shifts the common timelines for art history by tens of thousands of years.
As we highlight the history of Africa, we’ll also highlight its future, as Africa is home to the fastest growing population, and will likely be home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Call to Action
What did you learn about Africa in your own elementary or secondary education? Is there a particular question or idea that you’d like to share? Please contact us.
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