Africa Is Not More Savage Than Europe

In much of Africa, nature has defined African people struggle, challenges and civilize the land. The history of Africans is a record of accomplishments achieved in isolation against tremendous odds. These great records of achievements (which what these study is about) can only be better understood only against the background the physical environment of Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa is immense, 3.500 miles from north to south and 2, 000 miles from east to west at its narrow, southern end. Vast though the continent of Africa it is, very little of it is hospitable to humans: The landscape has variety - wide grasslands, tall large mountains, broad rivers, deep forests. The grasslands are not lush prairies, but tropical savannas. Scorched and baked by six months of relentless sun, then leached by six months of heavy rains, their topsoil is soon stripped of its nutrients, and when grown only yield crops.

The broad rivers of Africa move zig zag from hundreds of miles, then suddenly crash in tremendous falls that seem to split the earth wide open. Few of them offer a direct and easy route from point to point.

The Drankesberg Mountains in southern Africa stretch 200 kilometers wide where forests are dense and dark where it rains up to eight feet a year, and a person can wander and be lost for days with only fleeting glimpses of the sun.

And there are deadly discouragements-

Much of the wide middle region of the continent has been infested since earliest times by the tsetse fly, a carrier of sleeping sickness among people and a comparable fever among their cattle. Riverbanks and plains alike are plagued by the malaria-carrying mosquito. And let us not forget that there is the deadly yellow fever.

Yet Africans overcame these obstacles. They conquered and peopled their inhospitable land, and carried their life and culture from phase to phase in social settlements. They developed methods for growing crops and raising cattle; they learned how to extract metals from the earth and refine and use them. Armed with iron spears, they pressed through the trackless forests out into the hills and game-filled plains. They forged new ways of making a living and of living together, shifting back and forth across horrible terrain, colliding and mingling with each other, then moving off to form new groups.

This is Africa that Arabs Muslims wrote about in the 9th and 10th centuries, and what Europeans began to see for themselves in the latter half of the 15th century. They found prosperous self contained well organized communities comprising of merchants, artisans, laborers and clerks, linked to each by a carefully well ordered trade. Their pleasures were the familiar ones cherished by all people of the world: feasting and family gatherings. Africans were in many ways no more savage than Europe at those times when Europe was involved in a savaged 100 year war and the spiritual sainted woman by the name of Joan of Arc was savagely mercilessly butchered and burnt to death.