West Africa as a Cultural Hearth
West Africa as a Cultural Hearth
Centers of Innovation. During the Neolithic and post-Neolithic periods, places that scholars now call “cultural hearths” developed in various parts of the world. They were centers of innovation in areas such as food production, irrigation, the man-made environment, government, and religion. In effect, a cultural hearth was a regional “cradle of civilization,” where distinct cultural traits, elements, and values were developed and shared. Cultural hearths greatly influenced surrounding regions; the closer an area was to the hearth the stronger the influence. All cultural hearths were urban, relative to the population density in the rest of their specific environments. They were situated close to rivers or lakes that flooded annually, and they used systematic agriculture and irrigation to produce surplus food supplies for a predominantly sedentary population. In turn, each had to adopt residential patterns and organized behavior to protect crops from animal and insect predators.
The Rise of Agriculture. All developed distinctive social stratifications based on a division of labor tailored to the material circumstances of their environments, and all developed rituals, rites, and sometimes multilayered religious processes associated with the different cycles of food production. All transformed their natural environments to build permanent dwellings— generally in mud, stone, or brick and mortar—and public structures. All developed managerial procedures to exploit their natural resources, and all eventually learned to use tools and weapons, either by making them—usually from bronze or iron or a combination of the two—or through developing strong trade relations with peoples who worked metals. All these cultures
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represented the triumph of agriculturalists over nomadic hunter-gatherers.
West Africa. In West Africa the basins of the Niger and Senegal Rivers and Lake Chad—along with smaller waterways such as the Faleme, Benue, and Volta Rivers—allowed the development of cultural hearths. The migration of various peoples into these regions, before and during the period 500-1590, led to the urban development of West African kingdoms and empires and the extensive utilization and spread of metallurgy. In turn, the clan-based skills of smelting and smithing iron and gold required persistent deforestation and repeated population adjustments.
Other Cultural Hearths. The valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the Near East, the Nile in northeastern Africa, the Indus River in South Asia, the Huang He (Yellow River) and Yangtze in China, and the major rivers of Europe were also cultural hearths, which developed in parallel fashion, beginning with innovations in agriculture and continuing into state building, technical innovations, man-made alterations of the environment, warfare among competing states, and migrations sparked by political and religious conflicts as well as depletion of resources.
Sources
Nehemia Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” in History of West Africa, edited by J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, second edition, volume 1 (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 114-151.
Akin L. Mabogunje, “Historical Geography: Economic Aspects,” in Methodology and African Prehistory, edited by J. Ki-Zerbo, volume 1 of General History of Africa (London: Heinemann / Berkeley: University of California Press / Paris: UNESCO, 1981), pp. 333-347.
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