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In Africa there are the oldest traces of human activity.
The continent has housed many peoples who over time have
merged and split up, expanded and wiped out, and some
ethnic groups are during the 1900's. arising from the
administrative measures of the European colonial powers.
Our knowledge of the history of Africa is based on a
combination of written sources, oral traditions and
archaeological, linguistic and ethnological analyzes.
In Africa, man can be traced further back in time than
anywhere else on Earth. From the Rift Valley in East
Africa and from limestone caves in South Africa,
numerous finds of skeletal parts come from a now extinct
human species, Australopithecus species, which lived for
between 4 and 1 million. years ago. The most famous
Australopithecus find is the skeleton of a slender
female, Lucy, from Hadar, Ethiopia. However, there is no
evidence that she and her relatives used tools.
Older Paleolithic (Approximately 2 million to
120,000 years ago)
Between 2 and 1.8 million. years ago lived the
species Homo habilis, which is considered the ancestor
of man (see human), and whose remains have been found at
the Koobi Forums in Kenya and the Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania along with primitive stone tools, pebble tools.
Finds of these oldest tools, the so-called Oldowan
culture, are also known from Ethiopia, from the Omodalen
in the south and Hadar in the north.
The oldest finds of hand wedges are also from Olduvai
and Koobi Fora in East Africa and are 1.5 million. years
old. They belong to the acheulene culture that spread
across most of Africa. The older stages are linked to
the species Homo erectus, the younger to archaic or
early sapiens types. Settlements were found by the lakes
and along the great rivers Vaal, Zambezi and the Upper
Nile. In periods of humid climate in the Sahara,
elephants and wild oxen have been hunted in an
environment that had the character of a savannah. From
the coast of Casablanca in Morocco, settlements and
bones of Homo erectus are known in caves from the middle
and younger acheules, for example by Sidi Abd al-Rahman.
Similar finds are known from Ternifine in Algeria. Visit
Countryaah for detailed information about East
Africa, West Africa, Central Africa and Southern Africa.
Middle and Late Paleolithic (approximately
120,000-10,000 years ago)
From the beginning of this period, a more developed
set of tools appears, with slices of prepared blocks in
so-called levallois technique, small hand wedges and
triangular tips, which characterize the moustéri in
Europe and Asia. Traces of settlement include found in
caves at the mouth of the Klasies River in South Africa,
where seafood was fished, collected and wild bulls and
antelopes hunted. One of the earliest finds of Homo
sapiens known at all comes from here. During the
inter-Paleolithic period, markedly different tool
cultures developed. There was no single-stranded
development that makes it possible to define a clear
transition from the Middle to the Late Paleolithic in
Africa. Tips made in micro-splitting technique,
microliters, known from Europe in the Mesolithic after
9500 BC, occurs in Africa earlier than in other
continents. At the mouth of the Klasies River and in the
Border Cave in South Africa, microliters have been found
in layers that are at least 38,000 years old. Elsewhere,
the older tradition of making tools continued, for
example in the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia, where one also
finds the oldest rock art in Africa with an age of
approximately 27,500 years.
After a period of dry climate, the Sahara was
repopulated for approximately 100,000 years ago by a
population that used tools of the moustéri type.
Gradually, a special tool tradition was created: the
Atéria, which was especially characterized by slender,
finely chopped tips with shaft tongues.
Until for approximately 44,000 years ago, in
southwestern Egypt, gazelles could be hunted on the
savannah. But during the most severe period of the last
ice age, between 38,000 and 13,000 years ago, the Sahara
dried up again, and the glacier ice covered the highest
of the Atlas Mountains.
Oldest food production
In Eastern Sahara, 19000-16000 years ago, there were
various approaches to the collection of wild grasses and
grains as well as selective hunting and perhaps
beginning taming of animals. The oldest millstones are
approximately 16,000 years old. Collection of wild
barley may have taken place for approximately 12,000
years ago, but it did not lead at that time, as in West
Asia, to the development of permanent farming
communities. On the other hand, you look for
approximately 9500 BC settlements both along the Nile,
on Lake Turkana in East Africa and along the rivers of
the Sahara, where the dominant occupation was fishing
and hunting. The humid climate at the beginning of the
current warming season may have created a wealth of
natural resources that made it possible to live as
resident hunters, fishermen and gatherers. Pottery
production began in the Sahara 7500-6500 BC. and at
Khartoum approximately 6000 BC In Egypt, pottery first
appears approximately 4500 BC
Neolithic
From approximately 7000 BC emerged in Eastern Sahara
the first permanent agricultural communities, whose
population subsisted on millet, barley and dates and
kept sheep and goats. This peasant culture is believed
to have originated locally in contrast to later
communities in the Nile Valley, whose knowledge of
agriculture and cattle breeding may have originated in
West Asia. In the central Sahara there is evidence of
cattle farming from approximately 5000 BC Images of
cattle as well as hunting scenes have been retained in
numerous rock paintings.
In the period 5000-3000 BC. There were agricultural
cultures in West Africa where it is believed that the
cultivation of African rice and yam root may have begun.
Sustained settlement in northeastern Nigeria, Chad and
Cameroon led to the formation of urban mounds.
In East Africa, a resident population of cattle
breeders has existed from approximately 3000 BC and
until less than 1000 years ago. Dehydration - which is
still taking place - then forced the population to live
as nomads.
Centralization
Along the lower Nile were found from approximately
5000 BC a people who grew wheat, barley and flax, and
who kept cattle, sheep, goats and donkeys. In al-Fayyum
and in the Nile Delta, settlements with small oval
houses have been found. During the pre-dynastic period
in Egypt, until approximately 3100 BC, centers developed
along the Nile with increasing occupational
specialization and social division, forming the basis
for the emergence of Egyptian civilization.
Well-organized farming communities existed from
approximately 4000 BC along the Upper Nile in Sudan, for
example at Kadero, where the inhabited area covered four
hectares. Finds from Nubian burial sites from the same
period testify to prosperity and connection with the
northern regions along the lower Nile, from which
objects of flint and copper originate. In Sudanese Nubia,
approximately 1700 BC a significant center in Kerma,
whose rulers allowed themselves to be buried in giant
burial mounds up to 80 m in diameter. Theater
Describing the common features of an entire continent's theater is an
approximation, and in order for this to be possible, it must be clarified that
this is exclusively African theater south of the Sahara, as the
Muslim-influenced Arab performing traditions from the areas north for the Sahara
is markedly different. Closer descriptions of the distinctive features of the
different regions can be seen in the articles on theater in resp. West
Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa.
The traditional starting point for an African conception of the concept of
performance can be understood from the East African Swahili term ngoma,
which is the collective concept from which music, song and dance are
understood. In addition, a traditional African concept of performance is also
always associated with a greater or lesser degree of audience
participation; either in the form of the audience simply participating in the
session being played out or of the audience being involved as an active debating
forum. The foundation of the African musical accompaniment dance drama is the
ritual, the most important of which are tied to the great transitions of
life; birth, initiation and death. Because the African philosophy of life and
religion are tied to a cyclical principle, in which the ancestors and the unborn
still play as important a role as the living ones, it is important to constantly
relate publicly to these bodies. In many of these dance dramas, it is simply
ancestral manifestations, who, as masked dancers, appear and speak and thereby
act as a mouthpiece and moral guide for the participants. The drums, the dance
circle and the masking are the most important parts of this traditional starting
point for an African theater.
The African theater is thus in its basic form instructive and moral. Of
course, the quality of the workmanship matters a lot, but it is the content
before the form that counts. This has meant that an actual avant-garde theater
is rarely found on the continent. It has also meant that it has been relatively
easy for African playwrights to incorporate Western literary forms into the
traditional template.
However, modernization, Westernization, colonial times, independence and
globalization have shaken this foundation and led to the disappearance of many
traditional forms and the emergence of new ones in the cultural encounters that
have taken place. An actual conservative attitude is difficult to find in
today's Africa, where most active theater people after independence probably
work on maintaining the old traditions in the few existing theater schools, but
equally concentrate on the work with the new theater forms that come out of the
encounters with Western culture. There is little developed professional and
commercial theater, as all sorts of interest groups have always been interested
in having propaganda theater produced on a commission basis. That's why large
sections of the African audience are used to theater being free - and theater
people are used to being paid for anything other than ticket revenue. There are
not many actual theater schools. On the other hand, song, dance and music are an
active part of African everyday life, and the political/moral/pedagogical
amateur theater is widespread. Most African theorists in the field are
simultaneously performing artists and therefore work up semi-professional
ensembles at educational institutions.
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