Despite all I'd read about Africa, my first impressions upon being there were overwhelming. As I walked the streets of Windhoek, the capital of newly independent Namibia, I saw black Herero people and black Ovambo; I saw Nama, a group quite unlike the blacks in appearance; I saw whites, descendants of recent European immigrants; and outside Windhoek I saw the last of the formerly widespread Kalahari Bushmen struggling for survival. These people were no longer pictures in a textbook; they were living humans, right in front of me. But what most surprised me was a street sign on one of downtown Windhoek's main roads. It read GOERING STREET.
Surely, I thought, no country could be so dominated by unrepentant Nazis that it would name a street after Hermann Goering, the notorious head of the Luftwaffe. As it turned out, the street actually commemorates Hermann's father, Heinrich, founding Reichskommissar of the German colony of South-West Africa, which would later be renamed Namibia. But Heinrich is no less a problematic figure than his son: his legacy includes one of the most vicious attacks ever carried out by European colonists on Africans, Germany's 1904 War of Extermination against the Herero. Today, while events in neighboring South Africa command the world's attention, Namibia, too, struggles to deal with its colonial history and establish a multiracial society. Namibia illustrated for me how inseparable Africa's past is from its present.
Most Americans think of native Africans as black and of white Africans as recent intruders; and when they think of Africa's racial history they think of European colonialism and slave trading. But very different types of peoples occupied much of Africa until as recently as a few thousand years ago. Even before the arrival of white colonialists, the continent harbored five of what many consider to be the world's six major divisions of humanity, the so-called human races, three of which are native to Africa. To this day nearly 30 percent of the world's languages are spoken only in Africa. No other continent even approaches this human diversity, and no other continent can rival Africa in the complexity of its human past.
The diversity of Africa's peoples results from its diverse geography and long prehistory. Africa is the only continent to extend from the northern to the southern temperate zone; it encompasses some of the world's driest deserts, largest tropical rain forests, and highest equatorial mountains. Humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else: our remote ancestors originated there some 7 million years ago. With so much time, Africa's peoples have woven a complex, fascinating story of human interaction, a story that includes two of the most dramatic population movements of the past 5,000 years: the Bantu expansion and the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar. All those interactions are now tangled up in politics because the details of who arrived where before whom are shaping Africa today.
How did the five divisions of humanity in Africa get to be where they are today? Why did blacks come to be so widespread, instead of one or more of the four other groups whose existence Americans tend to forget? How can we ever hope to wrest the answers to these questions from Africa's past without written evidence of the sort that taught us about the spread of the Roman Empire?
