Page 128 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

africa 13

Advice to Persons About to Write History—
Don’t. • Lord Acton (1834–1902)

Schlegel, A., & Barry, H., III. (1991). Adolescence: An anthropological centric argument that the term is actually ancient Egypt-
inquiry. New York: Free Press. ian in origin, from Af-Rui-Ka, meaning “place of begin-
Worthman, C. (1999). Evolutionary perspectives on the onset of puberty.
In W.Trevathan, E. O. Smith, & J. McKenna (Eds.), Evolutionary med- nings.” Whatever the origins of the term, by the fifteenth
icine (pp. 135–164). New York: Oxford University Press. century Africa was winning out against competing terms
such as Ethiopia and Libya to become the common iden-
tifier for the continent. If one looks at maps of Africa pro-
duced during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries,
Africa once can see Africa increasingly come to dominate as the
name of the continent. The controversy over the land-
frica has played a number of often contradictory mass’s name serves as foreshadowing for the deeper
Aroles in the writing of world history. Indeed, perhaps conflicts over its meaning and relevance in world history.
no single world region has played so contentious a role
in the field. Africa has been derided by some scholars as Early Conceptions
irrelevant to world history. Conversely, others have of Africa
argued that Africa lies at the very center of human history. The field of history as we know it today is largely a West-
What could possibly account for such utterly incompat- ern European creation. It should be no surprise, then,
ible perspectives? The answer to the question is itself his- that the earliest attempts at writing histories of the world
torical. Over the past several hundred years, the history
of Africa has been viewed through a variety of lenses, and
these lenses have greatly influenced the way the history
of Africa has been understood. Similarly, as the range of
academic thinking has expanded and diversified in recent
years, so have the number of lenses for understanding
Africa. Rather than seeing the various contradictory
notions of Africa as a failing of history, however, it might
be more useful to look at the situation as instructive. By
examining the great variety of ways in which Africa has
been understood in the past few hundred years, we gain
a remarkable insight into not only the complex part of
the world known as Africa, but also into the growth and
development of the field of world history itself.

Origins of the Name Africa
The very origin of the name Africa is contentious. The
most common scholarly explanation is that it comes from
the Roman Africa terra, or “land of the Afri” in reference
to a Berber-speaking society that once lived in what is
nowTunisia. One alternative explanation is that it comes
from the Latin aprica (sunny) or the Phoenician term afar
(dust). An Arabic term, Ifriqiya, is often assumed to This early-twentieth-century book shows the
come from the Roman, though some argue that the vastness of Africa by superimposing four
Latin term came from the Arabic. There is also an Afro- other regions on its map.