4 - Unity and Variation

Summary

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THIS RUSTIC CIVILISATION OR GROUP OF civilisations may be regarded as a large achievement in the annals of mankind. But it is one which has had scant attention from the outside world. By contrast, many writers have celebrated the ancient Greeks for the ways in which they overcame an utter lack of precedent’, devising and codifying laws ‘constitutional, civil, sacral and criminal’ with no one to guide or help them—not even, we are told, in the midst of that geophysically so small and helpful Mediterranean world —until they produced what Finley has called a ‘situation of compulsive originality’. Yet even while admiring the ancient Greeks, one may perhaps still wonder how far their lack of precedent’ really existed in the wake of the high civilisations of antiquity which preceded them. Didn't Herodotus, after all, tell us that the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt?

Without suggesting that the achievements of the ancient Africans were ‘the same’ as those of the Greeks, it may be reasonable to think that they were in one great aspect superior. They really did evolve much out of little, or out of nothing at all. If one should praise ‘the Greek spirit’ as splendidly creative and inventive, one may perhaps express some admiration for an ‘African spirit’ which was far less favourably placed for the elaboration of the arts of life, but none the less made this continent supply the needs of man. Where, after all, lay the precedent for the social and ideological structures built by the Africans, so various and resilient, so intricately held together, so much a skilful interweaving of the possible and the desirable? Where did these systems draw their sap and vigour except from populations who evolved them out of their own creativeness? Even allowing for the distant precedents of Egypt, the peoples who settled Africa had surely less to go upon than the ancestors of Pericles. The balance needs adjusting here.

How great was the African isolation? The evidence that we have, still fragmentary and tentative, points insistently to some kind of 'common fund’ of long ago. Peoples separated by vast distances have similar ideas which suggest the same Stone Age source. Creation legends offer a good example.