Chapter 2 - Arms in Africa’s Antiquity

Summary

It is no easy task to assess warfare and military organisation in Africa’s antiquity. A serious lack of sources – documentary, material or oral – across much of the continent means that a comprehensive survey of processes and structures in the deep past is impossible; certainly, little is known about warfare across much of sub-Saharan Africa before the early centuries of the second millennium. However, it is possible to offer some speculative remarks about that vast region in the context of the spread of Bantu languages: The available evidence concerning economic development and socio-political change can be combined with intelligent guesswork to assess the military dimensions of this early period. More concrete reconstructions are possible further north, across the western savannah, where the first millennium CE witnessed a succession of dynamic and expansionist polities which depended on a combination of agricultural productivity, long-distance trade and armed force. Likewise, the range of sources for the Ethiopian Highlands and the upper Nile valley are comparatively rich and permit a closer examination of ancient African militarism. Of course, both western savannah and northeast riparian and highland polities were the products of their particular physical, climatic and demographic environments, and therefore the extent to which they can be used to speculate more broadly about the nature of early African warfare is limited. They do, however, demonstrate certain themes which are germane to other regions of the continent.