An Urban's Rural View

In preparation for a trip to Africa, which will take me away from this blog for 17 or 18 days, I've been reading John Reader's "Africa: A Biography of the Continent" -- and learning a lot about African agriculture.

Reader's powerful book was published the same year as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel -- 1997 -- and the two books, while focused on different parts of the world, share a theme, which I think of as environmental determinism. Both books argue that the differences that dictated how societies and economies in different parts of the world evolved over the millennia were mainly environmental, not cultural or genetic.

Reader is as impatient with racists who think Africans were genetically too primitive to modernize their agriculture as he is with dreamers who think Africans found a kind of Garden of Eden way of staying in harmony with nature.

Over the ages Africans, Reader says, have been like people everywhere. They've just had tougher conditions to cope with -- infertile soils in some parts of the continent, malaria and other diseases that limited cultivation in others, vicious weeds, an unpredictable climate.

And even when they could grow a crop, they had to worry about elephants eating it before it could be harvested. Because elephants dominated the landscape in the best areas for agriculture, agricultural evolution was discouraged.

In Africa, Reader argues, mere survival was a challenge owing to predators, parasites and disease. "The migrants who left the continent 100,000 years ago threw off the yoke," he writes. "That is why they had multiplied from just hundreds to over 300 million by AD 1500 while the population of Africa had risen from 1 million to only 47 million."

I'm hoping to see some of those predators while avoiding the parasites and disease over the next couple of weeks. I will check in with you again when I return.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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