Africa is home to some of the most extreme climates on earth

8/7/2019 Africa is home to some of the most extreme climates on earth

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Bailey Kennedy

November 1, 2010

Essay Topic #3

Environment and African Agency

Africa is home to some of the most extreme climates on earth, with steamy rainforests and

broiling deserts and vast savannahs all serving as homes for various societies of people. With this in

mind, it would be disingenuous to suggest that people s environment played no role in the types of

societies which they were able to form. At the same time, I do not believe that acknowledging this role

in any way has to diminish African agency; reacting to one s environment is always a rational decision.

The key word is, of course, decision; simply because they were reacting to something did not mean that

Africans did not have more than one option, or that they did not seek out what seemed to be the most

beneficial from amongst these options.

In some cases, in fact, humans shaped the environment which in turn shaped them. One of the

most interesting examples of this may have occurred in West Africa, where scientists speculate that

humans are responsible for creating the patches of rainforest scattered on the savannah. i This seems

less radical when one considers that people in Africa had been adapting plants since time immemorial.

This is vividly illustrated by the banana, a fruit originally native to Asia, but which found a comfortable

home in Africa. ii Arriving in several stages beginning at least 3,000 years ago, the banana was

transformed into hundreds of different varieties completely alien to the American notion of banana, and

soon became a staple crop. While historians have not yet proposed a truly convincing candidate for

carrying out this process, it seems obvious that human action must have been involved. iii Furthermore,

once it had found its home on the continent, African societies were able to utilize the banana to their


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own ends, as when the Bantu used the banana to increase their crop production and population, and,

ultimately, were able to inhabit large swaths of the continent. iv

The amount of rainfall a region receives, on the other hand, is more or less impervious to human

interference. This is what accounts for the overwhelming significance of the ITZC, or rain belt. v The rain

belt determines the amount of rain a region gets and its distribution over the course of a year, and can

be highly unpredictable. This in turn limits the crops that can be grown, especially in northern Africa. vi

However, rather than precluding African agency, this simply means that Africans living in these dry

regions have to think of more ingenious solutions to confront their climate. In a New York Times article

from September 6, John Wilford Noble described the discovery of an oasis in the desert with massive

silos of grain, presumably grown by the inhabitants of the settlement. The existence of such large scale

societies in such hostile environments is a testament to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of Africans,

and should not be used to diminish their agency.

Not all interactions between Africans and their environment were so fortuitous. One of the most

difficult issues for many Africans has always been disease, which have thrived in a tropical environment.

Sleeping sickness, spread by the tse-tse fly, has had a profound impact on the viability of keeping

livestock, and its spread is always the harbinger of immense economic destruction. vii However, this does

not mean that Africans cannot develop societies; it simply means that they must seek out profitable

locations to do so. In fact, some scholars have linked the rise and fall of Great Zimbabwe with the spread

of the tse-tse fly. viii In this case, we should recognize the agency that Africans took in seeking out and

building a city protected by the environment from sleeping sickness.

While these examples clearly illustrate that the environment was often a limiting factor in how

African society was developed, it is important to remember that no society ever develops completely

without constraints. Agency is built from reactions to those constraints, and from attempts to overcome


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them. Both of these were present to an admirable degree in African society; thus, discussing the

environment in which these societies were shaped should not be looked upon as removing agency.

i Erik Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds, Af rica in World History , (New Jersey: Pearson, 2008), 19.ii Gilbert, Af rica , 52.iii Gilbert, Af rica , 56.ivGilbert, Af rica , 57.v Gilbert, Af rica , 20.vi Gilbert, Af rica , 20.vii Gilbert, Af rica , 22.viii Jamie Monson, Lecture, October 20

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Africa is home to some of the most extreme climates on earth