The work “The hoe and the spear. Africa before the Portuguese”, by the Brazilian historian Alberto da Costa e Silva, distinguished author in 2014 with the Camões Prize, is published, in two volumes, by the National Press (IN).
The work was published for the first time in 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, and traces the history of the African continent from prehistory and ends in 1500, when the Europeans already installed their factories there and carried out their trade, specifically in slaves.
Costa e Silva ends the work anticipating this confrontation between Africans and Europeans, in particular the Portuguese, the first to land on its shores.
“It will not be surprising, therefore, that the Congos, and perhaps other peoples before them, confused the bulky forms that approached their coasts and brought the Portuguese with the whales,” the author anticipates at the end of the work.
In the preface to the third Brazilian edition of the work, reproduced in the IN edition, the author affirms that he elaborated it without concessions to fashion theses and generous fantasies. But with enthusiasm for “a history that has been denied for so long, and in which many of the most important roots of who we are as a people are drawn”, in reference to the scientific evidence that indicates that Homo Sapiens arose in Africa around 195,000 years.
The work deals with what is conventionally called “Black Africa”, peoples and ethnic groups, agricultural techniques, navigation, religious and artistic expressions, extinct kingdoms, disappeared cities, customs and beliefs, languages and dialects.
This first volume begins with Australopithecus, remote ancestors of modern humans who would have lived in the forests and savannahs of Kenya, Ethiopia, and neighboring regions millions of years ago, and “the reader embarks on a journey spanning many centuries that will take him finding ancient cultures, recorded in works of architecture, ceramics, sculpture, painting, weaving and other artifacts, produced most of the time by anonymous authors and that today offer scattered clues about their existence”, says Brazilian journalist and writer Laurentino Gomes. in the cover note.
Some of these civilizations are well known, such as the Egyptian pharaohs, the brave Nubian warriors of the heights and the Ethiopian Jews, supposedly one of the twelve lost tribes in the African savannas and whose religious practice is summarized in the first books of the Old Testament. . Others are practically unknown, such as that of the artisans of the mysterious Nok sculptures, found on the edge of the Sahara desert, and that of the Yoruba, a nation settled on the outskirts of Ifé, present-day Nigeria, whose kings possessed magical powers. powers”, adds Laurentino Gomes, referring to dealing with “a journey impregnated with surprises at every turn of the page”.
The diplomat and historian Alberto da Costa e Silva, with an “attentive and inventive eye”, is “skilled in mastering the Portuguese language” and “constructs his narration in a precise style, sometimes delicate and poetic, but always full of authority and erudition, based on his long experience as a researcher”, writes Laurentino Gomes referring to Costa y SIlva’s experience as a diplomat, having been ambassador of Brasilia in the Republic of Benin and Nigeria, in addition to having visited 15 other countries.
Gomes does not deny praise for Costa e Silva who is “generous with the reader” and “writes in a didactic and easy to understand way”, and highlights the effort of his research, having resorted to “the most varied clues and sourcesappealed to radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods, genetics, paleontology and archaeology, glottochronology (branch of linguistics that seeks to study the temporal separation between two or more related languages), as well as precious accounts of travelers who traveled through Africa over many years. millennia”.
“Alberto da Costa e Silva’s research work helps to dismantle some myths that ignorance created about Africa. The former tends to interpret the African continent before the arrival of the Portuguese as an agglomeration of primitive tribes living in the Stone Age and in a state of permanent war. The reality is quite different. Since time immemorial, well-organized cultures have existed there, united by an extensive trade network for products as varied as salt, rice, cotton, textiles, herds, gold, bronze and iron”, Laurentino draws attention. Gomes.
In the current region of Brong-Ahafo, in the Republic of Ghana, archaeologists found, in 1975, remains of an iron foundry dating from the Christian era, contemporary to the Roman Empire, at its height.
Gold mining is also worth mentioning, since the 14th century, it was largely with African gold that Europe met its minting needs.
Another myth concerns slavery. Alberto da Costa e Silva shows that the marks of slavery were already present in African history long before the arrival of the Portuguese, in the 14th century.
“The author wields his vast knowledge against the politically correct trend of softening forms of slavery prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the fourteenth century or even denying them altogether. According to this current of thought, the Europeans would have been to blame for the rise of the abominable trafficking of human beings in Africa. undeniably, Starting in the 16th century, Europeans systematized and gave this trade the scale it reached in the following centuries.. It is estimated that about 10 million humans were captured and brought to the Americas in the mid-19th century. It was possibly the largest forced movement of people in all of human history. But that does not mean that it was up to the Europeans to invent captive labor on the continent”, emphasizes Laurentino Gomes.
In the year 2680 BC, Pharaoh Snofero of Egypt organized an expedition to Nubia, from which he brought back seven thousand slaves.
Gomes states that “after the arrival of Islam, between the years 800 and 1600, slave exports to the Middle East, through the Red Sea, amounted to 2.4 million captives.”
About his work, Costa e Silva wrote, in the preface of the first edition, reproduced in this edition of IN: “I hope this book is useful. I wrote it only with the thought and objective of providing the reader with a manual -simple, clear, direct, but emotionally interested- that would serve as an introduction to the knowledge of Africa. That is why this volume does not contain, if anything, a dozen of my ideas: it brings what I have learned from others. In it I collected and summarized many, many days of diligent reading.”
Source: Observadora
