Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa

A few years ago I read John Womack Jr.?s ?Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? which struck me as being the ultimate book on the subject. While Vansina?s PATHS IN THE RAINFORESTS bears little similarity to the former book, it does resemble it in one way: it must change the way people look at its subject, it is an earth-shaking work in tropical African history. As an interested, but non-specialist reader, I found PATHS IN THE RAINFORESTS extremely hard going, though the writing is clear. The volume of unfamiliar names of peoples, rivers, and other geographical features is overwhelming, despite the many excellent maps provided. Vansina backs up his arguments about political evolution in rainforest Africa with an enormous array of facts, Bantu linguistic transformations, and difficult kinship terminologies. The system of using semantic innovations and transformations over centuries to ?excavate? knowledge about economic and political changes in tropical African societies is extremely impressive, but must have been incredibly hard to do. Except for serious students of history or African history, the volume will not appeal to many. However, if you are a reader of challenging books, rather than those which take the ?easy path?, then you will find this particular path through the rainforests both rewarding and eye-opening. After first contact with African cultures in the equatorial forest zone of central Africa, Westerners tended to regard them as 1) being cut from a single cloth, 2) unchanging. Albert Schweitzer?s view of Africans as sick, poor, primitive, and never-changing permeates Western thinking beyond academia. ?Tradition? meant that they had no history, but had lived the same way for thousands of years. As no written records existed, scholars tended to write central Africans off, saying that they were people ?without history?. Vansina shows, in a most scholarly way---mustering thousands of facts, using every possible technique except DNA research (which didn?t exist when he wrote)---that these presumptions are all products of ignorance and prejudice. New crops, new technologies, political and social innovations abounded. The first two chapters explore the rainforest environment and the original Bantu tradition, several millennia old. The following three chapters show how the tradition changed in separate regions of the equatorial forest region. The changes encompass an amazing variety of political innovation. Chapter Seven deals with the arrival of the Europeans on the Atlantic coast and the challenge that their slave trading and new material goods posed to the African societies of the time. The next chapter, most grim, describes the destruction of the African societies during the colonial period---wars conducted by colonial armies exterminated over half the population, while missionaries who scorned everything African tried to erase the culture of the survivors. The region?s suffering today stems from this history. The last