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Africa: West Africa
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Cultivation of crops in West Africa is theorized to have originated around the headwaters of the Niger River. Millet seems to have been the first important crop, and may have been eaten in a porridge. The techniques developed for crop cultivation of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices were indigenous to Africa. The Diola of Guinea-Bissau, for example, transformed most of the mangrove swamps lining a number of river estuaries into a network of paddy fields. Their techniques of dyking, desalinating, ridging, and transplanting antedate all European influence. The Yoruba and Bini and other Nigerian societies have lived in settled communities on the same sites for several hundred years, evolving agricultural systems that allow continuous cultivation of their soils without significant or permanent loss of fertility.
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According to the ancient Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85–165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge.
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Philippe Diaz’s documentary “The Empire in Africa” opens in NYC, Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin theaters this Friday. It is not to be missed. Focused on the bloody civil war in Sierra Leone, it is the perfect rejoinder to those who believe that the West has some kind of obligation to provide law and order through a “humanitarian” military intervention of the sort that NY Timesman Nicholas Kristof contributor calls for in Darfur or that Harvard professor Samantha Powers called for in Rwanda. Using interviews with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group widely portrayed as the Sierra Leone equivalent of the Janjaweed in Darfur, as well as supporters of military intervention against it, Diaz uncovers a rescue mission much more about rescuing diamond mining profits than lives. (Keep reading…)
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As host for centuries to fortune hunters, colonialist regimes, and migrations from Europe and other countries, West Africa has been perceived as the recipient, not the provider, of cuisine and culture. Even as French and other foreign languages began to blend with those native to the continent, thereby changing the names of certain dishes, and as minor changes in ingredients were made in those dishes (by way of foreign influence), West African cuisine remained a significant cultural force.
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By 3000 BC agriculture arose independently in both the tropical portions of West Africa, where African yams and oil palms were domesticated, and in Ethiopia, where coffee and teff became domesticated. No animals were independently domesticated in these regions, although domestication did spread there from the Sahel and Nile regions.[18] Agricultural crops were ... adopted from other regions around this time as pearl millet, cowpea, groundnut, cotton, watermelon and bottle gourds began to be grown agriculturally in both West Africa and the Sahel Region while finger millet, peas, lentil and flax took hold in Ethiopia.[19]
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Since 1950 nearly 75% of tropical forests in west Africa are gone and Nigeria, Kenya, Burundi, Cote D'Ivoire and Madagascar -- lost more than 90% of their original forest. IPS news Apr 20 1999
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