Culture of Africa

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The Culture of Africa encompasses and includes all cultures which were ever in the continent of Africa.

The continent Africa was the birthplace of the hominin subfamily and the genus Homo, including eight species, of which only Homo sapiens survive. Human culture in Africa is as old as the human race, and includes Neolithic (10,000 BC) rock engravings, the glacial age petroglyphs (a carving or line drawing on rock, especially one made by prehistoric people) of early hunter-gatherers in the dry grasslands of North Africa, the Nomes of Egypt (3100 BC), and ancient Egypt.

[edit] One continent, several worlds

Africa is one continent with several worlds. The continent of Africa covers an area of around 30 million square kilometers, one-fifth of the land mass of the Earth, and has more than 50 countries. Its geographical features are diverse and range from tropical wet or rain forest, with rainfall of 250 to 380 centimeters to tropical dry areas. Mount Kilimanjaro (height 5895 meters) remains capped with snow all the year round, whereas the Sahara is the largest and the hottest desert on the earth. Africa has a diverse plant life ranging from scrub, savanna, desert shrub, and a variety of vegetation growing on mountains as well as in the tropical rain forests and deciduous forests.

Like the nature, 800 million people of Africa have evolved a cultural milieu which is a study in contrast and have several dimensions.

[edit] Tribes & ethnic groups

Africa is home to innumerable tribes, ethnic and social groups, some representing very large populations consisting of millions of people, others are smaller groups of a few thousand. All these tribes and groups have cultures which are different, but represent the mosaic of cultural diversity of Africa.

Such tribes and ethnic/social groups include Afar, Anlo Ewe, Amhara, Arabs, Ashanti, Bakongo, Bambara, Bemba, Berber, Bobo, Bushmen (San), Chewa, Dogon, Fang, Fon, Fulani, Igbo, Kikuyu (Gikuyu) , Maasai, Mandinka, Pygmies, Samburu, Senufo, Tuareg, Tutsi, Wolof, Yoruba, and Zulu.

[edit] Music & dance

Main article: Music of Africa

Indigenous musical and dance traditions of Africa are maintained by oral traditions and they are distinct from the music and dance styles of North Africa and Southern Africa. Arab influences are visible in North African music and dance and in Southern Africa western influences are apparent due to colonization.

Many African languages are tone languages, in which pitch level determines the meaning. This also finds expression in African musical melodies and rhythms. A variety of musical instruments are used, including drums (most widely used), bells, musical bow, lute, flute, and trumpet.

African dances are important mode of communication and dancers use gestures, masks, costumes, body painting and a number of visual devices. The basic movements are sometimes simple, emphasizing only the upper body or torso or the feet. Such movements are sometimes complex involving coordination of different body parts. The dances are sometimes performed solo or in small group of two or three people. Team dances are also performed with various formations, like linear, circular, serpentine and so on.

With urbanization and modernization, modern African dance and music exhibit influences assimilated from several other cultures.

[edit] Art & craft

Main article: African art

Africa has a rich tradition of arts and crafts. African arts and crafts find expression in a variety of woodcarvings, brass and leather art works. African arts and crafts also include sculpture, paintings, pottery, ceremonial and religious headgear and dress.

African culture has always placed emphasis on personal appearance and jewelry has remained an important personal accessory. Many pieces of such jewelry are made of cowry shells and similar materials. Similarly, masks are made with elaborate designs and are important part of African culture. Masks are used in various ceremonies depicting ancestors and spirits, mythological characters and deities.

In most of traditional art and craft of Africa, certain themes significant to African culture recur, including a couple, a woman with a child, a male with a weapon or animal, and an outsider or a stranger. Couples may represent ancestors, community founder, married couple or twins. The couple theme rarely exhibit intimacy of men and women. The mother with the child or children reveals intense desire of the African women to have children. The theme is also representative of mother earth and the people as her children. The man with the weapon or animal theme symbolizes honor and power. A stranger may be from some other tribe or someone from a different country, and relatively more distorted portrayal of the stranger indicates proportionately greater gap from the stranger.

Cyborgx2495 15:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Folklores & folktales

A proverb from Sierra Leone states: Proverbs are daughters of experience. Likewise, in essence, folktales and folklores are residue of human experience and a treasury of human values. Folktales provide a look at any cultures moral and customs. This also applies to African folklores and folktales. It is estimated that there are around a quarter of a million of African folktales[1].

Like all human cultures, Africans folktales and folktales represent a variety of social facets of African culture[2]. Like almost all civilizations and cultures, flood myths have been circulating in different parts of Africa. For example, according to a Pygmy myth, Chameleon hearing a strange noise in a tree cut open its trunk and water came out in a great flood that spread all over the earth. The first human couple emerged with the water. Similaraly, a mythological story from Côte d'Ivoire states that a charitable man gave away everything he had. The God Ouende rewarded him with riches, advised him to leave the area, and sent six months of rains to destroy his selfish neighbors.

[edit] Languages & literatures

Main article: African languages

The continent of Africa speaks hundreds of languages and if dialects spoken by various ethnic groups are also included, the number is much higher. All these languages and dialects do not have same importance: some are spoken by only few hundred persons, others are spoken by millions. Among the most prominent languages spoken are Arabic, Swahili and Hausa. Very few countries of Africa use any single language and for this reason several official languages coexist, African and European.

The language of Africa present a unity of character as well as diversity, as is manifest in all the dimensions of Africa. Four prominent language families of Africa are:

• Afro-Asiatic
• Nilo-Saharan
• Niger-Kordofanian
• Khoisan

An early center of literature was the "African Ink Road".

Map showing the distribution of African language families and some major African languages. Afro-Asiatic extends from the Sahel to Southwest Asia. Niger-Congo is divided to show the size of the Bantu sub-family.

By most estimates, Africa contains well over a thousand languages. There are four major language families native to Africa.

• The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout East Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia.
• The Nilo-Saharan language family consists of more than a hundred languages spoken by 30 million people. Nilo-Saharan languages are mainly spoken in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, and northern Tanzania.
• The Niger-Congo language family covers much of Sub-Saharan Africa and is probably the largest language family in the world in terms of different languages. A substantial number of them are the Bantu languages spoken in much of sub-Saharan Africa.
• The Khoisan languages number about 50 and are spoken in Southern Africa by approximately 120 000 people. Many of the Khoisan languages are endangered. The Khoi and San peoples are considered the original inhabitants of this part of Africa.

With a few notable exceptions in East Africa, nearly all African countries have adopted official languages that originated outside the continent and spread through colonialism or human migration. For example, in numerous countries English and French are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Malagasy are other examples of originally non-African languages that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres.

[edit] Philosophy

Main article: African philosophy

African philosophy is a disputed term, used in different ways by different philosophers. Although African philosophers spend their time doing work in many different areas, such as metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy, a great deal of the literature is taken up with a debate concerning the nature of African philosophy itself. Though this is often criticized (with some reason) as being sterile and self-absorbed, it can nevertheless provide useful insights into the nature of philosophy in general.

One of the most fundamental loci of disagreement concerns what exactly it is that the term ‘African’ qualifies: the content of the philosophy or the identities of the philosophers. On the former view, philosophy counts as African if it involves African themes (such as distinctively African notions of time, personhood, etc.) or uses methods that are distinctively African; on the latter view, African philosophy is any philosophy done by Africans (or sometimes, by people of African descent).

[edit] Religions

The traditional religions followed in Africa are grouped under the term animist, and presently followed by around 100 million Africans.

The Christian faith reached North Africa in the 1st century and spread to Sudan and Ethiopia by the 4th century. The faith still survives in Egypt, Eritrea, and Ethiopia as subsets of Oriental Orthodoxy. In the 15th century, the Christian faith was again reintroduced in tropical Africa and presently there are around 340 million Christians on the Continent of Africa.

Islam, the second most widely followed religion in Africa, had reached the continent in the 7th century from the Mediterranean coast. Over a period of time, Islam spread along the East Coast and the interior areas of West Africa. Today, followers of Islam are found in all parts of Africa and number around 285 million.

Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs, with Christianity and Islam being the most widespread. Approximately 46.3% of all Africans are Christians and another 40.5% are Muslims. Roughly 11.8 percent of Africans primarily follow indigenous African religions. A small number of Africans are Hindu, or have beliefs from the Judaic tradition, such as the Beta Israel and Lemba tribes. (figures calculated from [3])

The indigenous African religions tend to revolve around animism and ancestor worship. A common thread in traditional belief systems was the division of the spiritual world into "helpful" and "harmful". Helpful spirits are usually deemed to include ancestor spirits that help their descendants, and powerful spirits that protect entire communities from natural disaster or attacks from enemies; whereas harmful spirits include the souls of murdered victims who were buried without the proper funeral rites, and spirits used by hostile spirit mediums to cause illness among their enemies. While the effect of these early forms of worship continues to have a profound influence, belief systems have evolved as they interact with other religions.

The formation of the Old Kingdom of Egypt in the third millennium BCE marked the first known complex religious system on the continent. Around the ninth century BCE, Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) was founded by the Phoenicians, and went on to become a major cosmopolitan center where deities from neighboring Egypt, Rome and the Etruscan city-states were worshiped.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Church officially date from the fourth century, and are thus one of the first established Christian churches anywhere. At first, Christian Orthodoxy made gains in modern-day Sudan and other neighbouring regions. However, after the spread of Islam, growth was slow and restricted to the highlands.

Islam entered Africa as Muslims conquered North Africa between 640 and 710, beginning with Egypt. They established Mogadishu, Melinde, Mombasa, Kilwa, and Sofala, following the sea trade down the coast of East Africa, and diffusing through the Sahara desert into the interior of Africa -- following in particular the paths of Muslim traders. Muslims were also among the Asian peoples who later settled in British-ruled Africa.

Many Africans were converted to West European forms of Christianity during the colonial period. In the last decades of the twentieth century, various sects of Charismatic Christianity rapidly grew. A number of Roman Catholic African bishops were even mentioned as possible papal candidates in 2005. African Christians appear to be more socially conservative than their co-religionists in much of the industrialized world, which has quite recently led to tension within denominations such as the Anglican and Methodist Churches.

The African Initiated Churches have experienced significant growth in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

[edit] Festivals & celebrations

Africa is a continent of festivals and celebrations and they touch all dimensions of life. Festivals and celebrations mark birth and initiation, courtship and marriage, selection of tribal chiefs, harvest rites, beliefs and worships, and even death, spirit and ancestors.

[edit] Food & drink

Main article: African cuisine

Africa is a big continent and the food and drink of Africa reflect local influences, as also glimpses of colonial food traditions, including use of food products like peppers, peanuts and maize introduced by the colonizers. The African cuisine is a combination of traditional fruits and vegetables, milk and meat products. The African village diet is often milk, curds and whey. Exotic game and fish are gathered from Africa's vast area.

Traditional African cuisine is characterized by use of starch as a focus, accompanied by stew containing meat or vegetables, or both. Cassava and yams are the main root vegetables. Africans also use steamed greens with hot spices. Dishes of steamed or boiled green vegetables, peas, beans and cereals, starchy cassava, yams and sweet potatoes are widely consumed. In each African locality, there are numerous wild fruits and vegetables which are used as food. Watermelon, banana and plantain are some of the more familiar fruits.

Differences are also noticeable in eating and drinking habits across the continent of Africa. Thus, North Africa, along the Mediterranean from Morocco to Egypt has different food habits than Saharan Africans who consume subsistence diet. Nigeria and coastal parts of West Africa love chilies in food. Non-Muslim population of Africa also uses alcoholic beverages, which goes well with most African cuisine. The most familiar alcoholic drink in the interior Africa is the Ethiopian honey wine called Tej.

Cooking techniques of West Africa often combine fish and meat, including dried fish. The cuisine of South Africa and neighboring countries have largely become polyglot cuisines, having influences of several immigrants which include Indians who brought lentil soups (dals) and curries, Malaya who came with their curries with spices, and Europeans with “mixed grills” that now include African game meats. Traditionally, East African cuisine is distinctive in the sense that meat products are generally absent. Cattle, sheep and goats were regarded as a form of currency, and are not generally consumed as food. Arabic influences are also reflected in East African cuisine – rice cooked with spices in Persian style, use of saffron, cloves, cinnamons and several other spices, and pomegranate juice.

Ethiopians lay claim to first regular cultivation of coffee, and they have a sort of coffee ceremony, like Japanese tea ceremony. From Ethiopia, coffee spread to Yemen, from there it spread to Arabia, and from there to the rest of the World.