by Suzy Charnas

Created on: July 31, 2008

The roots of much of Africa's relative poverty of indigenous technology based in the use of metallurgy and chemistry go much deeper than politics. The continent itself is and historically has been poor in the metal most important to developing industrial technology as we have known it in the industrialized world. Workable iron was extremely difficult to come by, so that men who made a specialty of smith work have been revered and feared as people endowed with magical power and prestige; and iron disintegrates easily in a hot, wet climate. Alternative materials for large-scale industrialization are no less problematic: wood rots fast and completely in the tropics, as does paper, cloth, and anything else made of natural plant fibers - which goes some way to explain the difficulties in establishing museums of ancient artifacts, such as are found elsewhere. Ceramics are susceptible to destruction by torrential rains, and even good, workable stone is difficult to find. There are reasons that many African communities are built of mud brick and thatch or (imported) galvanized metal sheet roofing (where concrete block is affordable, it is valued for its comparative durability).

Moreover, agriculture has been limited by poor soils (the iron that is so difficult to find in large amounts infuses the soil wherever the ground is red) and an extreme climate, while the proliferation of dangerous parasites has sapped the energy reserves of adults and increased infant mortality even where food has been plentiful. Expanding populations stripping jungle habitats of edible animals and overgrazing of pastureland has made animal protein hard to come by, so that the diet of even rural people is often protein-poor - a further reduction, along with the stress of truly terrible heat and humidity for most of the year in low-lying areas, of available energy.

For all of these reasons (and many regionally varied others), indigenous Africans' native genius was exercised in ways that suited their very demanding situation as it was, not the industrializing world that they were faced with when the Europeans began to take over. Indigenous peoples everywhere whose physical base is sharply limited in these ways usually turn their inventiveness and creativity to developing agricultural technologies that work in their particular circumstances, ephemeral arts that the monsoons can't rot (like epic and lyric poetry, story-telling in dance), richly complex belief-systems and social codes, and massive

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