Overview

The idea of an inherent backwardness of technology and material culture in early sub-Saharan Africa is a persistent and tenacious myth in the scholarly and popular imagination. Due to the emergence of the field of African studies and the upsurge in historical and archaeological research, in recent decades the stridency of this myth has weakened, and the overtly racist content of arguments mustered in its defense have tended to disappear. But more important are transformations in social, political, and cultural consciousness, which have worked to reshape conceptualizations of African peoples, their histories, and their cultures. Precolonial African Material Culture offers a thorough challenge to the myth of technological backwardness. V. Tarikhu Farrar revisits the early technology of sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by recent research and reconsiders long-possessed primary historical sources. He then explores the ways that indigenous African technologies have influenced the world beyond the African continent.

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9781793606440

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Divided into three sections, this text examines early African technologies and their impact, challenging old presumptions of backwardness. In the first segment Farrar (City College of San Francisco) critiques the ideology of several scholars, including Eric Jones, John Morgan, and Jack Goody, emphasizing the evolution of race theory and its influence on subsequent researchers. His excursion into classical Greece and Rome further illuminates this discourse. Farrar leaves no stone unturned in providing an insightful analysis of the ideology emanating from the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, referencing scholars such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Hegel, whom he identifies as fundamental to the origins and unfolding of modern race theory. The author's difficult journey across the intellectual horizon of bigotry, arrogance, and supremacist ideology culminates in challenges from Edward Blyden, Melville Herskovits, William Hansberry, and Carter Woodson. This sets the stage for the rest of the text, an in-depth historiographical and evidence-based discussion of African technological accomplishments in agriculture, metallurgy, textiles, and building technology. . . this scholarly text provides a welcome corrective lens to view Africa's material culture. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. * CHOICE *

Author Information

V. Tarikhu Farrar is professor of African American studies and history at City College of San Francisco.

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