ANIMAL RESOURCES OF AFRICA

GENERAL HISTORY OF AFRICA
The result of years of work by scholars from all over the world, The UNESCO General History of Africa reflects how the different peoples of Africa view their civilizations and shows the historical relationships between the various parts of the continent. Historical connections with other continents demonstrate Africa's contribution to the development of human civilization. Each volume is lavishly illustrated and contains a comprehensive bibliography.

Reconstruction of the environment at Fayum 40.000.000 years ago. Drawing by Gaillard and Bertonani (Musée de l'Homme Coll.)

ANIMAL RESOURCES AND CULTURAL DIVERSIFICATION OF AFRICA

Closely related to the vegetal resources is the pattern of distribution of the animal resources. Africa has attracted attention from as far back as records go as the continent with large mammalian esources. Indeed, it is claimed that, excluding bats, the African mammalians consist of as many as thirty eight families. The distribution of these animals over the continent has varied both in time and space. Fossil remains indicate that all regions of the continent carried at one time or the other an assortment of even the larger wild life.
The North African Mediterranean region, for instance, was the home of animals such as the lion and the elephant, many of which were believed to have been driven out in the periods of great aridity during the Pleistocene. Most of those left behind were overexploited in our era to meet, for instance, the large demands of Roman amphitheatres. Indeed, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, the army of the French Due d'Aumale discovered great numbers of wild animals, including lions, wherever they went in Algeria, from the precipitous rocks of Constantine to the plains of majority of African game.
Within these zones in West, East, central and southern Africa are found beasts of prey such as the lion, the leopard, the African tiger-cat and the hyena. It is here also that we find the bubal hartebeests, the topi, the red-fronted gazelle, the wart-hog, the roan antelope, the zebra, the giraffe and the ostrich. Here is the natural habitat of the elephant, the buffalo and the black rhinoceros as well as of the Derby and Cape eland, the bushbuck, waterbuck and reedbuck.
The extent of territory covered by each of these has changed over the centuries. All of the animals have suffered great depredations at the hands of m a n or have lost to other species in the great competition for survival as environmental conditions changed. The absence of the white rhinoceros between the Zambezi and the upper White Nile, for instance, is ascribed to the competitive advantage which the change in climate and vegetation during the Pleistocene gave to the more aggressive black rhinoceros.
Although most of the wild game frequent the forest of tropical Africa, this region is on the whole less endowed with animal resources. Some of the more notable forest animals include the bush pig, the giant forest hog, the bongo, the great apes such as the gorilla and champanzee and the okapi. Even here environmental changes have affected the extent of the territory available earlier. The intermittent presence of the bongo is due to the reduction of what must once have been a continuous forest cover across equatorial Africa.
These abundant animal resources certainly served man over the long period of his existence as primarily a hunter. So inexhaustible did these resources appear that some African communities have remained in this hunting stage of development right up to the present day. A special category of animal resources is represented by fish, which have also been caught from as far back as the Mesolithic. Not only the rivers but also freshwater lakes such as Turkana (Rudolf), Nakuru and Edward in East Africa and the Chad in West Africa attracted early human population because of their fish resources.Of the rivers, the Nile was obviously of special importance.
Here were found waterside communities who used harpoons and fish-hooks of bone and, in addition, hunted and ate the hippopotamus and the crocodile. The use of simple dugout canoes for fishing in inland waters is still pervasive throughout Africa. Only a few fishing communities, however, developed canoes large enough to attempt coastal sea fishing. Everywhere until recently, inadequate technological development prevented the exploitation of the rich fish resources in the sea around the continent. The singular richness of variety among land animals, however, provided a tremendous reserve of potential domesticates. Now , domestication of animals in Africa was virtually limited to the ass, the cat, the guinea fowl, the sheep and the cow. One reason for this state of affairs is that Africa Oran.
The desert still preserves a remarkable range of wild life. These include the dorcas and dama gazelle, the addax, the scimitar-horned oryx or oryx algazel. In much earlier and wetter times, its resources are known to have been more considerable and to have included animals such as the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe, the n ow extinct giant buffalo, and many of the larger antelopes.
But it is the grassland plains of Africa which are the true home of the during the Neolithic was influenced by an earlier and more successful experiment in south-west Asia. It was at this time that the continent was introduced to pastoralism. According to Clark, 'the first Neolithic pastoralists appear in the Sahara in the fifth millennium before our era, perhaps earlier. They drove herds of long and short-horned cattle and goats and flocks of sheep and continued there until the increasing desiccation after two thousand five hundred years before our era forced some of them to move out.

Reconstruction of Oreopithecus bamboli

Pastoralism was, however, not diffused uniformly in all the environments of the continent. Whilst most communities came to o w n the smaller varieties of stock, only a few mastered the skill of tending the larger ones. Among these the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Fulani of the West African savannah and the Masai of the East African grassland remained overwhelmingly committed to animal husbandry, and have eschewed any attempt at combining this skill with that of plant husbandry. Constantly following their herds in search of water and pasture, these communities have maintained till today the nomadic way of life in its purest form. Some Bantu groups in East Africa, however, have managed to combine animal husbandry with cultivation to the mutual advantage of both.
Perhaps one of the factors inhibiting the spread of pastoralism in Africa was the proliferation of other zoological species which had a negative impact on resource development of the continent. Prominent among these is the tsetse fly. This large, bustling brown fly is the main, but not the only, vector of trypanosomiasis, a disease which causes sleeping sickness in man and spells death for his animals. This fly is found today in a belt running across Africa between latitudes 14°N and S of the equator. T h e only exceptions are the highlands rising to levels above iooo metres which are relatively cold, and the open short-grass country where the dry season is too hot and desiccating for the fly to breed.
Tsetse fly has been present in Africa since very remote times. Given the fact that fossil impressions of this fly have been found in the Miocene beds in North America, it would appear that the fly must have had a far wider distribution in prehistoric times. Its disappearance from various areas in Africa and in parts of it may be the result of a combination of climatic changes, natural barriers and glaciation. Indeed, within Africa, the climatic alternations of the Pleistocene must have had a tremendous influence not only on the distribution of various species of the fly but also on their infection rates.
Belts of land infested by these flies have constituted effective barriers to the development of animal husbandry. Herders must have realized at an early stage that their herds would face heavy losses when travelling through infested country. As such, the penetration of cattle from North Africa to the south was subject to the existence of natural fly-free corridors as well as those created by densely settled agricultural communities. Of the latter, a good example is provided by the migration of cattle owners some nine centuries ago creating, through the merging with other peoples, the Tutsi and Hutu society of present-day Rwanda and Burundi.
The history of Africa would have been very different if the continent had been free of tsetse. Instead, with the fly effectively keeping large livestock out of the reach of settled agricultural communities, the use of such animals for draught purposes never occurred nor was opportunity created for discovering the great importance of the wheel. O n the other hand, some of the larger livestock provided some peoples with riding animals whose fleetness of foot encouraged them into aggression and political domination of the sedentary peoples.
Among other adverse zoological factors, w e find the malarial mosquito and the locust. O f the several species of mosquito capable of transmitting malarial parasites of one kind or another, some are more attracted to human blood than others. The most prevalent in Africa is Anopheles gambiae which, because it also feeds on animals, is very difficult to eradicate as it can survive even if temporarily prevented from feeding on m n . The mosquito usually breeds in standing water and is most numerous near swamps and rivers. Its breeding places increase with increasing rainfall, and high temperatures boost both the development of its larvae and that of the plasmodium cycle in the adult mosquito. By the same token, cooler temperatures encountered at higher altitudes curtail the incidence of the mosquito. Thus, endemic malaria tends to disappear above iooo metres even though transmission may persist beyond this level.
How long the mosquito has been part of the human environment in Africa is not known. The very high incidence of the sickle-cell trait found in many African populations would seem to suggest a long-standing and intimate relation between it and the evolution of the African populations. This trait is certainly the product of age-long selection pressure favouring the survival of these populations in conditions of hyper-endemic malarial infections. The malarial mosquito, to the extent that it greatly impairs the survival chances of non-adapted human groups, has also been a major factor in the history of the continent. Certainly, until the twentieth century, it effectively discouraged European settlement in the hot and humid climate of West Africa and saved the region from those thorny inter-racial problems that have plagued the history of the more elevated regions in North, East, central and southern Africa which had fallen victim to settler colonization.
Locusts are amongst the traditional plagues of Africa. They are large grasshoppers living normally in single, solitary state or in small groups. They are found in areas of vegetational transition at the desert margins or near woodland and grassland savannahs. Three main kinds of locust are found in Africa south of the Sahara. These are the red locust, the African migratory locust and the desert locust. All three need two kinds of habitat: bare ground for laying their eggs and vegetated country for feeding.
Occasionally when, for various reasons, their feeding ground is restricted to a small area they congregate into large swarms to invade areas far and near. Examples of such invasions are not easy to identify from the distant past, although the Old Testament does refer to the locust as one of the plagues from which Egypt suffered at the time of Moses. From about the nineteenth century records of invasions become more abundant. Central Africa, for instance, suffered invasions from the red locust at different times between 1847 and 1854, 1892 and 1910, and more recently between 1930 and 1944. For settled agricultural populations, the depredations of such invasions, especially just before harvest, can make all the difference between abundant food and famine. Where, in the past, other conditions such as drought coincided with locust invasion, the stage was set for considerable social and political upheaval on the continent.

By A. L. MABOGUNJE in the book 'GENERAL HISTORY OF AFRICA I'- Methodology and African Prehistory,Editor J. Ki-Zerbo, UNESCO international Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, published in 2000 by UNESCO Publishing PARIS  France, chapter 14, p.340-344. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.