Notes on Africa: Societies and Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa

Geographically, Sub-Saharan Africa is the part of the African continent south of the Sahara. It includes all African countries and territories that are wholly or partially south of the Sahara, according to the United Nations. While the UN geoscheme for Africa excludes Sudan from its definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, the African Union’s definition includes Sudan but not Mauritania.

North Africa, on the other hand, is commonly lumped into the MENA (“Middle East and North Africa”) region, and the majority of its states are Arab League members (largely overlapping with the term “Arab world”). Although they are members of the Arab League, the Comoros, Djibouti, Somalia, and the Arab-majority Mauritania (and occasionally the Sudan) are geographically considered portions of Sub-Saharan Africa. Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, the Sudan, and Tunisia are not listed as “sub-Saharan” countries by the United Nations Development Programme.

The exceptionally harsh environment of the sparsely populated Sahara has separated the Saharan and Sub-Saharan parts of Africa since at least 3900 BCE, establishing an effective barrier interrupted only by the Nile in Sudan, however transportation on the Nile was impeded by the Sudd and the river’s cataracts. There is a clear genetic difference between North and Sub-Saharan Africa that dates back to the Neolithic period.

People & culture of Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is no stranger to change. It is just as absurd to assign excessive stability to African societies prior to European occupation as it is to overemphasise change in contemporary African life. Since the historical picture is two-dimensional without writing, ethnographic depictions must be static. It does not follow, however, that the unrecorded past must have been as static. The dynamic aspect of current Africa reflects a long-standing feature of African life that may be seen in the study of African prehistory and supported by the logic of the variances seen in the distribution of physical kinds, languages, and civilizations across this vast continent.

Although an exact population estimate for Africa south of the Sahara is impossible, most authorities tend to accept a figure of 150 million. This is in comparison to 3 million Europeans, 750,000 Indians, and a smattering of Syrians, Lebanese, and other nationalities. When we consider that two-thirds of Europeans and half of Indians dwell in South Africa, the numerical disparity is highlighted.

Whereas elsewhere, we find ratios of 17 million Africans to 63,000 nonindigenous residents in French West Africa, 11 million Congolese to 60,000 from outside in the Belgian Congo, or even over 5 million Africans to 30,000 Europeans and about 120,000 Indians, Arabs, and Goanese in Kenya, which has a large non-African population.

The social structure of Sub-Saharan Africa

In recent years, it has become obvious that pre-colonial African nations’ traits have an essential role in their contemporary economic progress. Existing research has tended to focus on the function of historical political centralisation, finding a positive correlation between historical statehood and current income (Gennaioli and Rainer 2007, Michalopoulos and Pappaioannou 2013, 2014).

Segmented lineage organisation is a typical social structure among ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. Individuals’ social and political allegiances, as well as their patterns of residence, are most strongly influenced by kin relationships in segmented lineage cultures. Several anthropologists have proposed that segmentary lineage organisation and violent conflict are inextricably linked (especially Evans-Pritchard 1940 and Sahlins 1961, but also Bohannon 1958, Kelly 1985, Lewis 1961, 1989, 1994, Salzman 2007).

 They suggest that segmentary lineage societies are well adapted to mobilise soldiers for battle because they have clearly defined allegiances based on genealogy. This association, however, has never been systematically or experimentally explored to our knowledge.

Consider the hypothetical (patrilineal) segmentary lineage society depicted in Figure 1. Men are represented by triangles, and each row symbolises a generation. Individuals have a common ancestor, ‘I,’ and are also members of smaller lineage segments with others who are becoming increasingly linked to them.

In Figure 1, if individual I had a disagreement with individual ‘ix,’ all members of ‘Major Segment A’ would band together to support and defend individual ‘i.’ Similarly, everyone in ‘Major Segment B’ would band together to support and defend person ‘ix.’ As individuals mobilise to support members of their lineage or lineage segment, a conflict between two individuals evolves into a dispute between two huge groups.

Figure 1

Religions of Sub-Saharan Africa

“The vast majority of people in many Sub-Saharan African countries are profoundly committed to one or both of the world’s two largest religions, Christianity and Islam. Large majority identify with one of these faiths, and few individuals are religiously unaffiliated, in contrast to Europe and the United States. Traditional African religious ideas and practises have not vanished despite the prevalence of Christianity and Islam.Instead, they live side by side with Islam and Christianity. Whether or whether this creates theological tension, it is a fact of life for many Africans: they believe in witchcraft, evil spirits, ancestor sacrifices, traditional religious healers, reincarnation, and other features of traditional African religions.”

Explore “From December 2008 to April 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life conducted over 25,000 face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages or dialects in 19 Sub-Saharan African countries. […] The countries were chosen to represent a diverse range of colonial histories, linguistic backgrounds, and religious compositions across this wide geographical region. Three-quarters of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa lives in the countries examined.”

Conclusion

Sub-Saharan African societies featured a variety of cultures as well. However, many of them shared significant links, making it appropriate to examine them together. There were societies in the centre of the continent that spoke Bantu languages and shared Bantu culture. Furthermore, studying this region together made sense historically since it had three external obstacles that hindered engagement with the rest of the globe. The Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the west and east, and the Sahara Desert to the north, formed these three obstacles.

By 1750, however, all three of the principal barriers separating Sub-Saharan Africa from the rest of the world had become major trading hubs. The Sahara was travelled by caravans, and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans were crossed by ships. Thousands of Africans had crossed them, willingly or not. To some extent, people from Europe and Asia had also settled in Africa. These huge commerce networks had an impact on African societies in various places.