Guns, Germs, and Steel: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Africa is, in many different senses, the most diverse continent on the planet. A quarter of all the world’s languages are spoken only in Africa. Also, Africa harbors “five of the world’s six major divisions of humanity”—a concept that Diamond will explain throughout the rest of the chapter.

The five “human groups,” or races, found in Africa are: blacks, whites, African Pygmies, Khoisan, and Asians. It can be problematic to lump together so many different kinds of people together as one race—for example, it seems insufficient simply to call Zulus, Somalis, and Ibos “black,” considering the great physical and cultural differences between these peoples. While racial categories are somewhat arbitrary, Diamond uses the five races as a useful way of grouping people throughout human history.

Diamond offers some physical definitions of the five races he’ll discuss. Blacks and whites “are familiar to Americans and Europeans and need no physical description.” Before 1492, blacks lived most in sub-Saharan Africa. Whites, as Diamond defines them, encompass people from North Africa with lighter skin and straighter hair. Pygmies and Khoisan largely hail from the sub-Saharan region. Pygmies are physically characterized by their small size, dark skin, and large eyes and foreheads. Khoisan are physically characterized by yellowish skin and tightly coiled hair. Most of the Khoisan were wiped out by disease or colonialist massacres before the beginning of the 20th century. The final racial group Diamond will discuss is Asian. The island of Madagascar is populated largely by the descendants of Southeast Asians—Austronesians. It’s truly anomalous, Diamond says, that the descendants of Austronesians (i.e., people who live in Borneo, the Philippines, or Polynesia) have lived in Madagascar for thousands of years.

By studying the languages spoken throughout Africa, linguists have come to a few surprising conclusions. Contrary to popular belief, Western culture did not originate primarily in the Near East and was not diffused to Europe through Biblical, Semitic languages. In actuality, Semitic languages originated in Africa, meaning that the Near Eastern Semitic tribes mentioned in the Bible were only a small branch of the Semitic groups in North Africa.

Another surprising conclusion that linguists have brought up in studying language in Africa is that ancient African peoples who spoke the precursors of Bantu (a language, or, arguably, family of languages, still spoken in Africa) were more like to “engulf” their Khoisan and Pygmy neighbors than the other way around. (When Diamond uses the word “engulf,” he means conquer, wipe out, unify with, or displace—anything that involves one culture gaining supremacy over another). The bulk of the black peoples in Africa are descended from ancient Bantu speakers who lived in North Africa. So why did the Bantu peoples engulf their neighbors, instead of the other way around?

To answer this question, Diamond considers the different crops growing in Africa before the Europeans colonized sub-Saharan Africa in the 1400s. Every major crop grown in Africa at that time (bananas, millet, taro, yams) originated north of the equator. Similarly, the single animal species that we know was first domesticated in Africa before the 1400s was the guinea fowl, a small bird. There were some domesticated mammals in Africa before the 1400s, but these had all been imported from other regions—sheep, goats, chickens, horses, camels, etc. In general, Africa’s food sources originated far away from Africa.

The final step in solving the riddle of the Bantu involves some archaeology. It’s a common misconception that African agriculture began in Egypt. In fact, as early as 9000 B.C., Africans were farming in the Sahara desert, which, at the time, was lush and full of flora and fauna. Archaeological evidence indicates that agriculturalists in the Sahara 11,000 years ago spoke four languages that are ancestral to modern African languages.

Before tracing the relationship between the Bantu and the Khoisan any farther, let’s look at the history of Madagascar. How could Austronesians travel all the way there? An ancient merchant text written in Egypt in 100 A.D. describes an enormous sea trade between India and Egypt. After the rise of Islam, the Indian Ocean trading network became one of the largest in the world. It’s possible (though still unproven) that Austronesian colonists traveled to Madagascar along the Indian Ocean trading network, bringing with them artifacts of their Southeast Asian culture.

The Bantu expansion was one of the largest demographic shifts in African history. Prior to the Bantu expansion the majority of Africans were probably not black peoples. After 1000 B.C., though, Bantu peoples, having mastered agriculture, grew to such large numbers that they expanded southeast, to East Africa’s Rift Valley. There, the Bantu developed new farming techniques to incorporate new crops like millet into their agriculture. They also may have discovered iron metallurgy, giving them an unbeatable “military industrial package.”

In the ensuing Bantu expansion, the Khoisan and Pygmy peoples of Africa were either massacred or forced out of their homes. It’s not clear what role diseases played in the disappearance of the Khoisan populations, but it’s certainly possible that malaria—to which the Bantu, but not the Khoisan were probably resistant—killed large numbers of Khoisan. It’s important to notice that the Khoisan weren’t annihilated; there are still Khoisan regions in southern Africa. Significantly, these regions are unsuitable for farming—the Bantu couldn’t expand any farther south and continue their agricultural lifestyle.

Another important question: why did the Europeans colonize sub-Saharan Africa, rather than the sub-Saharan Africans colonizing Europe? Europeans had some major advantages over the sub-Saharan Africans—they had access to military technology, immunity to diseases, widespread literacy, centralized government—all factors that enabled them to explore the world and conquer the world’s peoples. Europe developed these advantages rather than the sub-Saharan Africans for a variety of reasons. 1) Europeans had access to domesticable animals, whereas sub-Saharan Africans did not. 2) Europeans had access to a greater variety of domesticable plants, meaning that they developed agriculture sooner than the sub-Saharan Africans. 3) Europe shares latitude with many other centralized societies, meaning that it was able to acquire important technologies and innovations from its neighbors. Sub-Saharan Africans had no neighbors to the east or west (just water), and were barred from communicating with North Africa by the Sahara Desert.

In conclusion, Europe’s colonization of Africa—which has been used by racists and bigots as proof that the Europeans are superior to the other races—actually had nothing to do with racial superiority. Due to a series of geographic coincidences, the Europeans became stronger and more mobile than the Africans, going off on their own “historical trajectory.”