History Eats Its Young

Africa is a vast and diverse continent, with a rapidly growing economy, and a significant role to play in the contemporary and future global order. This chapter argues that Africa’s deep past matters too, especially the continent’s socio-environmental longue durée. It shows why the neglect of a deep past and the idea of unchanging nature and people in nature is political. It focuses on the first nation (San/Bushmen) to illustrate the pernicious dangers of short-termism and argues that a long-term view of the past shatters the myth of discrete ethnicities and disrupts notions of human homogeneity. Deep history makes the story of human impact on the climate and environment more nuanced and complex. All this makes one reconsider much more than just Africa in history: but the very idea of beginnings and endings, the non-linear movements of people and effects of nature, the ways early peoples remade ecologies right down to the present day.