The Bushmen/San were the original inhabitants of Southern Africa and are commonly known as Bushmen or San.
They lived in rock shelters, in the open or in crude shelters of twigs and grass or animal skins. They made no pottery, rather using ostrich eggshells or animal parts for storing and holding liquids.
San-speaking groups remaining today live in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Angola.
The Bushmen of today are in a desperate struggle to change from their existing way of life into a more westernised lifestyle.
The Maasai are best known for their beautiful beadwork which plays an essential element in the ornamentation of the body.
Beading patterns are determined by each age-set and identify grades.
Cattle are central to Maasai economy. They are rarely killed, but instead are accumulated as a sign of wealth and traded or sold to settle debts.
Maasai community politics are embedded in age-grade systems which separate young men and girls from the elder men and their wives and children.
There are over 900,000,000 people in Africa and over a thousand languages.
(UNESCO estimated around two thousand languages are spoken in Africa)
Historically, the Yoruba were primarily farmers, growing cocoa and yams as cash crops
The political and social systems vary greatly in different regions, and allegiance is uniformly paid to the large urban center in the area, rather than to a singular centralized authority
Class Outline
•Conflicts in Africa
•Factors leading to Conflicts
•External and Internal Involvement
•The Impact of conflicts
•The Now and the Future
Rebels
Conflict spots
…the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in the second half of the 1990s was the “perfect war”. Precipitated by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the fall of the West’s client kleptocrat, President Mobutu, and his rotten state, the war in DR Congo was dubbed Africa’s First World War.
The war in DR Congo was but one demonstration of the emptiness of the promises of a post Cold War political and economic renaissance for Africa.
At the United Nations at the end of the Cold War neither the Secretariat nor the Security Council were able or willing to resolve these burgeoning conflicts in Africa.
The one UN success in Africa in the post cold war period, the peace operation in Mozambique, was overshadowed by the UN’s failure in Angola in 1992.
Then the dramatic US/UN failure in Somalia in 1993-5 rendered the international system helpless in the face of the emerging crisis in central Africa.
As China expands its engagement throughout Africa, it increasingly finds itself involved in African conflict zones either by design or accident.
There have been over 9 million refugees and internally displaced people from conflicts in Africa. Hundreds and thousands of people have been slaughtered from a number of conflicts and civil wars
It seems that the cause of the Rwanda genocide has typically been explained in simplified terms, such as ancient tribal hatreds, omitting many of the deeper and also modern causes, such as international economic policies, power politics and corruption of the elite, etc. which are also common contributing causes of problems elsewhere in the world today.
Class Outline
African Art
•General introduction
•Different forms of art
•Dressing as art
•Artefacts
African artifacts have generally been exhibited with reference only to cultural context and use…
…African aesthetic principles are also related to moral and religious values.
African aesthetics generally has a moral basis, as indicated by the fact that in many African languages the same word means "beautiful" and "good”…
It is consistent with the use and meaning of African art that it should be both beautiful and good, because it is intended not only to please the eye but to uphold moral values.