For the benefit of this European, one of the first they had ever set eyes on, the elders of the Bushongo recalled the legend and tradition of their past. That was not in the least difficult for them, since remembering the past was one of their duties. They unrolled their story in measured phrases. They went on and on. They were not to be hurried. They traversed the list of their kings, a list of one hundred and twenty names, right back to the god-king whose marvels had founded their nation.

It was splendid, but was it history? Could any of these kings be given a date, be linked -- at least in time -- to the history of the rest of the world? Torday was an enthusiast and went on making notes, but he longed for a date. And quite suddenly they gave it to him.

"As the elders were talking of the great events of various reigns," he remembered afterwards, "and we came to the ninety-eighth chief, Bo Kama Bomanchala, they said that nothing remarkable had happened during his reign, except that one day at noon the sun went out, and there was absolute darkness for a short time.

"When I heard this I lost all self-control. I jumped up and wanted to do something desperate. The elders thought that I had been stung by a scorpion."

"It was only months later that the date of the eclipse became known to me ... the thirtieth of March, 1680, when there was a total eclipse of the sun, passing exactly over Bushongo ...

"There was no possibility of confusion with another eclipse, because this was the only one visible in the region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

Torday's achievement was to reveal the possibility of African history in the centuries -- the protohistoric centuries -- before written documents occur. It is with these centuries that this book is largely concerned, and it will be seen that much has been learned since Torday's pioneering sixty years ago.

But the scene demands a little setting in the further past. What can be said, if anything, about the remote beginnings of mankind in Africa -- about the earliest men or manlike creatures of the dawn of prehistory?

Manlike apes lived in Africa a million years ago. More and more of their fossils have turned up over the last forty years or so. Were they manlike apes or apelike men? It is still an open question, for the "missing links" between the common ancestors of apes and men, and the creatures which prepared the way for Homo sapiens, have yet to be identified beyond dispute.

There are several strong contenders in the field, represented by fossils which have come, mainly, from South Africa and East Africa. Of several different types, these ancient animals -- whether nearer to apes or nearer to men in terms of evolution -- were undoubtedly proto-men of one kind or another. In Professor Raymond Dart's illuminating phrase, they "trembled on the brink of humanity."

They stood "in respect of brain size, manufacture of tools and knowledge of fire," says Dart, "on the very threshold of humanity. Whether they crossed that threshold is the enigma for future anthropology; but it is a puzzle in the human story to which Africa doubtless holds the answer."

That Africa may hold the answer to the earliest development of man himself is also suggested by evidence from East Africa. Finds in East Africa, mainly in Tanzania and Kenya, include the earliest hominid evidence now securely available, thus leading to a claim by some anthropologists, so far not denied, that Africa was the cradle of humanity: thus these finds not only suggest that Homo sapiens developed from less successful and since vanished types of humanity, but also that this specific evolution from early hominids towards Homo sapiens occurred in Africa.

What dates can one hope to apply? There is no point in trying to divide prehistoric time into years, for the years stretch out to thousands and to millions until they evade the liveliest imagination. All that can be done is to try and define some of the milestones on that remotely echoing trail; but even this, considering the difficulties, makes a remarkable and as yet uncertain feat of prehistoric detection.

Prehistorians have lately reached tentative agreement on a probable sequence of climatic changes in East Africa, and such is the richness of the evidence they have even tried to establish a correlation between this sequence and climatic changes in other parts of Africa, as well as in Europe. They distinguish four main pluvials or rainy periods in East Africa over the last half-million years or so; and these, they believe, were probably coincidental with the four main Ice Ages, or glaciations, of Europe. Their principal reason for thinking that mankind occurred first of all in Africa is that stone tools have been recovered from deposits laid down during the earliest of these pluvials, whereas stone tools in Europe turn up only much later in the long sequence of "glacials" and "interglacials." Thus tools found in East Africa are the oldest tools ever found anywhere.

These four pluvials of East Africa are called -- after the sites from which their tools or fossilized evidence was taken -- Kageran, Kamasian, Kanjeran, and Gamblian. But it is only in Gamblian times -- beginning, perhaps, some twelve or fourteen thousand years ago -- that the story begins to make much sense. By Gamblian times, however, Homo sapiens was not only well established as an inhabitant of East Africa (and of other parts of Africa), he was well into the Old Stone Age and was practically, by pluvial standards, a modern man. He had, as it were, long since ceased to worry about his rivals, whom he had survived; or even about his enemies, whom he had learned to kill or trap or even domesticate. Sometime during this last pluvial there disappeared from Africa the last manlike rivals of man as we know him -- Neanderthal Man, Rhodesian Man, and others caught in evolutionary stagnation. From now onward, though often with tremendous gaps, the story of Stone Age humanity takes on coherent shape. The foundations were securely laid, the successfully adaptable human type was firmly fixed.

Thereafter it has remained for humanity to develop the potentialities within itself, to migrate and multiply and populate the earth.