The ancient Sao of Lake Chad, says Lebeuf, "appear in legend as giants of prodigious force, and surprising feats are celebrated in their name. With one hand they dammed the rivers; their voices were so great that they could call from one town to another, and birds took flight in panic whenever one of them should cough. Their hunting expeditions drew them far from their dwellings; in a single day they would go hundreds of miles, and the animals they killed, hippopotamus and elephant, were carried easily on the shoulders of these fortunate hunters... Their weapons were bows from the trunk of a palm tree ... Even the earth bore their weight with difficulty ..."

Yet oral tradition, needless to say, never gives us the first inhabitants. It is overlay on overlay. All one can do is peel off layer after layer until the information altogether fails. For the many peoples of the Bantu language group - - those who now predominate in central and southern Africa -- this peeling off is possible for three or four hundred years into the past, and here and there -- as for example with Torday's Bushongo -- for a somewhat longer period. Many of the peoples now living in the central and southern continent appear to have reached their present habitat within the past few hundred years, but some of them reached it -- shouldering aside the closely related peoples whom they found or merging with them -- much more recently than that.

The Bushongo are a case of long establishment. They seem to have lived in the region of the Sankuru river for seven or eight hundred years; and in the course of this time they evolved a highly distinctive culture that was eminent alike in social order and artistic production. The Sala, one of the Ila-Tongo peoples of northwestern Rhodesia, represent the opposite case. They are one of many peoples whose establishment is relatively new. "Sala history," says Jaspan, "is said to start from about 1820, when a chieftainess, Namumbe, appeared from a district to the northwest of Lusaka, and founded a village... Namumbe died in about 1835. Her sister, Maninga, inherited the chieftaincy, but was later ousted by Chongo, Namumbe's son... He exacted a tax of all elephant ivory and all skins of game killed by his dependents."

What motives inspired this forming and re-forming of tribes and tribal groups -- sometimes of disparate elements, of men and women from other tribes-may be seen from many of these tribal histories. A good example is that of the southern Lunda and their related neighbors of the lower Congo. "The first large-scale emigration from the Lunda kingdom," says McCulloch, "was that of Chinguli and Chiniama, the brothers of Lueji" -- Lueji was high chieftainess of the Lunda between 1590 and 1610 -- "and their followers, between 1590 and 1625. Among the reasons for their departure suggested by the various traditions are displeasure at their sister's succession to power ... Chinguli went westwards and ultimately founded the Bangala people of northern Angola and the western Belgian Congo. Chiniama went southwards and then westwards, and he and his followers founded the Luena, Chokwe, and Luchazi peoples."

The process was complex and long enduring. Of the Bechuanaland peoples, wrote Ellenberger in 1912, "Napo, the younger brother of Mochuli, being unwilling, as he said, to live like a reed overshadowed by a tree, left his elder brother and migrated south about the end of the fifteenth century..." To which Schapera, writing a few years ago, adds that "All that can be said with some confidence is that the Tswana" -- of Bechuanaland today -- "were already in the eastern half of their present habitat by about 1600 A.D." During the next two centuries" each of the existing clusters became increasingly subdivided. It was a constantly recurring feature in Tswana history for a tribe to secede under a discontented member of the ruling family and move away to a new locality. There it would set up as an independent tribe under the chieftainship of its leader, by whose name it generally came to be known."

The dates are approximate, but there is little doubt that they are approximately right. Like these random samples of migration history they would greatly mislead, however, if they led to an impression of mere repetitive movement within a social framework that was stagnant or incapable of change and growth. Developing along their own lines of growth, these vigorous and multiplying peoples were inventive and successful in surviving and settling where few or none had ever lived before. Some of them-and the Bushongo are a notable case, yet only one of many of this kind -- achieved great stability and cultural distinction. They conquered their environment and learned how to live at peace with it; and the word "primitive" can be applied to them, with any degree of justification, only in a strictly narrow and technological sense.

On this, Emil Torday's comment will stand. He was writing of King Shamba Bolongongo, whose rule over the Bushongo began around AD. 1600 and who is said to have abolished his standing army and forbidden the use of the throwing knife in warfare. "A central African king of the early days of the seventeenth century," says Torday, "whose only conquests were on the field of thought, public prosperity, and social progress, and who is still remembered in our day by every person in the country... must have been a remarkable man indeed." Torday, it is true, was an enthusiast; yet his thoughts on the past of central Africa, even if they stray a little to the side of a romantic idealism, are none the less nearer to the truth than the miseries of savage chaos that others have presented as a description of that past.

Against the background of this interweaving process of migration and stability, there are several important points to be made. If the present peoples of continental Africa began to multiply from rarity some four or five thousand years ago or less, it appears that only in comparatively recent times- perhaps within the last thousand or fifteen hundred years- have they become really numerous and spread across the continent and acquired the strength they have today.

And it is this probable fact of their major movement and migration and settlement in the fifteen centuries or so before the coming of European trade and penetration that gives this long historic period its great significance. This is why the definitive history of African peoples, when finally it gets itself beyond the hesitations of the learned and the speculations of the unlearned- when finally it is fully written-will have to explain the course of the discovery and growth of agriculture in continental Africa, and even more, the course of the discovery and growth of the use of metals, but principally of iron. And this is why-returning to the necessarily modest limits of this present outline-these questions will be treated as of crucial value and importance. For it was the extension of agriculture and the use of iron, with all the added mastery of environment which these imply, that accompanied and governed both the need and the possibility of successful migration into new and unknown lands.

The achievement was not a small one. Across this inhospitable continent- difficult, intemperate, lacking many of the stable vegetables that sustained mankind elsewhere- these peoples spread themselves thinly, and survived. It is a large point, for example, that this migratory process certainly discouraged social growth from one form of society to another. Always able to move further on, since the land was so wide and its inhabitants so few, these moving peoples were seldom or never faced with the social and economic crises which helped to promote change in narrower and more densely populated lands. Hunting and fishing and the tilling of a little land for bare needs had given them an adequate means of survival. So long as this means continued to be adequate they would not seek to improve it. They would move elsewhere, follow the teeming antelope, look for new pastures, clear new ground.

Yet the record is very far from one of stagnation. These were pioneering peoples. They tilled where none had tilled before. They mined where there was none to show them how. They discovered a valuable pharmacopoeia. They were skillful in terraced irrigation and the conservation of soil on steep hillsides. They built new and complex social systems. They transformed whatever they could borrow from other and technologically more advanced social systems to the north, added and adapted and experienced and invented, until in the course of time they acquired a range of technique and a mastery of art, a philosophy and attitude and temperament and religion, that were unique to themselves and make the "Negro-ness," the negritude, they have today.

This African metal age of the last fifteen or twenty centuries, in short, is the formative period of modern Africa. It possessed its own dynamic of growth and change. It produced its own cultures and civilizations, uniquely African. It is the central theme of this book.

But before embarking on this central theme it will be useful to cast back into high antiquity. How much did this pre-medieval and medieval achievement in continental Africa owe to the ancient civilizations of the north? Where did the lines of influence run and how important were they?