Keywords

1 Introduction

When thinking about the historiography of Africa and the earth sciences, we are simultaneously confronted by variety and extent in some areas, but relative underdevelopment in others. The size and diversity of the African continent means that a summary discussion of “Africa and the Earth sciences” runs the risk of problematic generalizations. This chapter therefore thinks specifically about possible dialogue between the history of the earth sciences, and African history as two dynamic, yet currently quite separate, historical fields. How can these different areas of history speak to one another, and what insights does bringing them together potentially offer?

As the other contributions in this volume indicate, the history of the earth sciences is one of the liveliest areas in the history of science, examining changing conceptions of time and the world, economic and political power, and the social and economic structures of knowledge. Histories of the earth sciences have traditionally had a North American and European center of gravity, but the field has also consistently been aligned to international and transnational processes. It is therefore difficult to speak of any current “global turn” in the historiography of the earth sciences, as the field has always been globally orientated. Where matters have shifted over recent years is an increased desire to connect the earth and deep-time sciences with political and economic power relations, as well as thinking about how categories like “geology,” “palaeontology,” and “palaeoanthropology” are rooted within Western intellectual and institutional contexts (Chakrabarti 2020; Chakrabarti and Bashford 2021, and Hoare in this volume). Studies of these processes however have tended to focus on the Americas, Australia, and South Asia, with relatively little consideration of Africa, apart from some work on South Africa. This is possibly surprising, given the importance of African developments to the history of the earth sciences, and the multiple ways African history engages with conceptual, economic, and political power.

African history is fundamentally based on linking different approaches, disciplines, and sources, with great attention to the relationship between periods and timescales – and the still present legacies of historical processes. Vincent Hiribarren, in a recent review article, discusses how African history “was conceived as a radical project from the onset in the 1950s. Its main ambition was not only to discuss the history of a widely ignored continent but also to use methods which were not deemed to be academic or serious enough to analyse the past of newly independent nations” (Hiribarren 2020: v). As will be discussed in specific examples below, African histories frequently adopt a deep perspective, tracing continuities, changes, and disjunctions from early periods (Africanists increasingly resist the term “precolonial” as problematic and flattening), the colonial period (as perhaps the only common experience across the whole continent), and the postcolonial. Within this, there is often a self-consciously emancipatory project, aiming to demonstrate the importance of African actors, and recovering the agency of people and societies who have persistently been marginalized in colonial and postcolonial eras. This in itself requires distinct methodologies, cutting across different fields.

African history is therefore highly interdisciplinary, bringing perspectives from anthropology, literature, archaeology, ethnography, and climate and environmental studies, even if this interdisciplinarity is not always fully recognized or theorized (Semley et al. 2022) and can even lead to Africanists being dismissed for not being sufficiently “historical” (Brizuela-Garcia 2008). Nevertheless, at a time when many scholars are turning toward interdisciplinarity, African history is a field where crossing disciplines has long been crucial. Oral testimonies and ethnographic approaches have for example been utilized extensively by African historians, given the importance of orality in many African societies, and the varying times at which they have used written documents. Of course, stereotypes of African “orality” or “non-literacy” do need to be questioned: Egypt and Sudan contain some of the oldest written records of humanity; other areas, like Mali and Madagascar, have long literary traditions; while in other African societies, widespread use of written documents was a nineteenth and twentieth-century phenomenon. African history has also fruitfully connected with archaeology, bringing in material culture, histories of everyday life, and broader chronologies – although methodological and institutional barriers between history and archaeology, and the colonial implications of many archaeological projects and concepts, pose problems. The observations of outsiders have also been crucial for African history, with travelers and commentators from the Middle East, Europe, and China all reporting on African societies. As Wole Soyinka (2012:27) has argued Africa was never “discovered” by outsiders, but outsiders have persistently constructed images of the continent. African nature, antiquity, and culture were imagined in numerous ways – pristine wilderness, primordial savagery, deep mysterious antiquity, and utopian wonder have all been important motifs. These imaginings became a form of colonial and epistemological dominance over the continent, and moreover, these stereotypes still condition current views of Africa.

The interdisciplinarity of African history also means that Africanists often use the earth and environmental sciences, especially in the developing literature in African environmental history. Works like McCann’s Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land (1999) contain a great deal of geological discussion. Yet while the colonial background and heritage of geography and geology are widely acknowledged by historians, this is often effaced in environmental histories, which can use methods and concepts from the modern sciences uncritically (raised in Tilley 2018: 17). This is part of a tension discussed by Hersey and Vetter (2019): while the history of science and environmental history often examine similar issues, they can have very different attitudes to the truth claims and authority of the sciences themselves. Additionally, environmental histories of Africa have not widely engaged with the role of geology, minerals, and other products of the earth. The overwhelming focus so far has been on development, farming, deforestation, engagement with animals, land degradation, and increasingly how climate change and “the Anthropocene” relate to Africa (Austin 2017). These are of course not separate issues from the history of the earth sciences: mining and mineral exploitation have been a key part of human engagement with the earth, and (as will be discussed) a place where the earth sciences are particularly entangled with power, economics, and culture.

The wider position of Africa within the history of science, technology, and medicine has seen some consideration over the past few years. Helen Tilley (2018), in an important historiographic review of the relations between African history and the history of science, argues that African history enables us to consider long continuities over time in knowledge systems (even with the disruptions of the colonial period), and the position of African knowledges within wider global trends (something often ignored in the history of science, where African developments are frequently presented as a “field” for work by outsiders). This agenda, drawing on historiographic trends to see all knowledge as mobile and co-constituted (Secord 2004; Raj 2010), while nevertheless continuing to draw attention to power imbalances developing in the colonial and postcolonial periods, represents an important move in the history of science.

And of course, there are also structural issues in African history. It is frequently cited that many Africanists are not Africans themselves, and works of African history produced by European or North American scholars frequently (and quite rightly) begin by acknowledging their outsider status. This is also the position that this chapter is written from: I am a historian of the earth sciences based in a British university. These structural issues have led to attempts to amplify “history from Africa,” as African scholars must overcome significant barriers (Semley et al. 6–7): including lack of funding for historical and archaeological research in Africa; difficulties securing resources for the preservation, maintenance, and cataloging of African archival records (highlighted by the British Library’s Endangered Archives ProgrammeFootnote 1); and lack of funds, restrictive visa regimes and often also recognition blocking participation in Northern scholarly networks.

Considering connections between the history of the earth sciences and African history allows us to discuss larger issues. In her crucial book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes – or None (2018), Kathryn Yusoff draws attention to the deep connections between definitions of Blackness, the development of extractive mining-based economies, and the formation of subjects like geology and palaeontology, arguing how “the racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance” (2). These connections were nevertheless hidden by “the sleight of hand of the Janus-faced discipline of geology (as extractive economy and deep-time paleontology of life-forms) is to naturalize (and thus neutralize) the theft of extraction through its grammars of extraction” (12). Yusoff raises the importance of linking two often-separated fields – geology as leading to colonial extraction, and constructing histories of the earth. Existing histories of the deep-time sciences, and knowledges of the earth in Africa, offer ways of thinking beyond this binary. The history of the earth sciences in Africa can be about how we can link different historiographies and methods to understand power and economics in the modern world, and uncover new and obscured perspectives of the earth and its history.

The remainder of the chapter will take Yusoff’s contention of the “Janus-faced discipline of geology” into its structure, examining the two largest areas where histories of Africa and the earth sciences have been connected, which together illuminate the potential of linking African history with the history of knowledge of the earth. The first will be one of the largest areas of African historiography – the history of mining and exploitation of mineral resources. This has been a huge field, simultaneously showing the crucial importance of the earth for African history, while enabling us to consider long continuities and disjunctions in human relations with the earth and its products. The second will focus on a more minority pursuit, but which has developed massively in conceptual importance – the history of understandings of past life, both human and non-human. As the sciences of palaeontology and palaeoanthropology consolidated over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they marked Africa as a crucial region, while often marginalizing Africans themselves. But views of the history of life also offer scope to take these debates further, to a topic where Africa is now considered central to understanding the whole of humanity.

2 Mining

If we talk about Africa, the earth and historiography, then the history of mining dominates. This is an old literature on an even older phenomenon. African mining traditions go back thousands of years, and studies of African mining link political, economic, cultural, spiritual, and anthropological perspectives. Mining has been central to much of African history and is a clear point of intersection with histories of the earth sciences. The wide use of metals like copper, gold, and iron has been a persistent feature for many African societies – see especially Herbert (2003) for copper, and the works of Chirikure (such as 2015 and 2018) for iron. In some social evolutionary contexts, this use of metals was highlighted to belittle African societies, through describing Bantu peoples as living in “the iron age” in contrast to some imagined later modernity – a clear example of “the denial of coevalness” discussed by Fabian (2014). Nevertheless, the extent, sophistication, aesthetics, and complexity of African metallurgy have been widely valued. Indeed, brass-works from West Africa, most notably the Benin Bronzes, have been especially resonant focusses on demands for the restitution of objects looted during the colonial period (Hicks 2020; Gundu 2020).

One old strand in the literature has been based around searches for “origins” of African mining and metal-smelting, which has moved between ideas of independent innovation and diffusion – and not in a linear manner (Alpern 2005). While nineteenth and twentieth century diffusionists often saw Sub-Saharan Africa as receiving metal-working from the Phoenicians (Mauny 1952), late-nineteenth century German and French figures like Gaston Maspero, Felix von Luschan, and Ludwig Beck all argued for the independent invention of iron-metallurgy in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Maspero even arguing that Egypt itself received iron-working from southern neighbors (Maspero 1891). The association of iron-working with the Bantu-speaking peoples has also drawn on diffusionist currents. Indeed, Herbert (2001) has criticized romanticized “grand theories about Bantu expansion that featured the smith as culture hero: Bantu agriculturalists overspread Africa from the Cameroon Highlands to the Indian Ocean and south to the Cape of Good Hope thanks to their possession of iron technology” (48). These debates are particularly strong because the chronologies of metal-working in Africa disrupt norms derived from European contexts of a linear movement through stone, bronze, and iron ages. Egypt was one of the first metal-smelting and mining societies, especially in gold, silver, and copper, but was a relative latecomer to iron technology. Meanwhile, iron-mining and smelting seems to have been adopted extremely rapidly by many central and southern African societies by at least 1000 BCE – which the Senegalese archaeologist Hamady Bocoum (2004) pushes back even further to the second millennium BCE. Debates on dates and origin are still unresolved, and while the balance of interpretations is currently on independent innovation, the pendulum has been persistently swinging, and is doubtful to rest permanently.

Possibly a more fruitful line of inquiry going beyond the question of where it first started (and the diffusionist baggage associated with this debate) has been on the significance of mining and metallurgy for African societies. Chirikure (2018) has used archaeological, historic, ethnographic, and linguistic sources, and science and technology studies, to examine the wide-ranging importance of mining and metallurgy in numerous African societies, discussing how “the chaîne opératoire of metallurgy and mining was imbued with religious, sociocultural, and symbolic attributes, all of which were inseparable from the associated technology (11).” These histories show a mixture of commonality and diversity, with both alluvial and underground mining practiced across the continent, and mining and metallurgy having persistent ritual importance, often associated with gender and reproduction. Metallurgy and mining are also variably connected with politics and state-formation, sometimes highly controlled in centralized politico-economic systems, but more diffuse in other regions. As with much of African history, the history of metallurgy simultaneously shows dynamism; connections between culture, technology, political, and spiritual forces; and tremendous diversity across time and place.

The study of mining, metals, and minerals has also placed African history at the center of numerous global relationships. The paradox of early African history – that the archaeological record and observations of outsiders indicate extremely powerful, sophisticated, and wealthy societies, for which we often lack written records – is highlighted by François-Xavier Fauvelle, who describes Africa as “the cradle of civilizations so radiant, and yet so obscured in the surviving documentation” (Fauvelle 2018: 4). However, the study of metals and minerals provides an important entry point. Extracted minerals gave Africans a huge amount of importance in global commodity trades. Toby Green (2016, 2020) shows how many currencies, including some based on metals, made West African economies and people crucial players in a developing global economy in the medieval and early modern period, even if the value of their commodities depreciated over the centuries, especially through the distorting effects of the trade in enslaved people. Similar work for East Africa, especially the Swahili Coast (Horton et al. 2021 and Seland 2014), shows the importance of Africans in Indian Ocean trading networks, with iron, gold, and gemstones being crucial resources. While these studies generally do not say much about African knowledge of the earth or mining techniques, they nevertheless indicate the need for investigations of how these minerals were extracted, the knowledge and expertise which developed around them, and their persistence into later centuries.

African knowledges of the earth are of course not just about metals, as a wide literature especially in anthropology and archaeology can tell us. Earth, clay, and geological features have been crucial for many African societies in many different ways – clay for pottery, stone for tools and buildings, megaliths erected to stand in the landscape, rocks and the earth for health and healing, and deep knowledge of soils deployed in agriculture (summarized in Insoll 2015). In some cases, this traditional knowledge has been identified in a modern utilitarian manner, being seen to remedy or avoid environmental degradation (Diallo and Diallo 2016; Ngailo and Nortcliff 2007). But there are also important cultural dimensions. Traditions of humans being born from the earth are found across numerous African societies. In parts of western Africa, “geophagy” has had important healing functions, and earth shrines have a significant ritual and political role (Lentz 2013). Once again, histories of the earth in Africa show how impossible it is to disentangle the economic from the cultural and social, and long durational histories of culture and society.

Mining in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meanwhile becomes closely tied with imperial and colonial histories. This association dates to the colonial period itself, when the idea that colonialism in southern and central Africa was driven by mineral exploitation was widely discussed, and mining interests were entangled with the formation of colonial states (a critique going back at least to J.A. Hobson 1902). The history of colonial mining clearly shows the dispossession and erasure of African systems of ownership, as colonizers seized mines and deposits which had long been worked by Africans (Fauvelle 2018: 126; Dumett 1998). Mines and minerals also consolidated colonial systems. The search for gold and diamonds was a motor of colonial expansion, and a key part of colonialist imaginaries. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was just one cultural production seeking to define the continent (McClintock 1995; Chrisman 2011). The earth sciences, which were essential for prospecting, imagining territories, and converting of resources into commodities, were part of new systems of dominance. African minerals became central within international rivalries. That the 1899–1902 South African War was essentially a “war for gold” has been a persistent source of debates since the war itself (Smith 2000). The historiography has also shown colonial mining as socially transformative, when historical attention has focused on mine-workers rather than the mine-owners (see for example Johnstone 1976 for a pioneering Marxist-inspired work). Mines required miners after all, and studies of labor have emphasized deep engagement with the earth, but also the modernity of African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, defined by class-formation, new working patterns, migration, urbanization, and the formation of new communities and identities.

The history of mining has been dominated by two regions, both in southern Africa. South Africa has a distinct mining history, as the largest manifestation of settler colonialism on the continent, and racist state policy across the colonial period and Apartheid regime. Gold-mining on the Witwatersrand, and diamond mining in Kimberley, saw a huge amount of study in the 1980s, often following Marxist perspectives (Worger 1987; Turell 1987; Phimister 1988). These works illustrated the transformative impact of South African gold and diamond mines. Gold rushes sparked mass migration from Africa, Europe, and Asia, and mining organization of structured twentieth-century racial discrimination, class, and identity formation (Moodie and Ndatshe 1994; James 1992). As argued by Worger (1987) and Turell (1987), the monopolistic policies of diamond-mining companies, and attempts to depress worker wages and maintain control of diamond supplies, led to extremely coercive measures over Black workers, including draconian punitive regimes and being confined in compounds – presaging and possibly informing the policies of the Apartheid state. The South African context therefore shows the continued, long-term, and persistent connections between minerals and power, something of which historians of the earth sciences should be mindful.

The second large historiographical focus has been the Copperbelt in the north of modern Zambia. This region saw mining activity in earlier African history (Musambachime 2016; Nikis and Livinstone-Smith 2017), which then expanded dramatically, as the Copperbelt became one of the most densely populated and industrialized regions of the world over the early and mid-twentieth century, with Zambia itself producing 12% of the world’s copper in 1964 (Sikomo et al. 2016). This work focuses on mining as an engine of industrial and economic development, moving starkly against stereotypes of African “traditionalism” and subsistence economies to examine urbanization and complex social and labor relations. The Copperbelt was also a region of theoretical innovation. The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, founded in 1937, pioneered new forms of anthropology focusing on Copperbelt mining communities, which moved the discipline away from a stereotyped focus on “primitive societies,” to more complex ones based on class and migration. These forms of anthropology have themselves been shown as dependent on African experts, who conducted much of the fieldwork (Schumaker 2001; Tembo 2014), and simultaneously subverted, but also worked within, colonial structures.

There are enough studies of the Copperbelt for an essay of their own, which have shown the region to be one of the most economically and socially changed parts of Africa, but also locked within particular myths, of the African as a miner, and representing a particular African “urban modernity.” Recent studies have attempted to shift frameworks somewhat. Miles Larmer has attempted to decenter the “mythic modernist narrative” around the Copperbelt, bringing out alternative perspectives, drawing from environmental history, bringing women more strongly to the narrative, and seeking cross-border and globalized connections. His use of the “obvious but nonetheless irresistible analogy of geological time for our understanding of historical change” to think about the sedimentation of experience, cultural forms, social groups, and economics (Larmer 2021, 26) again shows how African history and thinking about the earth are linked.

For the postcolonial period, mining looms similarly large. Continuing with the Copperbelt, Musasa (2021), who herself grew up in the region, has written about the social destabilizations caused by the later privatization of the mines, simultaneously continuing this history into the present while highlighting the experiences of Zambian mining communities today. Recent work in South Africa meanwhile has followed shifts in mineral production across the later twentieth century, tied to new questions around political and legal frameworks in the post-Apartheid period. Platinum mining in the north-west of the country has generated an especially large literature and lively debates, as a prism to examine relations between landrights, private companies, chieftainship, and government (Manson and Mbenga 2012; Capps 2016; Phillips 2022). These studies have shown the importance of mining for postcolonial states, the social embeddedness of mining, and the continued dominance of external corporations and interests.

In terms of new directions for the history of African mining, and relations between African history and the earth sciences, two authors stand out. Recently, Robyn d’Avignon (especially 2022, but also 2018 and 2020) has examined links between African gold-mining practices in the Birimian greenstone belt in West Africa, conventionally described as “orpaillage” in colonial-era documents. Self-consciously “part history and part ethnography” (2022, 26) d’Avignon’s work is based on fieldwork in Senegal and archival research in Dakar, Conakry and Aix-en-Provence, and traces the long histories of West African mining, especially in Maninka-speaking regions of Mali, Senegal, and Gambia. Orpaillage is examined in terms of understanding of the earth, forms of African expertise, communities around mining and mines, and as a form of “ritual geology” shared across a wide region. Gold mining is tied with understandings of the minerals and the earth belonging to spirits which can in some respects be regarded as “actors” in scientific processes (d’Avignon 2020), and is connected to climatic and environmental change, with mining increasing during drought and famine as a crisis resource. And d’Avignon makes a wider point: we should regard African knowledges of the earth as “geology,” and not just “traditions” or “vernacular knowledges.”

A different, although complementary, approach has been taken by Gabrielle Hecht, in her work on “nuclearity,” thinking about uranium extraction across twentieth-century Africa (2012). Hecht shows how Africans were – in multiple ways – denied the status of “nuclearity,” while nevertheless being central for the development of the global atomic age – something often ignored in the voluminous work on the Cold War and nuclear culture. African states like Niger, Madagascar, and Gabon were denied the status of being nuclear powers, despite being major producers of uranium, and African miners were denied recognition that health problems were caused by working with radioactive materials. The history of nuclearity in Africa links the personal and geopolitical. Hecht’s methods are also worth noting, pulling material from a huge range of collections (26 archives in national, business and nuclear agency archives in seven countries, as well as oral histories), highlighting silences and gaps as well as formal statements in the documents, and with constant recognition that the story she tells is only partial.

D’Avignon and Hecht’s work shows directions in which histories of African mining, and knowledge of the earth more generally, can go, and the potential of linking the history of the earth sciences with African history. Continued interdisciplinarity (in varied constellations), highly creative use of sources, and simultaneously regarding mining in Africa as deeply embedded in local contexts, but also enmeshed in global practices – even if Africans themselves are often marginalized. Western-trained geologists are present in these histories, but are only one set of actors (and usually secondary to the African miners themselves). Historians of the earth sciences ought to be mindful of this. For all the apparent conceptual power of the geologists, and their entanglement with colonial states, they were always only one part of much larger stories, and we should be attentive to other actors and knowledges, and the potential of the diverse sources and methods used in African history.

And of course, histories of mining and extraction are not just histories, and it is no surprise that recent histories of mining by d’Avignon, Hecht, and others continue up until the present. The twenty-first century has indeed been presented as a new struggle for Africa’s resources, with companies and economies pouring money, personnel and political capital into operating in Africa. As of 2018, 19 African countries gain more than 50% of their export revenues from mineral resources (Jessell et al. 2018). The deep history of mining shows how economics, geology, geopolitics, and the state continue to intermix. And we should be aware of powerful yet distorting cultural constructions. Hecht’s opening example of Western panics over “yellow cake from Niger” being used in the Iraqi nuclear program, or media sensationalism over the trade in “blood diamonds” discussed by Cleveland (2014), certainly draws on a reality of inequality and instability in some parts of Africa. But, they also play into stereotypes of Africa as a lawless and dangerous place, working against alternate African perspectives, and African agency over mines and resources. Highlighting these stereotypes and showing how they can be deconstructed, and amplifying what minerals mean to different Africans, are important current directions for African history, and important links with histories of the earth sciences.

3 The Deep History of the Earth and Life

While palaeontology, and related subjects like palaeobotany and palaeoanthropology, have been minority pursuits in compared to the gigantic resources devoted to economic geology and mining, they have nevertheless had huge significance. The construction of deep-time chronologies for life and the earth has been acknowledged (particularly from a Euro-American perspective) as being one of the largest shifts in human engagement with the natural world (Rudwick 2014). And of course, fossil work is not separate from mining and mineral exploitation. Mines, quarries, and other geological diggings have been some of the most productive sites for fossil exploitation, and mining and fossil work present entangled histories.

It is increasingly common in discussions of the history of palaeontology to highlight Indigenous traditions regarding fossils and landscapes, often through the prism of “geomythology.” There is no equivalent work to Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2005) for African societies, although African examples do feature in some of the Greek and Roman cases discussed in The First Fossil Hunters (Mayor 2011). Nevertheless, there are certainly important areas of investigation here, and Charles Helm and Julien Benoit have – partly with Mayor’s encouragement and guidance – begun to work in this area (Helm et al. 2019; Helm and Benoit 2019). They have highlighted examples primarily from South Africa around the collecting and ritual use of what geologists would regard as fossils by many African peoples (both past and present), as well as the association of San rock art with fossilized dinosaur trackways in Mokhali Cave in Lesotho. These depict the extremely bird-like creature which might have made them, possibly one called //Khwai-hemm and Khoumolumo in oral traditions. These studies indicate the extent of African engagement with fossils and the need for more investigation of African knowledge of the earth.

However, there are of course caveats here. The instrumentalization of African oral traditions and genealogies by colonial-era scholars has made many (although by no means all) Africanists skeptical of the recording of long-durational knowledge of geological history in oral traditions. David Henige (2009) highlights the longstanding methodological debates on using oral history as a record of factual information in African historiography to raise doubts on recent claims that some Aboriginal Australian and Native American oral histories illustrate the retention of information on geological processes for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years (engaging especially with Mayor 2007; Nunn 2018; McGrath and Jebb 2015). Henige argues against the likelihood of such deep transmission but also raises the epistemological point that “it can operate only by supposing an ideal – and idealized set of worlds in which every conceivable constraint on change is presumed to have operated effectively, continuously and universally” (225). More widely, the extent it is possible or even desirable to take broad cosmological traditions, extract where they discuss what Western scientists call fossils, and then define that small subset as “geomythology” is something which needs further consideration – a point raised in Australian (Rademaker 2021) and South Asian contexts (Chakrabarti 2020: 104–9).

We know from the literature on enslavement and the mass displacement of Africans to the Americas that knowledge was also transferred: enslaved people bought rice cultivation techniques, healing practices, and botanical knowledge from Africa to the Americas (Carney 2002; Carney and Rosomoff 2009; Schiebinger 2017). How and whether this also included African knowledge of the earth is a further question. There are hints this was significant, especially in the now frequently repeated anecdote from Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43) that enslaved Africans in North America were able to identify mammoth teeth as being those of elephants (Mayor 2000). There is clearly more work to be done here, both in terms of the spread of African knowledge, and how it became incorporated into new scholarly disciplines – with all the issues around dispossession (both physical and epistemological) that this implies.

During the colonial period, Holger Stoecker has argued that the “scramble for Africa” was accompanied by a “scramble for dinosaurs” (Stoecker 2018: 25–6). However, it must be said that any “scramble” for African dinosaurs was far more ad-hoc and sporadic than the mass expropriation and exploitation of the continent by colonial systems. Stoecker himself worked on a project supported by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, on possibly the largest attempt to expropriate African fossil material – the exploitation of Tendaguru in modern Tanzania, which involved the excavation of 225 tons of fossils by huge numbers of African workers, mobilized by the German colonial state in the aftermath of the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–7). Tendaguru has been researched before: Gerhard Maier’s African Dinosaur’s Unearthed (2003) provided an in-depth narrative account of excavations in both the German and British colonial periods. The Dinosaurs in Berlin project, culminating in a lavishly illustrated volume, followed a more thematic and varied approach (Heumann et al. 2018). A particularly relevant study for African history was written by Mareike Vennen (2018), who discussed how photographs from Tendaguru codified visions of African labor, feeding into colonial and racial ideologies while highlighting the crucial dependence on African work and expertise. A further study by Michael Ohl and Holger Stoecker (2018) on the naming of the Tendaguru fossils shows how fossil animals were often given Swahili names by the excavators. However, these names were then effaced in the metropole by German scientists, who gave them Latin and Greek names, or often expressly “Germanized” them, most dramatically shown by an iguanodontian named Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki after the German colonial general – a direct example of the erasure of African expertise and knowledge, and the nationalization of palaeontology.

While we know a great deal about Tendaguru, the history of palaeontology in other parts of Africa is limited. As with mining and so with fossils, South Africa has seen some work, primarily through the works of Saul Dubow (especially 2004 and 2006), who shows the importance of South African geology and prehistory within the British empire, while also being domestically important for the formation of settler society and the later segregationist state. Other works have followed this lead, such as Chetty (2021) which examines the career of the South African geologist Alex Du Toit as simultaneously being central to the formation of ideas of continental drift, and deeply enmeshed within the political and social debates in twentieth-century South Africa.

There has also been some work on the history of interpretations of fossils from Madagascar – potentially a huge field, given the island’s geological diversity, the recent extinction of megafauna like Aepyornis and Megaladapis, and its definition in Western discourses as a strange place of biogeographic isolation. Thomas Anderson (2018) has written on how natural history, geology, ethnography, and palaeontology in nineteenth-century Madagascar intermixed with colonial discourses, and in a more specific article (Anderson 2013) examined the transfer of the eggs and bones of giant extinct flightless birds in Madagascar and New Zealand to examine global relations in the history of science, following the vogue of questioning centers and peripheries. While the Malagasy people are themselves largely invisible in these studies (a particularly noteworthy omission, given that the Malagasy language has an extensive written tradition), this still illustrates the diversity of currents feeding into the construction of African nature. Scientists have also approached the topic, most recently Alison Richard’s The Sloth Lemur’s Song (2022), examining the deep history of the island and its inhabitants, and using this to think about issues of time, diversity, and scientific work.

Even this limited work on palaeontology in South Africa and Madagascar is exceptional. We still know little about the field’s history in other parts of Africa. With the exception of some popularizing works (Nothdurft and Smith 2002), the extent of palaeontological excavation in North Africa, which interacted in complex ways with the much more studied history of Egyptology, has barely been touched. The expansion of palaeontology in the Karoo in South Africa, where fossils of what were problematically termed “mammal-like reptiles” became a major source of interest across the twentieth century, has also been unexamined by historians of science. However, there have been works by palaeontologists, most notably Bruce Rubidge (2013) who noted the scale of these projects, and Elsa Panciroli (2021) has highlighted how histories of fossil mammal research allow us to recover a greater variety of actors within palaeontological work. Meanwhile, the deep connections between histories of oil exploration in West Africa, and invertebrate fossils and micropalaeontology, have barely been acknowledged at all. These are not just gaps in the literature, but investigating these in-depth would reframe the history of knowledge and work on fossils in Africa in major and important ways, and draw further connections between ways of knowing the earth, nature, and humans, and the political, economic, and conceptual structures around them.

The primary exception to the lack of a literature on fossil work in Africa has been the history of human origins research in southern Africa. The history of palaeoanthropology – more than many branches of the history of science – has an old seam focusing on “larger than life” characters like Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, and Louis Leakey, debating “bones of contention” (Lewin 1997). Older accounts of the discipline’s history are often litanies of fossils and finders, and this is still continued in some popular works, with one recent example explicitly being titled “Fossil Men” (Pattison 2020). However, like most branches of the history of science, there has been a drive to deepen consideration of the history of palaeoanthropology, especially as connected to colonialism and debates over humanity, and the range of people involved in palaeoanthropological research (for a summary, see Goodrum 2009).

The broad trend in the history of palaeoanthropology has been an acknowledgment that, over the twentieth century, a general “Asiacentric” model of human development, seeking human origins in Central Asia in particular, gradually and unevenly shifted to either multiregional or Afrocentric views (Regal 2002; Yen 2014; Schweighöfer 2018). We have a good literature on the role of South African excavations for these processes, with several studies examining two especially prominent “fossil men” – Raymond Dart and Robert Broom (Richmond 2009a, 2009b; Schweighöfer 2018; Madison 2020). These works often examine the contested history of the Taung Skull and other southern African hominin finds in the early twentieth century. Partly this is a story around imperial hierarchies of power, as South African finds were questioned and doubted by scientific establishments in metropolitan Britain – often for not conforming to the features expected of a large-brained human ancestor, as had been epitomized by the (forged) Piltdown skull. However, these specimens were also significant for promoting the idea that South African science had crucial global contributions, through controlling and dominating a primordial antiquity.

On the history of human origins research in Africa, a particular mention must be made of Christa Kuljian’s Darwin’s Hunch (2016), which examines the field’s close connection with society and politics from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. This connects Dart and Broom’s work with colonial and racist policies in a considered way, and the stealing of human remains of modern people is a constant and disturbing theme. The example of a woman named /Keri-/Keri, whose remains and body-cast were held in Dart’s collections after her death from pneumonia in 1939, is a consistent thread. Likewise, the complexities of human origins research in South Africa in the context of Apartheid and the post-Apartheid period are dealt with in a sensitive and nuanced manner, with the field being shown as simultaneously useful for building an international profile for South African institutions, while jostling uneasily with domestic issues, including struggles over Apartheid and Creationist strands in various South African religious denominations. As well as building a complex and engaging picture of science in Africa, the book also admirably crosses the boundary between academic and popular history of science and should be a model for future work on these topics.

Kuljian’s work is also important for leading the history of human origins research from the early twentieth century into more recent decades, when – perhaps surprisingly – the range of history of science studies on palaeoanthropology in Africa either dry up, or move away from Africa itself. This is surprising given the number of high-profile finds from the late-1940s, most notably associated with the Leakeys in Kenya (ranging from “Nutcracker Man” or Zinjanthropus, to Homo habilis, the “handy man” privileged as the first tool-using human). Research on Australopithecines likewise expanded to fully regard them as the “first” human ancestors, with the iconic find of “Lucy” or “Dinkinesh” in 1974 in Hadar in Ethiopia (the subject of some retrospections, such as Johannson and Wong 2009, but no history of science-based account, as of yet). And more recently, genetic research has fully entrenched a “recent out of Africa” hypothesis, dislodging both out-of-Asia models and multiregionalism, and leading to the promotion of the notion that “we are all African apes” (with the “we” being all humans).

The expanding history of palaeoanthropology has shown it as one of the most prominent and culturally resonant sciences of the twentieth century. However, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on how palaeoanthropology was deployed in the United States and Europe. We know for example from Nadine Weidmann’s studies of the relations between Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey (Weidmann 2011) about the complexity of ideas of the “Killer Ape” and “African Genesis” of humanity, and the reception of these ideas in Cold War culture (not least through the famous monolith sequences in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). These threads have been taken up even more fully by Erika Milam in Creatures of Cain (Milam 2019), examining palaeoanthropology as a “vernacular science” in the USA, and how African finds (and stereotypes of Africa) were integrated into conceptions of humanity, science, nature, and aggression in late-twentieth century North America. Marianne Sommer (2016) has shown how genetics research used African palaeoanthropology to argue for pluralistic visions of humanity. These show the tremendous significance of Africa as a field of scientific work and succeed in what they set out to do: examine the role of African palaeoanthropology in discourses in North America and Europe. They do however indicate a parallel with Hecht’s work on “nuclearity”: African material is crucial for concepts of human origins in the North, and conceptions connected to the Cold War and Atomic Age. But African actors – with a very few exceptions, largely from South Africa – were generally invisible.

The contribution of Africans is hinted at in some works. Kamoya Kimeu (1940–2022) has been noted for his role in Kenyan human origins research in popular accounts and received obituaries in Nature and The New York Times. Another example is Saul Sithole (1908–1997), who worked as a preparator at the Transvaal Museum. Sithole initially worked on bird specimens, but also played an important role in fossil work, especially around the Sterkfontein site. As well as encouraging us to pay attention to people in ostensibly subordinate museum roles (also highlighted by Wylie 2021 and this volume), Jacobs discusses how while Sithole was accorded “respectability,” structures of contemporary scientific work and prejudice meant he was never accorded the status of being a scientist (Jacobs 2016, 180–210). Kuljian also discusses Sithole and engages with the promotion of palaeoanthropology in post-Apartheid South Africa, especially as providing depth for the project of the “African Renaissance.” Likewise, we know how “Lucy” is named “Dinkinesh” in Ethiopia (meaning “You are marvelous” in Amharic) and is a national icon, with the fossils being held at the National Museum in Addis Ababa and with casts displayed in museums around the world (Hochadel 2009). And Emily Kern has discussed the role of African archaeology within debates over human origins in the latter twentieth century (Kern 2018). However, these are still relatively short excurses, and a focused study like Sigrid Schmalzer’s The People’s Peking Man (2008) for any African context would be a key future project to fully take these African developments into account.

African perspectives have been investigated in museum studies – a further academic discipline which could easily be brought into these discussions. Scott’s Envisioning African Origins (2007) discusses human evolution displays in British and US museums, regarding their importance for fixing particular images of human evolution, social development, and African-ness in the USA and Britain (often re-emphasizing ideas of linear evolution from African “savagery” to Western modernity). However, it also includes two fascinating later chapters, examining the responses of Black visitors to displays of human evolution, and National Museums Kenya in Nairobi. These show how Black audiences express surprise at the lack of engagement with modern Africa (and the “Leakey-centric” perspective in the Nairobi museum), and how human origins can be a source of pride, with displays reread in “Africa-centric” counter-narratives. Yet there is still much more work to be done here. Scott concludes that “for too long modern-day African people, including those of the African diaspora, have been invisible in ‘out-of-Africa’ scenarios, invisible as representatives of modern humanity and invisible as members of the museum audience” (150) – something which is still true today, both in the historiography and museum displays, over a decade after the work’s publication.

The idea that humanity has African origins has also had a strong impact on African history itself. Paul Zeleza has written how the linked projects of decentering Eurocentric histories and categories “requires not only continued vigilance against Eurocentric conceptions of history and categories of analysis, but also vigorous reconstructions of history that (re)centre African history by deepening and globalizing it in its temporal and spatial scope. After all, Africa is the cradle of humanity, the continent where humans have lived the longest” (2006: 203). That Africa is now regarded as the “birthplace” of humanity has been highlighted as a reason for the importance of African history, showing the continent as a crucial center, rather than somewhere peripheral or cut-off from key human stories. Historians of science will of course recognize that this too is an ideological use of the past, albeit one which connects with the liberatory projects of African history, which makes this an area and set of claims where these two fields would have many possible points for discussion.

A final aspect around African palaeontology is the work by palaeontologists acknowledging how their discipline has been deeply shaped by colonialism and extraction. These include Raja et al. (2022), which has used statistical methods to construct a “parachute index” based on how scientific communities in particular countries have been subjected to various inequalities within palaeontological research. Four of the top ten countries in this index were African. Even more starkly, North et al.’s survey of 3,573 “high-impact geoscience articles” (2020) found that only 3.9% dealt with Africa, and of those, only 30% contained an African author (80% of whom came from either South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Ethiopia, Algeria, and Cameroon). These legacies of colonialism and exclusion are not surprising to historians of science, who have long engaged with the imperial and colonial connections of these fields. But they have dramatically highlighted these issues to earth scientists and raise the potential for socially engaged cross-disciplinary work between historians of science and working scientists.

The public prominence of palaeontology has also made it an important field in diversifying science and building African scientific institutions. Fossils have become an important focus to move debates on restitution – which have traditionally focused on human remains and human-made objects – to objects of a more “natural” provenance. These have included the Tendaguru fossils still held in Berlin, and other specimens like Kabwe 1 (historically termed “the Broken Hill skull” or “Rhodesia Man”) held at the Natural History Museum in London, which has been requested by Zambia since the 1970s (Stewens et al., 2022). That palaeontology also provides an opportunity to inspire African involvement in science have been raised by science communicators. One notable figure is Sibusiso Biyela, who has worked to develop new terms and modes of communicating science in Zulu, particularly through writing reports and coining terms around palaeontology, following the long trend of using dinosaurs as “ambassadors for science” (Biyela 2019). The public resonance of palaeontology has made it a central part of wider debates over the role and conduct of science, and attempts to diversify and expand it to traditionally excluded audiences.

4 Conclusion

To then return to the question posed in the opening of this piece: how can African history and the history of the earth sciences speak to one another, and what insights does bringing them together potentially offer? This chapter can of course only give a partial answer, and one which is strongly informed by my own position as a European primarily trained in the history of science. And given that this piece is part of a potential dialogue, it certainly is not the final word, and responses from Africanist and African positions would be most welcome. Nevertheless, three main points could be suggested. The first is the crucial, yet often hidden and ignored, contribution of African actors and processes to the history of human engagement with the earth, in all its manifestations and entanglements, including the economic, political, conceptual, and ecological. African history can inform the drive in the history of the earth sciences to broaden the range of actors involved in understanding of the earth and regard western geology as just one mode of knowing. The second is a related point that African history in dialogue with the earth sciences can underscore and develop a fundamental contention in both fields – that knowledges of the earth depend on various forms of power. One strand of this story is an expected one – the power exerted through colonial and neocolonial processes, in which the earth sciences and mineral extraction were central to exploitation and domination. But works like those of Hecht, d’Avignon, and the hints around the role of Africans in the history of palaeontology, can also broaden our understanding and recover a greater plurality of voices, actors, and perspectives. And finally, this is a history deeply relevant to the present. Whether discussing legacies and persistence of mineral exploitation, inequalities in research in palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, and the relative marginalization of African scholarship today, the history of the earth sciences in dialogue with African history can both illustrate the roots of these processes and potential means of redressing them in the present and the future.