As Africa approaches the threshold of the third millennium, it seems right
to conclude with some attempt to discern which strands in the African
experience show most signs of continuing relevance to the present. In this
context, the long and distant period of man's evolution as a scavenger,
hunter and gatherer may seem at first sight to be of marginal significance.
Yet the primacy of Africa in human evolution is a recent discovery, which
has so far had time to achieve only a fraction of its potential impact.
Already men of science are learning to see Africa not as a quaint
backwater, but as the scene of man's acquisition of his deepest genetic
characteristics. It seems likely that, as this knowledge spreads and is
pondered by the next generation of scientists across the whole spectrum of
intellectual disciplines, the outside world will learn to think of Africa with
more respect and that Africans themselves will face their fellows with a
new confidence. If the recent findings of molecular biology find accept-
ance, to the effect that the planet was not merely first colonized from
Africa, but also largely recolonized by the first fully sapient men spreading
out, again from Africa, within the last 250,000 years, the general impact
should be even stronger (above, pp. 25-6).

Shorter-term by these standards, but still extending backwards at least
ten thousand years to the early stages of food production, and still full of
significance, is the small-scale pattern of Africa's linguistic and cultural
ethnicity (above, pp. 147-8). Mainly, this seems to have been the result
of small units of food-producing population forming in the most favourable
pockets of a generally hostile environment. These pockets became the
areas within which a large measure of endogamy was practised over a long
period, thereby giving rise to divergent streams of language and culture.
The resulting ethnic groups had no necessary pattern of social and
political organization. Some remained entirely stateless. Most eventually
gave rise to clusters of very small states sharing a common language and
culture. Some became incorporated temporarily into larger states by
conquest. With the coming of colonialism, the whole continent was
reorganized into larger states, but even then the ties of language and

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