{"id":913,"date":"2020-08-12T03:06:06","date_gmt":"2020-08-12T10:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/?p=913"},"modified":"2020-10-31T03:25:16","modified_gmt":"2020-10-31T10:25:16","slug":"tales-on-the-rift-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/tales-on-the-rift-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"History I: Tales on the rift valley"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The East African rift valley; home to Olduvai Gorge and East Africa’s early history. Photo by Barbara Schneider from Freeimages.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Passed down through lore and ditty alike, collective wisdom first found its way to me as soon as I could form memories. More objective recollections of the past would later be incorporated into social and religious studies throughout my early education. However, it was not until the first day of my secondary education that this knowledge was formally christened \u201chistory\u201d. Then, history simply represented dreary afternoons in still tropical air, and perhaps my greatest feats of raw memorization. Moreover, all the curricular decisions that I made were obfuscated in uneventfulness. To me, the decisions to pursue the allure of the Rhine lands over the mysteries of the Chinese economic revolution or to revel in the logistical marvels of Timbuktu instead of the anti-apartheid movement, were mired in inconsequentiality. Ironically, the impatience with which I darted out of my final history class has since been supplanted by an eagerness to learn from the past. Here, I parse through important historical stories (illustrated through East Africa) and lessons from my past that elucidate the contemporary world.<\/p>\n

African history, as I have come to know it, began close to home. The story of Zinjanthropus<\/em> roaming Olduvai Gorge was told as a story of solitary hominin ancestors that braved the East African rift valley. These solitary units would later discover the survival advantage that human community conferred in order to form the first ethnic groups of Africa. When shared values and a drive for mutual survival were no match for the deprivation wrought by natural calamities, concourses of Bantu and Hamites, among others, set off on mass migrations that established current anthropological settlements. The search for arable land and propitious climate often convened several migrants, sparking skirmishes and secessions into smaller tribal units. In a bid to control finite resources, fiercer tribes pillaged, enslaved, and assimilated feebler tribes. Somewhere in this process, abject survival progressed into a mixture of inter-tribal cooperation, expansion and avarice. These precedents for greater survival for the \u201cwinners\u201d came at increasing costs to the \u201closers\u201d. Tribes that stood the test of time grew to become the kingdoms and chiefdoms that have shaped the geopolitics of the continent. To this day, the epic rivalry between Buganda and Bunyoro kingdoms is etched into my memory as the epitome of African tribal war and diplomacy. Such geopolitical structures were commonplace and would later be instrumental in the outcomes of first contact with overseas counterparts.<\/p>\n

Continued in Series on the rift valley<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Passed down through lore and ditty alike, collective wisdom first found its way to me as soon as I could form memories. More objective recollections of the past would later be incorporated into social and religious studies throughout my early education. However, it was not until the first day of my secondary education that this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “History I: Tales on the rift valley”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1160014,31,2139],"tags":[1160013],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concepts","category-personal","category-reflection","tag-conceptual"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jumar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}