Monody or solo song was the product of sixth-century poets living in the Aegean islands. The most remarkable were Sappho and Alcaeus of Lesbos and Anacreon and Ibycus at the court of Polycrates in Samos. The poetry was distinguished by its metre, dialect and subject matter and by the conditions of its performance from elegiac and iambic verse on the one hand and choral lyric on the other. The poets used short stanzas in a variety of metres, and sang the songs to their own accompaniment on the lyre, presumably repeating the melody for each stanza. They composed for the most part in their own dialects, Sappho and Alcaeus in Aeolic, Anacreon in Ionic, whereas the writers of choral lyric used an artificial language distinguished by some characteristic features of the western dialect group. The audience was presumably a small circle of friends who shared the poet's literary or political interests or lived at the court of his patron.

The poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus is the oldest monody to survive, but it had its antecedents in the earlier music and poetry of Lesbos and in the compositions of Archilochus. Seventh-century Lesbos was famous for its musicians Terpander and Arion (see above, p. 168), and although they wrote poetry of different types from Sappho and Alcaeus and gained their fame in other parts of the Greek world, they bear witness to the musical and literary prowess of the island. Archilochus mentions the Lesbian paean (fr. 121 IEG), and Sappho calls Lesbian singers superior to those of other lands (fr. 106).

For the history of Greek literature, philosophy, from Aristotle onwards, is important in at least three different ways. First, style and genre: the literary presentation of philosophy, sometimes within the same writer, varies on a scale which may range from what is little more than technical shorthand to highly polished prose. Some philosophers of the Hellenistic period even present their ideas in verse, and quotations, especially from the most famous poets, are not uncommon.

Secondly, literary theory: Aristotle himself, and some later Greek philosophers, made fundamental contributions to the theory of rhetoric and to literary criticism. Much of their work in this field was taken over by later classical writers, especially the Roman rhetoricians, and it has had a continuing influence.

Thirdly, thought. This must be considered when it directly influences the subject matter of literature. In this respect Aristotle is much less significant than the Stoics and Epicureans. The philosophy of Epicurus is Lucretius' theme and Lucretius is a poet of comparable genius to Virgil. But Lucretius is only the most notable of many poets and other writers whose work was strongly influenced by Epicureanism or Stoicism. Today that influence looks decidedly more marked on Roman literature than on Greek. But this is due, at least in part, to the loss of nearly all Greek literature from the last three centuries B.C. There can be little doubt that Stoicism and Epicureanism had a pervasive influence on later Greek culture.

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO ALEXANDRIA

The Greeks, who gave us the names, forms and classic models of tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric and pastoral poetry, and, in fact, of almost every literary genre known to the West, did not develop a system of writing adequate for the recording of literature until late in their history. When, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., they finally did so, Egyptian literature, religious and secular, had been transmitted on papyrus scrolls for over two millennia; the literature of the Mesopotamian civilizations, inscribed on clay tablets, went back to a similarly remote antiquity. There had, of course, been a period of literacy, of a very restricted nature, in the great centres of Mycenaean civilization; inscribed clay tablets, dating from the last half of the second millennium, have been found at Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae on the mainland and at Cnossus in Crete. The script — known as Linear B — seems to have been a rough and ready adaptation for Mycenaean Greek of the Cretan Linear A script (still undeciphered but almost certainly non-Greek); the new writing system was used, as far as our evidence goes, mainly for lists of property and simple bureaucratic and legal records — ‘long lists of names, records of livestock, grain and other produce, the account books of anonymous clerks’. No text of an even faintly literary quality survives. In any case the script's inefficiency as an instrument for literary purposes is clear at first glance: it lacks both economy and clarity.

INTRODUCTION

The astounding growth of the Macedonian empire in the second half of the fourth century resulted in a fundamental political restructuring of the Greek world; it also promoted radical cultural changes which turned intellectual and artistic endeavour irreversibly in new directions. In the fifth century, and even in the fourth, Greek culture had been dominated by Athens: yet it was the new Egyptian city of Alexandria which, within little more than a generation after the death of Alexander the Great, became the unquestioned intellectual centre of the transformed Hellenic world. Greek Egypt achieved stability well before the other areas of Alexander's fractured empire, which were thrown into nearly half a century of turmoil by his untimely death, and Ptolemy Soter's rapid consolidation of governmental power both within Egypt and in crucial areas of the Aegean combined with Egypt's immense natural wealth to make Alexandria one of the most attractive cities of the Greek world. The new regime determined to build for themselves in Africa a way of life which was powerfully and essentially Greek, and huge quantities of money were poured into the construction of buildings, the establishment of Greek religious cults and festivals, and the support of almost every type of intellectual and cultural activity from scholarly and scientific research to contemporary art. To Alexandria in the fourth and early third centuries went most leading intellectuals, writers and scientists from all over the Greek world, and two hundred years later Andron of Alexandria could write:‘It was the Alexandrians who educated all the Greeks and barbarians when general culture was tending to disappear owing to the continuous disturbances in the age of the Successors to Alexander.’

Introduction

‘It was produced in the archonship of Euthynus at the Lenaea by Callistratus. Result, first; second, Cratinus with Kheimazomenoi (not preserved); third, Eupolis with Noumeniai.’ So runs the record for our earliest surviving comedy, the Acharnians of Aristophanes, and it refers to an occasion in the year we call 425 B.C. At that time Aristophanes and Eupolis were near the beginning of their careers, young men in their twenties; Cratinus had won his first victory at the festivals some thirty years before, and Aristophanes, on the way up, could portray his distinguished rival as a figure from literary history, now a neglected old has-been with a drink problem. It happens that the first date in that literary history is some thirty years earlier still, in a year reckoned to be 486 B.C., when a competition for comedies was instituted at Athens as an official event at the Dionysia, and the winner was one Chionides, a man remembered by posterity for little else.

If Chionides and Magnes are the names to mention from the first generation of writers of Athenian Old Comedy, as they are for Aristotle in the Poetics (1448a34), then Cratinus and Crates represent the second generation; Eupolis and Aristophanes are of the third and last. What we know about Old Comedy still depends, in overwhelmingly large measure, on the selection of eleven plays by Aristophanes which survive in medieval copies together with an inheritance of interpretative commentary, a corpus of marginal scholia which has offered a perennial invitation to scholarly interest and may have been of decisive importance in keeping the text alive through times when so much other literature was lost.

The century following the Persian Wars has often been referred to as the age of the Greek enlightenment, for some of its leading thinkers demonstrate a rationalism in viewing man and his world and an enthusiasm for intellectual experiment suggestive of the eighteenth century. The heady victory of civilization over barbarism doubtless contributed to this, for it heightened hopes that the world was not an unreasonable place and that man could develop within it new institutions of government and society and new forms of thought and art to fit his needs. The so-called sophists were spokesmen for this intellectual position. Sophist basically means wise man and is the word used by Herodotus of Solon and Pythagoras, but when Hermes hurls it at Prometheus it has already an ironic force, and the presence of sophistic concepts and catchwords in Prometheus vinctus suggests that the movement was already well under way at least by the early 450s. In the later fifth century, however, sophist might often be translated ‘expert’ and was the accepted title of those professors of eristic, rhetoric and civics who travelled to the leading Greek cities giving exhibitions of their mental and verbal cleverness. Attendance on the sophists was fashionable and exciting. It was also expensive, and their followers were often the younger members of wealthy families, not always to the delight of older and conservative relations.

THE POET AND THE ORAL TRADITION

What would the world be like if the Iliad and Odyssey had utterly perished, or been preserved only in fragments? The question hardly bears thinking about. Yet only a fraction of Greek tragedy has survived — why then are we so fortunate in the case of Homer, who lived and worked some three hundred years earlier than the great tragedians, long before the era of libraries and a developed book-trade, probably even before writing itself was seriously applied in Greece to the composing and recording of works of literature? The main reason is that Homer was from the beginning the most admired poet of Hellenic and Hellenized antiquity, and remained so until near its end. He seemed to embody the spirit of an age of heroes, yet never looked old-fashioned like Aeschylus or morally dubious like Euripides. Learning his poetry by heart was an essential part of ordinary education, and that, more than anything, is what saved it from fragmentation and decay in the first centuries after his death. Once consigned to writing, the text gradually achieved a standard form. The written versions ran wild at first, but were slowly reduced to order by scholars and librarians in Athens, Alexandria and Pergamum from the fifth to the second centuries B.C. For hundreds of years even after that, as is shown by the ruins of Graeco Roman settlements along the Nile, on the dry escarpments where papyrus books happen to survive, the Iliad and Odyssey were still widely read, more popular even than the lowbrow and more modern works of Menander.

HOMER

LIFE

Worked probably in latter half of 8th c. B.C., but nothing plausible known about his life or background. His date depends mainly on refs. in ll. and Od. to 8th-c. practices and artefacts (e.g. hoplite-style fighting, gorgon-head brooch, tripod-cauldrons), on the probable posteriority of Hesiod, the decline of oral composition by the time of Archilochus, the appearance of epic scenes on vases etc. after 680, and on ancient opinions (esp. Herodotus (2.53) and Hesychius, citing a probably classical source on date of Arctinus (Suda s.v.)). His region is indicated by predominantly Ionic dialect of the poems, by local east-Aegean detail and colour (e.g. ll. 2.144-6, 459-63, 13.12- 14) and by the unanimous ancient tradition, which associated him primarily with Chios and Smyrna (so e.g. Pindar according to Vit. Thorn. 2); other Lives (in OCT v; mostly of Graeco-Roman date and feebly fictitious) add Cumae and Colophon, agreeing that he died on Ios. See G. S. Kirk, The songs of Homer (Cambridge 1962) 271-87.

For millions of peoples in Africa – and those with liberal inclinations outside Africa – two decades of independence brought little but disillusionment. For the Africans, the nationalist agitations of the 1930s down to the mid-1950s promised a new era of political self-assertion and freedom from foreign imperialist domination. The vision of what was to come was well put by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana when he said: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and everything else shall be added unto you.’ Independence was to be the millennium when the African, after decades of being exploited and oppressed, was to come into his own ‘inheritance’. To the liberals of Europe and North America, the nationalist rhetoric of freedom and equality was a reassertion of the ideals they had cherished and proclaimed. But after two decades of independence these hopes and ideals were replaced by despair as pluralist institutions were supplanted by military rule in many states and the promise of plenty gave way, if not to the increasing impoverishment of the masses, then most certainly to relative stagnation. For example, it has been estimated that the average African state grew less food per capita in 1968 than it had done in 1956, while the per capita gross domestic product at market prices stood in 1970 at $200, a figure which had changed little from what it had been a decade earlier.

WITH AN APPENDIX ON EQUATORIAL GUINEA

Although modelled with local variations on the ideas and structures of Italian Fascism, and later stiffened by an admiration for German National-Socialism, Portugal's Estado Novo was constrained to neutrality during the Second World War. Geographical realities allowed no decisive preference for the Axis powers before the great turning points of 1942: unlike Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal sent no troops to aid the Germans on its eastern front. After those turning points the merest common sense ensured that Portugal's neutrality should be such as to prove acceptable to the western allies.

Portugal's colonies remained intact, but the overall influence of the World War, though less of a nexus of change than it proved elsewhere in colonial Africa, can now be measured as one of various and in some ways profound effect. On the side of the colonised, this influence constituted a formative prelude to the beginning of anti-colonial protest in modern forms; on that of the colonisers, it spurred the system to greater and more insistent exploitation of natural resources and African labour. Generally, the colonial governors anticipated hard times from interruptions to maritime transport. Arguing the economic dangers that lay ahead, the Governor-General of Angola, for example, told his council during its session of 9–14 September 1959 that ‘he wished to see the installation of a war economy’. In fact, so far as most exports were concerned, the hard years were 1941–2, after which there came a recovery and expansion. Sisal exports from Angola fell by half between 1940 and 1941, barely improved in 1942, but more than doubled in 1943 and rose again in 1944.

By 1939 the European colonial powers were as firmly in control of their African territories as they ever would be. During the preceding ten years there had been few major challenges to their authority. Africans had come to accept the new political order and to obey the rules laid down by the colonial administration. The lesson had been learned that, although the colonial administration was thin on the ground, in the last resort it had overwhelming resources of power. Attempts to take advantage of the weakness of some colonial administrations during the First World War and to return to an independence based on pre-colonial political structures, though temporarily successful, had failed. Such challenges to the colonial authorities as did take place during the 1930s were made within the framework of the colonial state and were by and large limited to protest against obnoxious features of the administration; such protest took the form of riots against taxation or strikes to obtain higher wages or better conditions of service in the small colonial industrial sector. With the notable exception of French North Africa, there were few violent demonstrations of a modern political character, that is, aimed at securing greater participation by Africans, and more specifically the small educated élite, in the governmental processes of the colonial state. Nevertheless it was clear that if the educated élite accepted the status quo it was a passive not an active acceptance: they hankered after an independence, but, like the British, they saw it as a goal whose realisation was distant.

In 1940, Pan-Africanism seemed to be in a state of decay, yet was germinating new growth. One generation of leaders and organisations was fading. There had been no Pan-African Congress since the unimpressive New York Congress in 1927. The organiser of the four congresses between 1919 and 1927, W. E. B. DuBois, later acclaimed as the ‘Father of Pan-Africanism’, appeared to look back on them as a completed episode. His semi-autobiographical book, Dusk of dawn, published in 1940, showed minimal interest in Pan-Africanism. However, DuBois's contribution to Pan-Africanism was not only as the organiser and inspirer of occasional congresses, but also as an intellectual, making known the contribution of black people in both Africa and the African diaspora to humanity. In this respect, he was still fruitfully active. His Black folk then and now, published in 1939, was a lively and penetrating collection of essays on African and diaspora history and culture from ancient to modern times. It continued a genre he had pioneered as far back as 1915, with his book The Negro, and which he was to return to in 1947 with The world and Africa. In these works he showed himself capable of stimulating the intelligent general reader on vast, little-known themes. In spirit, these books were profoundly if not explicitly Pan-African. They dealt with Africa as a whole, defended the creativity and validity of African culture through the ages (as had the great nineteenth-century proto-Pan-Africanists, such as E. W. Blyden), and treated the history of the diaspora as a vital part of the history of Africa and Africans.

Much more than most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn is a region with a historical and cultural identity of its own, created by the interactions – and often the conflicts – between its indigenous peoples, rather than by the imposition of an external colonialism. The forces which so drastically affected Africa during the mid-twentieth century certainly had their impact on the Horn. But this impact was mediated through indigenous social and political systems which softened some of its effects, and adapted it to local forms.

THE SETTING

The geographical configurations and historical developments which endowed the Horn with its peculiar character have been examined in earlier volumes in this series. In summary, they comprise the tensions between the social and political systems derived from the central Ethiopian highlands and those derived from the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean littoral, with a buffer zone of greatly varying width between the two. Ethnically, these tensions divide the Amhara and Tigrean peoples of the highlands from the nomadic Afar and Somali of the littoral, with the Oromo (Galla) by far the most important of the intermediate peoples. In religion, an analogous though by no means identical division separates the Orthodox Christian highlands from its Muslim periphery. Politically the long-established Ethiopian state, with a strength founded on arable agriculture, has continuously attempted to impose itself on surrounding peoples with smaller or more decentralised political structures.

The Maghrib, which in Arabic means the place of the sunset, is not a precise geographical term. It has been construed at its narrowest as Morocco alone and at its broadest as all of northern Africa west of Egypt, including Mauritania, where Arabic is the national language. The present chapter excludes both Libya and Mauritania and focusses upon the political and economic development of the core countries, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, in a comparative perspective suggested by their similar colonial experiences. The French presence decisively reshaped all three societies, though in different ways, reflecting the particular colonial situations. In Algeria, where occupation by the French began in 1830, the indigenous economic and political order was most affected, whereas Morocco, the last to lose its independence, was least affected, especially in the northern zone, which in 1912 fell under Spanish rather than French control. In all three societies French education (and Hispano-Arabic education in Spanish Morocco) formed new élites imbued with nationalism and eager to take over the modern economic and political structures largely dominated by European settlers. Pre-colonial traditions influenced the independent regimes, established in Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, and in Algeria in 1962, only insofar as they were refracted through the prism of anti-colonial struggle.

The major influence upon these regimes was the struggle itself, which was more protracted and violent in the Maghrib than in most of colonial Africa because of the more extensive French and settler interests conditioning it. It generated political elites whose organisations and social followings in turn helped to define the new regimes and their respective strategies of development.

The history of most African countries since 1940 seems to revolve around a single event: their gaining of political independence. But this climax of nationalism must be set within those social and cultural changes of which it was so much the product and which were, in the main, confirmed in their course for at least a decade or two thereafter. The Second World War boosted a whole variety of social changes: the intensification of cash-crop production, the acceleration of migration of all kinds and the rapid growth of cities, the diversification of the occupational structure and, eventually, the movement of Africans into its upper echelons, and the expansion of modern education at all levels. All these implied changes in areas more immediately constitutive of ‘society’, namely in how people identified themselves and in their patterns of social cooperation and conflict. Now the concept of ‘social change’ is more than a mere umbrella for several parallel, probably somehow-related changes in diverse aspects of social life; it denotes the systematic transformation of a particular society. But at what level do we set ‘society’? The difficulty was that, though the prime source of these changes did not lie within them, it was still much easier, as late as the 1940s, to speak of local social systems like those of Asante or the Luo as being societies than whole colonies like the Gold Coast or Kenya. Thus the pioneering study, G. and M. Wilson's The analysis of social change (1945), took as its units of analysis these small-scale societies, even though the features of change which they described resulted from the progressive incorporation of these societies into wider units, of which the colonial social system was the most important.

The treatment of Africa as an economic entity needs to be approached with caution, for it is a continent of great natural diversity. Over and above this the differing political, social and economic policies imposed on the continent by the colonial powers left independent Africa with a poorly integrated economy. Intra-African trade was negligible; there was no continental transport and communications system; and the various independent African countries belonged to different monetary zones, each monetary area being linked with one or the other of the former metropolitan powers. It is, therefore, more accurate to talk about the evolution of the African economies rather than of the African economy; and necessary to trace how each has evolved during the period of 35 years covered by this volume. Such an approach, however, would do less than full justice to the economic history of Africa for in spite of the differences in the patterns of development of the various countries, certain overall themes and features are discernible. It will be our aim to highlight these while emphasising, as may be appropriate, the uniqueness of each economy. South Africa, being a developed economy, at least as far as its dominant white community was concerned, is not considered here except for comparative purposes; nor for that matter, unless expressly stated, is Rhodesia, due to lack of data, particularly during the period of the unilateral declaration of independence.

In the 1940s it was the racial composition of the East and Central African societies that presented the critical obstacle to African advance. Although there was in 1940 a distinction in the British mind between the ‘colonies of settlement’, Kenya, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, on the one hand, and the ‘colonies of administration’, Uganda, Tanganyika and Nyasaland, on the other, the settler presence dominated the region in such a manner as to preclude the easy adoption of the ‘West African’ solution in the face of the demand for African independence. Power was nevertheless transferred to African not European hands, and by 1964 all these territories save Southern Rhodesia were independent African states. A year later, the settler rebellion in Southern Rhodesia dispelled any remaining illusions of Britain's effective control over that territory.

Independence, therefore, represented a fundamental landmark in this period, opening up new arenas for African participation and removing significant political, although not economic, constraints. The crucial effect, for the first post-colonial decade at least, was upon the internal balance of power once the colonial arbiter had withdrawn. The independence settlement conferred control of the institutions of state upon the dominant nationalist leadership, but it did not necessarily ensure its continued authority. Its legitimacy depended upon a complex internal political balance so that those who inherited the colonial mantle had both to nurture that legitimacy and to build the new state. The first decade of independence was therefore concerned primarily with the distribution of power in the post-colonial state, although the nature of the conflict was frequently obscured by the rhetoric of development.