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The History of Africa The Quest for Eternal Harmony Molefi Kete Asante
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From Lumumba to Gbagbo Africa in the Eddy of the Euro
American Quest for Exceptionalism 2016 K Martial Frindéthié
Authoritative and comprehensive, The History of Africa provides an accessible narrative from earliest prehistory to the present day, with unusual attention paid to the ordinary lives of Africans. This survey includes a wealth of indigenous ideas, African concepts, and traditional outlooks that have escaped the writing of African history in the West. The fully updated new edition includes information on the recent conflicts in Libya and the Sudan, as well as additional content on the experiences and contributions of women. A companion website offers a wealth of supporting resources for each chapter, including new historic maps, primary sources, video and audio clips, and links to sites for further research. Richly illustrated and clearly written, this volume is an indispensable introduction to the major developments, personalities, and events that have shaped the history of the African continent.
Molefi Kete Asante is Professor and Chair of the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and President of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies and has published 83 books, including Revolutionary Pedagogy (2017), As I Run Towards Africa (2015), and The African American People: A Global History (2013).
The History of Africa
The Quest for Eternal Harmony
Third Edition
Molefi Kete Asante
Third edition published 2019 by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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The right of Molefi Kete Asante to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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First edition published by Pearson Education Ltd. 2007
Second edition published by Routledge 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Asante, Molefi Kete, 1942– author.
Title: The history of Africa : the quest for eternal harmony / by Molefi Kete Asante.
Description: 3rd edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018033406 (print) | LCCN 2018034403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315168166 | ISBN 9781138710375
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033406
ISBN: 978-1-138-71037-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-71038-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-16816-6 (ebk)
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Visit the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/asante
Dedicated to the fathers of African History
Cheikh Anta Diop
Joseph Ki-Zerbo
Kenneth O. Dike
J. F. Ade-Ajayi
Boniface I. Obichere
Albert A. Adu-Boahen
Djibril T. Niane
Mazisi Kunene
Ali Mazrui
Acknowledgments
It is customary to acknowledge those who have inspired, criticized, corrected, and praised a manuscript in preparation; I will not ignore that custom for this Third Edition of The History of Africa. I want to express my gratitude to all of the African scholars who have granted me their commentaries on my work. I especially want to praise the cordial friendship and fraternal spirit shown by the prolific Toyin Falola in his studied and erudite responses to questions and his essays on African histor y. Of course, nothing that I write on history and philosophy escapes the severe attention of my closest colleagues Maulana Karenga, Ama Mazama, Simphiwe Sesanti, Vusi Gumede, Ana Monteiro Ferreira, Michael Tillotson, and Lewis Gordon. I have benefited from their wisdom, clarity, understanding of the Afrocentric vision, and ideas.
The advantage I have had as a professor at Temple University with the support and critique of clearheaded Africology graduate students has had a profound impact on my work. The Nommo sessions allow all writers and researchers with courage to present their ideas to be questioned, sometimes without mercy, by an energized cadre of Afrocentric scholars. Let me also acknowledge the more than 125 doctoral dissertations that I have supervised, because the authors of those dissertations, my students, have added to my knowledge and information in many ways. I have learned from them as they have from me, and I am thankful that they have become productive scholars in their own right.
In a special way I want to point out the brilliance and character of my technical research assistant, Trey “Taharka Adé” Lipscomb, whose intelligent search for additional sources, information, data, and maps have made this Third Edition much more comprehensive and useful than previous editions. He has, from time to time, read particular sections of the text at great benefit to me. Taharka Adé has worked with my editors at Taylor and Francis, Routledge to maintain a state-of-the-art program of technologically accessible materials supporting this edition. I want to acknowledge the support of my colleagues and students to whom I have sometimes seemed pre-occupied, but as they know and have seen, I was always willing to engage. The great joy of loving to come to work cannot be underestimated; I have relished the discussions about histor y, politics, economics, culture, religion, and university strategy with my colleagues: Ama Mazama, Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, Kimani Nehusi, Amari Johnson, Aaron Smith, and Sonja Peterson-Lewis, all professionals and all seeking the same peace as I am. When I have needed them, they have come, and when I needed to find time to write they have allowed me to disappear.
I am indebted most of all to the African people whose tremendous leaps toward re-centering their own narratives on the stage of human histor y have been remarkable since the end of South African apartheid changed the continental prospects. It is not just that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison hand-in-hand with Winnie Mandela and
x Acknowledgments
into the presidential offices of South Africa, but rather that the people of all African nations rejoiced that the continent had finally been cleared of an insidious and often brutal racism that distorted the life chances of the masses of people. I salute the young people who made and are making new avenues as adventurous entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, educators, builders, and ethical leaders. Africa, the continent with the first Homo sapiens population, now has the youngest population on earth, with the average age of the African person being approximately 19 years old.
My family has not left me alone, and that is a good thing, because there are issues that cannot wait in families and one must quickly learn about priorities. As one who could write for hours without eating or drinking, I have come to appreciate the caring expressions of family, especially my grandchildren, Jamar, Ayaana, Aion, Nova, Akira, and Akila, who are free to interrupt at any time. Praise to their parents, my children, Mario, Eka, and M.K., and may they know that my love for them is unconditional. I salute Ana Yenenga, who tries her best to keep me organized and without whom I would not be able to flourish.
Preface
Standing on the banks of the mighty Congo River several years ago, I reflected on the vastness of the African continent. This was just one of the great rivers of Africa, although a magnificent one in its own right; the Congo impacted me with its size and volume and suggestion of the massiveness of Africa.
By the time I had determined that this book must be written, I had climbed the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre, entered the tombs of the dead in the Valley of the Kings, walked across stretches of the hot Sahara, sur veyed Great Zimbabwe from the hilltop, and slept in the rainforest while the earth poured out its soul in massive pans of rain. But there on the green fertile banks of the Congo, I could feel the years of power, and sense the immensity of the continent from this particular angle. I think it was then that I decided to write a narrative history of Africa.
I was born in southern Georgia, the great-great-grandson of enslaved Africans, according to mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA tests, of Nubian and Yoruba ancestry, amidst the tall pine trees of the coastal plains, a very long way from the African continent physically, but very close to the questing spirit and the collective psychology of Africa. As if a magnet were pulling me, I have been drawn to the continent more than 75 times, living and working in Zimbabwe; serving as an external examiner in Kenya and Nigeria; being made a king (Nana Okru Asante Peasah, Kyidomhene of Tafo) in Ghana; consulting with presidents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Senegal; and relaxing on the beaches of Senegal, Ghana, and Tanzania. However, my interest in the continent was more than casual or social; it was academic and intellectual. I realized that most of the people I knew in colleges and in the general community understood very little about Africa; I felt the need to write this book for those people.
My earliest intellectual interest in the African continent was provoked by several outstanding professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I trained for a doctorate in communication with a cognate field in history. My professors were Gary B. Nash, Ronald Takaki, Terence Ranger, and, perhaps most influential, Boniface Obichere. I also had the opportunity to listen to the lectures of Robert Farris Thompson, Mazisi Kunene, and Janheinz Jahn. What characterized these scholars was a common excitement about either African or African American histor y. I inherited much of their love for the careful study of history. While none of my professors were Afrocentrist, they were all committed to discovering as much as possible the meaning of African history in the light of what they had been taught. Each of them went on to contribute to scholarship about the experiences of Africans in the Diaspora or on the African continent.
Scholars in African American studies, African studies, and history have continued to write books and articles exploring certain aspects of the vast history of Africa. Of course, this has meant that there have been many eager students of African history seeking to
establish for themselves and others a place in the pantheon of writers on this subject. Therefore, we have scores of books, many volumes of interpretations, and numerous videos and other documents explaining in detail ever y aspect of the continent. There is a paradox about Africa: it remains a subject that attracts considerable attention, although there has never been a full appreciation of its complexity.
The purpose of The History of Africa, given the many books that have been written about Africa, is to provide a straightforward, illustrated, and factual text told from the standpoint of Africans themselves. It is a book that allows African agency to dominate the interpretations and explanations of the facts on the ground. In this way, The History of Africa will give the readers a chronological and critical examination of the extensive history of Africa. The objective of my endeavor was to use the cultural, social, political, and economic lenses of Africa as instruments to explicate the ordinary lives of Africans within the context of their own experiences.
This is not a book about Europeans in Africa, nor is it a book about how Europeans interpret Africa. Rather, it is the story of Africa as Africans tell it themselves, and as they see the grand movements and personalities that constitute the panoply of heroes who have traversed that history. While the work draws upon the very extensive research that has been done by European and American historians, I have tried to place the works of African historians in the center of this narrative, thus rewriting and reorienting African history from the standpoint of Africans as subjects.
We should not obfuscate the central tendencies of the African people in regard to their vision of their own nations and leaders. What Africa sees, or has said it sees, is a much more interesting subject for this book, since it is clear to me that the overwhelming emphasis in the literature and orature of the continent has been the subject of harmony, balance, and order. These represent the calling cards of the eternal quest in African history.
In one sense the aims of this book are modest: to present in the most challenging manner a simple, basic book that will allow the student and lay reader access to the major developments, personalities, and events on the African continent. To do this I begin with humankind’s earliest origins, spend some time discussing the prehistory of Africa, and then enter the fascinating world of African development through the origin of human civilization. What grabbed my attention in my research was the wealth of indigenous ideas, African concepts, and traditional outlooks that have escaped the writing of African history in the West. Too much of African historiography has been about writing Africa for Europe without writing Africa for itself, as itself, from its own perspectives. To truly know a continent, one must study, travel, allow the aromas, rhythms, dances, and visual sights to dominate one’s being; only then, it seems to me, can one really ask the proper questions, seek the best answers, and arrive at the most knowledgeable and creative interpretations based on Africa’s own authentic voice. I have tried to present to readers a book that expands our view and vision of the continent from the staid old notions of Africa as helpless, stagnant, or crippled in its potential.
In the West, the ignorance of Africa is palpable, like a monster that invades our brains with disbelief, deception, and disinterest, yet is everywhere around us. We are victims of probably the most uninformed educated people in the world on the subject of Africa. Owing to the colonial experiences of Europe, the Europeans tend to engage the African continent in ways that have not been done by Americans. Nevertheless, what I desire of this book is a wide readership in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia with particular emphasis on those readers in schools and colleges, as well as among ordinary people, in order that they may have a unifying view of the vast continent. The reader should come away from the book with a fresh attitude about the continent and about its
Preface xiii people. The intent in this work is to make no easy commentaries for which there is no plausibility, and to argue only those lines that are rich enough to produce vast amounts of data about the history of the continent that is ancestral home to more than 40 million citizens of the United States, nearly 70 million Brazilians, another 50 million South Americans, 5 to 7 million who live in Europe and the Pacific, and about 40 million people of the Caribbean, as well as the nearly 1 billion Africans who live on the continent. All books are written with debts. I owe a great debt to numerous mentors, collaborators, and friends who, knowing of my interest in the subject, have encouraged me to do what I had outlined on African history several years ago but had not found the right moment to start. My reading in the field has been extensive, and I have written and researched Africa for many years in English, French, and German, but I am also familiar with Akan, Yoruba, KiSwahili, Arabic, and Mdw Ntr. Yet this is the first time that I have embarked on such a comprehensive treatment of the African continent. It has been a thrilling process; Africa has revealed yet more secrets to me in the writing of this book. Thus, to write a history of Africa is to write a major part of the histor y of the world, since Africa’s contributions to humanity are fundamental and expansive. I offer this book as my contribution to human understanding.
Note on the Third Edition
One always delves into the infinite maze of African history with the eye of a novice, because revelations dance in and out of one’s mind like the images one meets around the corner in a magical haunted house. Surprise cautions us, and lets us know that what we have learned from studying and reading other historians is only a small part of the possible revelations. I have often felt like an observer wrapped in a blanket of knowledge from which I could not escape when I approached African history, so I relaxed and enjoyed myself examining the smallest aspects of a narrative or the largest symbols of a culture.
In this Third Edition of The Histor y of Africa, I have leaned more and more on the wealth of individual scholars and observers for information, insight and interpretation. This has hopefully bent this edition more towards the idea of African agency than ever before. What do Africans say? What do Africans believe? How is this puzzle solved without the understanding that comes from the people themselves? I have tried to allow my sources, sometimes my colleagues in African histor y or philosophy, to tell me something that I could only write about through texts, primary or secondary. In this way, I discovered angles, edges, and periods that I did not realize were staring at me as I was unraveling myself from the blanket of knowledge that had been fashioned by a combination of what I had learned at Pepperdine and UCLA and from my readings of archival materials. Try talking to Bhengu about the relationship of Zulu history to the ancient Egyptians, and one thinks of Mubabingi Bilolo and his Baluba musings on what constitute the most ancient African linguistic connections, or Wande Abimbola’s profound understanding of the ethical foundations of Yoruba, and you realize that you will never be able to discover the avenues through the maze of this incredible history without guides who are simply much more than people who point you in a direction. These men and women who have held my hand as I waded into the deeper waters of what Africans themselves say about their own narrative have been the best friends of my work. Thus, there will be obser vations, concepts, and perspectives that are much more robust than in past editions.
However, I have had to recognize the changing situations on the continent of Africa since the publication of the Second Edition. It is to be expected that change will happen; what is not often expected is that change would be so dramatic that it would alter the way we think about African history. Change could be easy, or it could be a re-ordering affair in a society. The South Sudanese Civil War, for instance, still rages at the publishing of this edition. Whether Salva Kiir or Riek Machar will relent and allow their country to prosper, as it could, will only be known with time. Ethnic conflicts replacing racial ones on the continent are rooted in the quest for power and the urge for domination; neither of these actions are necessary for a productive society. Robert Mugabe has been retired from the presidency of Zimbabwe, and only time will tell if the country will regain its strong footing as a regional agricultural and mining giant in southern Africa.
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AtlasMountains
Reunton (FR)
Map 0.1 Modern Africa
The changing nature of contemporary Africa, largely shaped by one of the youngest populations of any continent, will define the future in politics, economics, and culture. The powerful demographic changes will have an impact on the international arena as nations jockey for positions in the great stakes of African resources. What the historian asks is “What propels the continent toward a United Africa, if anything?” On the ground, among technocrats and the leadership class, there is a growing sentiment for One Africa; however, the stakes are high for many national and regional stakeholders who seek advantage in telling Africa’s narrative. In this edition, I have made adjustments by reducing some imprints and allowing others to flourish a little more. I have also taken time to listen to the voices of more women thinkers and educators who have always been the shapers of a major part of Africa’s history. The priestesses and queens, often called queen mothers by Europeans, have spoken on everything from matrilineality to the role of men in society. Furthermore, historians have paid too little attention to women like Nana Asma’u bint Shehu Usman dan Fodio, who was born in 1864 and lived until 1793 as a revered princess, teacher, poet, and regional leader. Her father Usman dan Fodio was the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, and like her father, Nana Asma’u became a prolific author.
Of course, a history is a narrative as seen by the author; it is not a question of the rightness of a perspective, since rightness is only in the collection of facts and not in the interpretation. However, as an Africologist I have a particular perspective on the emerging philosophy of African history as a movement toward the reconstitution of an embracing epistemology. Fragmentation happens, but unity can also happen. The reader will gain a sense that this is an optimistic book, one that thrives on taking advantage of an Afrofuture that is more real than Wakanda.
Molefi
Kete Asante, Philadelphia, 2018
Introduction to Third Edition, The History of Africa
The introduction to this third edition of The History of Africa is not unlike other introductions in that the aim is to establish for the reader the general context and reason for writing history in the first place. I have done this for the first two editions and will do it in this one as well. Clearly the pursuit of African history takes place within the formative contours of narratives that we know and narratives that are unknown. This means the historian is always learning about something else and this something else functions to expose what we do not know or do not understand even if we know it.
In the southern hemisphere’s summer 2018, I was asked to give one of the historic Spring Lectures at the University of Limpopo in South Africa. As one of four lecturers I was struck by the student intensity and involvement in the weeklong conference on the Afrocentric Renaissance of Africa. In all my travels and conferences in Africa I had never seen the enthusiasm for understanding and interpreting Africa’s history from the standpoint of the people’s own agency so brilliantly presented by participants. So I came to the conclusion that this Third Edition of The History of Africa should introduce what I believe will emerge in the next few years as some of the most provocative discourses in African historiography. I was not only impressed by Simphiwe Sesanti, Kwesi Prah, and Nomakhosazana Rasana but also literally pleased by the overwhelming support that the audiences gave to all of us who challenged the contemporar y and historical misinterpretations of African culture. Mgomme Masoga as the functional leader of the Spring Lectures had brought together a revolutionary cadre committed to new thinking about Africa.
Two recent discoveries in South Africa have changed the writing of African history and upset the generally held beliefs about African civilizations. The first event is Johan Heine’s discovery of what is erroneously referred to as “Adam’s Calendar” which has been written about by Michael Tellinger and must be considered among the most magnificent collection of megaliths found anywhere in the world. The second event is the 73,000 years old nine red ocher colored lines drawn on a granite flake that represents the oldest known drawings by Homo sapiens according to archaeologists studying the stone (Nicholas St., Fleur, “Oldest Known/Drawing by a Human is found in South Africa,” New York Times, A-12, September 13, 2018). These discoveries add to the explanatory revisions already proposed in the field of African history, and suggest that alongside human origins on the continent of Africa we must now seriously consider the impact of the rise of cognitive consciousness as seen in the development of the megaliths and human drawings on the flake of stone in southern Africa.
The Province of Megaliths
These ancient megalithic structures were considered the sacred site of “Inzalo y’Langa,” that is, “the places of ancestral rituals.” I knew at once that this would send us back to
the historical drawing boards regarding the presence of civilization in Africa. Findings throughout the continent and in other continents have already pointed to the emergence of humanity on the African continent and migration earlier than we thought from Africa to the rest of the world. Recently the discoveries in sheltered caves in Brazil and in the Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile and Argentina have indicated the physical presence of African people in South America prior to the arrival of the settlers who came through Siberia and the Bering Straits.
The oldest known human made structures are the 100,000 or more megaliths dated to a minimum of 75,000 years ago and which spread widely over southern Africa from a core group of stone structures found in the province of Mpumalanga. From all contemporar y research it is agreed that these sites are the most monumental ancient structures created by human beings so long ago. Our knowledge of human migration throughout Africa and into the rest of the world combined with the material finds of skulls, traces of drawings, cave paintings, and fossils suggest a much more active past than we may have thought. The identification of Mpumalanga in South Africa, just south of the province of Limpopo, near Zimbabwe, as the most ancient site of human made structures will rewrite the history of southern Africa, the continent of Africa, and human creative architecture. The humans who designed and made the huge circular stone structures displayed knowledge of stone materials, scale, structure, and ornamentation with precious stones. Thus, the inheritances that we have written about so meticulously lead directly to the sculptures at Great Zimbabwe, Dhlo Dhlo, and Mapungubwe as examples of ancestral reverence long before we meet the flourishing Nile Valley Complex.
The sites built by indigenous Africans have been estimated to be as old as 200,000 years old, nearer to the earliest presence of Homo sapiens. The historical sites were off limits to African people during the period of apartheid when whites took large portions of the South African land for themselves and squeezed Africans on about 15 percent of the land in resettlements on the poorest sections of the country.
Three white men during the period of apartheid took charge of recording, photographing, and interpreting the ancient ruins of Inzalo y’Langa. They were Johann Heine, Cyril Hromnik, and Michael Tellinger. None of these men would turn to the indigenous people to determine the nature, meaning, or history of the sites that had been used until the rise of the white minority government. Heine was the pilot who flew over the sites and first noted the unusual circles of stones. Hromnik and Heine were influenced and energized by Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin, both purveyors of false ideas about aliens building African monuments. Tellinger has become a great popularizer of the sites writing articles and books, giving lectures, and appearing on television and radio as an interviewee on the stone sites.
Alongside these concrete achievements of African people have arisen a culture of disbelieve of African accomplishments often accompanied by European interpreters who see these African sculptures and megaliths as extra-terrestrial.
It is the same phenomenon of disbelief that we see in white interpretations of African history during the period of colonization and enslavement. They seem to ask, “How could these people have built these pyramids?” It was well put by the French adventurer and writer Count Constantin Volney who said, “Just think, that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech” (Count Constantin Volney, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, 1787). Furthermore, Volney could see that the so-called mulatto appearance of the modern Egyptian was related to the mixture with the many invaders of the country, and “In other words, the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same type as all native-born Africans. That being so, we can see how their
blood, mixed for several centuries with that of the Greeks and Romans, must have lost the intensity of its original color, while retaining nonetheless the imprint of its original mold” (Volney, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, 1787).
There are indications that ancestral rituals had been held regularly among the stone terraces and megalithic fields until the imposition of white minority apartheid doctrine that prevented Africans from having freedom of travel and access to ancient lands. Now that Africans are once again able to travel their own country there will be more historical and archaeological study of this region, potentially the key to unlocking the history of humans in Southern Africa.
Hopefully by the time of the next edition there will be enough indigenous people looking at the sites to draw even more robust narratives about the history of Mpumalanga. Nevertheless, I have made two general observations:
1. The sites of these megaliths represent the largest field of megaliths anywhere in the world.
2. The Mpumalanga megaliths are the oldest known in the world.
The visitors to the sites have given us photographs, drawings, and written records about the megaliths. Their interpretations have ping-ponged between aliens, meaning non-Africans, creating the sites for their own terrestrial purposes to some ancient cattle kraals constructed by a race of humans who no longer exist. Perhaps most appealing to some of the visitors to the site is the possibility that the megaliths represent a calendar, hence Adam’s Calendar. There is nothing to indicate that this is the case except the whimsical idea that these megaliths are similar to Stonehenge, the iconic British megaliths that have become the standard by which we are to examine all megaliths. Of course, Stonehenge is much more recent and is a northern hemisphere site. Nabta Playa, Central Africa, Zimbabwe, and now South African sites have given us other places for concentration on the achievements of Africans.
Drawing on Stone
Christopher Henshilwood from Norway’s University of Bergen is the lead expert on the discovery of the Homo sapiens’ oldest drawing on stone. The artifact was found in Blombos Cave on the Eastern Cape in an area that has yielded human teeth, spear points, tools, and beads made from seashells. This discovery from a cache that was first revealed in 2011 was made of a two-inch flake of stone. Subsequent analysis demonstrated that it was not painted on the stone, say with a brush made of a flared stick but rather the lines were drawn using a crayon-like piece of red ocher.
Of course, we are aware of the generally accepted fact that the oldest cave paintings, going back to nearly 100,000 years ago, are found in Africa, and that there are various example of cave painting stretching around the world. However, none have been discovered that are as old the paintings in Africa. Now we know that the drawings found in Chauvet Cave in France, El Castillo Cave in Spain, the Maros Cave sites in Indonesia, or the other African sites such as the so-called Apollo II Cave site in Namibia are old, as old as 42,000 years old, but these figurative and abstract drawings are at least 30,000 years later than the new discovery from the Blombos Cave of South Africa. A drawing on stone dated to 73,000 years is changing the nature of our history
A drawing is distinctive and different from a painting. One requires a thin instrument that can be controlled by an individual that has a particular purpose for making lines on a surface. It can be called more refined than a painting but not necessarily
more meaningful. Thus, the discovery of this drawing like that of the megaliths in the southern part of Africa help us to push back the origin of civilization. The point that I am making in this introduction is that Africa reveals more of itself each day and those of us who study the continent know that there is always something new emerging out of Africa.
Kete Asante Abidjan
Molefi
Part I
The Time of Awakening
At the dawn of the universe, Maat was the food of the gods.
—Molefi Kete Asante
1 Africa and the Origin of Humanity
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Senegalese genius Cheikh Anta Diop, scientist, linguist, and historian, proposed the important thesis that Africa was not only the cradle of humanity but also the cradle of civilization (Diop 1993). He was not the first to make such a suggestion, but he was the first African scholar to defend the thesis in several provocative books, including The African Origin of Civilization ([1974] 1993) and the major anthropological work Civilization or Barbarism (1991). Diop’s work challenged the very heart of the doctrines of racism and the negative arguments that had been made against Africa by many European and American authors. It was Diop’s contention in his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne in France not only that Africa was the home of humanity and civilization, but that Europe had “stolen” or “distorted” much of the African record. This charge created a wave of intellectual resistance that would follow Diop for most of his life because he had challenged the idea of European superiority. Diop’s arguments gained in respectability as the wall of ignorance established by decades of racist science came tumbling down. Indeed, a host of other scientists in fields as dissimilar as archeology and linguistics wrote books and articles that illuminated the findings of Cheikh Anta Diop. Authors such as Martin Bernal, Theophile Obenga, and Basil Davidson have shown the truth of Diop’s initial thesis. Indeed, Africa is the home of all living humans. Furthermore, it is the source of many of the technological innovations that laid the foundation for modern industrial and informational societies.
Documentation of the Origins
Africa stands at the very beginning of the origin of humanity. In no other continent have scientists found such extensive evidence of our origins as in Africa. If that were its only distinction, it would be enough to engage our attention. The early evolution of humans has been so detailed on this continent that one could not write a complete history of humanity without delving into the prehistory of Africa. The word prehistory is used to refer to the time before writing was available. There is enough evidence from fossilized bones and stone tools to allow scientists to recover information that will generate plausible arguments for African origin.
Animal or plants which die and whose remains are captured by the geological formation of rocks are turned into fossils. Later, when a human being digs up the rock, breaks open the stone, or by chance stumbles upon a broken rock and discovers the fossilized matter that may have been left inside the rock for millions of years, we have evidence of what life was like during the time of that animal or plant. Modern science can date these fossils with highly developed techniques such as carbon-14 dating to approximate their age.
Carbon-14 may be called an atomic clock that can be used for dating purposes because it is based on the radioactive decay of the isotope carbon-14, which has a halflife of 5,730 years. Since carbon-14 is produced continuously in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by the bombardment of nitrogen by neutrons from cosmic rays, scientists have a fairly good idea about its existence and character. We know this much from science: the newly formed radiocarbon becomes mixed with the nonradioactive carbon in the carbon dioxide in the air, and it gets into all living plants and animals. Actually, all carbon in living organisms contains a constant proportion of radiocarbon to nonradioactive carbon. Thus, after the organism dies, the amount of radiocarbon gradually decreases as it reverts to nitrogen-14 by radioactive decay. By measuring the amount of radioactivity remaining in organic materials, the amount of carbon-14 can be calculated and the time of death can be determined. Therefore, if carbon from a plant sample is found to contain only half as much carbon-14 as that from a living plant, the estimated age of the plant sample would be 5,730 years.
This method is good for recent prehistory, meaning less than 50,000 years. For example, if you were interested in establishing the time period of King Tutankhamen, you could use samples of materials, leather, and cloth taken from his burial coffin. You could use charcoal, the organic remains of burned plants, to discover the age of ancient trees. One could use the samples collected from strata in Olduvai Gorge, East Africa, which enveloped the fossil remains of Zinjanthropus and Homo habilis, thought to be precursors to humans, to discover their age.
Toward the Hominins and Beyond
Modern humans belong to what contemporary scientists have referred to as the primate family of hominins, a biological term meaning human or human-like creatures who walk upright on two legs and have enlarged brains. According to science, we are the only remaining hominin, although at an earlier stage of human evolution there were other hominin species. The evidence suggests that millions of years ago other primates such as the chimpanzee, the bonobo, and the gorilla, called pongids (modern apes and gibbons and their ancestors), separated from the group that became hominins. Recent scientists have demonstrated through DNA that we share 99 percent of the same DNA as chimpanzees. Both anatomically modern humans and the other aforementioned primates belong to a parent grouping known as hominids
It is clear that humans know only a small fraction of what happened in the evolution of hominids, but we know enough to say that between 10 million and 4 million years ago, hominids moved from the forest to the savannas of East Africa. We know from the fossil remains that they were standing upright, walking on two legs (bipedal), and stretching their arms over their heads.
There are many theories about why and how hominids did what they did. One theory is that to survive in the open plains and savannas they needed to stand upright, so that they could see long distances and spot predators who hunted them for food. Thus, the first hominids to stand upright did so on the African continent. Indeed, hominids could not have stood upright anywhere else, since these were the earliest.
Since the 1920s, scholars and scientists have been investigating the various links in the chain of human evolution, looking at the archeological record as well as the biological record. In 1925, a South African named Raymond Dart made the first find, and would make many subsequent finds in South Africa (Walker 1957; Jackson 2001, pp. 42–44). In a limestone cave in Taung, South Africa, he discovered the buried skull of a six-year-old creature. It was ape-like in appearance but had certain human characteristics such as
Africa and the Origin of Humanity 9 the shape of the back of the skull, which gave some indication of how the neck muscles would have been attached. Indeed, Dart assumed from this structure that the creature walked upright on two legs and probably had a forward stoop. Dart named the creature he had discovered in the cave Australopithecus (Southern Ape). Many other finds were made and added to the category Australopithecine. These came from other caves in South Africa. It did not take long for other scientists to find Australopithecines in East Africa, particularly in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, the Great Rift Valley and the Lake Turkana areas of Kenya, and the Omo River valley in Ethiopia.
The 1970s were a very fruitful period for discovery in East Africa. In 1972, Richard Leakey, the son of the famous scientist Louis Leakey, found skull 1470 near East Turkana in Kenya, which looked quite human. This find was to be topped by the remarkable discovery in 1975 of the remains of an Australopithecine group of 13 adults and children near Hadar in Ethiopia. Then, in 1976, human footprints were discovered close to an extinct volcano near Olduvai. They were set in what would have been volcanic ash from 3.25 million years ago, when an eruption of the volcano must have killed the creatures who made them.
Recent information from many sources has extended our understanding, but has also placed the origin of Australopithecines farther back than we had ever realized was possible. Indeed, some scientists say that we have to look to the Fayum Depression in Egypt for the earliest known ancestors of both hominids and pongids. Here, west of the Nile, several species of primates have been found. One possible candidate for the earliest ancestor of hominids and pongids is called Aegyptopithecus and dates to 30 million years ago. Paleontologists, those who study fossilized life forms, now believe that the separation of hominids from pongids may have occurred around 8 million years ago.
New candidates have appeared on the scene every year as scientists have been furiously investigating the evidence on the African continent. Sahelanthropus tchadensis was found in 2002 in the country of Chad, and represents the oldest known fossil of a hominid. It has been dated to 7 million years ago. The fossil shows signs of modernity in that its teeth are relatively small, and its face is flat and does not jut out like that of a chimpanzee. More and more hominids have to be incorporated into the family as scientists discover more examples. Indeed, prior to the finding of Sahelanthropus tchadensis in Chad, scientists had thought that Ethiopia and Kenya would yield the most interesting results, since they are the places where Ardipithecus ramidus was discovered in the Awash area of Ethiopia, dating to 4.5 million years ago. Prior to this, Australopithecus anamensis was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Perhaps the most heralded of all these finds was that of Dinknesh, called Lucy by Americans. Found in the Hadar region of Ethiopia by Maurice Taieb and Donald Johanson in 1974, Dinknesh was an upright biped belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis, and dated to 3 million years ago.
Quite recently, anthropologists have noted that there were other hominids around. Australopithecus afarensis has been found in Ethiopia but also in Chad. There was some mobility in the way this species got around the continent. However, the famous Taung Child studied by Raymond Dart belonged to the Australopithecus africanus branch of the hominid family and was the oldest example. Yet there were other hominids such as Australopithecus aethiopicus, Australopithecus boisei, and Australopithecus robustus. It is believed that they were vegetarians. The latest species of hominids to be discovered was Australopithecus garhi (garhi means “surprise” in the Afar language, Ethiopian language spoken by the people of the region where the fossils were found). This group dates from around 3 million years ago. They appear to have been meat and vegetable eaters as well as tool makers.
The most widely accepted classification of early hominids categorizes them in two separate genera. The earliest, as discussed above, is Australopithecus. The second is Homo, and among the more familiar are Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens.
In 2006, Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia, and his colleagues discovered the skull of a small human ancestor in an area near Gawis, Ethiopia, that could be another part of the puzzle of modern humans. The scientists found parts of an early human cranium believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old.
Modern Humans
The next step in the hominid line is called “Homo,” meaning man. The first was named Homo habilis, that is a “handy human.” This form dates from 2 to 3 million years ago. Homo habilis has many characteristics that distinguish it from Australopithecus. In the first place, the skull is rounder and higher, and the cranial capacity is nearly 700 cc (compared with 1450 cc for modern humans and 400 cc for Australopithecus). Homo habilis is associated with making tools, although the species seems to have retained the ability to climb trees. Deposits of stone tools have been found in Gona and Hadar in Ethiopia, as well as Senga in the Congo. These Oldowan tools, as they are called, could have been used to cut the meat of game, as well as to fight predators.
After Homo habilis came Homo erectus, or “upright man.” This species appeared about 2.3 million years ago, and it is thought to have survived in Asia as late as 53,000 years ago. If you saw Homo erectus and just looked at him or her from the neck downward, the creature would look just like a modern human. It was in the size of the brain that there was still a difference with modern humans. The brain size of Homo erectus was about 1000 cc, which is about 450 cc less than the cranial capacity of modern humans.
Now enter the modern humans. There is still debate, although science has just about put an end to it, about whether there was a monogenetic or a polygenetic origin of humans (Cavalli-Sforza 1991, pp. 72–78). The polygenetic model suggests that humans emerged in different parts of the world, or developed directly from Homo erectus in different regions of the world. The monogenetic model argues that the evolution of humans was a single event that occurred in Africa, and that Homo sapiens (modern humans) expanded outward, driven by the Sahara pump during the Weichsel/Wisconsin/Wurm Ice Age (which ended about 10,000 years ago), when populations were displaced.
Most scholars now believe that the type Homo neander thalensis was an evolutionary dead-end. This is a type found only in Europe, but which until recent times was thought to have no direct descendants in modern humans. However, there have been some scientists who have recently claimed that Neanderthalian DNA might appear in some populations of European people. What we know is that some Neanderthalian traits are evidenced in the DNA of British people and other Europeans (Williams 2017; Dannemann 2017; and Prüfer et al. 2017).
The Northwest African Corridor Revealed
An article in Phys.org on June 7, 2017 made a startling announcement: “300,000 year old remains place oldest Homo Sapiens in Morocco” (Callaway 2017). Alicia McDermott writes in Ancient Origins (2017) that “A re-evaluation of early human remains and artifacts from Morocco has pushed back the advent of Homo sapiens by 100,000 years. Two new papers suggest the oldest of the fossils comes from 300,000 to 350,000 years ago. This may lead researchers to re-think their general search in the area around the
Africa and the Origin of Humanity 11
Great Rift Valley of East Africa for the origin of our species.” The cache of skulls, teeth, and long bones of at least five Homo sapiens, along with stone tools and animal bones, was found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Researchers have known about the area since 2004. Before this discovery, scientists had claimed that the oldest date for Homo sapiens remains were said to be from the sites in Ethiopia, at Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago, and in Herto, dated to 160,000 years ago (Sanders 2003, p. 1). Sanders wrote, “The fossils date precisely from the time when biologists using genes to chart human evolution predicted that a genetic ‘Eve’ lived somewhere in Africa and gave rise to all modern humans.” Furthermore, Tim White, paleontologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-leader of the team that excavated and analyzed the discovery said, “Now, the fossil record meshes with the molecular evidence” (Sanders 2003, p. 1). Of course, the Morocco archeological evidence shows evidence of H. sapiens crossing the continent. Daniel Richter, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and his team, used thermoluminescence dating of fire-heated flint artifacts unearthed in the Irhoud site to help establish the age.
Obviously the Morocco find suggests that we are able to demonstrate the convergence in Africa of the stone evidences of H. sapiens with the actual remains of skulls and bones. Some scholars had already been alert to the presence of H. sapiens during the Middle Stone Age but the oldest H. sapiens fossil example until now was the Ethiopian discovery at Omo Kibish. Other Homo species, such as H. naledi and H. floresiensis also originated on the continent of Africa. The latter, H. floresiensis, who existed nearly 1 million years ago, have also been found in the Pacific region of Asia, and were called “Indonesian Hobbits.” However, as researchers at the Australian National University reported in the Journal of Human Evolution in an article entitled “The affinities of Homo floresiensis based on phylogenetic analyses of cranial, dental, and postcranial characters,” H. floresiensis was directly related to Homo sapiens, and not to Homo erectus, as had been believed (Argue et al. 2017, pp. 107–133).
Thus, although the story is not complete and may never be complete, we now know that the biological, that is, DNA evidence, coincides with the stone tool and fossil evidence that human origins began on the African continent.
The North African Discoveries in Tunisia
Few African historians have given attention to North Africa when considering the history of the continent. Yet it is now clear that the spread of Homo sapiens stretched across the continent from east to west. Scientists are fast discovering the dates at which Homo sapiens appeared in various parts of North Africa. We know that humans were in Morocco about 300,000 years ago, according to recent fossils at Irhoud. Researchers digging near Tozeur in southwestern Tunisia found a site about 6,000 square meters in size where there was evidence of human activity, such as flint tools and weapons similar to those used in Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Great Rift Valley by early Homo sapiens
It appears to researchers from the Tunisia National Heritage Institute and Oxford University that these tools indicate the presence of Homo sapiens during the Middle Stone Age. Clearly bones of zebras, rhinoceros, and other animals indicate the presence of savanna and fresh water. Using a dating technique called thermoluminescence, the scientists dated the tools to 92,000 years old. While this does not extend as far back as the discoveries in Morocco at Temara and Irhoud, the discovery does allow us to speculate about migration patterns and movements of early Homo sapiens.
No matter how much certain historians have tried to take North Africa out of the continent, we now see clearly that it is an integral part of the texture of African chronology,
12 The Time of Awakening
migration, and history. Herodotus, in 440 BCE, referred in his writing to the myth that the active god Zeus followed Io to Africa. What we know is that the land that is now Tunisia was occupied by Africans long before the coming of the Phoenicians under the rule of Queen Elissa, sometimes called Dido.
Herodotus said, “According to the Persians the best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. These people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Eritrean Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria” (Herodotus 2003). If the Phoenicians who came to Khart Haddas (Carthage) from Tyre and Sidon along the Lebanese coast were originally dwellers of the Eritrean (Erythraean) Sea, then they had merely passed through the coast of Lebanon for some years before making their way back to the continent of their origin.
Of course, we now know from scientists that Homo sapiens, most likely black-skinned humans, occupied the land long before the Phoenicians, who were also probably black according to their land of origin. It is believed that they appeared in the 16th century BCE in the land that is today called Somalia. Of course, we know that Herodotus, much maligned because of his observations that the ancient Egyptians had black skin, says, “According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. These people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Erythraean (Eritrean) Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria” (Herodotus 2003). There is no northern origin thesis for the Phoenicians, and since the ancients said they came from the region of Punt, they were undoubtedly black-skinned people.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Four girls of forty years ago
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Title: Four girls of forty years ago
Author: Nina Rhoades
Illustrator: Eleanor R. Weeden
Release date: March 31, 2024 [eBook #73301]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co, 1920
Credits: Susan E., David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR GIRLS OF FORTY YEARS AGO ***
FOUR GIRLS OF FORTY YEARS AGO
BOOKS BY NINA RHOADES
MARION’S VACATION. Illustrated. Cloth. $1.75
DOROTHY BROWN. Illustrated. Cloth. $1.75
VICTORINE’S BOOK. Illustrated. Cloth. $1.75
THE GIRL FROM ARIZONA. Illustrated. $1.75
THE INDEPENDENCE OF NAN. Illustrated. $1.75
FOR YOUNGER READERS
“T B H B ”
The sight of the brick house on the cover makes girl readers happy at once.—Indianapolis News. Illustrated. Large 12mo. Cloth. $1.50 each.
ONLY DOLLIE
THE LITTLE GIRL NEXT DOOR
WINIFRED’S NEIGHBORS
THE CHILDREN ON THE TOP FLOOR HOW BARBARA KEPT HER PROMISE
LITTLE MISS ROSAMOND
PRISCILLA OF THE DOLL SHOP
BRAVE LITTLE PEGGY
THE OTHER SYLVIA
MAISIE’S MERRY CHRISTMAS
LITTLE QUEEN ESTHER
MAKING MARY LIZZIE HAPPY
A REAL CINDERELLA
NORA’S TWIN SISTER
FOUR GIRLS OF FORTY YEARS AGO
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. BOSTON
Four Girls of Forty Years Ago
BY NINA RHOADES
ILLUSTRATED BY
ELEANOR R. WEEDEN
BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
Published, August, 1920
C , 1920, B L , L & S C .
All Rights Reserved
Four Girls of Forty Years Ago
Norwood Press BERWICK & SMITH CO. N , M U. S. A.
I. T F L W
II. A V
III. A W D
IV. T S L
V. M P ’ S
VI. P
VII. T S C
VIII. T H A
IX. M P ’ P
X. D ’ B
XI. P E M P
XII. D W L
XIII. D D
XIV. M . W G T
XV. D T H
XVI. L S
XVII. S
XVIII. A H -C
ILLUSTRATIONS
“I think you are the most wonderful person I ever heard of” declared Dulcie
The door swung open so quietly and easily that she nearly fell over backward
“She’s got the big fellow down. She’s sittin’ on his head”
Daisy took the two letters, flew down-stairs, and out into the street
“We’re—we’re looking for a situation”
“Do we say ‘How do you do, stepmother?’” Maud wanted to know
(Page 87) Frontispiece F P
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Four Girls of Forty Years Ago
CHAPTER I THE FOUR LITTLE WINSLOWS
THEY all lived in the big front room on the top floor of Grandpa Winslow’s old-fashioned house near Washington Square. They had lived there for so long that Molly and Maud—who were only nine and seven—could not remember ever having lived anywhere else. But Dulcie—who was nearly twelve—and Daisy—who was ten and a half —had dim memories of a very different home—a home that was always bright and happy, and in which the grim figures of Grandma Winslow and her daughter, Aunt Kate, played no part.
It was more than five years since their father had brought his four little motherless girls from the Western town where they were born, to the stately, gloomy old house near Washington Square. It had seemed to Mr. Winslow the wisest thing to do, for he was young and inexperienced, and the death of his pretty young wife had almost broken his heart. With the exception of his father, who was very old and infirm, and his stepmother, whom he had never loved very much, he had no near relatives, and so when his father had written in his trembling old hand, offering a home to him and his four little girls, he had accepted the offer, and they had left the Western home, where they had been so happy, and taken the long journey to New York, accompanied by Lizzie, the faithful servant, who had formerly been maid-of-all-work, but now acted as the children’s nurse.
That was five years ago, and many things had happened since then. In the first place, their father had been in China for more than a year. Young Jim Winslow, as every one called him, had not found it easy to make a living in New York, and he had ended by accepting the offer of a friend in China, who promised him a good position in his business. And one sad day, he had kissed his little girls good-bye and gone away. How they had all cried, for though Papa tried to be
very cheerful, they felt quite sure that this going away was different from any other.
“When Papa went to The Centennial in Philadelphia, he only stayed away a week,” Daisy had reminded them, with a great effort to be cheerful, “and he brought us all home something. I suppose China is a great deal farther away than Philadelphia.”
“Of course it is,” said Dulcie, with difficulty suppressing a sob; “it’s away the other side of the world. But he says we must all be good till he comes back, so we’ll have to try very hard.”
“We’ve got Lizzie, anyhow,” chimed in Molly. “She won’t ever go away; she promised Papa she wouldn’t leave us till he came back.”
That was a comforting thought, and as Lizzie had come into the nursery at that moment, they had all run to her, and she soon had Molly and Maud in her lap, while Dulcie and Daisy sat on the arms of her chair, for next to their father, they all loved Lizzie better than any one in the world.
But alas! When Lizzie had promised not to leave the children, she had not counted on her temper. She loved the little girls dearly, but she had never learned to control her quick temper, and in less than a month from the day of Mr. Winslow’s departure, she had been dismissed by Grandma for having used what that lady called “outrageously impertinent language.” That was a dreadful day for the children, even more dreadful than the one on which their father left for China. Their father had occasionally left them for a short time before, but never, never since their mother’s death, had Lizzie been absent for a single night.
“Who’ll put us to bed?” wailed Maud, “and give us our baths, and hear us say our prayers? Oh! oh! I want to go away with Lizzie. I don’t want to stay here any more—I don’t, I don’t!”
“Hush, Maudie, don’t cry so,” soothed Dulcie, who was crying herself. “I’ll hear your prayers. I’m ’most twelve, so I guess it will be all right, and Daisy and I can take our own baths, so I guess we can teach you and Molly to do it, too. But, oh, Lizzie, Lizzie, I do want
you so much!” And poor Dulcie broke down utterly, and sobbed as if her heart would break.
The next important event was Grandpa’s death. This, though sad, was not the heart-break to the children that Lizzie’s departure had been. Grandpa was very feeble, and for several years had taken small notice of them, except to nod and smile kindly at them, when they came into his room, and ask them their names, which he never seemed able to remember from one day to another. Lizzie had once told them that Grandpa was losing his mind, and that they must always be very kind and polite to him, and they had looked upon the old gentleman with a kind of awe, which had been greatly increased when, one morning, Mary, the chambermaid, had come into the nursery to tell them in a whisper that “their dear grandpa” had died suddenly during the night.
But all these things had happened nearly a year before the rainy January afternoon on which this story begins. It had been a very stormy day, and as Miss Hammond, the prim daily governess, who came for three hours every morning, was laid up with a bad cold, there had not even been lessons to break the monotony, and time had hung rather heavily on the children’s hands. Even the usual diversion of luncheon with their elders had been denied them, for Aunt Kate had given a luncheon party, and, according to the Winslow code, little girls were expected to keep out of the way on all such occasions. So Mary had brought them each a bowl of bread and milk, that being less trouble than anything else, and although bread and milk is nourishing, it is not what Dulcie called “exciting,” and by four o’clock they were all feeling decidedly bored, and more than a little hungry
Dulcie had read till her eyes ached; Daisy had completed a whole spring outfit for Maud’s doll, and Molly and Maud had played so many games of lotto that Molly declared crossly she was sure she could play lotto in her sleep.
“If only it didn’t pour so, I’d go round to the library for another book,” remarked Dulcie, with a yawn.
Dulcie cared more about reading than about almost anything else in the world. She read everything she could lay her hands on, and when her father went away to China, he had given her a ticket to the circulating library, which was only three blocks away.
“I wish things happened to real people the way they do to people in books,” said Molly. “If we were in a book, something interesting would be sure to happen to us this afternoon. We’ve been in the house all day, and only had bread and milk for lunch.”
“Something rather interesting is going to happen now,” said Daisy, who had been looking out of the window for the past five minutes. “The Van Arsdales across the street are going to have a party. There’s an awning, and the ice-cream wagon has just stopped there. We can watch the carriages come, and if they happen to leave one of the parlor shades up, the way they did that other time, we can see them dance.”
Mollie and Maud looked interested, but Dulcie sighed.
“I don’t see much fun in watching a party you can’t go to yourself,” she said, discontentedly. “If Grandma would only let us know some of the neighbors, we might be invited to places sometimes. I wonder how it would feel to have a party.”
“I don’t think I should like it much,” said Daisy. “Things might go wrong, and that would be so embarrassing. You remember the time those Leroy children came to see us, and Grandma called out we were making too much noise. I think I’d rather go to other people’s parties, especially while we have to live with Grandma and Aunt Kate.”
Dulcie sighed again.
“If only Papa would come home,” she said. “Things weren’t half so bad when he was here.”
“He is coming home next year,” put in Daisy, cheerfully. Daisy always looked on the bright side of things. “You know what he said in his last letter, about our all having a nice little home together. Perhaps Lizzie will come back then, too. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“Mary told the butcher-man that Lizzie is going to be married,” announced Maud. “I heard her yesterday when I was in the kitchen, playing with the kitty.”
“I don’t believe it,” declared Molly, indignantly. “Lizzie never told Mary things; she said she was an old gossip.”
“Well, Mary said it, anyhow,” persisted Maud. “She told the butcherman, and he said——”
“Oh, children, don’t argue,” interrupted peace-loving Daisy. “Come here and watch for the party. I guess the carriages will begin to come pretty soon.”
“They had ice-cream for lunch down-stairs,” exclaimed Molly, with a sudden recollection. “I wonder if there’s any left!”
“If there were we wouldn’t get any,” said Dulcie. “Mary and Bridget would be sure to eat it all up.”
“If Grandma were like a grandmother in a book, she’d see that we had ice-cream, and lots of other nice things,” remarked Molly, reflectively. “Book grandmothers are always so nice. I wonder why real ones aren’t?”
“I guess real ones are, too,” said Daisy. “That’s just the trouble with us. Grandma isn’t our real grandmother; she’s only a step, and steps are never any good. Even Aunt Kate isn’t our real aunt, because Grandpa was only her stepfather.”
“Steps are pretty bad,” remarked Dulcie, “but the worst of all is a stepmother, and, thank goodness, we haven’t got that. If I thought we were ever going to have a stepmother, I’d—I’d do something awful.”
“What would you do?” inquired Molly, eagerly.
“I don’t know, I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I’ve often thought about it. I’m sure it won’t happen, though; Papa is much too kind to do anything so dreadful, but if it did, well—don’t let’s talk about it.”
Dulcie’s dark little face had grown suddenly very stern and determined, and her sisters regarded her with something like awe. Although only a little more than a year older than Daisy, Dulcie had
