C is for Calabash...and Chronology....

is for

Yvonne Chaka Chaka, a globally recognised and much respected musician from South Africa. 

And Chidinma, a young and upcoming artiste from Nigeria -

Calabash - The calabash vine grows widely in Africa and its fruit is called various names such as Igba by the Yoruba, Nkalu by the Kikongo, Igula by the Zulu and Duma by the Hausa. The round or bottle shaped fruits are allowed to mature, dried and hollowed out and used as household utensils, religious artefacts, musical instruments and also carved into artwork. Typically they are made into spoons, drinking cups, rice bowls/containers, and water pots. Large calabashes make the resonators of a range of West African musical instruments, lutes and rattles, as well as percussion.

Credit. Nigerian 60's stamp honouring calabash carver

Calabash is processed by letting the fruits mature on the vine, then picked and soaked in water to decay the seeds and pulp. The gourds are cut open, the flesh scooped out, and the naturally yellow shells dried to hardness in the sun. These can be dyed using natural materials such as millet leaves to give a rose colour, or indigo to give blue for instance. The natural yellow darkens with age, it can also be darkened by exposing to smoke. Once the desired colour is achieved, the shells are then carved using various techniques – scraping, scorching, engraving and pyro-engraving.

Calabash art was among the souvenirs the peddlers brought to our porch to sell. Some of them still there at my parental home.

Chronology and Connecting the dots - The story of humans is the story of Africa.  It’s a super-long family saga, so helps to have the key dates and milestones handy in one place. This is necessarily an oversimplified version, for a more detailed analysis try this link. 

It needs stressing that these families of hominins and early human ancestral species existed side by side, and so far no direct link between Homo sapiens and any of these species has been established. In other words, we know we are cousins but don’t quite know how exactly – a predicament I often face when meeting some members of the outer branches of my extended family :)

Time	Events
7 million years ago	The human-like ancestral line branches off from the great apes.

7-4.4 million years ago	Ardipithecus, the earliest group of Hominins. In Ethiopia, Chad and Kenya. These early relatives of modern humans attempted to walk upright.
4.5-2.5 million years ago	Australopithecus. In Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa. Walked upright, but also climbed trees.
2.7-1.8 million years ago	Paranthropus. Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa. They had large molars and powerful jaws and could feed on a variety of foods.
2.4-1.4 million years ago	Earliest members of genus Homo evolve. Found in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi. Members of this group were the first to leave Africa

1.89 million-143,000 years ago	Homo erectus. The first species to have expanded beyond Africa. Lived in East, South and North Africa, Western and Eastern Asia. Oldest early humans known to have modern man-like body proportions. Walked upright. No longer climbed trees. Associated with the first stone hand axes.
700,000-200,000 years ago	Homo heidelbergensis. Europe, East Asia and Africa. Shorter, wider bodies thought to be an adaptation to the cold. Used fire. Hunted with spears, and routinely hunted large animals.
400,000-40,000 years ago	Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), Closest extinct evolutionary human relative. Lived in Asia and Europe. Shorter and stockier than modern humans, but large brain size. Used sophisticated tools. Lived in shelters, controlled fire. Wore clothing, made art, buried dead and sometimes marked graves with offerings.
200,000 years ago	Homo sapiens. Evolved in response to some cataclysmic climate event. Evolved in Africa and then migrated out to the rest of the continent. Recent fossil findings in Morocco might push the 200,000 ya date back by a further 100,000 years
125,000 – 71,000 years ago	Modern man gains control of fire, uses it to modify tools, evidence in settlements in South Africa.
106,000 years ago	The first migrations of modern humans out of Africa. Migrations happened in waves every 20,000 years or so. Due to a wobble in the Earth’s axis climate shifts opened up green corridors between Africa and the other continents. Man arrived simultaneously in China and Europe about 80-90,000 years ago.
195,000-70,000 years ago	Evidence of first humans in Nile Valley in Central and North Africa, first signs of modern humans traced in Ethiopia and Sudan.
77,000 years ago	The first human-made abstract art object – a piece of engraved red ochre, found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa.
60,000 years ago	Evidence of human habitation in West Africa in the Aïr Mountains in northern Niger and Chad, in what is now the Sahara but at the time was grassland. Evidence of hunter-gatherers living in these areas intermittently in 1000 year spans from 7000 BCE onwards till 2000 BCE when the climate became arid desert.
22,000 years ago	Ishongo bones in Congo. The first evidence of arithmetical ideas.
13-14,000 years ago	Jebel Sahaba site in modern day Sudan bears possible evidence of first warfare – large number of skeletons with trauma and blades embedded. Early food storage pits/silos – hints of early agriculture?
9000 BCE	First agriculture begins in the Nile Valley.
5000 BCE	Organised farming begins in Egypt. Writing/recordkeeping systems develop. Prehistory ends.

From the Safaris 

~ Thank you for watching! ~

Books n stuff

J.M. Coetzee (1940 -) is a novelist, essayist, and translator of South African origin, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, and the Booker Prize twice before the Nobel. He was born in Cape Town to Afrikaner parents and has been educated in South Africa and USA. He was among the anti-apartheid writers during the apartheid era and is an animal rights activist. He started his career with Dusklands in 1974. Apart from fiction has published literary criticisms, essays, screenplays, poetry and translations of Afrikaans and Dutch works. He has worked in UK and USA in addition to South Africa, and he currently holds Australian citizenship and lives in Adelaide. He is among the most highly esteemed authors from the African continent.

Gladys Casely-Hayford (1904-1950) was one of the pioneer poets of Africa writing in English. Born to Sierra Leonese parents in what was then known as the Gold Coast, she was among the first women poets as well. Another poet I studied as part of my literature syllabus at school. Her poems have been widely anthologised.

Most of her verses I studied at school had something or other to do with Christian themes, one of them I remember reimagined the birth of Jesus as a black child in Africa. It was quite a revelation that some of her poems portray female sexuality and homoeroticism with daring frankness for her times, and a rather poignant lyricism. Which I discovered much later, naturally, on rereading her work as an adult. Can’t see anybody including Rainy Season Love Song in the 70’s school curriculum! I’ve come across critical views of her poetry as well - that her verses are simplistic, she mixed her metaphors, etc etc, which may or may not be correct, her technical accomplishment as a poet is not something I’m getting into here. I like what I like.  I have a fondness for Gladys, probably based on the feel-good memories or the rhymes, or her lyrical celebration of her hometown, who knows? Not important anyways. There is no perfect way to write poetry. 

Read a poignant excerpt from a mother-daughter memoir profiling Gladys here.



Thank you for your exceptional patience with this one!







Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2018