Fractals occupy a prominent place in African geometry and architecture, but they represent only one of several forms of mathematical ordering reflected in African settlement patterns and architecture
Isaac congrats on such a careful and rigorous investigation! Completely agree about the presence of Cartesian-like regularity in layouts of some of the large pre-colonial African settlements.
My guess is that they were not only like European cities in their geometry, but also in social structure, with socioeconomic hierarchies similar to those of Europe--king at top, nobles below that, down to poor masses. As you say it is important to acknowledge that this too was part of Africa's pre-colonial past.
My own emphasis was in part motivated by the search for for alternative social models--ones that might guide us towards a future which is more egalitarian, more democratic, and more sustainable than what Western traditions have produced. So I look to Africa's fractal settlements for clues about those non-extractive, deeply regenerative social possibilities. From my POV, they too had "highly organized" systems, its just that they were organized bottom-up rather than top-down: information structures the West has only recently started to recognize. How could we create, for example, carbon-zero, worker-owned data centers for AI? Fractal organization from the past offers some important models for such decentralized information networks in the future.
But this raises a challenge for historians: European historical documentation pays far more attention to African kings and cities. How do we recover historical data on pre-colonial decentralized societies? Of course many are still thriving. I regret not including travel to the Karamoja region in my research, some of the best large-scale fractals can be found there: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=615945393973132&set=a.451858460381827 -- note how they leave the central location empty at every scale, from individual household to multi-family compound to entire settlement. Fascinating contrast to the Cartesian-like examples you noted, in which the center is more filled than any other location, with a royal palace at the intersection of main streets.
Yes, all the African cities whose plans displayed Cartesian-like regularity resembled their European counterparts in terms of their social structure, with top-down hierarchical political systems, as exemplified by the Yoruba, where the Palace of the Oba (King) is at the center of the city with streets raidiating outwards, or in ancient Nubia and the medieval Swahili coast, where the temples/mosques (and attimes, palaces) occupied a central place in the walled urban settlement, and where streets dividing the urban quarters often intersected.
But besides these, there were, as you mentioned, societies that didn't have hierarchical political structures; the best example of these was Djenne-Jano, considered the oldest city in West Africa, which the archaeologists Susan and Roderick McIntosh famously described as a self-organizing city, or cities without citadels. (see: Ancient Middle Niger Urbanism and the Self-organizing Landscape, by Roderick McIntosh).
The archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure applied their concept of "heterarchies" to the famous stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe and Khami, challenging traditional top-down organization by showing that these stone cities existed about the same time rather than as successive capitals.
They participated in long-distance trade, where goods could also be found in parts of the ruins without monumental architecture, and leadership could shift between different lineages in the region, rather than a single dominant center. (see: No Big Brother Here: Heterarchy, Shona Political Succession and the Relationship between Great Zimbabwe and Khami, Southern Africa. Chirikure S, Mukwende T)
I think McIntosh and Chirikure's work can provide the best representation of alternative Top-Down political structures in pre-colonial African societies that were highly complex. They have been overlooked by external documentation, which pays far more attention to African kings and cities.
Another excellent resource is the chapter: "On the Shoreline of History: The State of Archaeology In The Sahel" by R. McIntosh and Mamadou Cisse in "Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara" By Alisa LaGamma
Quote: "West Africa during the Iron Age (ca. 800 b.c.–a.d. 1000) was a vibrant landscape of craft innovation, migration, sustained contact between distant communities, and original experiments in city life and territorial polities. Sahelian cities looked nothing like their counterparts in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica—places such as Ur, Tikal, or Chichén Itzá—and West Africa did not go through the same sociopolitical stages (band, chiefdom, archaic state, empire) once understood as universal.
Indeed, many of the expected markers of states and empires (capital cities, monumental architecture, powerful elites lording over underclasses in vassalage) are simply not in evidence.
The social and political development of the Sahel from the fourth to the fourteenth century A.D. instead consisted of many diverse transitions from small-scale village communities—some fast and enthusiastic, some barely perceptible—to what are known as "alternative polities," a concept that has emerged in recent research to describe virtually all large territorial entities with diverse populations held together by means other than the top-down decision-making mechanisms, which were once thought responsible for the emergence and functioning of most early states or archaic empires.
Although this period witnessed the beginning of a shift toward state-level polities in some parts of the Sahel (characterized by centralized authority, administrative machinery, and judicial institutions binding together a hierarchically stratified social system), this process was not universal, and where it did occur it did not inevitably lead to a state or multiethnic empire."
Valuation of egalitarianism and democracy is very, very Western (and Modern, Anglo and French mainly). This is not to say that nobody else in the world ever had such ideas, but looking around for such things may be more Eurocentric than the opposite.
The African terminology is much richer than that, for sure. Some are specific to certain practices: mweria (rotating labor organizations) in Kenya, idir (mutual credit) in Ethiopia, nnoboa (cooperatives) in Ghana, etc. But others have been taken up as national slogans: harambee in Kenya, ujamaa in Tanzania, and so on. The term ubuntu, often summarized by the Nguni phrase, “I am because you are, you are because we are” is one of the best known and most widely utilized.
One of my favorite papers on this topic is Baldwin and Holzinger (2019). They surveyed Indigenous governance techniques and found a really spectacular variety. For example, 40% did not have any centralized authority at all. They were instead organized as quasi-autonomous “band” structures. Similar attempts in online technology, called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are often seen as crucial hope for contemporary struggles of platform cooperatives against the domination of corporations and state authority (Nabben et al). So to my mind, deeper study of African traditions is not only better documenting the past, but also providing new models for the future.
Baldwin K and Holzinger K (2019) Traditional political institutions and democracy: Reassessing their compatibility and accountability. Comparative Political Studies 52(12): 1747–1774.
Nabben K, Puspasari N, Kelleher M, et al. (2021) Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’(DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other? Available at: SSRN 3979223.)
I know virtually nothing about African societies, but my general problem with looking for parallels between social organization in non-Western (or non-modern-Western, actually) societies and some political model or idea drawn from Western European political theory (such as communalism) is that Western societies are in fact extremely strange. Primarily because they are systematically this-wordly, and other societies are not. Framing a non-Western society, or a pre-modern one, in such terms inherently deforms it by lopping off a central part of the world as experienced by this people. For instance, some of the nomadic peoples of Siberia may appear to us to be nonhierarchially organized, but THEY do not agree. In their world, they are in fact in the position of being very low in a hierarchy of spirits, to whom they pay fealty. They appear to us, empirically, to be some kind of collectivist group, but they are not in their understanding of the world, in which they are actually a bottom run of a strict feudal order.
Similarly, while what I know of African societies is very superficial, I suspect that the system of social organization is going to look very different ifyou look at it from within, including the "invisible hierarchies" (a term I just made up) of ancestors and gods and spirits and not ignoring them because WE think they are mythical.
Isaac congrats on such a careful and rigorous investigation! Completely agree about the presence of Cartesian-like regularity in layouts of some of the large pre-colonial African settlements.
My guess is that they were not only like European cities in their geometry, but also in social structure, with socioeconomic hierarchies similar to those of Europe--king at top, nobles below that, down to poor masses. As you say it is important to acknowledge that this too was part of Africa's pre-colonial past.
My own emphasis was in part motivated by the search for for alternative social models--ones that might guide us towards a future which is more egalitarian, more democratic, and more sustainable than what Western traditions have produced. So I look to Africa's fractal settlements for clues about those non-extractive, deeply regenerative social possibilities. From my POV, they too had "highly organized" systems, its just that they were organized bottom-up rather than top-down: information structures the West has only recently started to recognize. How could we create, for example, carbon-zero, worker-owned data centers for AI? Fractal organization from the past offers some important models for such decentralized information networks in the future.
But this raises a challenge for historians: European historical documentation pays far more attention to African kings and cities. How do we recover historical data on pre-colonial decentralized societies? Of course many are still thriving. I regret not including travel to the Karamoja region in my research, some of the best large-scale fractals can be found there: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=615945393973132&set=a.451858460381827 -- note how they leave the central location empty at every scale, from individual household to multi-family compound to entire settlement. Fascinating contrast to the Cartesian-like examples you noted, in which the center is more filled than any other location, with a royal palace at the intersection of main streets.
Thank you for the response; I'm greatly honoured.
Yes, all the African cities whose plans displayed Cartesian-like regularity resembled their European counterparts in terms of their social structure, with top-down hierarchical political systems, as exemplified by the Yoruba, where the Palace of the Oba (King) is at the center of the city with streets raidiating outwards, or in ancient Nubia and the medieval Swahili coast, where the temples/mosques (and attimes, palaces) occupied a central place in the walled urban settlement, and where streets dividing the urban quarters often intersected.
But besides these, there were, as you mentioned, societies that didn't have hierarchical political structures; the best example of these was Djenne-Jano, considered the oldest city in West Africa, which the archaeologists Susan and Roderick McIntosh famously described as a self-organizing city, or cities without citadels. (see: Ancient Middle Niger Urbanism and the Self-organizing Landscape, by Roderick McIntosh).
The archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure applied their concept of "heterarchies" to the famous stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe and Khami, challenging traditional top-down organization by showing that these stone cities existed about the same time rather than as successive capitals.
They participated in long-distance trade, where goods could also be found in parts of the ruins without monumental architecture, and leadership could shift between different lineages in the region, rather than a single dominant center. (see: No Big Brother Here: Heterarchy, Shona Political Succession and the Relationship between Great Zimbabwe and Khami, Southern Africa. Chirikure S, Mukwende T)
I think McIntosh and Chirikure's work can provide the best representation of alternative Top-Down political structures in pre-colonial African societies that were highly complex. They have been overlooked by external documentation, which pays far more attention to African kings and cities.
An excellent introduction to these alternative African political structures is Susan McIntosh's Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, the first part of which is available here: https://assets.cambridge.org/97805210/22699/excerpt/9780521022699_excerpt.pdf.
Another excellent resource is the chapter: "On the Shoreline of History: The State of Archaeology In The Sahel" by R. McIntosh and Mamadou Cisse in "Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara" By Alisa LaGamma
Quote: "West Africa during the Iron Age (ca. 800 b.c.–a.d. 1000) was a vibrant landscape of craft innovation, migration, sustained contact between distant communities, and original experiments in city life and territorial polities. Sahelian cities looked nothing like their counterparts in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica—places such as Ur, Tikal, or Chichén Itzá—and West Africa did not go through the same sociopolitical stages (band, chiefdom, archaic state, empire) once understood as universal.
Indeed, many of the expected markers of states and empires (capital cities, monumental architecture, powerful elites lording over underclasses in vassalage) are simply not in evidence.
The social and political development of the Sahel from the fourth to the fourteenth century A.D. instead consisted of many diverse transitions from small-scale village communities—some fast and enthusiastic, some barely perceptible—to what are known as "alternative polities," a concept that has emerged in recent research to describe virtually all large territorial entities with diverse populations held together by means other than the top-down decision-making mechanisms, which were once thought responsible for the emergence and functioning of most early states or archaic empires.
Although this period witnessed the beginning of a shift toward state-level polities in some parts of the Sahel (characterized by centralized authority, administrative machinery, and judicial institutions binding together a hierarchically stratified social system), this process was not universal, and where it did occur it did not inevitably lead to a state or multiethnic empire."
Valuation of egalitarianism and democracy is very, very Western (and Modern, Anglo and French mainly). This is not to say that nobody else in the world ever had such ideas, but looking around for such things may be more Eurocentric than the opposite.
The African terminology is much richer than that, for sure. Some are specific to certain practices: mweria (rotating labor organizations) in Kenya, idir (mutual credit) in Ethiopia, nnoboa (cooperatives) in Ghana, etc. But others have been taken up as national slogans: harambee in Kenya, ujamaa in Tanzania, and so on. The term ubuntu, often summarized by the Nguni phrase, “I am because you are, you are because we are” is one of the best known and most widely utilized.
One of my favorite papers on this topic is Baldwin and Holzinger (2019). They surveyed Indigenous governance techniques and found a really spectacular variety. For example, 40% did not have any centralized authority at all. They were instead organized as quasi-autonomous “band” structures. Similar attempts in online technology, called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are often seen as crucial hope for contemporary struggles of platform cooperatives against the domination of corporations and state authority (Nabben et al). So to my mind, deeper study of African traditions is not only better documenting the past, but also providing new models for the future.
Baldwin K and Holzinger K (2019) Traditional political institutions and democracy: Reassessing their compatibility and accountability. Comparative Political Studies 52(12): 1747–1774.
Nabben K, Puspasari N, Kelleher M, et al. (2021) Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’(DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other? Available at: SSRN 3979223.)
I know virtually nothing about African societies, but my general problem with looking for parallels between social organization in non-Western (or non-modern-Western, actually) societies and some political model or idea drawn from Western European political theory (such as communalism) is that Western societies are in fact extremely strange. Primarily because they are systematically this-wordly, and other societies are not. Framing a non-Western society, or a pre-modern one, in such terms inherently deforms it by lopping off a central part of the world as experienced by this people. For instance, some of the nomadic peoples of Siberia may appear to us to be nonhierarchially organized, but THEY do not agree. In their world, they are in fact in the position of being very low in a hierarchy of spirits, to whom they pay fealty. They appear to us, empirically, to be some kind of collectivist group, but they are not in their understanding of the world, in which they are actually a bottom run of a strict feudal order.
Similarly, while what I know of African societies is very superficial, I suspect that the system of social organization is going to look very different ifyou look at it from within, including the "invisible hierarchies" (a term I just made up) of ancestors and gods and spirits and not ignoring them because WE think they are mythical.
What is meant by "indigenous" here? Non-European, or pre-Bantu in the areas of the Bantu expansion?