Historian Kenneth Vickery is a pinch-speaker today, filling in for George Ayittey. It’s awfully hard to fill Ayittey’s shoes, but Ayittey has been well represented by early speakers, and Vickery has a useful set of stories to tell – historical stories from the continent from the past millennium. He starts with his own story – a young graduate student, hitchhiking from Nairobi to Arusha, and collecting stories from the man kind enough to pick him up and the people he encountered on the trip. He found “people with stories, intertwined with the stories of their ancestors,” and was convinced that there was a life’ss work in collecting these stories. He tells us three historical stories, points of inflection that could have radically changed the course of events had they played out differently, offering a story from Mark Twain, that “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” He starts with the encounter between kingdoms in the early 16th century – the Portuguese, and the Kingdom of the Kongo, based in what is now northern Angola. The Kongo Kingdom is a “classic late iron age” society – it had a surplus production of food, organized pottery and textile industries, copper… (more)
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Business at 7:31 AM)