[Ancestral practices and demography of precolonial Black Africa]
(2005) Anthropos : revue internationale d’ethnologie et de linguistique — Vol. 100, n° 1, p. 53-72 (2005)
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- Slavery is often seen to be the main if not the sole factor for Africa's supposedly underdeveloped demography. But exclusive recourse to extraneous explanations not only prevents local actors from assuming some of the responsibility for their historical lot (be it for the better as well as for the worse) but also curtails academic attention to the phenomenological complexity of population growth, maintenance, or decline. In precolonial Africa natural calamities (floods, famines, epidemics...) combined with such ancestral practices as witchcraft ordeals, warfare, infanticide, and the like, could also have had nonnegligible demographic consequences. Some of these customs disappeared on the advent of colonial regimes not so much as a result of imperial legislation as of indigenous self-determination.
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Michael Singleton. (2005). [Ancestral practices and demography of precolonial Black Africa]. Anthropos : revue internationale d’ethnologie et de linguistique, 100(1), 53-72. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/43585 (Original work published 2005)