Technological Innovation and the Emergence of the State in Eastern and Southern Africa

How and what ways might one view technological invention, innovation, transfer, and impact of metallurgy on ancient and modern African culture and the environment? The discoveries of early copper and bronze working sites in Niger and the Central Africa has strengthened the hypothesis that knowledge of iron working independently evolved in that region and spread to other regions of Africa. The 1200 BC date for the making and use of iron Central Africa weakens the once popular notion that iron and copper working spread in conjunction with the Bantu migration. The production of carbon steel in northwest Tanzania during the first century AD and crucible steel on the Kenya coast around AD 700 provide significant evidence for technological innovation by African practitioners. What is the relationship between technological innovation and the emergence of socially complex societies? Regional scholarship posits that elite control of internal and external trade infrastructure, investment in extractive technologies, restricted access to arable land and accumulation of surplus, manipulation of religious ideology, and exploitation of ecological crises were among the major factors that contributed to the rise of the state. To what extend did elite investment and monopolization of trade, technology, and other wealth-creating resources coalesce to propel the region towards greater interaction, complexity. Major transformations in the form and increase household size, clear differences in wealth, and inequality? It appears that opportunistic use of ideological and ritual power enabled a small elite initially composed of elders, ritual and technical specialists to control the regional political economy and information flows. The timing of these transformations was continent-wide and date to the last three centuries of the first millennium AD. My chapter evaluates the emerging evidence from Eastern and Southern Africa to assess the role of technological invention, innovation, transfer on the evolution and sustenance of socially complex chiefdoms and states.