300s CE Onward: (Africa’s Reversed Metallurgical Sequence: Everywhere South of the Sahel, Iron Preceded Copper, the Prior Possession of Iron Technology Leadi…

300s CE Onward: (Africa’s Reversed Metallurgical Sequence: Everywhere South of the Sahel, Iron Preceded Copper, the Prior Possession of Iron Technology Leading People to the Discovery and Smelting of Copper Ores, the Copper Belt of Central Zambia and Southern Congo as the Most Notable Example with Sabi-Speaking Bantu Peoples Beginning Exploitation No Later Than the Fourth Century CE, Copper Trade Spreading Across the Zambezi Watershed and into the Congo Basin, and Later Luba-Speaking Communities Expanding Across the Region from the Eighth Century CE): Everywhere farther south in Africa, the establishment of iron metallurgy clearly preceded the utilization of copper. Across two-thirds of the continent it was the prior possession of iron technology, it seems, that led people to the discovery and the smelting of copper ores. The standard sequence that historians assume for the rest of the world, copper first and then iron, was reversed in most of Africa. The most notable region of this iron-to-copper invention comprised today’s Copper Belt, a stretch of copper-rich lands extending from central Zambia into the southern Democratic Republic of Congo. People speaking a Bantu language of the Sabi subgroup began exploiting the local ores no later than around the fourth century CE, several centuries after the spread of iron technology across those areas. This region soon became the source, via community-to-community trade, of the spread of copper and copper items all across the Zambezi River watershed, as well as along the rivers leading northward into the Congo basin. A new set of Bantu communities spread across the region from around the eighth century, with their language, ancestral to the modern-day Luba dialects of those areas, progressively displacing the earlier Sabi language from use, and with the production, trade, and demand for copper all the while continuing to grow. The Copper Belt story is a perfect illustration of Ehret’s larger point: African technological development followed its own logic, on its own timeline, generating its own trade networks and its own linguistic transformations. It did not need to replicate the European or Middle Eastern sequence to be valid. It was simply different, and difference is not deficiency.