V.

History

At some point between 130,000 and 90,000 years ago the first true human beings, Homo sapiens, evolved in eastern and southern Africa. These Stone Age humans had the same capacity for thought as modern human beings. They were capable of making tools such as hooks and needles made of bone, and precise stone blades. These stone blades could be used as scrapers and hand-knives, or attached to poles and sticks for use as spears or arrows. By 90,000 years ago Homo sapiens had begun to move out of Africa into the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, and beyond. All modern human beings are descended from these original African ancestors.

A.

Early Africans

By 40,000 years ago people could be found hunting and gathering food across most of the regions of Africa. Populations in different regions employed various technological developments in adapting to their different environments and climates. The most notable adaptations occurred in response to major climate changes.

A.1.

Spread of Languages and Cultures

Between 16,000 and 13,000 bc the climate of much of Africa was considerably drier than it is today. The Sahara expanded north and south at the expense of grassy steppe lands and woodland savanna, and the area of equatorial rain forest shrank. This put pressure upon human hunter-gatherer populations to improve their techniques and to more intensively use locally available food resources. Those who adapted most successfully spread their techniques, cultures, and languages beyond their home areas, while absorbing or influencing other populations. This period gave birth to the four great language families of Africa—Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan—from which all modern African languages are descended.

From Eritrea and the Red Sea Hills to the northern borders of Sudan, speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages specialized in collecting the seeds of wild grasses, which were ground into flour. Over subsequent millennia their descendants spread their languages and cultures northward into Egypt and westward over the whole of North Africa.

In the middle Nile region of central Sudan the speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages specialized in hunting large antelope, including the wild ancestors of Saharan cattle. Eventually these people also spread, moving south into East Africa and west across the southern Sahara.

In the savanna woodlands of West Africa, speakers of early Niger-Congo languages hunted with bow and arrow, fished with hook and line, and intensively collected the West African yam. Their languages and cultures eventually spread across the whole of West and Central Africa, and later, even to the southern reaches of the continent.

In East Africa, from what is now Kenya to northern Zambia, speakers of ancestral Khoisan languages made the most successful adaptations of this period. They developed a wide range of small, finely honed stone tools for hunting and many other purposes. Their adaptable tools and tool-making skills enabled the Khoisan to become excellent hunters and to spread throughout southern Africa, and partly explain why, through thousands of years of further climate change, they felt no need to domesticate animals and plants like their northern neighbors.

A.2.

Origins of Cultivation and Herding

Between 11,000 and 3500 bc Africa experienced a wet climatic phase, which reached its peak between 9000 and 6000 bc. The Sahara became a grassland steppe surrounded by savanna woodlands, perennial rivers flowed from its mountain ranges, and Lake Chad expanded into a vast inland sea. The environmental changes opened huge new opportunities for Africa’s human populations. Farming originated in this period with the domestication of African plants and animals.

The Nilo-Saharan speakers of central Sudan adopted the grain-collection practice of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors. They applied it to wild sorghum, a tropical grass, which they domesticated and cultivated by 8000 bc. By this time, they had also invented techniques for making pottery, which was used to collect and store food and water. In the same period, Nilo-Saharan speakers domesticated wild cattle in and around the Nile Valley. Between 7000 and 5000 bc they also domesticated pearl millet, gourds, melons, and beans, and spread their farming and herding practices westward across the southern Sahara.

By this time, northern Afro-Asiatic speakers had taken wild seed collecting practices into Egypt, where they domesticated donkeys and pigs. They also spread into the Middle East, where tropical grasses would not grow. Instead, they learned to domesticate wheat and barley, and cultivation of these grains spread back westward through the Mediterranean regions of North Africa. Meanwhile, Cushitic speakers (an Afro-Asiatic subgroup) spread herding and grain cultivation throughout the Horn of Africa and into the central plains of East Africa. In the valleys of the Ethiopian Highlands, the indigenous crops teff (a grain) and enset (a banana-like fruit) were also domesticated.

Niger-Congo speakers in West Africa domesticated the yam and planted it in the expanded zone of savanna woodland by about 8000 bc. By 5000 bc their domesticated crops also included oil palm, raffia palm, peas, groundnuts, and kola nut, and they had also domesticated the guinea fowl. The domestication of West African rice, in and around the inland delta of the Niger, occurred slightly later, during a drier period after 3000 bc. By that time West Africans had developed polished stone axes for clearing woodland and were penetrating the rain forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin to the southeast.

Another important feature of the wet climatic phase was the development of fishing cultures around the numerous expanded lakes and rivers. From Lake Chad to the upper Nile and south to Lake Turkana and the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, fishers gathered in large settlements and traded dried fish for grain and other products from their neighbors.

B.

Ancient Nile Valley States

By 3500 bc the favorable wet phase was coming to an end and the Saharan steppe again gave way to full desert. As the desert expanded, herders and cultivators concentrated in areas of perennial water sources, notably the Nile Valley. In what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, the north-flowing Nile forms a great S-shaped curve and passes through six cataracts (rapids or waterfalls), which are numbered from north to south. In this area, known as Nubia, the concentration of settlements between the first and fourth cataracts prompted the clearing of riverside vegetation and exposure of the fertile floodplain. Large-scale projects such as this required communal labor and, consequently, the development of political and religious authority capable of commanding large workforces. Clan chiefs became kings, with each king acting as the guardian of his kingdom’s god.

B.1.

Ancient Egypt

Nubian concepts of kingship and religion spread northward to the Nile Delta region (known as Lower Egypt) as the desert encroached ever closer to the river. The navigability of the river from the delta to the first cataract allowed for easy communication and the expansion of political authority. Kingdoms along the Egyptian Nile merged until there were only two: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. In about 3100 bc the two kingdoms were united by Narmer, king of Upper Egypt, who thus founded the earliest dynasty of Ancient Egypt. The old Nubian gods of the individual kingdoms became regional deities in a new polytheistic religion, and the creation of this regionally diverse religion helped cement the unification.

Egyptian unity prevailed for about 900 years. The first centuries saw a strengthening of central authority until, by the time of the Third Dynasty (about 2649 to 2575 bc), the king himself was recognized as a god. Egypt then entered the era referred to as the Old Kingdom (about 2575 to 2134 bc). Around the dawn of the Old Kingdom, Egyptians began constructing great burial pyramids for their kings. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in about 2500 bc as a tomb for Khufu, the second king of the Fourth Dynasty (about 2575 to 2467 bc), and is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World that survives intact today. Its construction required the mobilization of a huge, rotating labor force. The scope of manpower involved may have been the reason why the pyramids of Khufu’s successors were never quite as big. Grand pyramid building ceased by the end of the Sixth Dynasty (about 2323 to 2151 bc).

Farm labor by peasants, who made up the vast majority of the Egyptian population, formed the economic basis of Ancient Egypt. The annual flooding of the Nile renewed the soils of the valley with fertile silts carried down from the far-off Ethiopian Highlands. As the annual flood receded, the farmers moved back onto the floodplain, digging irrigation canals and planting their crops in the rejuvenated soil. They grew wheat, barley, flax, vegetables, and fruit. Peasants also herded cattle and goats, fished for Nile perch, and hunted wild birds in the marshes.

Every aspect of the peasants’ labor was overseen by government scribes and tax collectors, who developed hieroglyphs, possibly the earliest form of writing in the world. All agricultural surplus went to the state to support the king in luxury and to feed and clothe his huge army of government servants, artists, artisans, builders of pyramids and temples, priests, and guardians of religious shrines.

During most of the Old Kingdom, trade remained a monopoly of the state. During the Sixth Dynasty, however, wealth became more widespread among regional princes, merchants, and priests. Around 2200 bc northeast Africa experienced several decades of cooler, drier climate. The Nile failed to flood and Egypt suffered a devastating famine. Central authority collapsed and regional princes asserted their independence.

In about 2040 bc the kings of Thebes in Upper Egypt reestablished Egyptian unity and Egypt entered what is known as the Middle Kingdom (about 2040 to 1640 bc). In this period, Egyptian trade expanded down the Red Sea coast of Africa. This time, however, the trade was run by professional merchants, and the central government taxed the trade instead of running it as a royal monopoly. Middle Kingdom kings revived pyramid building, though on a much smaller scale.

In about 1640 bc Middle Kingdom unity was destroyed by an invasion of the Nile Delta region by invaders from the Middle East known as Hyksos. These foreigners, who introduced horses to Egypt, established a rival dynasty in the delta. In about 1550 bc Ahmose I, king of Upper Egypt, defeated the Hyksos and founded the 18th Dynasty (about 1550 to 1307 bc). In doing so, he reestablished Egyptian unity and Egypt entered an era called the New Kingdom (about 1550 to 1070 bc). For the first time, Egyptian kings maintained a standing army, and military conquest was used to build an Egyptian empire from Palestine and Syria in the north to the fourth cataract of the Nile, the heart of Nubia, in the south. Pyramid building was not revived, but massive statues and temples were built. Kings, now known as pharaohs, were buried in elaborately decorated tombs cut into solid rock in the Valley of the Kings across the river from the royal capital of Thebes.

Egypt’s power declined during the 20th Dynasty (about 1196 to 1070 bc). The New Kingdom empire broke apart as Palestine and Nubia reclaimed their independence. There followed a succession of foreign invasions and rebellions by Libyan mercenaries. From this point on, native Egyptian dynasties were interspersed by Nubian, Assyrian, and Persian ones, until the last Egyptian dynasty fell to Greece in 332 bc.

B.2.

Nubian Kingdoms

By the time of the unification of Egypt in 3100 bc, several Nubian kingdoms had already been established along the middle Nile between the first and fourth cataracts. After an Egyptian invasion of Nubia as far as the second cataract in about 1900 bc, the Nubian kingdoms formed a loose unity, centered on the city of Kerma, just south of the third cataract. Little is known about this kingdom until it was brought within the Egyptian New Kingdom empire about 1500 bc.

As Egyptian control weakened after 1100 bc, Nubia reasserted its independence and became known as Kush. A new capital and religious center was established at Napata, near the fourth cataract, and Kushite culture flourished. Kush’s agricultural economy was based on cattle herding and cultivation of sorghum and millet. Through payments from subject provinces and trade in ivory, skins, and ebony from the south, the kings of Kush grew wealthy and powerful. In about 770 bc they invaded Egypt and established what is known as the 25th Dynasty (about 770 to 657 bc) at Thebes.

The Kushites were ousted from Egypt in the 7th century bc by an Assyrian invasion from the Middle East. The Assyrians wielded weapons of iron, a metal until that time unknown in North Africa. The Kushites withdrew to Napata, and again farther south to Meroë, following an Egyptian invasion in 593 bc (although Napata would remain the Kushite capital until 300 bc). At Meroë, between the fifth and sixth cataracts, the Nubians would found a new kingdom based in large part upon the new technology of ironworking (see the Meroë section of this article).

C.

Dawn of the Iron Age

The first metal worked in Africa was copper, smelted and forged in Egypt before its unification in 3100 bc. Copper and stone remained the main tool-making materials in Egypt until the 17th century bc, when the Hyksos invasion from the Middle East brought bronze, a harder alloy, to North Africa. During Egypt’s New Kingdom, gold was forged into jewelry and elaborate furniture to decorate the pharaohs’ palaces and tombs. Far to the west of Egypt, in the Aïr Mountains of what is now Niger, copper working was independently invented some time after 3000 bc. These early metalworkers probably spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, perhaps ancestral to modern Songhai. By 1500 bc their copper-working techniques and furnaces were well developed and the technology had spread to other copper-bearing areas of the southern Sahara.

Iron is a much harder metal to smelt than copper, requiring larger quantities of charcoal and much higher temperatures. Its invention, therefore, required considerable expertise in furnace building. While the knowledge of ironworking was first brought to northeast Africa from the Middle East after 670 bc, the techniques had been independently invented in sub-Saharan Africa some 300 years earlier. Presumably building upon furnace techniques developed for the smelting of copper, metalworkers were smelting iron in Chad and the Great Lakes region (an area in East Africa between and around Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika) by 1000 bc. From these centers of development, ironworking spread among the agricultural peoples of West, Central, and East Africa, reaching southern Africa in the early centuries ad.

C.1.

Development of Farming Communities in West Africa

The increasing use of iron tools and weapons helped West Africans clear woodland for cultivation and improved hunting efficiency. This accelerated the development and spread of farming communities. In the inland delta of the Niger River—where the river divides and spreads into a complex pattern of waterways—clusters of villages formed into larger settlements. Many of these Mande-speaking villagers specialized in the production of dried fish, rice, or cotton. Producing far more than they needed for themselves, they traded their surplus with their neighbors at large central markets. By about 250 bc Djenné, in present-day southern Mali, was perhaps the largest of these commercial centers.

Rice growing spread to the tidal estuaries of what is now Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. In these areas local farmers developed special water-control techniques that used tidal salt water to clear the land of weeds and fresh water from rivers to irrigate the rice crop. Centuries later, slaves taken from this region would introduce similar techniques to the plantations of South Carolina in what is now the United States.

Throughout the Niger-Congo societies of West Africa, craftspeople specialized in wood carving, producing dugout canoes and three-legged stools, as well as masks for use in festivals and religions rituals. A thriving, ironworking community, referred to as the Nok culture, established itself on the Jos Plateau of central Nigeria by 500 bc. Nok craftsmen combined carving and pottery-making skills in the production of finely sculpted terracotta clay heads.

C.2.

Bantu Migration

By 2000 bc Bantu-speaking farmers of the Niger-Congo culture had begun to migrate from what is now Cameroon and eastern Nigeria into the forest regions of the Congo River Basin. Traveling in dugout canoes along the region’s numerous waterways, they established riverside settlements and supplemented yam and oil palm farming with hunting and fishing. By 1000 bc they had crossed the forests to reach the southern savanna lands of what is now Angola and reached the Great Lakes region in the east. In the Great Lakes region they adopted ironworking and learned techniques of cattle keeping and grain cultivation from their Sudanic- and Cushitic-speaking neighbors.

Bantu-speaking farmers thus developed a unique and wide-ranging combination of technological skills: planting yams, sowing grain, herding livestock, working iron, and making pottery. This adaptable set of skills enabled them to spread, in a series of small movements, over most of East, Central, and southern Africa between 300 bc and ad 300. In the process, they interacted with and absorbed existing, mostly Khoisan, populations. The only region the Bantu did not penetrate was the far southwestern corner of Africa, which was too dry for their agricultural practices.

C.3.

Meroë

By the 3rd century bc the middle Nile Valley had a long history of agricultural settlement and political kingdoms. The kingdom of Kush formally moved its capital southward from Napata to Meroë in about 300 bc. In this island of savanna woodland between the ‘Aţbarah and Nile rivers the ruling elite built a powerful kingdom. The wetter climate of this region allowed the cultivation of tropical cereals, sorghum, and millet. With plentiful iron ore and wood for charcoal, the kingdom of Meroë became a major center for the production of iron. Iron spears and arrows helped the kingdom defend itself against any threat from Egypt and aided hunting as well. Meroë was also in an advantageous position for trade. With access to the ivory, ebony, and animal furs of the Upper Nile, Meroë’s traders were well positioned to trade with Egypt to the north and with Red Sea ports to the east.

At first, the culture of Meroë was strongly influenced by that of Egypt, but the kingdom soon evolved its own distinctive culture, language, and writing. Although their religion retained many of the Egyptian gods, they developed other gods with different characteristics, notably the lion god, Apedemek. They also buried their kings in small pyramids, long after pyramid building had ceased in Egypt.

By ad 300 Meroë was in decline. In feeding a dense population, intensive farming had worn out the land, while the widespread felling of trees for charcoal led to soil erosion. Furthermore, Meroë had lost its advantageous trading position to the rising kingdom of Aksum in the southeast.

C.4.

Aksum

The kingdom of Aksum arose on the Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea. By 500 bc mixed coastal communities of local farmers and immigrant traders from southeast Arabia had developed their own language and system of writing. These ports grew in strength, competing with Meroë for control of Red Sea trade. By the 1st century ad the ports had united and come under the control of a kingdom with its capital at the inland city of Aksum. As Meroë declined, Aksum became a prosperous city. It was noted for its monumental stone architecture, especially its carved, multistoried, solid stone pillars called stelae.

In the mid-4th century the Aksumite king Ezana converted to Christianity. The Aksumite church was affiliated with the Egyptian Coptic Church, and was also influenced by Syrian monasticism. With the spread of Islam in the 7th century, the Red Sea increasingly came under the control of an expanding Islamic state and Aksum lost much of its access to Indian Ocean trade. The kingdom disintegrated in the 10th century, but its unique, monastic church persisted as the state religion of the subsequent kingdom of Ethiopia.

C.5.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia, a Christian kingdom that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands after 800, was controlled by an aristocracy. The local Agaw peasantry owned and worked the land in the fertile valleys, but paid a tax from their produce to their governing aristocracy as well as to their local monastic church. In about 1150 an Agaw dynasty, known as the Zagwe, took over the kingship. The Ethiopian Christian Church flourished under Zagwe rule, as recorded in both manuscripts and architecture. The combination of Agaw belief in the sacred role of rock caves and the Aksumite tradition of grand stonework led to the creation of a series of unique churches carved into solid rock, many of which still survive today. The Solomonid dynasty succeeded Zagwe in the 13th century and established a monarchy and a political system that remained intact until the 20th century.

D.

Early North Africa

The Greek conquest of Egypt in 332 bc tied Egypt more closely to the fortunes of the Mediterranean world. The new ruling class adapted many aspects of Egyptian culture, but Greek became the language of administration and trade. A new capital city was built at Alexandria, which, within a few centuries, became the greatest trading center of the ancient world. The Greeks founded the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, which persisted until the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in 31 bc.

D.1.

Roman Africa

Under Roman rule Egypt became a province of the empire and a major center of grain production for the citizens of Rome. The rest of Mediterranean North Africa was incorporated into the Roman Empire between 150 bc and ad 200. Carthage, on the northeast coast of what is now Tunisia, had been a Phoenician trading colony since at least 800 bc. By the 5th century bc it rivaled Rome for control of the western Mediterranean Sea. After the century-long Punic Wars, Rome conquered Carthage in 146 bc. The Romans named their new Tunisian province Africa. To the west lay independent Berber kingdoms of mountain herders and settled coastal farmers. The Romans called these lands Numidia (modern-day northern Algeria) and Mauretania (now northern Morocco). Initially, these regions maintained their independence and entered into trading alliances with the Romans, but by ad 200 they too had been largely incorporated into the Roman Empire. Roman North Africa provided the empire with wheat and olives, grown on coastal plantations worked by Berber slaves.

The Roman Empire split in two in about 400 ad, and Rome declined in power. Carthage fell to Germanic invaders, known as the Vandals, in 439. After a period of Vandal rule, North Africa was recaptured by the Byzantine Empire (the eastern half of the Roman Empire) in 533.

D.2.

Spread of Christianity

By ad 100 Alexandria had become the most important intellectual center of the early Christian Church. From Egypt, monastic Christianity spread south to Nubia and Ethiopia, and west to Berber North Africa. In the latter region, the Berbers adapted the new religion to fit in with indigenous beliefs. Subjugated by the Roman Empire by 200, Berber Christians maintained a strong tradition of religious independence from Rome, even after the empire had adopted Christianity as the official Roman religion in the 320s.

D.3.

Trans-Saharan Trade

The Romans introduced the camel to North Africa in about 200, and in doing so unwittingly revolutionized trans-Saharan trade. North African Berbers and other residents of the central Sahara quickly adopted the use of camels, both as a source of food and as a means of transport. Where trade across the desert had formerly been sporadic, moving haltingly from oasis to oasis, it was now possible to take a camel caravan on a two-month journey directly across the Sahara. Trade and contact between the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan West Africa flourished. Major traded commodities included horses, weapons, and textiles from the Mediterranean; gold, slaves, and animal products from West Africa; and salt mined from dried-up prehistoric lakes in the central Sahara.

D.4.

Islam and the Arab Conquest of North Africa

The religion of Islam, founded in Arabia in the early 7th century, quickly united Arabs and inspired the expansion of a great Islamic empire across the Middle East and North Africa. By 641 Muslims had conquered Egypt, where they established a new ruling class of administrators and merchants. Over the ensuing centuries, and following further Arab immigration, most of the Egyptian population converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language, leaving the Egyptian Coptic Church as a small Christian sect. In Nubia, the Christian kingdom of Makuria managed to maintain its independence, establishing important trade connections with its newly Islamic northern neighbors. Arab penetration south and conversion of Christian Nubia to Islam did not occur until the early 14th century.

The Arabs referred to North Africa west of Egypt as al-Maghreb (“the West” in Arabic). Muslims conquered Byzantine Carthage in about 700, and by 711 they overcame Berber resistance, extended their empire to Morocco, and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to southern Spain. In the Maghreb, the Arabs were initially confined to coastal regions. Here, captured Berbers were conscripted into the Arab army and converted to Islam.

Inland, among the Berbers of the mountains and desert, conversion proceeded at a slower pace. In addition, many Berber groups asserted their independence from the caliphs (the rulers of the Islamic empire) soon after being converted. Over the ensuing centuries, a number of independent Islamic Berber states rose and fell, until, in the 10th century, the Fatimid dynasty united the central Maghreb. In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt and declared their independence from the caliphate.

D.5.

Egypt Under the Fatimids, Mamluks, and Ottomans

The Fatimids established a new Berber aristocracy in Egypt. The main wealth of the country, as always, was derived from peasant agriculture. Fatimid rulers granted Berber aristocrats huge land estates from which they were to collect taxes from the peasants. A portion of this tax was paid to the state and the rest retained by the Berber landholder. As the Berbers settled into the role of landed elite, their former ranks in the Fatimid army were filled by legions of Turk and Mongol slave soldiers known as Mamluks.

In 1171 a Kurdish military officer named Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, also known as Saladin, seized the Egyptian throne and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. His action was prompted by the threat to Egypt posed by Christian Crusaders from Western Europe who had seized control of much of Palestine (see Crusades). Saladin reformed the army, imported more Mamluks, and placed the land estates and the collection of taxes in the hands of successful Mamluk officers. These Mamluks became the new Egyptian aristocracy and in 1250 they seized the throne from the Ayyubids. The Mamluk dynasty ruled Egypt for the next 250 years. The Mamluk period was a time of great religious and cultural revival in the Egyptian capital of Cairo. However, in the countryside—where the vast majority of Egyptians lived—the estate holders abused their tax-collecting powers and exploited the peasantry.

In 1517 the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt and made it an Ottoman province. The Ottoman sultan appointed the pasha, or governor, of Egypt, but otherwise Ottoman Egypt was largely able to act autonomously. Under the Ottomans, Egypt’s boundaries were extended south as far as the third cataract of the Nile and down the Red Sea coast as far as Eritrea. South of Egypt, a dynasty of black Muslims known as the Funj established a sultanate over the Sudanese Nile centered at Sannār (Sennar) and extending as far south as the highlands of Ethiopia.

D.6.

Almoravids and Almohads of Northwest Africa

Across the Sahara, Islam provided the traders and herders of the remote desert oases with a common sense of brotherhood. Trans-Saharan trade expanded in response to the Islamic world’s demand for West African gold for its trading currencies. Muslim Berbers making their pilgrimages to Mecca—a duty of Muslims—were exposed to the vast differences between life in the remotest Saharan oases and the realities of the wider Muslim world. Scandalized by the wealth and luxuries of urban North Africa, a small group of Sanhaja Berbers in what is now Mauritania initiated an Islamic reform movement in the mid-11th century. Known as the Almoravids, they provided the desert peoples with a new sense of unity and reformist zeal. The Almoravids built up a mass army that swept north through the western desert and conquered Morocco.

After the deaths of early Almoravid leaders in the late 1050s, the southern desert regions broke away. In the 1140s another reformist movement, known as the Almohads, overthrew the Almoravids and established the Almohad empire over much of the Maghreb. In subsequent centuries the Almohad empire broke apart into three Islamic states, roughly corresponding to the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

D.7.

Ottoman Maghreb and Morocco

In the decades following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottomans seized the major ports of the Maghreb: Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Tangier. Ongoing conflict with Christian Europe, however, kept the Ottomans from extending their control of the Maghreb into the interior. In addition, the port cities—important bases from which to raid European shipping in the western Mediterranean Sea—remained largely autonomous from central Ottoman control

In the 16th century Morocco rose as an independent kingdom, reaching the height of its power under Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled from 1578 to 1603. In 1591 al-Mansur attempted to seize control of the trans-Saharan gold trade by sending an invasion force across the desert to occupy the West African empire of Songhai (see the Songhai Empire section of this article). The occupation of Songhai, however, was more of a drain on Moroccan resources than a benefit, and during the 17th century local West African rulers asserted their independence from Moroccan control.

E.

The Age of Empires in West Africa

By the 10th century North African trading powers were clamoring for gold from West Africa to satisfy the Islamic world’s increasing demand for currency. This stimulated the growth in sub-Saharan West Africa of large trading empires, which accrued vast amounts of wealth and power by controlling trans-Saharan caravan routes.

E.1.

Kingdom of Ghana

The Kingdom of Ghana arose among the Soninke-speaking farmers of the transition area between desert and woodland in what is now southeastern Mauritania. Ghana exploited its strategic position between the gold-producing peoples of the south and the camel caravans of desert nomad traders to the north. From their capital at Kumbi Saleh (Koumbi Saleh) Ghana’s rulers were able to tax the gold trade and build an empire which by 1000 stretched from the Sénégal River valley in the west to the great bend of the Niger River in the east.

The rulers of Ghana converted to Islam following the rise of the Almoravid empire in the 11th century, easing communication along the growing network of trade routes across the desert. However, these improved trade conditions also provided the opportunity for the growth of rivals to Ghana’s control of the gold trade. Increased competition combined with overexploitation of the environment at Kumbi Saleh led to the decline and eventual breakup of the Kingdom of Ghana in the early 13th century.

E.2.

Mali Empire

Soninke and Mandinka (also known as Mandingo or Malinke) clans were among the first to break away from Ghana. In the 1230s Mandinka leader Sundiata Keita organized a coalition of clans in the fertile valley of the upper Niger River, and began bringing neighboring groups under his control. This growing state became known as the Mali Empire. Under Sundiata’s successors, known as mansas, the empire would grow far larger than Ghana had ever been. At its height in the 13th century, Mali stretched from the Atlantic Ocean coast in the west to beyond the Niger bend in the east, and from the goldfields of modern Guinea in the south to the major southern Saharan caravan stops in the north. Mali came to the attention of the wider world when Mansa Musa made a lavish pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Cairo from 1324 to 1325. In this period, the city of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), northwest of the Niger bend, achieved world fame as both a center of the gold trade and of Islamic learning.

Holding such a massive empire together required energetic and forceful leadership. When brief reigns and dynastic struggles weakened the rule of the mansas in the late 14th century, Mali’s outer provinces asserted their independence. From south of the Niger bend, powerful Mossi states raided the center of the empire, and Tuareg nomads from the desert captured Tombouctou. By 1500 the rule of the mansas of Mali stretched little beyond the Mandinka heartland of the upper Niger.

E.3.

Songhai Empire

Songhai, with its capital at Gao on the east side of the Niger bend, had been a riverside trading kingdom since at least the 8th century. Songhai was one of the first states to break away from Mali’s imperial control, using an army of horsemen and a fleet of war canoes to assert independent control over the Niger bend by the end of the 14th century. Songhai became an empire in the second half of the 15th century, under the rule of military hero Sunni Ali. Expanding his territory through military conquest, Ali seized control of Tuareg Tombouctou and drove the Mossi south of the Niger bend. By Ali’s death in 1492, Songhai had completely eclipsed Mali and stretched from the Atlantic coast to what is now central Niger.

Ali was succeeded by Muhammad, founder of the Askia dynasty. A devout Muslim, Muhammad consolidated Ali’s conquests and strengthened the administration of the empire. He used Islam as a unifying force within the empire, once justifying a major raid against the Mossi by declaring it a jihad, or holy war. Trans-Saharan trade flourished under Muhammad, who extended the empire to incorporate the Taghaza salt mines of the central Sahara.

In the late 16th century Songhai suffered a series of dynastic conflicts that weakened central control. Rising states in the east—such as Bornu, the Hausa city-states, and the Tuareg sultanate of Aïr—drew trade away from the empire. At the same time, gold produced in the southern forest regions was being redirected towards the increasing presence of European traders on the West African coast. The unity of the Songhai empire ended with the Moroccan invasion of 1591.

E.4.

Kanem-Bornu

In the Lake Chad region, far to the east of the Niger bend, trans-Saharan trade was controlled by the state of Kanem, founded by Nilo-Saharan Kanuri nomads in about 800. By 1000 Kanem came under the leadership of the Saifawa clan, who established an Islamic dynasty and a settled capital at Njimi, north of Lake Chad.

Kanem controlled the shortest route across the desert, by way of the highlands of Aïr (in what is now north central Niger) and the Libyan region of Fezzan. Its traders also had access, by way of the Sudanese regions of Darfūr and Kordofan, to the markets of the Sudanese Nile and ultimately to Egypt. Kanem traded copper and salt from the desert, horses from North Africa, and ivory, ostrich feathers, and slaves from the south. In the 13th century, Kanem’s army was 40,000 horsemen strong, and the state controlled trade as far north as Fezzan. Near the end of the century Kanem absorbed the state of Bornu, southwest of Lake Chad, and moved its capital to Birmi, in the grasslands of Bornu. In the 16th century the rulers of Kanem-Bornu strengthened their control over the region with firearms imported from Ottoman North Africa.

E.5.

Hausa City-States

Between 1000 and 1200 seven Hausa city-states emerged as regional trading powers in the savanna lands west of Bornu in what is now northern Nigeria. These cities were centers of agriculture and manufacturing, and each developed its own specialized manufactured product, such as cotton cloth, dyes, or leather. The most important of these cities were Kano, Katsina, Zaria, and Gobir. In the south, Zaria raided the Benue River valley for captives to sell as slaves, either for internal Hausa use or for sale to Bornu and North Africa in exchange for horses and guns.

E.6.

People of the West African Forest

South of the savanna, in the forest zone from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, political organization tended to be clan- or village-based. However, several larger states emerged: The Yoruba kingdom of Ife and the Edo kingdom of Benin developed deep in the Nigerian forest in the 11th and 12th centuries. The artisans of Ife and Benin produced finely crafted terracotta sculptures and elaborate brass, bronze, and copper castings. By the 15th century Benin had expanded to control the entire length of the Nigerian coast, while Ife had been surpassed by Oyo as the dominant Yoruba state.

Farther west, in the forests of what is now Ghana, Akan-speaking peoples mined gold and traded with Songhai from about 1400. By the 16th century a number of powerful Akan chiefdoms arose, exploiting new European markets for gold along the coast. In the late 17th century several of these states merged to form the Ashanti Kingdom, which soon rose to prominence as a leading exporter of both gold and slaves. By 1800 Ashanti controlled all of modern Ghana and dominated trade with the numerous rival European trading posts along the coast.

E.7.

Rise and Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The collapse of Songhai in the late 16th century coincided with the emerging importance of European trading interests along the West African coast. The combination of the two stimulated considerable movement of inland peoples and the emergence of new states within the forest zone. Initially, Europeans sought West Africa’s gold, but by the 17th century demand had shifted to slaves for export to European colonies across the Atlantic (see Atlantic Slave Trade).

Slavery and other forms of involuntary human servitude had long been features of African economic life (Slavery in Africa). Usually these workers—outcasts, criminals, and war captives—were considered part of their captors’ societies, although at a subordinate level. Slaves had been marketable commodities for centuries in the trans-Saharan trade, but the European Atlantic slave trade introduced a much larger scale to the trade in human beings.

Initially, the supply of captives available for sale on the coast was generally the result of specific local wars connected to the rise and fall of states. For example, the forest kingdom of Benin supplied the Portuguese with captives as the kingdom expanded in the 1490s, but when the kingdom stabilized it stopped supplying captives. Similarly, wars waged by the expanding states of Fouta Djallon, Oyo, Dahomey, and Ashanti in the 17th and 18th centuries produced specific peaks of captives for sale into slavery. Basically, African rulers sold captives when it suited them, becoming rich and powerful in the process, and rarely took them from their own people.

In the 18th century, as European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more North American, South American, and Caribbean lands became available for European use, the need for plantation labor increased. Demand for slaves exploded, growing to between 50,000 and 100,000 a year. As African war leaders and merchants fed the increasing global economic demand for slaves, they altered the nature of the trade and also changed everyday African life all along the coast and far into the interior. Systematic slave raiding became common, warfare became much more widespread, and small, village-based communities suffered badly at the hands of powerful neighbors. From the mid-15th century to the late 19th century at least 12 million young adults were sent from Africa to the New World as slaves, some 2 million of them dying en route. Combined with the millions of African slaves sent to the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the millions more who died in the process of capture, transportation, and detainment within Africa, the total number of productive young Africans lost to the slave trade exceeded 20 million.

F.

Early East Africa

Early Iron Age Bantu-speaking farmers spread their settlements widely along the Indian Ocean coast and throughout the better-watered and wooded regions of the East African interior during the early centuries ad. The drier regions largely remained the domain of cattle-herding peoples, many of them descendants of earlier Cushitic-speaking herders.

F.1.

States of the Great Lakes

As woodland was cleared for cultivation, wider areas of East Africa became suitable for cattle keeping. In the centuries before and after 1000, Nilotic-speaking cattle herders pushed southward into the newly exposed grasslands of the Great Lakes region. Some retained their Nilotic language and culture, such as the Luo northeast of Lake Victoria. West of Lake Victoria, Nilotic herders integrated into Bantu society and adopted local Bantu languages. In this period local state structures began to emerge. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the states of Bunyoro, Ankole, Karagwe, and Buganda were established in what is now Uganda and northern Tanzania. By the 16th century Bunyoro had grown to dominate the region.

In the same period the hierarchical kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi emerged in the mountains bordering Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika. These kingdoms were ruled by a cattle-owning aristocracy, known as Tutsi, who exacted tribute from the farming population, known as Hutu. The distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was one of power and wealth rather than ethnicity, although so-called ethnic differences between the two would be distorted and exploited in modern times.

The kingdom of Buganda, located at the northwest corner of Lake Victoria, grew in stature by the early 18th century. The region’s rich, fertile soil and regular rainfall supported intensive banana cultivation, which in turn supported a dense population and allowed for the development of a powerful, centralized state. Power rested with the kabaka (king) who controlled his realm by granting land estates to regional chiefs. A sophisticated system of roads and administration was established and by 1800 Buganda rivaled Bunyoro as the major power of the region.

To the east, Nilotic herders moved into the Kenya highlands and the Eastern Rift of the Great Rift Valley. Absorbing southern Cushitic-speaking cereal farmers and herders, these peoples were the ancestors of the Kalenjin of Kenya and the Dadog of Kenya. Subsequent Nilotic migrations, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, created the Karamojong and Teso of northeastern Uganda, the Samburu and Turkana of northwestern Kenya, and the Masai of the central Kenyan rift valleys and northern Tanzania. The pastoral Masai traded with the Bantu-speaking Kikuyu (Gikuyu) and Kamba of the central Kenya highlands and maintained peaceful relations with them.

Most of the Bantu-speaking farmers of Kenya and Tanzania lived in small, clan-based chiefdoms, but sizeable states emerged among the Chagga, Pare, and Shambaa in the wetter hills of northeastern Tanzania. In central and western Tanzania, the Nyamwezi became experienced traders in iron and salt, establishing important links between the coast and the emerging states of the western Great Lakes region.

F.2.

Swahili and East Coast Trade

About 2,000 years ago, the Indian Ocean coast was populated by Bantu-speaking farmers, cattle keepers, and fishers. These people established small village settlements on estuaries and islands and built small boats for fishing, communicating, and trading along the coast. This region was known to Greek and Roman traders of the early centuries ad as Azania. By this time Bantu settlements stretched from the Kenyan island of Lamu in the north to the Rufiji estuary near modern-day Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the south. These communities exported ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shell, and other goods.

With the ongoing spread of Islam, from the 8th century the communities of the East African coast became more directly connected to the long-distance trading network of the Indian Ocean. Muslim Arabic-speaking traders settled along the coast and married into local ruling families. The language and culture that developed remained distinctly African, but with Arabic and Islamic borrowings and influences. This language and culture, and the people in general, are referred to as Swahili. By 1000 Swahili trading settlements stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Mozambique, the Comoros archipelago, and northern Madagascar in the south. (By this time, Madagascar had been settled by Polynesian peoples from the eastern Indian Ocean.) Other major Swahili towns included Mombasa, Kilwa, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. The more prosperous Swahili towns minted their own copper and silver coins. Gold from the southern African interior became a significant export in southern Swahili towns, while northern towns sold captives for slave labor. Most of these slaves were sent to the Middle East, many to work in southern Iraq collecting salt from coastal flats.

The growing significance of the Swahili gold trade prompted further Arab immigration in the 12th century. Wealthy Muslim elites ruled the Swahili cities, and their imports of fine Indian and Chinese pottery hint at the range and wealth of their Indian Ocean trading connections.

After Portuguese sailors first rounded southern Africa at the end of the 15th century, Portugal sought to seize control of this lucrative Indian Ocean trade, especially the gold trade. The Portuguese sacked several of the principal Swahili cities, built a string of fortresses along the coast, and dominated the coastal trade until an Arab force from Oman drove them out of the northern cities in the 1690s.

G.

Early Central Africa

In Central Africa, the Bantu migration came full circle. By 1000 bc western Bantu-speaking farmers had crossed the Congo River and settled in what is now Angola. Approximately 1,500 years later, eastern Bantu-speaking groups—descended from groups that had spread throughout East Africa—met and intermingled with their distant relatives in what is now Angola, southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western Zambia.

G.1.

Luba, Lunda, and Maravi Empires

In the Upemba Depression, in what is now southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the ancestors of the Luba people made up one of the earliest iron-working groups in Central Africa. This wet, fertile savanna woodland on the southern edge of the equatorial forest was ideally suited to the production of food and the development of settled communities. In addition, the upper Lualaba River provided the Luba with trading connections between the forest and the southern savanna. They traded salt, iron, and dried fish, and became expert craftsmen in copper imported from the south. By 1300 they had organized into prosperous farming and trading chiefdoms and were casting copper into cross-shaped ingots for use as trading currency. From these origins, a great, centralized Luba Empire emerged by the early 1400s.

According to traditional accounts, in the 1450s the growth of the Luba Empire inspired a sense of unity among the scattered Lunda chiefdoms to the west. New dynasties arose, but they recognized the authority of the existing Lunda rulers. The Lunda Empire that emerged in the 16th century was more like a confederation of tribute-paying chieftaincies than a single, centralized empire.

Luba and Lunda ideas of kingship and inheritance of power spread farther west, to present-day Angola, and southeast, to eastern Zambia and southern Malawi. The Phiri clan, which grew powerful in southern Malawi in the early 1400s, claimed to inherit its authority from Luba kings. The Phiris married into the local Banda clan and developed their own concept of kingship, based upon the authority of local religious cults. Over the course of the 16th century they founded the Kalonga, Lundu, and Undi kingdoms—known collectively as the Maravi Confederacy—in the rich elephant-hunting lands between Lake Malawi and the Zambezi River. They profited greatly from the ivory trade with the Portuguese at the Swahili coast. For a brief period between 1600 and 1650 the Maravi were united under the Kalonga dynasty as a single empire from the Shire and Zambezi river valleys to the coast of Mozambique.

In the early 18th century the king of the Lunda Empire sent a small force eastward to capture the Luapula River valley (on what is now the northern border of Zambia). The leader of the invasion was given the title Kazembe, with authority to extend Lunda tribute collection over the people of the region. In the fertile valley, which brimmed with fish and was close to the rich copper deposits in northern Zambia, this leader was able to build an autonomous Kazembe empire. By 1800 Kazembe still nominally acknowledged Lunda authority but, in practice, independently controlled a vast trading network that stretched nearly the width of the continent.

G.2.

Kongo and Portuguese Interference

Before 1000 Bantu-speaking farmers had developed numerous small states in the hills and valleys of present-day Angola and in the woodland savanna country on either side of the lower Congo River. By 1400 a number of these states had merged to form the kingdom of Kongo with its capital at Mbanza Kongo, south of the Congo River. The nearby Pool Malebo, a lake formed by a widening in the river, was a major trading junction of the lower Congo region. By controlling the pool, the kings of Kongo were able to dominate trade on the river and regional overland trade as well.

Kongo was a federation of provinces and the king was elected by the hereditary rulers of the provinces. By the 1480s, when Portuguese explorers first visited Kongo, the capital housed 10,000 to 15,000 people, occupied in trading and in manufacturing iron and raffia cloth. This great concentration of people gave the king the power to challenge the local authority of the provinces. The power struggle between the king and the provinces was to be a dominant theme of Kongo’s history over the next 200 years.

The Portuguese emissaries and missionaries who arrived in the 1490s became one more element in the internal struggles. The Kongo king welcomed the Portuguese, seeking to gain strength from their weapons technology, and converted to Christianity. Kongolese Christianity retained distinctive African beliefs and rituals, despite the efforts of Portuguese missionaries to quash them. It became more of a royal religious cult than a religion of the masses. The king’s power declined in the 18th century, but the Kongolese form of Christianity persevered, incorporating further African qualities and strengthening indigenous African religious thought.

Politically, the Portuguese were arrogant and unreliable allies and refused to consider their relationship with Kongo as a meeting of equals. They intervened in dynastic struggles and entered into wars in the interior. By the mid-16th century it was clear that Portugal’s primary objective was to acquire slaves for their plantations on the island of São Tomé and, later, in Brazil. The kings of Kongo were prepared to wage war against rebellious provinces in order to acquire captives for sale, but they objected to the Portuguese dealing directly with the provinces, independent of royal control. The Portuguese fueled rebellions in the provinces, culminating in a civil war that virtually destroyed the kingdom in the 1660s and 1670s.

By this time the Portuguese had shifted the focus of their slave trading south to the port of Luanda, where they established the colony of Angola. Here, they continued their disruptive practices, clashing with the nearby kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba. Queen Nzinga of Matamba was one of their foremost opponents from 1624 to 1663.

From north of the Congo River, English, Dutch, and French traders tapped into the trade in Central African captives, and in doing so stimulated even higher levels of conflict in the region. The impact of the Atlantic slave trade was deeper and longer felt in this area than in any other part of the continent. By the 18th century the slave-raiding frontier stretched far into the forest to the heart of Central Africa.

H.

Early Southern Africa

By 650 small Bantu-speaking communities of ironworkers and farmers had settled all over southern Africa, excluding only the drier regions of central and western Botswana, Namibia, and the Cape of Good Hope region of South Africa. In these drier areas, Khoisan hunter-gatherers and herders were dominant.

H.1.

State Formation in Southern Africa

Some southern Bantu groups may have learned how to herd cattle by absorbing Khoisan herders into their societies. From the 7th century on, cattle keeping came to be associated with the rise of chiefs. Owners of large herds were able to lend cattle to poorer people for milk and, upon the consent of the lender, for consumption or sale. In this way, cattle-owning chiefs acquired subjects, dependent upon their wealth and continued goodwill.

Chiefdoms first developed into fairly large states in the cattle-raising regions of eastern Botswana. Archaeological evidence has shown that on several flat-topped hills in eastern Botswana there were large settlements of wealthy people surrounding enclosures that would have held several hundred cattle. In the areas surrounding each of these hills were numerous smaller hilltop settlements, not as rich in their possessions or in numbers of cattle. Scholars hypothesize that each of the larger hills was the capital of a kingdom, and the smaller hills represented subordinate chiefdoms. In the flat land between the hills lived the peasantry, probably Khoisan, who tended the cattle, hunted, and tilled the fields for their patrons. These states are collectively known as the Toutswe culture, named after Toutswemogala, one of the hills. The Toutswe people established indirect trading links with the Indian Ocean coast by way of the Limpopo River valley. The Toutswe hills were abandoned and the people dispersed in about 1300, for reasons that are not yet known. Other similar state systems were established in the Lake Ngami region of northwest Botswana.

A similar cattle-keeping culture developed on the western Zimbabwe plateau, near the modern city of Bulawayo, from about the 10th century. Here farmers terraced hillsides to retain moist soils for cultivation, and miners worked the region’s rich gold seams. This western Zimbabwean culture reached its height between 1100 and 1300 when it developed close links with Mapungubwe, in the Limpopo valley in what is now northern South Africa. Mapungubwe was a wealthy, cattle-keeping state that traded gold and ivory with the coast. After about 1250, however, the focus of trade, wealth, and political power shifted to the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe on the eastern edge of the plateau.

H.2.

Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe started as a hilltop settlement in the early 13th century. Possibly chosen for some religious significance, the location also had a number of distinct political and economic advantages. The land was fertile and well watered, and the site was strategically situated at the head of the Sabi River valley, midway between the goldfields of the western plateau and the Indian Ocean coast. With cattle forming the basis of the state’s power, its location on the edge of the plateau provided a range of upland and lowland grazing. There was a plentiful supply of timber for firewood, building, and the production of charcoal for smelting, and hunters collected ivory from the area’s abundant elephants. The volume of gold trading in Great Zimbabwe grew so large that Swahili traders built a new Indian Ocean port at Sofala, due east of Great Zimbabwe, to facilitate the trade. In exchange for gold, the Swahili traded pottery from East Asia and other luxuries to Great Zimbabwe.

At its height in the 14th century, the capital city of Great Zimbabwe housed up to 11,000 residents. The great stone walls for which Great Zimbabwe is famous were built with slabs of locally available granite carved so carefully that no mortar was required to hold them together. The Great Enclosure, built in the valley between 1300 and 1400, was constructed to enhance the prestige of the king rather than for defensive purposes. Great Zimbabwe was abandoned in about 1450, possibly due to the kingdom’s overexploitation of the environment, but its stone ruins remain to this day as a monument to this large and thriving early Shona state.

H.3.

Mutapa and Other Zimbabwean States

Great Zimbabwe was quickly followed by the rise of Mutapa, a Shona empire at the headwaters of the Mazoe River to the north. Mutapa was likely founded by migrants from Great Zimbabwe itself. In the 15th and 16th centuries it dominated the gold trade between the plateau and the Zambezi River valley, notably with Swahili trading posts at Sena and Tete. In the 16th century the Portuguese established bases at both posts in an attempt to seize control of the trade and conquer Mutapa and the plateau. Mutapa resisted Portuguese intrusion until the mid-17th century, when the empire was at last subjugated. 

On the western side of the Zimbabwean plateau, Torwa (also called Butua) was founded in the 15th century as another successor state to Great Zimbabwe. At Torwa’s capital city of Khami, masons continued to refine Great Zimbabwe’s tradition of building precise stone walls.

In the 1670s a new power arose on the plateau led by a Shona military ruler called the Changamire. His army of followers, known as the Rozwi, seized control of Torwa, drove the Portuguese from the plateau in 1693, and established the Rozwi Empire (also called Changamire).

H.4.

Dutch at the Cape

In the mid-17th century a new force appeared at the southwestern tip of the continent. The Dutch East India Company established a trading station at the Cape of Good Hope to provision their ships heading to Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Subsequent Dutch and other European settlers used firearms to seize control of the region, subjugate the Khoisan, and strip them of their cattle. These white settlers established wheat farms and vineyards in the Cape region, worked by imported slaves or Khoisan forced labor. Other settlers moved into the interior, establishing large cattle ranges and hunting lodges before moving on when resources were exhausted. By the 1770s their settlements had reached as far east as the lands of the southernmost Bantu farmers. Here they met well-established and powerful Xhosa kingdoms that could command armies sufficient to halt the settlers’ advance. Thus began a century of conflict between the Xhosa and the Cape invaders.

I.

North Africa to the 1870s

By the final decade of the 18th century Africans had survived several centuries of outside interference and remained largely in control of their own destinies. Ottoman control over North Africa had declined in the face of increasing European dominance of Mediterranean Sea trade. For the most part, Egypt and the coastal settlements and ports of the Maghreb acted independently of central Ottoman authority. To the west, Morocco remained an independent kingdom, but the king’s power did not extend far beyond Morocco’s major cities.

In the desert regions to the south, trans-Saharan caravans continued to ply their trade between the southern savanna lands, the salt mines and oases of the desert, and the Mediterranean world. However, the scale of trans-Saharan trade had declined considerably from its height in the 16th century. This was largely due to the rising importance of European seaborne trade along the West African coast.

I.1.

Egypt and Sudan

French general Napoleon Bonaparte invaded and conquered Ottoman Egypt in 1798. The Ottomans retook Egypt in 1801, but the French invasion sparked important changes in the province. A key figure in the Ottoman reconquest was Muhammad Ali, leader of an Albanian regiment of the Ottoman army. The French invasion had weakened the old Egyptian Mamluk aristocracy and Muhammad Ali seized the opportunity to establish himself as the ruler of Egypt. The position was recognized by Ottoman sultan Selim III, who awarded Ali the title pasha (viceroy) in 1805.

Determined to establish his own dynasty in Egypt, Muhammad Ali built a professional army to withstand any future foreign invasions. Soldiers were conscripted from the peasantry and from slaves brought north from Sudan. Muhammad Ali ordered the massacre of most of the leading Mamluks and took over their tax-collecting powers. Then he set up a professional civil service, whose principal role was to reap as much tax income from peasant farmers as possible. To this end, his new civil servants directed the rebuilding of irrigation canals and introduced modern agricultural methods to the peasantry. Egypt’s peasant farmers produced cotton and wheat in huge quantities, and the state took a large portion of the harvest in the form of taxes and exported it to Europe.

In the 1820s Muhammad Ali sent an army to invade and occupy the upper Nile. The army conquered the Funj sultanate and established the administrative capital of Khartoum at the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. By the 1840s Ali had extended Egypt’s empire to include most of what is now southern Sudan. Rich in ivory and slaves, this area was a good source of wealth and of forced recruits for the Egyptian army. The Arab Egyptian merchants who set up their headquarters in Khartoum, using what were in effect private armies, chose to raid southern Sudanese settlements of Dinka, Shilluk, and Nuer peoples for goods rather than trade for them. In doing so they established a pattern and frame of mind for the relationship between Sudan’s Arabs and black Africans that was to persist all the way into the 21st century.

Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, allowed European traders to settle in Egypt. Ismail encouraged Europeans to invest in the construction of railways and also in the digging of a canal to link the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. France financed the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869. Egyptian cotton production for the British market increased rapidly during the American Civil War (1861-1865), when cotton supplies from the United States were cut off. Overconfident of Egypt’s economic position, Ismail began undertaking costly endeavors such as building a railway to Khartoum and investing heavily in garrisons in southern Sudan to suppress Sudanese resistance.

By the mid-1870s it was clear that Ismail’s government had overstretched itself and was bankrupt. Britain and France—fearful that the Egyptian state might collapse and they would lose their huge investments in railways and canal—intervened, deposing Ismail in 1879. The two European powers established a system of “dual control” over Egypt’s finances. When an Egyptian army coup threatened to drive out the Europeans, Britain sent an army of occupation and took over sole control of Egypt in 1882.

I.2.

Algeria and the Maghreb

The rulers of Algeria supported the French in their 1798 invasion of Egypt and supplied Napoleon’s army with wheat, on credit, throughout the subsequent Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Thereafter, however, the French refused to repay their debt to Algeria and relations between them soured. In 1830 the French army occupied Algiers and overthrew the Algerian ruler. France annexed Algiers and the fertile coastal region in 1834 and invited in French settlers to occupy the land. Beyond the coastal regions, however, the French met the formidable resistance of Arab and Berber Muslims, led by marabout (Muslim holy man) Abd al-Qadir. By the 1840s the French needed an army in excess of 100,000 men to maintain their occupation and to wage the ongoing war. Although Abd al-Qadir was captured in 1847, French conquest of Algeria was not completed until the 1870s.

In the early 19th century the rulers of Libya and Tunisia, acting independently of Ottoman control, bought firearms from Britain and used them to extend their control into the interior regions of the Sahara. Libya took control of the Fezzan region in 1811 and thereafter stepped up the trade in slaves from the Bornu region by Lake Chad. The kingdom of Morocco maintained its independence throughout the 19th century, despite clashes with Spain along the Spanish-controlled northern coast and with France on the Algerian border. At the same time the Moroccan sultans extended more effective control over the remoter Berber regions of the interior.

J.

West Africa to the 1870s

From the 17th to the 19th century in sub-Saharan West Africa—from the Sénégal River estuary in the west to Cameroon in the east and as far south as Angola—political and economic life was dominated by the demands of the European-controlled Atlantic slave trade. By the late 18th century the scale of this trade had reached unprecedented heights, with up to 100,000 captives exported every year. The wars that generated this traffic in captives dominated life in the interior. States with standing armies became more centralized and more powerful, dominating smaller, village-based communities. For the most part, European presence was confined to coastal fortresses, which were fortified against European rivals rather than local Africans. Coastal African rulers tolerated the European presence because the European fortresses provided useful trading links that strengthened their positions against their own African rivals.

Two important developments occurred in 18th-century West Africa that presaged large-scale change in the 19th century. First, by the mid-18th century a rise in Islamic reformist zeal led to several jihads and the establishment of new Islamic states in Fouta Djallon (in what is now Guinea) and Fouta Toro (in Senegal). Second, in the 1780s and 1790s Britain helped freed slaves from Britain and North America establish settlements in the British territory of Sierra Leone. The Islamic states of Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro served as inspirations for larger 19th-century West African jihads, while the colony of Sierra Leone was symbolic of the emerging abolitionist movement that would eventually bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade.

J.1.

Jihads and New States in 19th-Century West Africa

West African Islamic reformist ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were spread by Fulani peoples, who had played a prominent role in the earlier jihads of Fouta Djallon and Futa Toro. The Fulani—largely Muslim cattle herders who lived in the savanna lands from Senegal to Cameroon—typically lived in peace among farming populations. However, in the Hausa region of what is now northern Nigeria the Fulani became estranged from what they regarded as the corrupt rule of the nominally Muslim Hausa aristocracy. They particularly resented the Hausa’s heavy taxation of their cattle. The Fulani were therefore very receptive to the reformist teachings of Muslim scholar Usuman dan Fodio, who had begun his preaching as a young man in the 1770s in the Hausa city-state of Gobir.

By the early 1800s Usuman had accumulated a considerable following. In 1804 the ruler of Gobir sent his cavalry to capture or kill Usuman, but the force was defeated by his followers. This military action sparked a spontaneous revolutionary movement among Fulani and other oppressed Muslims across the whole of Hausaland. Within four years most of the Hausa city-states had fallen to the jihad. After Usuman’s death in 1817 his brother Abdullahi and son Muhammad Bello united the Hausa states into a single Islamic empire, with its capital at Sokoto. This brought an end to centuries of rivalry and clashes between the states. By the time of Muhammad Bello’s death in 1837 this Sokoto Caliphate stretched across the whole of northern Nigeria and was the largest West African state since 16th-century Songhai. Islam and Sharia (Islamic law) made up the unifying elements in what was otherwise a federation of semiautonomous emirates. Literacy became widespread and, with an end to inter-state Hausa wars, trade flourished. Those who benefited least were the Hausa peasantry, who had in effect changed one oppressive master for another.

Fulani pastoralists tried to extend the jihad into Bornu, but they were resisted by Muhammad al-Kanemi, a religious and military leader from Kanem. Although the state lost control of its eastern Hausa provinces, Bornu retained its independence under a new dynasty set up by al-Kanemi’s son Umar.

West of Sokoto, Usuman dan Fodio’s revolution inspired further Fulani-led jihads and political change. On the upper Niger River, a jihad was led by Umar Tal, a Muslim preacher from Fouta Toro. In the Fouta Djallon region, he built up an army and equipped it with firearms, bought in exchange for captives on the coast. From 1855 to 1862 Umar’s army captured the Bambara states of Kaarta and Ségou, and the Fulani state of Macina. He thus created what was known as the Tukolor Empire, which stretched from Fouta Djallon to Tombouctou. Following Umar’s death in 1864, Tukolor was weakened by internal revolts and was conquered by the French in 1893.

South of Tukolor, in what is now Guinea, military leader Samory Touré conquered and united the states of the Dyula people in the 1860s, creating the powerful Mandinka state. Unlike some of his contemporary state-builders, Samory was not a religious preacher and Mandinka was not a reformist state as such. Nevertheless, he used Islam to unite the nation, promoting Muslim education and basing his rule upon the Sharia. Samory’s professional army was the real strength of what had become a Mandinka empire by the 1880s. As such it provided one of the major forces of resistance to French conquest in the final decades of the century.

J.2.

Abolition of the Slave Trade

How the Atlantic slave trade came to be abolished has been the subject of ongoing historical debate. The traditional view argued by British historians for much of the 20th century was that the abolition of the slave trade was the result of a humanitarian campaign spearheaded by a handful of prominent British philanthropists. This view was challenged in the mid-20th century by historians who argued that it was hard economics, not humanitarian concerns, that ended the slave trade. According to this view, by 1800 colonial plantations were declining in profitability, while the spread of industry in Britain (see Industrial Revolution) was becoming increasingly profitable, making the slave trade unnecessary.

Many historians now agree that the complete story of abolition was in fact very much more complex than either of these positions. Both economics and philanthropy were involved, though which was the more powerful force remains a subject of debate. Another factor, often overlooked, was African opposition to slavery, both in the form of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and resistance within Africa itself.

By 1817 the major European powers had officially banned the slave trade, but it still continued, and even increased at times, until slavery itself was completely abolished (in 1865 in the United States and in the 1880s in Cuba and Brazil). While there were still markets for slaves the trade continued, despite patrols by a British naval antislavery squadron. The British captured a number of slaving ships and freed their captives in Sierra Leone, which had been annexed as a British colony. Later in the century Britain and other European powers would use the anti-slave-trade campaign as a justification for seizing further African territory, and eventually for their colonization of the continent.

J.3.

Coastal and Forest Regions

Africans powers had not been consulted in the official European ban on slave trading, and states in many areas, eager to acquire European firearms, continued to supply the European, American, and Brazilian ships that evaded the ban. One such area was the Yoruba lands of present-day southern Nigeria, which had not previously been a great supplier of captives for sale into slavery. But when the Fulani jihad spread southward from Sokoto in the 1820s it destabilized the Yoruba state of Oyo and prompted warfare across the whole of Yorubaland. Increasing numbers of Yoruba war captives were subsequently transported to the Lagos lagoon for export as slaves. This provided the British with the excuse to seize control of Lagos in 1851 in the name of suppressing the slave trade. In reality it provided the British with a colonial foothold. They declared Lagos a colony in 1861 and, over the next 40 years, gradually extended British control over the whole of what was to become the colony of Nigeria.

The Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now southern Benin, used the Yoruba wars as an opportunity to break free of Oyo domination and assert its independence. With the backing of a large standing army, Dahomey’s kings built a highly efficient and powerful centralized state. Dahomey’s wealth was originally derived from the slave trade, but as the trade was suppressed in the mid-19th century, the king turned to the exploitation of the region’s numerous oil palm plantations. Palm production that was not directly controlled by the state was taxed in a highly efficient manner. When the French took over the territory at the end of the century, they estimated that it contained 40 million palm trees.

The Ashanti Kingdom, in what is now Ghana, was the largest and most powerful West African forest state throughout most of the 19th century. Ashanti derived its wealth from the production of gold dust, which it traded with British, Danish, and Dutch traders on the coast. Consequently, the region was known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. The British sought to control the gold trade, and allied themselves with the coastal Fante people, bitter rivals of the Ashanti, to keep Ashanti from monopolizing the trade. Ashanti and British forces clashed in the mid-1820s, but signed a peace treaty in 1826. In the 1840s the British bought a string of Danish forts along the coast and in 1872 purchased the Dutch fort of Elmina. This left Britain the sole European power in the area. The king of Ashanti challenged the rising colonial power by invading the British-held coast in 1873, sparking the Second Ashanti-British War. A British counterinvasion in 1874 penetrated deep into the Ashanti heartland where British forces sacked the Ashanti capital of Kumasi. The British withdrew, but Ashanti had been fatally weakened and finally fell to British forces in 1896.

To the west, at the mouth of the Sénégal River, the French held the trading towns of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque. These were important bases for access to trade in gum arabic (used in dying cloth) and groundnuts from the interior. The inland Wolof state of Fouta Toro imposed taxes on most of this trade, however, and in response the French sent an army up the Sénégal River valley in the 1850s. By 1858 the army had defeated the Wolof and established a protectorate over the region. In the process the French clashed with the jihad army of Umar Tal, which prompted him to turn east, toward the upper Niger River, where he founded the Tukolor Empire.

Over the course of the 19th century Sierra Leone grew rapidly, as the British transported freed African captives from all over West Africa to the colony. These mixed groups of Africans communicated in Creole (or Krio), a mixture of English and African languages, and they were known collectively as Creoles. Starting in the 1820s groups of freed African Americans began settling to the east of Sierra Leone in a region they named Liberia. These Americo-Liberians established Liberia as an independent nation in 1847.

K.

East Africa to the 1870s

By the 19th century foreign powers dominated the East African coast, but in the inland regions indigenous Africans still largely controlled their own fates. The southern Arabian sultanate of Oman extended its influence to the northern Swahili coast in the 17th century, expelling the Portuguese from the Kenyan coast by 1700 and from the island of Zanzibar in 1729. To the south, along the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese remained the dominant trading power. This region supplied captives to meet the rising French demand for slave labor on sugar plantations on Mauritius and other French-held Indian Ocean islands.

In the interior, west of Lake Victoria, the lakeside kingdom of Buganda had grown to surpass Bunyoro, its older rival, in regional strength. To their south, Rwanda and Burundi had become powerful mountain kingdoms. The Nyamwezi people of the interior of present-day Tanzania were professional traders, carrying ivory between the lake kingdoms and the coast. Meanwhile, in the north, the Christian empire of Ethiopia continued to be a regional power in the highlands, while the Ottoman Empire controlled the coastal region of Eritrea.

K.1.

19th-Century Swahili Coast

As the slave trade waned in West Africa in the 19th century, it was peaking on the East African coast. By this time Brazil had become one of the main markets for the trans-Atlantic trade. Restrictions on the slave trade drove up prices in West Africa, and starting in the 1820s it became more economical for Brazilian slavers to venture around southern Africa to Mozambique. There they found a well-established slave trading system supplying local Portuguese needs as well as those of French sugar planters on various Indian Ocean islands. Afro-Portuguese settlers, known as prazeros, in the Zambezi River valley used private slave armies to hunt and raid for ivory and slaves to sell on the coast. North of the Zambezi, the Yao people played a similar role as professional raiders and traders between southern Malawi and northern Mozambique.

Meanwhile, under the rule of Sayyid Sa‘īd ibn Sultan, the sultanate of Oman was rising in power along the northern half of the Swahili coast. Starting in the 1820s the sultan encouraged Omani Arabs to set up clove plantations on the large offshore islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. Worked by slave labor from the mainland, these plantations became so successful that in 1840 Sayyid Sa‘īd moved his primary residence to Zanzibar itself. The growth of Omani plantations prompted a huge increase in the demand for slave labor. By the 1850s Zanzibar’s slave market had become the largest of its kind in Africa. Apart from local needs on the clove plantations, by the 1860s Zanzibar was exporting 60,000 slaves a year, mostly to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The increasing demand for slaves stimulated expeditions by Swahili-Arab and Nyamwezi slaving caravans into the African interior, to the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Following the 1873 death of Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had done much to bring the horrors of the African slave trade to the attention of Europeans, the British forced the closure of Zanzibar’s slave market. By then, however, Britain’s demand for East African ivory had reached such heights that slave labor continued to be used to transport it to the market in Zanzibar. In the last decades of the 19th century, Britain was to make the suppression of the inland slave trade its moral justification for the colonization of much of the region.

K.2.

Political Developments in Ethiopia

Ethiopia had been independent and regionally powerful for 1,000 years before facing a political crisis in the 19th century. Before the 17th century Ethiopia had a roving capital which moved from province to province, helping the Ethiopian emperor retain effective central authority. However, in the 17th century Gondar (Gonder) gradually became the fixed capital, allowing Ethiopia’s regional nobility to develop a stubborn autonomy in their isolated valleys. Ethiopia became an increasingly fragmented feudal state until the mid-19th century, when Ethiopia’s relative security was threatened by the expansion of Egyptian control over southern Sudan. In response, a provincial leader named Kassa Haylu developed a trained army equipped with modern firearms and artillery. In 1855 he seized the Ethiopian throne and declared himself Emperor Theodore II.

Theodore saw that if he did not modernize Ethiopia’s military and unify the empire, it was in danger of being overrun by more powerful external enemies. He expanded his own fighting force, and built it into a modern national army. He stripped the hereditary provincial nobility of powers and appointed paid governors and judges to take their places. Fearing the power of the Ethiopian Church, Theodore seized much of its land and limited the number of clergy. These efforts to forge national unity made Ethiopia more powerful but earned Theodore many enemies.

In 1868, following a minor diplomatic row, Theodore arrested some British consular officials. In response, Britain invaded with an army of 30,000 men. The Ethiopian Church helped convince the majority of Ethiopian nobility to abandon their emperor in his hour of need. Left with only 4,000 men, Theodore’s army was easily overrun and he himself committed suicide. The British withdrew, leaving Europeans with the erroneous notion that Ethiopia could easily be captured in the future if the need arose.

Theodore’s successor, Johannes IV, regained the support of the Ethiopian Church and regional nobility by restoring their hereditary powers and privileges. In doing so he was able to summon a large enough army to defeat an Egyptian invasion in 1875, but at the expense of entrenching the feudal system into the fabric of Ethiopian economy and society.

L.

Central Africa to the 1870s

For centuries, the trade in captives had dominated the commercial activity of Central Africa. North of the densely forested Congo River Basin the Bornu sultanate declined by the 18th century, and its place was taken by the sultanates of Wadai and Darfūr to the east. These states conducted slave raids through what is now southern Chad and the Central African Republic and transported captives eastward through Kordofan to southern Sudan and the Nile River Valley. South of the Congo River Basin the Kazembe Empire had grown to eclipse the former Luba and Lunda empires of the region and was a powerful trading state. Meanwhile, the histories of the forest peoples of the Congo River Basin are some of the least known in Africa beyond their riverine trade contacts with peoples and states to the north, south, and west. However, these peoples became more and more threatened as Swahili slave raiders penetrated ever farther into the forest.

L.1.

Natural Resources and Trade

Besides captives, 19th-century European and Swahili traders also sought to tap into Central Africa’s vast supplies of raw materials, notably ivory. In response to the demand for ivory, some Central African peoples became professional elephant hunters. The Chokwe hunted elephants across the southern fringes of the forest, supplying ivory to Portuguese traders in Angola. Similarly, north of the Congo River, the Fang expanded from southern Cameroon into the forest of Gabon to supply ivory to European traders at the coast.

Other raw materials exported to the western coast included copper, palm kernels (the source of palm oil), cotton, coffee, and raw latex rubber. Africans collected these raw materials and traded them to Europeans in exchange for firearms, cloth, and other manufactured imports. Faced with competition from plentiful European manufactured goods, indigenous African industry—such as the manufacturing of iron tools, raffia cloth, and bark cloth—went into terminal decline in the 19th century. This economic pattern—Africa’s dependent role as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods—persists in much of Africa to this day.

L.2.

Trading States of the Congo River Basin

In the Luapula River valley, on the southeastern fringes of the Congo River Basin, the Kazembe Empire entered the 19th century as the driving force behind a transcontinental trading network. A Lunda state, Kazembe controlled the trade in copper, which was mined in the Copperbelt region of what is now Zambia and southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and cast into ingots for use as currency. Besides copper, Kazembe also exported ivory, salt, and captives. The latter were sent mostly eastwards to meet the rising demand for slaves on the East African coast.

By mid-19th century the demand for ivory and slaves on the East African coast was so great that coastal Swahili, Nyamwezi, and Arab or mixed-race traders began exploring west of Lake Tanganyika, penetrating the Central African interior. Leading their own trading caravans of hunters, raiders, and porters, and heavily armed with guns, they sought out new sources of ivory and slaves. In the 1850s a Nyamwezi trader named Msiri set up his own raiding and trading state west of the Luapula River in defiance of Kazembe (which at the time was suffering a civil war). This state, known as Yeke, took control of the Copperbelt and with it the western Lunda trading network.

In the 1860s Hamed bin Muhammed (also known as Tippu Tip), a man of mixed coastal and Nyamwezi ancestry, established similar raiding and trading bases on the Lualaba River (the upper Congo River), west of Lake Tanganyika. Tippu Tip considered his “kingdom” an outpost of the sultanate of Zanzibar, by then Africa’s largest market for ivory and slaves. The activities of traders such as Tippu Tip and Msiri brought the full horrors of the slave trade to the remotest forest regions of the Congo River Basin, which had previously been little affected by the trade.

L.3.

Lozi Kingdom

By the 19th century the Lozi Kingdom grew to dominate the savanna woodland region of the upper Zambezi River valley in what is now western Zambia. Lozi was a complex, centralized state. Its king delegated regional authority to aristocratic bureaucrats, who directed the seasonal cultivation of the Zambezi floodplains. In 1840 Lozi was overrun by Kololo raiders from what is now South Africa, but in the 1860s the Lozi dynasty and aristocracy were restored. In the second half of the 19th century, ivory hunting and cattle raiding accompanied an expanding Lozi state.

M.

Southern Africa to the 1870s

In the 18th century Sotho and Tswana states emerged on the grasslands south of the Limpopo River. As was the case with the earlier Toutswe states of eastern Botswana, cattle were an important source of power and wealth, and conflict between peoples over cattle ownership was a regular feature of 18th-century life. Across much of southern Africa population was still relatively sparse. In this setting, political change was fluid and ongoing: Dynastic clashes and disputes over cattle often led to the breakup of states and the establishment of new ones.

In the Cape of Good Hope region, the spread of Dutch-speaking settlers known as Boers (ancestors of South Africa’s modern Afrikaners) had largely been halted in the east by effective resistance from Xhosa herders and farmers who were themselves eager to expand their chiefdoms westward. The strategic position of the Cape to world sea trade, however, was to draw it into inter-European conflicts. The British seized the Cape from the Dutch permanently in 1806 (after having first occupied it from 1795 to 1803), adding a new dimension to European influence in South Africa.

M.1.

The Mfecane

From the 1810s to the 1830s southern Africa went through a period of violent turmoil and political upheaval in which many different chiefdoms and other states came into conflict with each other, spurring wars and large-scale migrations. This period, referred to as the mfecane (from a Nguni word meaning “the crushing”), has long been the subject of debate among historians. For years, historians generally believed that the violence was singularly the result of the emergence of an expanding Zulu kingdom under military leader Shaka. However, many historians now contend that this emphasis on Zulu expansion obscures the fact that, as we have seen, the rise and fall of similar states and conflict over the control of cattle were already very common in the region. It also ignores two important factors: Firstly, the rise in the demand for slaves along the southern Mozambique coast from the 1820s likely played a role in the emergence of some of these new states, particularly the Gaza Empire. Secondly, assaults by armed and mounted raiders from the Cape Colony region—searching for cattle and captives for sale in the colony—were also a major source of disruption among the peoples of the area.

Apart from the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and the Gaza Empire under Soshangane, other new states in the region included the Sotho kingdom under Moshoeshoe, the Swazi kingdom under Sobhuza, and numerous Tswana kingdoms of the western grasslands. The Ndebele, led by Mzilikazi, left the Zulu region in the early 1820s and settled briefly north of the Vaal River, absorbing local Sotho and Tswana into their ranks. Constantly harassed by Boer, Griqua, and Kora raiders, the Ndebele moved north and established a new kingdom in southern Zimbabwe in about 1840. By this time, groups of other migrants, who came to be known as the Ngoni, had already moved north through Zimbabwe to settle in the region of eastern Zambia, Malawi, and southern Tanzania. In the far south of the region the Xhosa held out against the increasingly violent challenge of the British-occupied Cape Colony, only finally going down to defeat and colonization in the 1870s.

M.2.

Boer Trek and Boer Republics

In the late 1830s several thousand Boer families began migrating from British-ruled Cape Colony to the northeast, across the Orange and Vaal rivers. These migrants sought new expanses of land unclaimed by Europeans, as well as unrestricted access to African forced labor. Their further occupation of land in the colony had been limited by Xhosa resistance from the east, while their use of forced African labor had been restricted by the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s. These Boer trekkers established settlements in the lands north of the Orange River, farther north in the Transvaal, and in the eastern lowlands of Natal.

Later in the century Boers and other Dutch-speaking South Africans began calling themselves Afrikaners. As part of a cultural and political struggle against British domination, Afrikaner historians portrayed this Boer migration as a Biblical-style “Great Trek” into unoccupied wilderness. But the reality was very different. The early Boer intrusion was challenged throughout, and many Africans died at their hands. They fought bloody battles with Zulu in the east and with Sotho, Tswana, and Ndebele in the north.

The British intervened as well, annexing the colony of Natal in 1843, and seizing the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers in 1848. Eventually, however, the British recognized two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (in Transvaal) in 1852, and the Orange Free State in 1854.

M.3.

Discovery of Mineral Wealth

By 1867 large parts of what is now South Africa were still under independent African control. However, the discovery that year of diamonds near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal rivers, followed by the 1886 discovery of the world’s largest gold deposits in the Transvaal would ultimately transform the economic and political life of all southern Africans. As a vast and hugely lucrative industrial market opened up in the interior, conflict over land and labor heightened. Britain in particular was determined to bring the whole area under its imperial control.

N.

The Scramble for Africa

In the final two decades of the 19th century European colonial powers took over virtually the whole continent of Africa, racing each other to claim territory to expand their colonial empires. This so-called Scramble for Africa marked an irreparable turning point in the history of the continent. Almost overnight, most Africans lost control of their own historical destinies. Nations and whole empires were swept aside as the political layout of the continent was reconfigured according to European dictate.

N.1.

European Motivations

Historians have debated the questions of what sparked the Scramble, what Europe’s motives were, and why the takeover happened so rapidly and completely. In the early 20th century the colonizing powers set the terms of the debate, arguing that they came to Africa with a “civilizing” mission. Because it morally justified their actions, they unfairly portrayed Africa as a dark and primitive continent with no discernible record of historical achievement. European powers claimed they had come to suppress the slave trade, end endemic warfare, and establish their own right to trade freely in the continent without local interference. Attempts by African rulers to control and tax the trade within their own states were arrogantly dismissed by European traders, who accused them of interfering with the free flow of trade. Income from the taxation of trade had always been an essential source of government revenue in most African states and the removal of this rightful income deliberately and seriously weakened them in the face of the European challenge.

From the beginning, Europe’s presumed “moral justification” for imperialism was challenged by contemporary thinkers (including British social reformer John Hobson and, later, Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin) who identified economics as the prime motivator underlying the European conquest of Africa. Industrial Europe needed Africa’s raw materials: palm oil, cotton, rubber, and minerals. Furthermore, while the ancient gold riches of West Africa and Zimbabwe had long been known, the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated the presence of spectacular diamond and gold wealth in southern Africa. But Africa was not only a source of raw materials for European factories, it was also a vast, untapped market for the overproduction of those same factories. African indigenous industry was unable to compete with European mass-produced cloth, metal tools, and liquor.

N.2.

Conquest of a Continent

In 1877 Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley emerged at the mouth of the Congo River, completing an arduous, three-year transcontinental trek and proving the Congo’s navigability for thousands of kilometers above the rapids near its mouth. Ambitious Europeans, led by King Leopold II of Belgium, recognized the river as a major potential trading artery. By the early 1880s Belgium and France had competing claims to territories on either side of the lower Congo. Territorial acquisition quickly became competitive and strategic, as Europe’s major powers decided that their future economic prosperity depended on their seizing as much of the continent for themselves as possible. The biggest players were Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, with Spain and Italy playing lesser roles, and Portugal maintaining its claims to its longstanding colonies. The process was already well under way by the time the European powers met at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885 to lay down the ground rules of the Scramble. The principal of these was that European claimants to any part of Africa had to prove their presence in the area by getting the signed agreement of a local African ruler or—if that was not possible or convenient—by military conquest.

Europeans frequently tricked illiterate African rulers into signing documents under false pretences. For example, in 1888 Ndebele king Lobengula inadvertently gave British businessman Cecil Rhodes and his private mining company the right to take over the whole of what is now Zimbabwe. The British government ignored Lobengula’s subsequent protests and approved Rhodes’s colonization of the country. Some African rulers, more experienced in European ways, willingly agreed to “protection” before the arrival of European military forces, and in this way managed to obtain some concessions. Lozi king Lewanika achieved better treatment for Lozi than the rest of what is now Zambia by agreeing to an 1889 British treaty of protection which left him with some power and kept the British from seizing Lozi land.

European armies eventually occupied most of the continent, brutally conquering most African states that resisted. African powers lost virtually every conflict for two main reasons: the age-old principle of divide-and-conquer and the superior weaponry of the European armies. Europeans were able to play one African ruler against another because a ruler’s first duty to his people was to protect them from their traditional rivals or enemies. Up to this point, Europeans had been trading partners and not necessarily rivals or enemies, roles more likely to be played by neighboring African states. Therefore, neighbors of West African slave-trading states were often prepared to help Europeans overcome their traditional enemies, who had long raided them for captives to sell into slavery. Many African states even provided military support for European colonizing armies.

Despite trading firearms into Africa for more than a century, Europeans were much better armed. European armies had access to the latest weapons technology, which was developing rapidly in the final decades of the 19th century. Some African armies possessed breech-loading rifles (loaded through the rear of the barrel rather than through the muzzle), but none had the newly-developed machine gun and, with almost the sole exception of Ethiopia, none had artillery with explosive shells. African bravery and strategic skill resulted in a few memorable African victories, such as the Zulu victory over the British in the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. However, with huge resources of equipment and soldiers at their disposal, European imperial victory was virtually inevitable. Often it was a very one-sided fight: In 1898 at Omdurman, Sudan, the British killed 20,000 Sudanese fighters in a matter of hours.

Some of the longest struggles for political survival occurred in what was to become French West Africa, where Samory Touré’s Mandinka state fought off French incursion from the early 1880s until 1898. Sudanese military leader Rabih al-Zubayr, using a disciplined and well-armed cavalry, waged a jihad in the Chad region and conquered Bornu in 1893. There he set up a militaristic empire that held up French conquest until 1900, when two French armies converging from north and the south finally overcame Rabih.

In many parts of Africa, rural people were initially unaware of the fact that European powers had, on paper, taken over. Rural resistance to European presence, when it came, was often small in scale but long in duration.

N.3.

Victory at Ādwa

Ethiopia stands as the exception to the rule in the Scramble. Menelik II became emperor in 1889 and proceeded to use the powerful, well-equipped Ethiopian army to expand south, east, and west, incorporating the territories of the Oromo, Sidama, and Somali peoples into his empire. Italy, which had taken Eritrea from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1880s, invaded Ethiopia in 1895, anticipating an easy victory. The Ethiopian army, using breech-loading rifles and artillery, annihilated the Italian force at the Battle of Ādwa in 1896. With this victory, Ethiopia became the only indigenous African state to successfully resist European colonization during the Scramble for Africa.

O.

Colonial Rule

By World War I (1914-1918) Ethiopia and Liberia were the only independent nations left in Africa. France and Britain held the most African territory: French colonies stretched across almost all of West Africa, while Britain held an almost unbroken string of colonies from Egypt to South Africa.

O.1.

Colonial North Africa

European colonial control came earlier to North Africa than to most of the continent. As the British occupied Egypt in 1882, the French extended their control from Algeria to Tunisia. Morocco managed to resist the establishment of a French protectorate until 1912. Banding together in Islamic resistance forces, North Africans provided European colonists with their most persistent opposition. When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911 they faced formidable opposition from the Sanusi Brotherhood, who conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign that lasted for 20 years. In the northern extent of Morocco in the early 1920s the Berbers of the Er Rif mountains almost expelled the Spanish from the region until the French came to their aid in 1926. In Algeria, Islamic brotherhoods had fought French rule for decades in the mid-19th century. However, by the 20th century French control was secure, and the French settler population rose rapidly.

In early-20th-century Egypt, anticolonial opposition, protests, and riots were commonplace, as were violent British reactions. The pressure on the British, compounded by the demands of World War I, led Britain to make political concessions. In 1922 Egyptians gained nominal independence and a parliament under King Fuad I, although Britain remained in control behind the scenes. The corruption and ineffectiveness of Fuad’s government undermined the parliamentary system as a viable form of government. In the 1930s an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in vehement opposition to parliamentary government as well as European culture and interference. This brotherhood inspired other movements throughout Islamic North Africa, and its impact is still felt in the region.

O.2.

Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa

Across most of sub-Saharan Africa, colonial rule was accompanied by the exploitation of the continent’s raw materials by private European concessionary companies. The conduct of these companies was often brutal. The worst excesses were in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which Belgian king Leopold II ruled as his personal fiefdom until it was taken over by the Belgian government in 1908. Leopold’s agents used forced African labor to collect rubber, and regularly tortured and mutilated African workers. Violence by concessionary companies was also experienced in British Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); German East, West, and South-West Africa (now Tanzania, Cameroon, and Namibia); Portuguese Mozambique; and French Equatorial Africa (now several countries, including Gabon, Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic).

In the early 20th century European colonists in Africa directed the building of new infrastructures, such as port facilities and numerous railways. Railways were built with African forced labor and the railway companies were often paid with vast grants of African land or mineral concessions. Almost exclusively, the railways linked the source of a colony’s agricultural or mineral wealth with ports. They were arteries by which colonizing powers extracted the continent’s raw materials to benefit themselves, with virtually no thought given to local African economies. Although Europeans would later claim that they had given Africa a modern infrastructure, Africans had paid for it and Europeans were the main beneficiaries. Furthermore, land along the railways became valuable commercial farmland because of the easy access to wider urban or international markets, and so it was often set aside for white settlement. In Kenya, a railway built to link Uganda with the coast provided the British with the incentive to seize the Kikuyu highlands of Kenya for exclusive white settlement.

Colonial taxation of Africans was an important method of control. Throughout much of the continent—but especially in countries with extensive white settlement, such as Kenya, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa—taxation was used as a deliberate tool to drive Africans into the labor market. In order to earn the money to pay the new taxes, Africans had to work European farms and mines. Colonists encouraged Africans to migrate from rural areas to work their various enterprises. They recruited men from rural areas and paid them minimal wages on short, fixed-term contracts. Colonists assumed that the workers’ wives who remained behind would be able to grow enough food to feed their families’ children and elderly. The reality was that rural areas became impoverished by the absence of male labor and insufficient income from wages to compensate. Women therefore often followed men to urban areas in search of casual employment, further impoverishing the rural areas. This migratory pattern would persist throughout the 20th century.

African farmers who were able to retain their land grew a variety of crops for the new colonial markets. They grew groundnuts in the Sénégal and Gambia river valleys and in northern Nigeria. Palm oil continued as an important product of the forest region, from Côte d’Ivoire to the Niger River delta, while cocoa planting was adopted by the Akan of the Ashanti forest of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). In Uganda local African initiative ensured the development of thriving cotton production for export by rail to Indian Ocean ports.

Minor rebellions were widespread in colonial Africa wherever land was seized for white use, forced labor was particularly oppressive, or taxation was harshly or unreasonably imposed. Major rebellions aimed at expelling colonizers altogether erupted in Rhodesia (1896-1897), German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia, 1904-1907) and German East Africa (now Tanzania, 1905-1907). Ultimately, however, the colonizers had the resources to summon however many reinforcements were needed to suppress these rebellions.

In South Africa, Africans suffered the most extreme form of colonization. The British controlled the entire area following their victory over the independent Boer republics in the South African War, or Boer War (1899-1902). In 1910 Britain established the Union of South Africa, granting the white population—both British and Afrikaners—control of their own parliamentary government. Between 1910 and 1940 successive white governments pursued increasingly restrictive policies of segregation, which included restricting Africans to bantustans (homelands) that amounted to a mere 13 percent of the country’s land area. For the most part, Africans were only allowed into the “white areas,” which included all the cities, if they were employed by whites. What emerged was an unbalanced economic system based upon race, designed for the benefit of whites and dependent on the subservience of blacks. It evolved haphazardly in the first half of the 20th century, but following 1948 the National Party government codified it into the apartheid (Afrikaans for “separateness”) system, which lasted until 1994.

O.3.

Africa and the World Wars

World War I impacted many parts of Africa as British, French, and Belgian forces invaded their neighboring German colonies. Africans suffered badly, mostly as noncombatant forced laborers. In addition, many thousands served in the French Army as combatants in the trenches of Western Europe. After the war, Germany’s African colonies were handed over to neighboring colonial powers.

World War II (1939-1945) combat was limited to Ethiopia and North Africa. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and, with the use of aerial bombardment and poison gas, conquered it in 1936. Driven into exile, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie failed to gain any wide support for Ethiopia until Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. With the aid of British troops and volunteers from all over Africa, Ethiopians expelled the Italians in 1941 and Haile Selassie was restored to the throne. In North Africa, the British, Germans, and Italians fought a hugely destructive war across the deserts of Libya and Tunisia until 1943. African volunteers from British- and French-controlled areas served in the Allied army in Europe and Asia.

In the long term, the most significant impact of World War II on Africa was political and psychological. The brief colonization and subsequent liberation of Ethiopia had galvanized the emerging class of urban, educated Africans. These people were determined that the war—fought and won in the name of freedom—should liberate them too. Throughout the continent, from Algeria to Ghana to South Africa, Africans awoke with a new determination to bring an end to the humiliation of colonization.

P.

The Winning of Independence

After World War II the dominant African colonial powers, France and Britain, were too economically weakened to resist African demands for political reform. They hoped, however, that even as they loosened their political grip upon the continent, the colonial economic subservience of Africa to Europe could be maintained.

P.1.

North Africa

In some parts of North Africa, independence came fairly quickly and smoothly after the war: Libya became independent in 1952, and both Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the numerous and powerful French colonists were determined that it would remain part of France. The bitter and bloody Algerian War of Independence was fought until the French finally conceded independence in 1962. In Egypt, radical Muslim army officers overthrew the British puppet government in 1952. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, they redistributed Egyptian land to the peasantry and nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. This was the final symbol of Egyptian independence from Europe, and the failure of Britain’s attempt to regain the canal signaled to the rest of Africa that the colonial bluff had been called.

P.2.

French Sub-Saharan Colonies

In sub-Saharan Africa, the French were quickest with political reform. Across French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the French allowed the election of local government representatives and in return received African agreement to maintain close economic ties with France. In 1946 the French established a common West African French currency, the CFA franc (franc de la communauté financière Africaine, or franc of the African financial community). The currency, exchanged at a fixed rate with the French franc, assured that virtually all of France’s decolonizing African territories would continue to bank, invest, and trade with France. All of France’s sub-Saharan colonies became independent in 1960, except Guinea (1958) and Djibouti (1977).

P.3.

British Colonies and South Africa

The British decolonizing process was more haphazard and often more African-driven in its initiatives. The Gold Coast led the way, becoming independent Ghana in 1957. Thereafter, the pace of liberation of British colonies largely depended on how long it took the population to agree on its leaders and form of government. Most sub-Saharan British colonies became independent in the period from 1960 to 1964. It was only in the colonies with substantial numbers of white settlers that the process was seriously delayed or fought over. Thus, the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s was required to persuade the British to drop their backing of white settler power in Kenya. The British did little to prevent the white settlers of Rhodesia from declaring the independence of their own white minority regime in 1965. After a decade of guerrilla warfare, Zimbabwe was finally liberated in 1980.

White settler power in industrialized South Africa was more entrenched. The white South African government overrode the wave of African nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by the use of widespread oppression and imprisonment. Through the 1980s internal rebellious pressures combined with the loss of Western support finally prompted the South African government to change. South African-occupied Namibia became independent in 1990, and the government negotiated an end to the oppressive apartheid system with the country’s African majority from 1990 to 1994.

P.4.

Belgian Congo

Belgium had no plans for decolonizing the Belgian Congo until 1959, when it panicked in the face of rapid political change in surrounding colonies. It rushed toward an ill-prepared decolonization in 1960, with the departing Belgians hoping to retain a measure of economic control by handing political power over to a weak and disunited government. With Belgian prompting, civil war erupted. As the country slid into chaos, the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered, while United Nations peacekeeping troops were largely ineffective. Order was only restored in 1965 with the establishment of the brutal military dictatorship of Joseph Désiré Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko). Mobutu’s regime was to last until 1997 when, following his overthrow, the country once more slid into a state of civil war.

P.5.

Portuguese Colonies

The liberation of Portugal’s colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique was only achieved after lengthy and bitter guerrilla wars. Exhausted, Portugal withdrew from its colonies in 1974 (in Guinea-Bissau) and 1975 (in Angola and Mozambique), leaving behind revolutionary Marxist regimes to attempt to transform battered economies. Instead, Angola and Mozambique became pawns in the Cold War, as South Africa and the United States supported rebel armies in both countries in the name of fighting communism. These external pressures were not lifted until the late 1980s. Even then, Angola’s civil war continued for another decade.

Q.

Africa in the Late 20th Century

Africa’s political inheritance from colonial rule was a mass of artificial “nations” with arbitrarily drawn borders and ethnically diverse populations with few or no historical ties. In the buildup to independence, “nationalism” presented only a façade of unity in the face of the colonial opponent. After independence that unity only survived while the new African government was able to deliver on its promise to improve the lives of its citizens, particularly in terms of employment and social services.

The colonial powers had been at pains to emphasize ethnic diversity, as a way to weaken national opposition. They had encouraged a sense of ethnic difference and rivalry far greater than that which had existed in precolonial times. In the most extreme version of this policy, for instance, the German and Belgian rulers of Rwanda and Burundi had encouraged Hutu and Tutsi adversity. They co-opted the Tutsi aristocracy as their partners in colonial rule and, in doing so, deprived the Hutu peasantry of educational and economic opportunities. In this policy lay the seeds of Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred that was to lead to massacres and genocide in the 1990s. In many democratic nations of independent Africa, political parties developed around ethnic identity. As a result, insecure governments constantly feared ethnic conflict or secession. The fear was well founded, as shown by the 1967 secession of the Igbo homeland, called Biafra, from Nigeria, leading to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

Q.1.

Political Development in Independent Africa

In the 1960s fear of divisive tendencies encouraged many African governments to set up one-party states, in which it was argued that the entire population could work together for the common good of development. In practice, this allowed weak governments to become dictatorial in order to stay in power. In many of these cases, the country’s military responded by intervening and seizing power by force.

In the first decades of independence, military intervention was often welcomed by urban populations who felt betrayed by weak civilian governments tainted by corruption and failed economic schemes. Military governments proved no better, however, and they too supported themselves by corruption. Many grew even more brutally dictatorial and, unrestricted by constitutional rule, committed atrocities against their perceived opponents. Among the most extreme examples were the rules of Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, both overthrown in 1979. Through the 1980s many dictators were kept in power by external support, usually in the name of Cold War politics.

It was not until this support was withdrawn around 1990, at the end of the Cold War, that most African people had the chance to demand accountable governments. From 1990 to 1994 most countries established or reestablished multiparty systems of elective government. Citizens voted long-standing autocratic governments out of office in countries such as Niger, Mali, Malawi, and Zambia, while the more astute military rulers, such as Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, discarded their uniforms and were elected as civilian presidents.

Several African countries went against the trend of ousting dictatorial and military governments in favor of multiparty democracy in the first half of the 1990s. The scale of military corruption in oil-rich Nigeria delayed the process until the late 1990s. Mobutu’s 1997 overthrow by armed rebellion created the instability that slid the Congo into outright civil war in the late 1990s and early 21st century. In Algeria, when it appeared that a militant Islamist party was about to win 1992 legislative elections, the Algerian military cancelled the election, suspended the legislature, and ushered in a decade of violent civil conflict. In Libya, the long-standing one-party regime of revolutionary leader Muammar al-Qaddafi ruled on, supported by huge oil wealth, reasonably redistributed among a sparse population.

Although a new era of accountable government arrived in Africa in the 1990s, it is still very unstable, and military coup d’états still occur. Nevertheless—as in the cases of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Niger in the mid- or late 1990s—an incoming military ruler now has to justify his presence by declaring that he is only there temporarily to right some specific wrongs and to reestablish civilian democracy within a very short timespan. Africa no longer tolerates indefinite dictatorships.

However, the proliferation of weapons across the continent, economic hardship, and weak government infrastructures have combined to encourage banditry and civil conflict across much of Africa. In West Africa, a violent civil war in Liberia in the 1990s spilled over into Sierra Leone, where it continued long after peace returned to Liberia. Even Côte d’Ivoire—long a model of stability—has not been immune from violent conflicts. At least, however, African governments have taken up a collective sense of responsibility and are prepared to intervene on a regional basis to settle disputes or even to restore peace and order.

Q.2.

Africa and the World Economy

Africans are faced with widespread poverty, ill health, and lack of educational opportunities. Despite the positive political developments of the late 20th century, many African governments have been unable to improve their peoples’ standards of living. The foundation of Africa’s disadvantaged position has been its economic role in the world trading system.

Since at least the mid-19th century African economies were increasingly reworked to meet the needs of industrial Europe. Virtually all economic infrastructure was geared toward the export of Africa’s raw materials to Europe. Economic transaction and communication between neighboring states stopped if they were ruled by different colonial powers. African manufacturing was discouraged, and even banned, if it was likely to compete with the interests of European manufacturers. Indigenous African industry dwindled, and Africa was forced to import virtually all of its manufactured consumer goods. This was the economic system that Africa inherited at independence.

Making Africa even more dependent, the prices paid for its exported raw materials were set in the major financial markets of the world: New York City, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The prices on African commodities rose and fell according to the needs of the industrial world, bearing no relationship to the costs of production or the economic needs of Africa. The full implications of this were powerfully demonstrated during the energy crisis of 1973. As oil prices quadrupled, the Western world went into recession and African commodity prices tumbled. Although North African oil producers benefited, sub-Saharan Africans were not yet oil producers on a significant scale and they too suffered from the hike in oil prices. The industrial world paid less and less for African commodities, while at the same time demanded higher and higher prices for its manufactured goods, which Africans needed to import. In this way Africa helped subsidize the industrial world’s economic recovery while most African countries spiraled into debt, poverty, corruption, and political instability, from which they have spent decades trying to recover.

Since the 1980s the industrial world’s financial tools, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), have proposed solutions to Africa’s chronic indebtedness. These solutions have been based upon the economics of developed economies, however, rather than upon the specialized needs of developing countries. They have directed African development plans to increase raw material exports, in order to generate the foreign exchange to pay back Africa’s debts. But as Africans export more coffee, for example, the price of coffee falls. Thus, Africans work harder and receive less for their efforts. The ultimate goal of the IMF and World Bank has been to enable Africa to pay its debts rather than to enable Africa to develop the self-sufficient ability to compete on equal terms with the industrialized world. They have succeeded in their goal: Africa pays back more in debt servicing than it receives in direct aid. But this means that governments have less to spend on health and education, leading to falling living standards.

R.

Africa Enters the 21st Century

As Africa entered the 21st century, the legacy problems of the previous century continued. African leaders were striving to establish regional trading groups to strengthen their position in the global market. In 2002 they inaugurated the African Union, an organization intended eventually to establish a common economic market and political union across the entire continent. Achieving this goal, which would make Africa a formidable world power, was considered by many to be Africa’s primary task for the 21st century.

The History section of this article was contributed by Kevin Shillington.