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History of Africa

Further information: General History of Africa and List of kingdoms in Africa throughout history
Contemporary political map of Africa (Includes Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa)
Map showing the states, people, and material cultures of the African continent c. 1800 BC, but missing the Kintampo civilisation and Tichitt culture in West Africa.
Obelisk at temple of Luxor, Egypt. c. 1200 BC
Ethiopian king Menelik II at the Battle of Adwa in 1896
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The history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans and — around 300,000–250,000 years ago — anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states.[1] The earliest known recorded history arose in Ancient Egypt,[2] and later in Nubia, the Horn of Africa, the Maghreb, and the western Sahel.[3]

Following the desertification of the Sahara, North and East African history became entwined with the Middle East and Southern Europe while the Bantu expansion swept from modern day Cameroon (Central West Africa) across much of the sub-Saharan continent in waves between around 1000 BC and 1 AD, creating a linguistic commonality across much of the central and Southern continent.[4]

Many kingdoms have formed and existed throughout African history, with some notable states including:

Some societies maintained an egalitarian way of life without hierarchy, such as the Jola or Hadza peoples, whilst others did not organise and centralise further into complex societies, such as the Boorana and the chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, and are rarely discussed in political history. At its peak, prior to European colonialism, it is estimated that Africa had up to 10,000 different states and autonomous groups having distinct languages and customs, with most following African traditional religions.[5][6]

From the 7th century AD, Islam spread west from Arabia via conquest, intent on spreading monotheism, and via proselytization, mainly through Faqirs, to North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and later southwards to the Swahili coast, then from the Maghreb traversing the Sahara into West Africa, catalysed by the Fulani Jihad in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Slavery in Africa has historically been widespread and systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the ancient world.[7] When the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Atlantic slave trades began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems started supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa.[8][9] The Atlantic slave trade was the most exploited of these, and between 1450 and 1900 transported upwards of 12 million enslaved people overseas in terrible conditions with many dying on the journey.[10][11]

From 1870 to 1914, driven by the Second Industrial Revolution and its rapacity, European colonization of Africa developed rapidly from 10% of the continent being under European imperial control to over 90% in the Scramble for Africa, with the major European powers partitioning the continent in the 1884 Berlin Conference. [12][13] European rule had significant impacts on Africa's societies and the suppression of communal autonomy disrupted local customary practices and caused the irreversible transformation of Africa's socioeconomic systems.[14] Whilst there were some Christian states in Africa preceding the colonial period, such as Ethiopia and Kongo, widespread conversion occurred under European rule due to efficacious missions, particularly in southern West Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa, with peoples syncretising Christianity with their local beliefs.[15]

Following struggles for independence in many parts of the continent, and a weakened Europe after the Second World War (1939–1945), waves of decolonisation took place across the continent, culminating in the 1960 Year of Africa and the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, the predecessor to the African Union.[16]

In Sub-Saharan African societies, there exists a reverence for the spoken word, with history generally having been recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed oral rather than literate civilisations.[17] Disciplines such as the study of oral tradition, historical linguistics, archaeology, and genetics have been vital in rediscovering the great African civilisations of antiquity, as well as documenting those of later periods.

  1. ^ "Evolution of Modern Humans: Early Modern Homo sapiens". www2.palomar.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-27.
  2. ^ "Recordkeeping and History". Khan Academy. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  3. ^ "Early African Civilization". Study.com. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  4. ^ "History of Africa". Visit Africa. Retrieved 2020-05-27.
  5. ^ Meyerowitz, Eva L. R. (1975). The Early History of the Akan States of Ghana. Red Candle Press. ISBN 978-0-608390352.
  6. ^ Boyes, Steve (October 31, 2013). "Getting to Know Africa: 50 Interesting Facts". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 2013-12-27.
  7. ^ Stilwell, Sean (2013). "Slavery in African History". Slavery and Slaving in African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 38. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139034999.003. ISBN 978-1-139-03499-9. For most Africans between 10000 BCE to 500 CE, the use of slaves was not an optimal political or economic strategy. But in some places, Africans came to see the value of slavery. In the large parts of the continent where Africans lived in relatively decentralized and small-scale communities, some big men used slavery to grab power to get around broader governing ideas about reciprocity and kinship, but were still bound by those ideas to some degree. In other parts of the continent early political centralization and commercialization led to expanded use of slaves as soldiers, officials, and workers.
  8. ^ Lovejoy, Paul E. (2012). Transformations of Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. London: Cambridge University Press.
  9. ^ Sparks, Randy J. (2014). "4. The Process of Enslavement at Annamaboe". Where the Negroes are Masters : An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Harvard University Press. pp. 122–161. ISBN 9780674724877.
  10. ^ Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), ISBN 0-374-11396-3, p. 4. "It is now estimated that 11,863,000 slaves were shipped across the Atlantic." (Note in original: Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature", in Journal of African History 30 (1989), p. 368.)
  11. ^ Patrick Manning, "The Slave Trade: The Formal Dermographics of a Global System" in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 117-44, online at pp. 119-20.
  12. ^ Chukwu, Lawson; Akpowoghaha, G. N. (2023). "Colonialism in Africa: An Introductory Review". Political Economy of Colonial Relations and Crisis of Contemporary African Diplomacy. pp. 1–11. doi:10.1007/978-981-99-0245-3_1. ISBN 978-981-99-0244-6.
  13. ^ Frankema, Ewout (2018). "An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835–1885". The Journal for Economic History. 78 (1): 231–267. doi:10.1017/S0022050718000128.
  14. ^ Mamdani, Mahmood (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1st ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691027937.
  15. ^ Walls, A (2011). "African Christianity in the History of Religions". Studies in World Christianity. 2 (2). Edinburgh University Press: 183–203. doi:10.3366/swc.1996.2.2.183.
  16. ^ Hargreaves, John D. (1996). Decolonization in Africa (2nd ed.). London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-24917-1. OCLC 33131573.
  17. ^ Vansina, Jan (1971). "Once upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa". Daedalus. 100 (2). MIT Press: 442–468. JSTOR 20024011.

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