Short answers, pulled from the story.
Archaic humans emerged out of Africa between 0.5 and 1.8 million years ago. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, then appeared in East Africa around 300,000 to 250,000 years ago and spread across the world. Africa is considered the oldest inhabited territory on Earth.
At its peak, Africa is estimated to have had around 10,000 polities, with most following traditional religions. These ranged from egalitarian and heterarchical societies to chiefdoms, kingdoms, and large empires such as Mali, Songhai, Kush, Aksum, Kongo, and Great Zimbabwe.
The Bantu expansion was the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples from north-western Central Africa, in modern-day Cameroon, across much of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa between around 3000 BCE and 500 CE. They displaced or absorbed groups such as the Khoisan and Pygmies and carried iron metallurgy with them.
The Scramble for Africa was the rapid European colonisation of the continent between 1870 and 1914, driven by the Second Industrial Revolution. At the 1884 Berlin Conference the major European powers partitioned Africa, increasing territory under European control from one-tenth of the continent to over nine-tenths.
From the 7th century, Islam spread west during the Arab conquest of North Africa and reached the Horn of Africa by proselytization. It later moved south to the Swahili coast through Muslim dominance of Indian Ocean trade and across the Sahara into the western Sahel and Sudan, catalysed by the Fula jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries.
A wave of decolonisation followed the Second World War, beginning with Libya in 1951 and peaking in 1960, the Year of Africa, when 17 nations declared independence. At the Organisation of African Unity conference of 1964, the new countries chose to keep their colonial borders due to fears of civil wars and regional instability.