Africa

• 1. Introduction

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  Africa covers about 30.3 million square kilometres, roughly 20 percent of Earth's land. In 2012 its median age was 19.7, while the worldwide median stood at 30.4. That makes it the youngest of all the continents, and by 2100 its population is projected to pass 3.8 billion. This is a continent of extremes that sit uneasily together. It is the least wealthy inhabited continent per capita, yet home to many of the world's fastest-growing economies. It is widely accepted as the birthplace of humans, yet its history has often been under-appreciated by the wider world. How did a place where the earliest hominids date back roughly 7 million years become a continent of 54 recognised states keeping borders drawn by others? Why do scholars now argue over the very word Africa, and even over the line between a northern and a southern half? The answers run through buried bronzes, vanished empires, a drying Sahara, and a name whose origin no one can fully agree on.

• 2. A Name Without A Home

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  Afri was a Latin name for the inhabitants of what was then northern Africa, the lands west of the Nile and south of the Mediterranean, also called Ancient Libya. The name seems to have first meant a native Libyan tribe, an ancestor of modern Berbers. One long-standing idea ties it to the Phoenician word for dust. A 1981 hypothesis instead traces it to the Berber word ifri, meaning cave, a nod to cave dwellers, and links it to places like Ifrane in Morocco. After Rome defeated the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, Carthage became the capital of a province named Africa Proconsularis. The later Muslim region of Ifriqiya preserved a form of the same name. The geographer Ptolemy, who lived from about 85 to 165 CE, drew a firm line between the continents. He made the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. Competing origin stories multiplied over the centuries. The 1st-century historian Flavius Josephus claimed the name came from Epher, a grandson of Abraham. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century suggested it came from the Latin aprica, meaning sunny. In 1881 Massey traced it to the Egyptian af-rui-ka, which he rendered as the birthplace. The name kept expanding too, growing with European knowledge as outsiders grasped the real extent of the land they were trying to label.

• 3. The First People

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  Most paleoanthropologists regard Africa, and Eastern Africa in particular, as the oldest inhabited territory on Earth. Evidence of human occupation reaches back perhaps 7 million years before present. Fossil species tell the story in layers. Australopithecus afarensis is dated to roughly 3.9 to 3.0 million years ago, Paranthropus boisei to about 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago, and Homo ergaster to roughly 1.9 million to 600,000 years ago. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 350,000 to 260,000 years ago, after which the continent was mainly home to hunter-gatherers. Around 50,000 years ago, modern humans left in the Out of Africa II migration. They exited across Bab-el-Mandeb over the Red Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, or the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt. The land they left behind kept changing under their feet. At the end of the Ice ages, around 10,500 BC, the Sahara turned green and fertile, and rock art at Tassili n'Ajjer depicts that abundance. By 5,000 BC the region was growing dry and hostile, and around 3500 BC a tilt in Earth's orbit drove rapid desertification. In West Africa a wetter phase pushed rainforest and wooded savanna from Senegal to Cameroon. There, between roughly 9,000 and 5,000 BC, Niger-Congo speakers domesticated the oil palm and raffia palm, then crops like black-eyed peas and kola nuts, inventing polished stone axes to clear the forest.

• 4. Empires Of Sand And River

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  From 3500 BC, small units called nomes coalesced into the kingdoms of Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt. Around 3100 BC Upper Egypt conquered the north and unified the land under the 1st dynasty, and the Old Kingdom formed in 2686 BC, the age of the great pyramids. The Kingdom of Kerma rose to dominate Nubia, holding territory between the 1st and 4th cataracts of the Nile. Power passed back and forth for centuries. The New Kingdom collapsed in 1069 BC, which freed the Kingdom of Kush, and Kush went on to conquer Lower Egypt in 754 BC. Far to the south and west, other centres grew rich on trade. The Ghana Empire, also called Wagadu, rose out of the Tichitt culture, the oldest known complexly organised society in West Africa, beginning around 4000 BC in modern-day Mauritania and Mali. The camel revolutionised trans-Saharan trade that linked Wagadu's lands with Tahert and Sijilmasa in the north. Soninke tradition holds that Wagadu's founding came after a man named Dinga struck a deal with a serpent deity guarding a well, sacrificing one maiden a year for rain and gold. The kingdoms kept reshaping themselves. Sonni Ali, who ruled from 1464 to 1492, founded the Songhai Empire, seizing Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473. His successor Askia Mohammad I made Islam the official religion and brought Muslim scholars to Gao, including al-Maghili, who died in 1504.

• 5. Buried Bronzes And Forest Kings

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  The Kingdom of Nri, ruled by the Eze Nri, was established around the ninth century, making it one of the oldest kingdoms in present-day Nigeria. It is famous for elaborate bronzes found at the town of Igbo-Ukwu. In the forested regions of the West African coast, kingdoms grew with little influence from the Muslim north. The Kingdom of Ife was the first of the Yoruba city-states, governed by a priestly oba called the Ooni of Ife. Ife was a major religious and cultural centre, known for a unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. Its model of government spread outward. The Oyo Empire adapted Ife's system, its obas called the Alaafins of Oyo, and it controlled many other states including the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey. Power on the continent was never only about kings. Pre-colonial Africa held as many as 10,000 different states and polities, from the San hunter-gatherers of the south to the Swahili coastal trading towns of the southeast. Bantu-speaking agriculturalists began migrating south from the Grasslands of northwestern Cameroon sometime between 5000 BC and 3000 BC. They carried iron metallurgy through Central Africa and reached modern-day KwaZulu-Natal around the 3rd century AD. As they spread, they displaced, replaced, or absorbed the hunter-gatherer and farming groups already in place.

• 6. Chains And Conquest

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  Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 7 to 12 million people to the New World. Slavery had long been practiced within Africa, and the Trans-Saharan trade moved Africans across North Africa and the Near East over millennia. The flow ran in more than one direction. More than 1 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. The trade's decline reshaped West Africa's politics in the 1820s. Falling demand, anti-slavery legislation, and the British Royal Navy's growing presence forced African states to find new economies. Between 1808 and 1860 the British West Africa Squadron seized roughly 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans aboard them. The largest West African powers responded differently. Asante and Dahomey built legitimate commerce in palm oil, cocoa, timber, and gold, the foundation of the region's modern export trade. The Oyo Empire could not adapt and collapsed into civil wars. Then came a faster, harder conquest. Driven by the Second Industrial Revolution, European nations seized and colonised most of Africa from the late 19th to early 20th century, sparing only Ethiopia and Liberia. The colonies existed for economic exploitation and the extraction of natural resources. The map drawn in those decades would outlast the empires that drew it.

• 7. After The Flags Fell

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  In 1951 Libya, a former Italian colony, gained independence. Tunisia and Morocco won theirs from France in 1956, and Ghana followed in March 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony freed. Waves of decolonisation crested in the 1960 Year of Africa, and the Organisation of African Unity formed in 1963. The new states chose to keep their colonial borders, a decision with long consequences. Marginalisation of ethnic groups and corruption fed instability, and some leaders deliberately stoked ethnic conflicts inherited from colonial rule. The toll was immense. The Nigerian Civil War brought a famine that killed 1 to 2 million people. Two civil wars in Sudan, from 1955 to 1972 and from 1983 to 2005, killed around 3 million between them. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in up to 800,000 deaths and helped trigger the first and second Congo Wars, the deadliest in modern African history with up to 5.5 million deaths. Then the curve bent the other way. Civil wars ended in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Algeria in 2002, Liberia in 2003, and Sudan and Burundi in 2005, and the Second Congo War, which drew in 9 countries, ended in 2003. As violence fell, growth rose. Between 2000 and 2014, annual GDP growth in sub-Saharan Africa averaged 5.02 percent, doubling total GDP from 811 billion to 1.63 trillion dollars in constant 2015 terms.

• 8. Riches Underfoot

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  Africa is believed to hold 90 percent of the world's cobalt, 90 percent of its platinum, 50 percent of its gold, 98 percent of its chromium, 70 percent of its tantalite, and one-third of its uranium. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone holds 70 percent of the world's coltan, the mineral behind the tantalum capacitors inside cell phones, along with more than 30 percent of the world's diamond reserves. Guinea is the world's largest exporter of bauxite. Yet this mineral wealth has not lifted most people out of poverty. The continent is the world's poorest and least-developed apart from Antarctica. In a 2003 development report, the bottom 24 ranked nations were all African. Growth has come mainly from services rather than manufacturing or agriculture, producing growth without jobs and without falling poverty. Hunger has deepened in recent years. In 2024 nearly 307 million people in Africa were undernourished, about 46 percent of the global total, up 10 million from the year before. There may be a way out from within. A Harvard study led by professor Calestous Juma argued that Africa could feed itself by shifting from importer to self-sufficiency. As Juma put it, African agriculture is at a crossroads, with the continent starting to focus on agricultural innovation as its new engine for regional trade and prosperity.