History of Africa

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The History of Africa begins with the oldest inhabited territory on Earth. 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. This single continent gave rise to humanity itself, and then to a staggering political variety. At its peak, scholars estimate Africa held around 10,000 separate polities, most of them following traditional religions. Some were heterarchical and egalitarian. Others organised into chiefdoms, kingdoms, and sprawling empires linked by trading networks that crossed deserts, oceans, and rivers. How do you tell the story of a place where history itself was carried in the spoken word rather than written down? How did a green and fertile Sahara become a desert, and what did that do to the people living through it? Why did so many of these states rise, peak, and collapse, again and again, across thousands of years? And how did a continent that once held nine-tenths of its own land come, between 1870 and 1914, to have nine-tenths of it ruled by European powers? Those are the questions ahead.

• 2. The Spoken Past

  ›

  The oral word is revered in most African cultures, and history there has predominantly been passed down through oral tradition. This was not a poor substitute for writing. It was a different way of knowing. African historical consciousness placed change and continuity within the framework of a person and their environment, the gods, and their ancestors. People believed themselves to be part of a holistic spiritual entity. Ancestors, in this view, were not gone. They were considered historical actors, still present in the unfolding of events. The historical process itself was largely communal. Eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations were crafted into narrative oral traditions, then performed and transmitted across generations. Time could be mythical and social rather than strictly linear. Mind and memory shaped these traditions, as events were condensed over time and crystallised into clichés. Working with such sources demands care. Jan Vansina said that interpretation requires a proficient, or better yet native, understanding of the language and culture. Oral tradition could be exoteric, open to all, or esoteric, reserved for the few. The philosopher Anselm Jimoh described African epistemology as one where the knower experiences the known object in a sensuous, emotive, intuitive, abstractive understanding, rather than through abstraction alone, to arrive at what he called complete knowledge. By that logic, music, proverbs, and oral traditions were not decoration. They were the machinery of preserving and transmitting knowledge.

• 3. A Green Sahara Vanishes

  ›

  Around 10,500 BCE, at the end of the Ice ages, the Sahara was a green fertile valley. African populations returned to it from the interior and from coastal highlands. Rock art at Tassili n'Ajjer, perhaps 10 millennia old, depicts that fertile Sahara and the large populations it supported. The change did not last. A warming, drying climate meant that by 5000 BCE the region was becoming increasingly dry and hostile. Then, around 3500 BCE, a tilt in the Earth's orbit pushed the Sahara into a period of rapid desertification. Even before farming, people had begun to reshape their world. The domestication of cattle in Africa preceded agriculture and seems to have existed alongside hunter-gatherer cultures. By around 6000 BCE, cattle were domesticated in North Africa. Far to the south, in West Africa, a wet phase opened up expanding rainforest and wooded savanna from Senegal to Cameroon. Between 9000 and 5000 BCE, Niger-Congo speakers domesticated the oil palm and the raffia palm. They cultivated black-eyed peas and voandzeia, the African groundnut, then okra and kola nuts. Because most of these plants grew in dense forest, the Niger-Congo speakers invented polished stone axes to clear it. Older lineages endured through all of this. Pygmies have inhabited Central Africa for many millennia, likely splitting into eastern and western groups around 5000 BP. The Khoekhoe and San trace back to an early dispersal of modern humans over 150,000 BP, and the San preserved their hunter-gatherer way of life into modern times.

• 4. Empires Of The Nile And The Sands

  ›

  Around 3100 BCE, Upper Egypt conquered Lower Egypt and unified the region under the 1st dynasty. By 2686 BCE the 3rd dynasty had formed the Old Kingdom of Egypt, whose height saw the construction of many great pyramids. Egypt's story is one of repeated collapse and revival. The Old Kingdom disintegrated under drought and famine as power slipped to local nomarchs. Around 2055 BCE the 11th dynasty, based in Thebes, formed the Middle Kingdom. After the Hyksos invaded Lower Egypt, the 18th dynasty expelled them in 1550 BCE and established the New Kingdom, which collapsed in turn in 1069 BCE. Egypt never stood alone. To its south, the Kingdom of Kerma became the dominant force in Nubia, controlling territory as large as Egypt between the 1st and 4th cataracts of the Nile, until the New Kingdom extinguished it. After Egypt's collapse, the Kingdom of Kush rose in Nubia, conquered Lower Egypt in 754 BCE, and revived pyramid building, until the Assyrians drove the Kushites out in 663 BCE. Conquerors then came in waves. The Achaemenid Empire took Egypt in 525 BCE. Alexander the Great conquered it in 332 BCE, installing the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty, which fell to the Romans in 30 BCE. Across the Maghreb, a parallel drama unfolded. Phoenician settlers seeking precious metals in the Gulf of Tunis founded a colony that grew, after gaining independence in the 6th century BCE, into Ancient Carthage and its strict mercantile trading empire. Rome destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, raising Numidia and Mauretania to power. When Numidia's Jugurtha usurped the throne from a Roman ally, the two fought Rome in the Jugurthine War, until Mauretania's Bocchus I sold Jugurtha out to the Romans. In the 5th century CE the Vandals conquered Roman Africa, the Byzantines reconquered it a century later, and indigenous peoples reclaimed self-governance in Masuna and successor kingdoms such as Ouarsenis, Aurès, and Altava.

• 5. The Word Of The Prophet

  ›

  From the 7th century, as part of the Arab conquests, the Rashidun Caliphate took Egypt and the Exarchate from the Byzantines in the 640s. The Umayyads followed, conquering the Maghreb by the early 8th century despite stiff resistance from Berber leaders such as Kusaila and Kahina. Conversion was uneven and often coerced. Large numbers of Berber and Coptic people willingly converted to Islam. Followers of other Abrahamic faiths, the People of the Book, were protected, but followers of traditional Berber religion were violently oppressed and frequently given the choice to convert or face captivity or enslavement. Power then passed through a long succession of dynasties. The Fatimids rose in modern-day Tunisia in the 10th century, established a rival caliphate, and conquered Egypt. The zealous Almoravids took the Maghreb and intervened in Iberia. Saladin, a Fatimid vizier, usurped power in the 12th century to found the Ayyubid dynasty, while the Almohad revolution deposed the Almoravids. Later the Almohads splintered into the Marinids, Zayyanids, and Hafsids. Facing Mongol expansion, Mamluk generals seized Egypt. In the early 16th century the Ottoman Empire rapidly conquered North Africa, save for Morocco under Saadi rule. Islam travelled far beyond conquest. It reached the Horn of Africa by proselytization, spread to the Swahili coast aided by Muslim dominance of the Indian Ocean trade, and crossed the Sahara into the western Sahel and Sudan, later catalysed by the Fula jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries. In Nubia, Christian Makuria annexed Nobatia and halted Muslim expansion in the 7th century, signing a peace treaty and defending the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria for centuries before it finally collapsed.

• 6. Gold, Cattle, And Kings

  ›

  The Ghana Empire, also called Wagadu, grew wealthy after the camel was introduced to the western Sahel, revolutionising the trans-Saharan trade that linked its capital and Aoudaghost with Tahert and Sijilmasa. Soninke tradition holds that Wagadu's final founding came after Dinga struck a deal with a serpent deity guarding a well: one maiden sacrificed each year in exchange for rainfall and gold. When the Almoravids captured Aoudaghost and worsening climate shifted trade, Wagadu fell to its former vassal Sosso around 1200. In response, Sundiata Keita united the Mandinka clans, conquered Sosso and Gao, and founded the Mali Empire, which grew fabulously rich controlling the trans-Saharan trade. Under Sonni Ali, Gao swept through the crumbling empire to form the Songhai Empire, until Morocco conquered Gao in 1591. Around Lake Chad, a different story played out. The Kanem Empire, founded around 700, thrived as a crossroads for east-west and north-south Saharan trade. Its Duguwa dynasty converted to Ibadi Islam in the 11th century before being usurped by the Sunni Sayfawa dynasty, under whom Kanem became a centre of Islamic scholarship. When a warm period in the 14th century dried up Lake Chad, the Bilala captured Kanem's capital and forced its leadership to move to Bornu. Far to the south, the Bantu expansion reshaped half the continent. Between roughly 3000 BCE and 500 CE, Bantu speakers spread from north-western Central Africa, in modern-day Cameroon, across Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. A Western Stream followed the coast and the Congo system, reaching the southern fringe of the Congolian Rainforest around 500 BCE, its arrival coinciding with the spread of iron metallurgy. An Eastern Stream reached just west of Lake Victoria around 500 BCE, where Bantu speakers adopted iron metallurgy from Cushitic speakers. By the 3rd century CE they had reached modern-day KwaZulu-Natal, displacing, absorbing, or intermarrying with hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups along the way.

• 7. Stone Cities And Sacred Hills

  ›

  Just south of the Limpopo River, growing wealth and inequality at Bambandyanalo led people to move to the foot of Mapungubwe Hill around 1220, while the ruler settled the flat summit. The Mapungubwe state grew to cover 30,000 square kilometres before collapsing around 1300 amid shifting trade routes. In its place rose Great Zimbabwe, with its monumental dry-stone walls, where the mambo, or king, controlled the gold trade flowing to the east coast. That state likely covered 50,000 square kilometres. A new 15th-century trade route along the Zambezi, running directly to the goldfields, helped decline Great Zimbabwe and raise Butua near the goldfields and the Mutapa Empire to its north. The Portuguese arrived and worked their way inland. In 1629 they vassalised Mutapa by intervening in a succession conflict, and an influx of prazo-holders brought lawlessness that worsened drought, famine, and disease. Then, in the 1680s and 1690s, Changamire Dombo conquered Butua, founded the Rozvi Empire, and expelled all Portuguese from the Plateau. Inland and across the lakes, other states formed from migration and memory. After leaving Luba territory in the 11th century, the Maravi reached Lake Malawi around the 15th century and absorbed the Chewa politico-religious structure. In the Great Lakes, Nyoro traditions describe a Kitara Empire ruled by the Tembuzi and Chwezi dynasties, though most scholars treat the Tembuzi as mythical and the Chwezi as historical figures of the 14th and 15th centuries. Peter Robertshaw considered the Chwezi religious leaders who used networks of hill-top shrines to project authority. Out of this churn came Bunyoro, Buganda, founded traditionally by Kintu, and the kingdom of Rwanda, which formed as dominant pastoralists amalgamated smaller clan-states towards the end of the 15th century. On the East African coast, proto-Swahili settlements converted to Islam from around 800, joining Muslim trading networks. City-states like Manda, Shanga, Mombasa, and Kilwa flourished, with Kilwa seizing the Sofala gold trade from Mogadishu. Far out in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar had been settled by Austronesians who crossed in outrigger canoes between the 5th and 7th centuries, and there the Sakalava Empire rose to dominate west-coastal trade.

• 8. The Scramble And After

  ›

  In 1885, Hiram S. Maxim developed the maxim gun, the model of the modern machine gun, and the European powers refused to sell such weapons to African leaders. That imbalance is one key to a sudden reversal. For 400 years, European nations had mostly limited themselves to trading stations on the African coast, with few daring to venture inland. African germs took numerous European lives. Yellow fever, sleeping sickness, yaws, and leprosy made the continent inhospitable, and the deadliest, malaria, was endemic throughout Tropical Africa. The discovery of quinine in 1854, alongside repeating rifles and increasing artillery, made conquest possible. Driven by the Second Industrial Revolution, European colonisation grew rapidly between 1870 and 1914 in the Scramble for Africa. The major powers partitioned the continent at the 1884 Berlin Conference, and territory under European control rose from one-tenth of the continent to over nine-tenths. By the 1880s, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. Captivated by eugenics and Social Darwinism, some colonisers branded their rule a civilising mission. Colonial borders were drawn unilaterally, often cutting across kinship, language, and culture, and traditional leaders were folded into the regimes as indirect rule. The reversal of that reversal came after the Second World War. With a weakened Europe, African nationalism grew stronger, drawing on militaristic skills natives had learned serving in the British, French, and other armies during the world wars. Decolonisation began with Libya in 1951 and peaked in 1960, the Year of Africa, when 17 nations declared independence. Some colonisers resisted. The last to grant formal independence included Guinea-Bissau in 1974, Mozambique and Angola in 1975, Djibouti in 1977, Zimbabwe in 1980, and Namibia in 1990, with Eritrea splitting from Ethiopia in 1993. At the Organisation of African Unity conference of 1964, the new nations chose to keep their colonial borders, fearing civil war and regional instability. That single decision, made by states whose ancestors once counted around 10,000 polities, still shapes the map of Africa today.