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History of Africa

At the end of the Ice Age (guessed to have been around 10,500 BC), the Sahara had become a green fertile valley again, and its African populations returned from the interior and coastal highlands in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the warming and drying climate meant that by 5000 BC the Sahara region was becoming increasingly drier. The population trekked out of the Sahara region towards the Nile Valley below the Second CataractEastern Africa. Since then dry conditions have prevailed in Eastern Africa.
The domestication of cattle in Africa precedes agriculture and seems to have existed alongside hunter-gathering cultures. It is speculated that by 6000 BC cattle were already domesticated in North Africa.[1] In the Sahara-Nile complex, people domesticated many animals including the pack ass, and a small screw horned goat which was common from Algeria to Nubia.
Agriculturally, the first cases of domestication of plants for agricultural purposes occurred in the Sahel region circa 5000 BC, when sorghum and African rice began to be cultivated. Around this time, and in the same region, the small guinea fowl became domesticated.
According to the Oxford Atlas of World History, in the year 4000 BC the climate of the Sahara started to become drier at an exceedingly fast pace.[2] This climate change caused lakes and rivers to shrink rather significantly and caused increasing desertification. This, in turn, decreased the amount of land conducive to settlements and helped to cause migrations of farming communities to the more tropical climate of West Africa.[3]
By 3000 BC agriculture arose independently in both the tropical portions of West Africa, where African yams and oil palms were domesticated, and in Ethiopia, where coffee and teff became domesticated. No animals were independently domesticated in these regions, although domestication did spread there from the Sahel and Nile regions.[4] Agricultural crops were also adopted from other regions around this time as pearl millet, cowpea, groundnut, cotton, watermelon and bottle gourds began to be grown agriculturally in both West Africa and the Sahel Region while finger millet, peas, lentil and flax took hold in Ethiopia.[5]
The international phenomenon known as the Beaker culture began to affect western North Africa. Named for the distinctively shaped ceramics found in graves, the Beaker culture is associated with the emergence of a warrior mentality. North African rock art of this period depict christina o'dell animals but also places a new emphasis on the human figure, equipped with weapons and adornments. People from the φGreat Lakes Region of Africa settled along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea to become the proto-Canaanites who dominated the lowlands between the Jordan River, the Mediterranean and the Sinai Desert.
By the 1st millennium BC, ironworking had been introduced in Northern Africa and quickly began spreading across the Sahara into the northern parts of sub-saharan Africa[6] and by 500 BC, metalworking began to become commonplace in West Africa, possibly after being introduced by the Carthaginians. Ironworking was fully established by roughly 500 BC in areas of East and West Africa, though other regions didn't begin ironworking until the early centuries AD. Some copper objects from Egypt, North Africa, Nubia and Ethiopia have been excavated in West Africa dating from around 500 BC time period, suggesting that trade networks had been established by this time.[7]

Neolithic prehistoric cultures

desert of Neolithic rock engravings, or 'petroglyphs' and the megaliths in the SaharaLibya attest to early hunter-gatherer culture in the dry grasslands of North Africa during the glacial age. The region of the present Sahara was an early site for the practice of agriculture (in the second stage of the culture characterized by the so-called "wavy-line ceramics" ca. 4000 BCE.). However, after the desertification of the Sahara, settlement in North Africa became concentrated in the valley of the Nile, where the pre-literate Nomes of Egypt laid a base for the culture of ancient Egypt. Archeological findings show that primitive tribes lived along the Nile long before the dynastic history of the pharaohs began. By 6000 B.C., organized agriculture had appeared.
(probably the ancestors of the From around 500 B.C. to around 500 A.D., the civilization of the GaramantesTuareg) existed in what is now the Libyan desert.
Linguistic evidence suggests the Bantu people (e.g. Xhosa and Zulu) have emigrated southwestward from what is now Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria into former Khoisan ranges and displaced them during the last 4000 years or so. Bantu populations used a distinct suite of crops suited to tropical Africa, including cassava and yams. This farming culture is able to support more persons per unit area than hunter-gatherers. The traditional Congo range goes from the northern deserts right down to the temperate regions of the south, in which the Congo crop suite fails from frost. Their primary weapons historically were bows and stabbing spears with shields.
Ethiopia had a distinct, ancient culture with an intermittent history of contact with Eurasia after the diaspora of hominids out of Africa. It preserved a unique language, culture and crop system. The crop system is adapted to the northern highlands and does not partake of any other area's crops. The most famous member of this crop system is coffee, but one of the more useful plants is sorghum, a dry-land grain; teff is also endemic to the region.
Ancient cultures also existed all along the Nile, and in modern-day Ghana.

History of Africa until 1880 A.D.


Bantu expansion

Main article: Bantu expansion
It is believed by some historians that the Bantu first originated around the Benue-Cross rivers area in southeastern Nigeria and spread over Africa to the Zambia area. It should be noted here that the term "Bantu" suffers from its connection with South Africa's "apartheid" regime. Sometime in the second millennium BC, perhaps triggered by the drying of the Sahara and pressure from the migration of Saharans into the region, they were forced to expand into the rainforests of central Africa (phase i). About 1000 years afterward, they began a more rapid second phase of expansion beyond the forests into southern and eastern Africa. Then sometime in the first millennium new agricultural techniques and plants were developed in Zambia, likely imported from South East Asia via Malay speaking Madagascar. With these techniques another Bantu expansion occurred centered on this new location (phase III).

West Africa

Main article: History of West Africa
There were not many great empires in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past few millennia, especially in West Africa where important trade routes and good agricultural land allowey large countries to develop. These included the Nok, Mali Empire, Oba of Benin, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the Fulani Empire, the Dahomey, Oyo, Aro confederacy, The Efik/Ibibio/Annang Kingdom of the Coastal Southeastern Nigeria Efik, Ibibio, Annang, the Ashanti Empire, and the Songhai Empire.
Also common in the region were loose federations of city-states such as those of the Yoruba and Hausa.

Trans-Saharan trade

Main article: Trans-Saharan trade
Trade between Mediterranean countries and West Africa across the Sahara Desert, was an important trade pattern from the eighth century until the late sixteenth century. This trade was conducted by caravans of Arabian camels. These camels would be fattened for a number of months on the plains of either the Maghreb or the Sahel before being assembled into caravans.

Central Africa

Main article: Early Congolese history
First settled by Pygmies, Central Africa was later settled by Bantu groups, forming the basis for ethnic affinities and rivalries in the present day. Several Bantu kingdoms — notably those of the Kongo, the Loango, and the Teke — built trade links leading into the Congo River basin. The first European contacts came in the late 16th century, and commercial relationships were quickly established with the kingdoms —trading for slaves captured in the interior. The coastal area was a major source for the transatlantic slave trade, and when that commerce ended in the early 19th century, the power of the Bantu kingdoms eroded.
and erected magnificent The Mandara kingdom in present day Cameroon was founded around 1500fortified structures, the purpose and exact history of which is still unresolved. The Aro Confederacy of Nigeria, had presence in Western Cameroon due to migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the late 1770s and early 1800s, the Fulani, a pastoral Islamic people of the western Sahel, conquered most of what is now northern Cameroon, subjugating or displacing its largely non-Muslim inhabitants.
The Central African Republic is believed to have been settled from at least the 7th century on by overlapping empires, including the Kanem-Bornu, Ouaddai, Baguirmi, and Dafour groups based around Lake Chad region and along Upper Nile. Later, various sultanates claimed present-day C.A.R, using the entire Oubangui region as a slave reservoir, from which slaves were traded north across the Sahara. Population migration in the 18th and 19th centuries brought new migrants into the area, including the Zande, Banda, and Baya-Mandjia.

Southern Africa

Main articles: History of South Africa and History of Zimbabwe
Large political units were uncommon but there were exceptions, most notably Great Zimbabwe and the Zulu Empire. It is supposed by some historians that (perhaps around 1,000 AD) the Bantu expansion had reached modern day Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe historians find what is believed to be the first major southern hemisphere empire. With its capital at Great Zimbabwe, it controlled trading routes from South Africa to north of the Zambezi, trading gold, copper, precious stones, animal hides, ivory and metal goods with the Swahili coast.
It has been seen that Portugal took no steps to acquire the southern part of the continent. To the Portuguese the Cape of Good Hope was simply a landmark on the road to India, and mariners of other nations who followed in their wake used Table Bay only as a convenient spot wherein to refit on their voyage to the East. By the beginning of the 17th century the bay was much resorted to for this purpose, chiefly by British and Dutch vessels.
In 1620, wanting to forestall the Dutch, two officers of the British East India Company, on their own initiative, took possession of Table Bay in the name of King James, fearing otherwise that British ships would be "frustrated of watering but by license." Their action was not approved in London and the proclamation they issued remained without effect. The Netherlands profited by the apathy of the British. On the advice of sailors who had been shipwrecked in Table Bay the Netherlands East India Company, in 1651, sent out a fleet of three small vessels under Jan van Riebeeck which reached Table Bay on the April 6, 1652 when, 164 years after its discovery, the first permanent white settlement was made in South Africa. The Portuguese, whose power in Africa was already waning, were not in a position to interfere with the Dutch plans, and Britain was content to seize the island of Saint Helena as a halfway house to the East. Until the Dutch landed, the southern tip of Africa was inhabited by a sparse Khoisan speaking culture including both Bushmen (hunter-gatherers) and Khoi (herders). Europeans found it a paradise for their temperate crop suites.
In its inception the settlement at the Cape was not intended to become an African colony, but was regarded as the most westerly outpost of the Dutch East Indies. Nevertheless, despite the paucity of ports and the absence of navigable rivers, the Dutch colonists, including Huguenots who had fled France, gradually spread northward.

Ethiopia

Main articles: History of Ethiopia and Nubia
Ethiopia had centralized rule for many millennia and the Aksumite Kingdom, which developed there, had created a powerful regional trading empire (with trade routes going as far as India).
At the period of her greatest power, Portugal also had close relations/alliances with Ethiopia. In the ruler of Ethiopia (to whose dominions a Portuguese traveller had penetrated before Vasco da Gama's memorable voyage) the Portuguese imagined they had found the legendary Christian king, Prester John for whom they had long been searching. A few decades later, the very existence of a Christian Ethiopia was threatened by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi of Adal, backed by Ottoman cannons and muskets, while the Ethiopians possessed but a few muskets and cannons. With the aid of 400 Portuguese musketmen under Cristóvão da Gama during 1541–1543, the Ethiopians were able to defeat the Imam the Portuguese were expelled from the Ethiopian dominions and Emperor and preserve the Solomonic dynasty. After da Gama's time, Portuguese Jesuits travelled to Ethiopia in hopes of converting the populace from Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. While they failed in their efforts to convert the Ethiopians to Roman Catholicism (though Emperor Susenyos did so briefly), they acquired an extensive knowledge of the country. Pedro Paez in 1605 and, 20 years later, Jerónimo Lobo, both visited the sources of the Blue Nile. In the 1660sFasilides ordered all of the books of the "Franks" burnt in 1665. At this time Portuguese influence on the Zanzibar coast faded before the power of the Arabs of Muscat, and by 1730 no point on the east coast north of Cabo Delgado was held by Portugal.

East Africa

Main article: Swahili people
Historically, the Swahili could be found as far north as Mogadishu in Somalia, and as far south as Rovuma River in Mozambique. Although once believed to be the descendants of Persian colonists, the ancient Swahili are now recognized by most historians, historical linguists, and archaeologists as a Bantu people who had sustained and important interactions with Muslim merchants beginning in the late 7th and early 8th century AD. By the 1100s the Swahili emerged as a distinct and powerful culture, focused around a series of coastal trading towns, the most important of which was Kilwa. Ruins of this golden age still survive.
One region that saw considerable state formation due to its high population and agricultural surplus was the Great Lakes region where states such as Rwanda, Burundi, and Buganda became strongly centralized.
Neglecting the comparatively poor and thinly inhabited regions of South Africa, the Portuguese no sooner discovered than they coveted the flourishing cities held by Muslim, Swahili-speaking people between Sofala and Cape Guardafui. By 1520 the southern Muslim sultanates had been seized by Portugal, Moçambique being chosen as the chief city of Portugal's East African possessions. Nor was colonial activity confined to the coastlands. The lower and middle Zambezi valley was explored by the Portuguese during the 16th and 17th centuries), and here they found tribes who had been for many years in contact with the coastal regions. Strenuous efforts were made to obtain possession of the country (modern Zimbabwe) known to them as the kingdom or empire of Monomotapa, where gold had been worked from about the 12th century, and whence the Arabs, whom the Portuguese dispossessed, were still obtaining supplies in the 16th century. Several expeditions were despatched inland from 1569 onward and considerable quantities of gold were obtained. Portugal's hold on the interior, never very effective, weakened during the 17th century, and in the middle of the 18th century ceased with the abandonment of their forts in the Manica district.

European exploration

Main article: European exploration of Africa
During the fifteenth century Prince Henry "the Navigator," son of King John i, planned to acquire African territory for Portugal. Under his inspiration and direction Portuguese navigators began a series of voyages of exploration which resulted in the circumnavigation of Africa and the establishment of Portuguese sovereignty over large areas of the coastlands.
Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Verde in 1445, and by 1480 the whole Guinea coast was known to the Portuguese. In 1482 Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo, the Cape of Good Hope was rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama, after having rounded the Cape, sailed up the east coast, touched at Sofala and Malindi, and went from there to India. Portugal claimed sovereign rights wherever its navigators landed, but these were not exercised in the extreme south of the continent.
was dotted with forts and " The Guinea coast, as the nearest to Europe, was first exploited. Numerous European forts and trading stations were established, the earliest being São Jorge da Mina (Elmina), begun in 1482. The chief commodities dealt in were slaves, gold, ivory and spices. The European discovery of America (1492) was followed by a great development of the slave trade, which, before the Portuguese era, had been an overland trade almost exclusively confined to Muslim Africa. The lucrative nature of this trade and the large quantities of alluvial gold obtained by the Portuguese drew other nations to the Guinea coast. English mariners went there as early as 1553, and they were followed by Spaniards, Dutch, French, Danish and other adventurers. Colonial supremacy along the coast passed in the 17th century from Portugal to the Netherlands and from the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries to France and Britain. The whole coast from Senegal to Lagosfactories" of rival European powers, and this international patchwork persisted into the 20th century although all the West African hinterland had become either French or British territory.
Southward from the mouth of the Congo to the region of Damaraland (in what is present-day Namibia), the Portuguese, from 1491 onward, acquired influence over the inhabitants, and in the early part of the 16th century through their efforts Christianity was largely adopted in the Kongo Empire. An incursion of tribes from the interior later in the same century broke the power of this semi-Christian state, and Portuguese activity was transferred to a great extent farther south, São Paulo de Loanda (present-day Luanda) being founded in 1576. Before Angolan independence in 1975, the sovereignty of Portugal over this coastal region, except for the mouth of the Congo, had been only once challenged by a European power, the Dutch, from 1640 to 1648 in which Portugal lost control of the seaports.



Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century
Nigeria; Benin
Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1972 (1978.412.323)
Mask;Iyabo,16-19 yuzyil
Nigeria;Benin




Gabon or Equatorial Guinea; Fang, Okak group
Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1965 (1978.412.441)
Kadin figüri
Gabon yada Gine,1965



Figure: Seated Couple, 16th–19th century
Mali; Dogon
Gift of lester Wunderma 1977
Oturan cift, 16-19 yuzyil
Lester wunderma nin hediyesi 1977