History of Africa


Archaic humans emerged out of Africa between 0.5 and 1.8 million years ago. This was followed by the emergence of modern humans in East Africa around 300,000–250,000 years ago. In the 4th millennium BC written history arose in Ancient Egypt, and later in Nubia's Kush, the Horn of Africa's Dʿmt, and Ifrikiya's Carthage. Between around 3000 BCE and 500 CE, the Bantu expansion swept from north-western Central Africa across much of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, displacing or absorbing groups such as the Khoisan and Pygmies. The oral word is revered in most African cultures, and history has generally been passed down through oral tradition. This has led anthropologists to term them "oral civilisations".
There were many kingdoms and empires all over the continent that rose and fell. Most states were created through conquest or the borrowing and assimilation of ideas and institutions, while others developed largely in isolation. Some African empires and kingdoms include:
Some societies were heterarchical and egalitarian, while others were organised into chiefdoms. The continent has between 1250 and 2100 languages, and at its peak it is estimated that Africa had around 10,000 polities, with most following traditional religions.
From the 7th century CE, Islam spread west amid the Arab conquest of North Africa, and by proselytization to the Horn of Africa, bringing with it a new social system. It later spread southwards to the Swahili coast assisted by Muslim dominance of the Indian Ocean trade, and across the Sahara into the western Sahel and Sudan, catalysed by the Fula jihads of the 18th and 19th centuries. Systems of servitude and slavery were historically widespread and commonplace in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient and medieval world. When the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Atlantic slave trades began, local slave systems started supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. This reorientated many African economies, and created various diasporas, especially in the Americas.
From 1870 to 1914, driven by the Second Industrial Revolution European colonisation of Africa grew rapidly in the "Scramble for Africa", and saw the major European powers partition the continent at the 1884 Berlin Conference, resulting in territory under European imperial control increasing from one-tenth of the continent to over nine-tenths. European colonialism had significant impacts on Africa's societies, and colonies were maintained for the purpose of economic exploitation of human and natural resources. Colonial historians dismissed oral traditions, claiming that Africa had no history other than that of Europeans in Africa. Pre-colonial Christian states include Ethiopia, Makuria, and Kongo. Widespread conversions to Christianity occurred under European rule in southern West Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa due to successful missions, and the syncretization of Christianity with local beliefs.
The rise of nationalism gave birth to independence movements in many parts of the continent, and with a weakened Europe after the Second World War, a wave of decolonisation took place, culminating in the 1960 Year of Africa and the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, with countries deciding to keep their colonial borders. Traditional power structures, which had been incorporated into the colonial administration, remained partly in place in many parts of Africa, and their roles, powers, and influence vary greatly. Political decolonisation was mirrored by a movement to decolonise African historiography by incorporating oral sources into a multidisciplinary approach, culminating in UNESCO publishing the General History of Africa from 1981. Many countries have experienced the rise and fall of nationalism, and continue to face challenges such as internal conflict, neocolonialism, and climate change.

History in Africa

In accordance with African cosmology, African historical consciousness viewed historical change and continuity, order and purpose within the framework of human and their environment, the gods, and their ancestors, and they believed themself part of a holistic spiritual entity. In African societies, the historical process is largely a communal one, with eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations crafted into narrative oral traditions which were performed and transmitted through generations. In oral traditions time is sometimes mythical and social, and ancestors were considered historical actors. Mind and memory shapes traditions, as events are condensed over time and crystallise into clichés. Oral tradition can be exoteric or esoteric. It speaks to people according to their understanding, unveiling itself in accordance with their aptitudes. In African epistemology, the epistemic subject "experiences the epistemic object in a sensuous, emotive, intuitive, abstractive understanding, rather than through abstraction alone, as is the case in Western epistemology" to arrive at a "complete knowledge", and as such oral traditions, music, proverbs, and the like were used in the preservation and transmission of knowledge.

Early prehistory

The first known hominids evolved in Africa. According to paleontology, the early hominids' skull anatomy was similar to that of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, great apes that also evolved in Africa, but the hominids had adopted a bipedal locomotion which freed their hands. This gave them a crucial advantage, enabling them to live in both forested areas and on the open savanna at a time when Africa was drying up and the savanna was encroaching on forested areas, which occurred sometime between about 10 million and 5 million years ago.
The fossil record shows Homo sapiens living in Africa by about 350,000–260,000 years ago. The earliest known Homo sapiens fossils include the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco, the Florisbad Skull from South Africa, and the Omo remains from Ethiopia. Scientists have suggested that Homo sapiens may have arisen between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East Africa and South Africa.
Evidence of a variety of behaviors indicative of Behavioral modernity date to the African Middle Stone Age, associated with early Homo sapiens and their emergence. Abstract imagery, widened subsistence strategies, and other "modern" behaviors have been discovered from that period in Africa, especially South, North, and East Africa.
The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, for example, is famous for rectangular slabs of ochre engraved with geometric designs. Using multiple dating techniques, the site was confirmed to be around 77,000 and 100–75,000 years old. Ostrich egg shell containers engraved with geometric designs dating to 60,000 years ago were found at Diepkloof, South Africa. Beads and other personal ornamentation have been found from Morocco which might be as much as 130,000 years old; as well, the Cave of Hearths in South Africa has yielded a number of beads dating from significantly prior to 50,000 years ago, and shell beads dating to about 75,000 years ago have been found at Blombos Cave, South Africa.
Around 65–50,000 years ago, the species' expansion out of Africa launched the colonization of the planet by modern human beings. By 10,000 BC, Homo sapiens had spread to most corners of Afro-Eurasia. Their dispersals are traced by linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence. Eurasian back-migrations, specifically West-Eurasian backflow, started in the early Holocene or already earlier in the Paleolithic period, sometimes between 30 and 15,000 years ago, followed by pre-Neolithic and Neolithic migration waves from the Middle East, mostly affecting Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and wider regions of the Sahel zone and East Africa.
Affad 23 is an archaeological site located in the Affad region of southern Dongola Reach in northern Sudan, which hosts "the well-preserved remains of prehistoric camps and diverse hunting and gathering loci some 50,000 years old".
Around 16,000 BC, from the Red Sea Hills to the northern Ethiopian Highlands, nuts, grasses and tubers were being collected for food. By 13,000 to 11,000 BC, people began collecting wild grains. This spread to Western Asia, which domesticated its wild grains, wheat and barley. Between 10,000 and 8,000 BC, Northeast Africa was cultivating wheat and barley and raising sheep and cattle from Southwest Asia.
A wet climatic phase in Africa turned the Ethiopian Highlands into a mountain forest. Omotic speakers domesticated enset around 6,500–5,500 BC. Around 7,000 BC, the settlers of the Ethiopian highlands domesticated donkeys, and by 4,000 BC domesticated donkeys had spread to Southwest Asia. Cushitic speakers, partially turning away from cattle herding, domesticated teff and finger millet between 5,500 and 3,500 BC.
During the 11th millennium BP, pottery was independently invented in Africa, with the earliest pottery there dating to about 9,400 BC from central Mali. It soon spread throughout the southern Sahara and Sahel. In the steppes and savannahs of the Sahara and Sahel in Northern West Africa, the Nilo-Saharan speakers and Mandé peoples started to collect and domesticate wild millet, African rice and sorghum between 8,000 and 6,000 BC. Later, gourds, watermelons, castor beans, and cotton were also collected and domesticated. The people started capturing wild cattle and holding them in circular thorn hedges, resulting in domestication.
They also started making pottery and built stone settlements. Fishing, using bone-tipped harpoons, became a major activity in the numerous streams and lakes formed from the increased rains. Mande peoples have been credited with the independent development of agriculture about 4,000–3,000 BC.
Evidence of the early smelting of metals lead, copper, and bronze dates from the fourth millennium BC.
Egyptians smelted copper during the predynastic period, and bronze came into use after 3,000 BC at the latest in Egypt and Nubia. Nubia became a major source of copper as well as of gold. The use of gold and silver in Egypt dates back to the predynastic period.
In the Aïr Mountains of present-day Niger people smelted copper independently of developments in the Nile valley between 3,000 and 2,500 BC. They used a process unique to the region, suggesting that the technology was not brought in from outside; it became more mature by about 1,500 BC.
By the 1st millennium BC iron working had reached Northwestern Africa, Egypt, and Nubia. Zangato and Holl document evidence of iron-smelting in the Central African Republic and Cameroon that may date back to 3,000 to 2,500 BC. Assyrians using iron weapons pushed Nubians out of Egypt in 670 BC, after which the use of iron became widespread in the Nile valley.
The theory that iron spread to Sub-Saharan Africa via the Nubian city of Meroe is no longer widely accepted, and some researchers believe that sub-Saharan Africans invented iron metallurgy independently. Metalworking in West Africa has been dated as early as 2,500 BC at Egaro west of the Termit in Niger, and iron working was practiced there by 1,500 BC. Iron smelting has been dated to 2,000 BC in southeast Nigeria. Central Africa provides possible evidence of iron working as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Iron smelting developed in the area between Lake Chad and the African Great Lakes between 1,000 and 600 BC, and in West Africa around 2,000 BC, long before the technology reached Egypt. Before 500 BC, the Nok culture in the Jos Plateau was already smelting iron. Archaeological sites containing iron-smelting furnaces and slag have been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in Igboland: dating to 2,000 BC at the site of Lejja and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi. The site of Gbabiri has also yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896–773 BC and 907–796 BC respectively.