ALC GEOGRAPHY
History of Sub-Saharan Africa
*The
oldest known civilisation in Africa was that of Egypt, which appeared
about 3100 BC. Although it was more involved in the Middle East
and the Mediterranean world than with Sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt did
have contact with the civilisation of Kush.
*The area known as Kush, or Nubia, was around the Upper Nile (in what
is now Sudan), and was inhabited by a series of city-states and
kingdoms since at least 2600 BC. Eventually Kush extended farther
south, to take advantage of iron deposits and wood to fuel blast
furnaces and become one of the first major users of iron in Africa.
*Eventually, parts of Kush (or Nubia) were taken over by the Roman
Empire, and the last remnants were probably conquered by the Kingdom of
Axum (based in northern Ethiopia) around 350 AD.
*The Kingdom of Axum began about 500 BC, and lasted until about 1200
AD, although most later Emperors of Ethiopia (including the current
royal house in exile since 1974) claimed descent from the Kings of
Axum, and through them, from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
*The majority of the Kingdom of Axum converted to Christianity about
325 AD, and Ethiopia has remained a traditionally Christian nation
since then although most of the countries around it later were
converted to Islam.
*Except for a brief period between 1936 and 1941, Ethiopia would remain
an independent country, and often a very important on in African
politics, although drought, poverty, and civil wars have changed this
since the 1970s.
*In the 700s and 800s, Islam began to spread to Africa, both across the
Sahara Desert and along the east coast of Africa, as Moslem traders
carried their religion with them. By the 1200s and 1300s, Islam
was widespread in much of Northern and Eastern Africa.
*African Moslems and Arab traders set up many kingdoms in West Africa
and along the coast of East Africa, and grew rich from trade in gold,
spices, and slaves.
*The slave trade has always been part of African history. African
tribes had always used prisoners of war as slaves. Since the
800s, Arab traders had brought African slaves back from their missions
to Africa. In the 1500s and 1600s, Europeans began to trade with
Africa, seeking gold, ivory, cloth, and slaves. Eventually slaves
became the most important subject of European trade, with the trade
reaching its peak in the 1700s.
*The United States, one of the major importers of African slaves,
officially outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807, and Britain
banned all slave trading, and used the Royal Navy to enforce that,
although this brought it into conflict with Spain, Portugal, Brazil,
and France. Britain also created the colony of Sierra Leone as a
place to send freed slaves, and the USA created Liberia (Latin:
‘Land of the Free’) as a place to ‘colonize’ freed slaves in
Africa. During the 1800s, the former Spanish colonies of the New
World also outlawed slavery completely, as did Britain in 1833, the
United States in 1865, and Brazil in 1888. Slavery still exists
in parts of Africa today.
*In the 1800s, Africa was slowly divided up among the European
powers. Some areas had already been colonised, notably South
Africa, which had been settled by the Dutch in 1652. The British
seized South Africa in 1797.
*Many of the Dutch farmers, called Boers, resented this, and fled to
the interior in the Great Trek, where they formed two independent
republics, the Orange Free State and Transvaal. Eventually these
were taken over by Britain as well.
*The Boers, along with other settlers of Dutch descent, became known as Afrikaners, and speak their own language, Afrikaans.
*Between 1874 and 1877, Henry Morton Stanley explored the Congo River
Basin and claimed it for the King of Belgium, Leopold II. This
meant that now almost all of Africa had been at least somewhat
explored, and, with King Leopold claiming so much territory, everyone
else wanted in on it, too.
*In 1885, the great powers of Europe (as well as the United States) met
in the Berlin Conference to divide Africa among them. Britain and
France got the majority of Africa, with Britain getting much of
southern and eastern Africa, and France getting most of West
Africa. Portugal and Spain retained a few colonies along the
coasts, notably Angola and Mozambique for Portugal and Western Sahara
for Spain, although both had a number of other little islands and
enclaves. Germany was awarded what are now Togo, Cameroon,
Namibia, Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda (after World War I, most of
these would go to Britain, although South Africa would hold Namibia as
a League of Nations Mandate until 1990). Italy got parts of Libya
and Somalia. Leopold II was recognised as the legal owner of the
Congo, although eventually his agents’ mistreatment of the people there
became so infamous that he gave the Congo Free State to Belgium.
*Ethiopia remained independent, although Italy tried to take it over in
1896 (and was defeated by king Menelik II’s army) and later did take it
in 1936. Liberia was also allowed to remain independent, because
it was ruled by former American ex-slaves.
*The borders drawn at the Berlin conference (with the exception of some
in North Africa) were mostly created without regard for the existing
cultural, tribal, ethnic, or historical homelands of the African
peoples in the new colonies, so that today, many of the nations of
Africa have serious problems with ethnic tensions, and also with
irredentism (the desire of related people in different countries to be
in one united country, which often has diplomatic complications).
*By the start of World War I, Africa belonged to Europe, which was
rapidly created an extractive colonial economy there even more
pernicious than the old mercantile colonial economies of the
Americas.
*Africa existed primarily as a source of raw materials to be shipped
back to Europe, so most of Africa’s industries were based on getting
the most out of Africa’s mineral wealth, forests, and wild game.
Most roads and railroads were designed to run to major seaports, not to
link major settlements in the interior.
*Most colonies did not see large numbers of European immigrants, except
in South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Algeria (and even where they did
come, Europeans were a minority, although a politically powerful
one).
*In order to maintain their dominance, the white minority rulers of
South Africa, especially the Afrikaners, had always had segregation
laws, but slowly made them more strict and wide-ranging in the 20th
century. After WWII, beginning in 1948, this segregation was
codified as the system of Apartheid (apart-ness), which segregated
every aspect of life, even in residential and business zoning—blacks
needed passbooks to travel anywhere, even around town. The white
parts of South Africa prospered, while the Black and Coloured
(mixed-race) peoples were forced into slums called townships or onto
reservations called ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’ where they were not
even regarded as South African citizens.
*In the rest of Africa, World War II changed things in the other
direction. As Europe relied more on its African colonies than its
Asian ones (which it had temporarily lost to Japan), Africans saw how
much they were contributing to the war effort, while also seeing how
little they were getting in return.
*After the war, many Africans (and also many Americans) felt that
Europe, which had supposedly been fighting for democracy, ought to live
up to its ideals, and allow self-government in Africa.
*After WWII, Europe was also much poorer than it had been, and while
the colonies potentially had a lot of wealth, it also cost a lot of
money to maintain and exploit those colonies. In the 1950s and
1960s, economic pressures at home and growing demands in the colonies
for independence (including some outright revolutions) led Britain and
France to begin releasing its colonies. Later Portugal, Spain,
and Belgium would do the same.
*By the 1980s, only South Africa (and its mandatory colony of Namibia)
remained under white dominance. The United Nations had already
declared Apartheid illegal, and many nations had placed embargoes
against South Africa (although Japan got along with them:
Japanese in South Africa were legally regarded as ‘honourary
Europeans).’ Still, South Africa maintained and tried to
strengthen the Apartheid regime through military force and police
violence.
*Eventually international and domestic pressure became too great, and
in a 1992 referendum, in the last all-white vote in South Africa, the
people of South Africa gave the government the authority to negotiate
with the leading African nationalist groups, notably the ANC (African
National Congress) a major Black political group. In 1994, the
first election open to all races was held, and the ANC won about 63% of
the vote.
*Today, most countries in Africa are democracies or republics, at least
in name. However, many of them are, in fact, military
dictatorships or one-party states. The nations of Africa have
frequently suffered from civil wars, with over 70 coups and 13
presidential assassinations in the 1970s and 1980s alone.
*Ethnic divisions were often made worse during the colonial period, as
ethnic groups were split up or forced together by colonial boundaries,
and as some colonial powers tried to classify their subjects by race or
tribe.
*Rwanda and Burundi, for example, had a lengthy period of ethnic
cleansing in the 1990s, as the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, two groups that
had been relatively peaceful before the colonial period but which had
grown apart under Belgian rule (when Tutsi were given more prestige),
made war upon one another, killing at least 800,000 people (mostly
Tutsis and some Hutus who opposed the murder) in 1994 in the Rwandan
Genocide.