African history - your history
African history is a massive and intricate subject,
world-shaking events have shaped the continent’s history,
from the early men and women who left their footsteps in volcanic
ash to the liberation of Nelson Mandela,
and a whole lot of wars, conquests, civilisations and revolutions in between.
All leading to today's Africa where you’ll find modern
high-rise cities, international business but still,
untouched rural areas, not to mention the wild life.
Enjoy a morning coffee in silence,
overlooking the water hole which is the natural
meeting point for all animals.
If you haven’t seen a hippo in the water outside a zoo,
well, you’re not done with your bucket list yet.
Human origins & migrations
Let’s start where it all started.
You’ve probably heard the claim that Africa is ‘the birthplace of humanity’.
But before there were humans, or even apes, or even ape ancestors,
Africa is the oldest and most enduring landmass in the world.
When you stand on African soil,
97% of what’s under your feet has been in place for more than
300 million years.
During that time, Africa has seen pretty much everything –
all leading to dinosaurs and finally,
around five to 10 million years ago, a special kind of ape
called Australopithecines, that branched off (or rather let go of the branch),
and walked on two legs down a separate evolutionary track.
This radical move led to the development of various hairy,
dim-witted hominids (early men) – Homo habilis around 2.4 million years ago,
Homo erectus some 1.8 million years
ago and finally Homo sapiens (modern humans) around 200 000 years ago.
Around 50 000 years later, somewhere in Tanzania or Ethiopia,
a woman was born who has
become known as ‘mitochondrial Eve’.
We don’t know what she looked like, or how she lived her life,
but we do know that every single human being alive today is descended from her.
So at a deep genetic level, we’re all still Africans.
The break from Africa into the wider world occurred around 100 000 years ago,
when a group numbering perhaps as few as 50 people migrated out of North Africa,
along the shores of the Mediterranean and into the Middle East.
From this inauspicious start came a population
that would one day cover almost every landmass on the globe.
Around the time that people were first venturing outside the continent,
hunting and gathering was still the lifestyle of choice;
humans lived in communities that rarely exceeded
a couple of hundred individuals, and social bonds were formed
to enable these small bands of people to share food resources and hunt co-operatively.
With the evolution of language,
these bonds blossomed into the beginnings of society and culture as we know it today.
The first moves away from the nomadic hunter–gatherer way of life
came between 14 000 BC and 9500 BC,
a time when rainfall was high
and the Sahara and North Africa became verdant.
It was in these green and pleasant lands that the
first farmers were born, and mankind learned to cultivate crops
rather than following prey animals from place to place.
By 2500 BC the rains began to fail
and the sandy barrier between North and West Africa became the Sahara we know today.
People began to move southwest into the
rainforests of Central Africa.
By this time a group of people speaking the same kind of languages
had come to dominate the landscape in Africa south of the Sahara.
Known as the Bantu, their populations grew as they discovered iron-smelting technology
and developed new agricultural techniques.
By 100 BC, Bantu peoples had reached East Africa;
by AD 300 they were living in southern Africa, and the age of the African empires had begun.
Victorian missionaries liked to think they were bringing
the beacon of ‘civilisation’ to the ‘savages’ of Africa,
but the truth is that Africans were developing commercial empires
and complex urban societies
while Europeans were still running after wildlife with clubs.
Many of these civilisations were small and short-lived,
but others were truly great,
with influence that reached far beyond Africa and into Asia and Europe.
Pyramids of power
Arguably the greatest of the African empires was the first: Ancient Egypt.
Formed through an amalgamation of already organised states in the Nile Delta around 3100 BC,
it achieved an amazing degree of cultural and social sophistication.
Sophisticated food-production techniques from the Sahara
combined with influences from the Middle East to
form a society in which the Pharaohs,
a race of kings imbued with the power of gods,
sat at the top of a highly stratified social hierarchy.
The annual flooding of the Nile kept
the lands of the Pharaohs fertile and
fed their legions of slaves and artisans,
who in turn worked to produce
some of the most amazing public buildings ever constructed.
Many of these, like the Pyramids of Giza, are still standing today.
During the good times, which lasted nearly 3000 years,
Egyptians discovered the principals of mathematics and
astronomy, invented a written language and mined gold.
Ancient Egypt was eventually overrun by the
Nubian Empire, then by the Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great and finally the Romans.
The Nubians retained control of a great swathe of the Lower Nile Valley,
despite getting a spanking from the Ethiopian empire of Aksum around AD 500.
Established in Tunisia by a mysterious race
of seafaring people called the Phoenicians
(little is known about their origins,
but they probably hailed from Tyre in modern-day Lebanon),
the city-state of Carthage filled the power gap
left by the fading empire of Ancient Egypt.
By the 6th century BC, Carthage controlled much of the local sea trade,
their ships sailing to and from the Mediterranean ports laden with cargos of dye,
cedar wood and precious metals.
Back on land, scholars were busy inventing the Phoenician
alphabet, from which Greek, Hebrew and Latin letters are all thought to derive.
All this came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the Romans,
who razed Carthage to the ground (despite the best efforts of the mighty warrior Hannibal,
Carthage’s most celebrated son) and enslaved its population in 146 BC.
A host of foreign armies swept across
North Africa in the succeeding centuries,
but it was the Arabs who had a lasting impact,
introducing Islam around AD 670.
Source: NNG Research