A Great Oral Tradition
The European colonial powers called
Africa “the Dark Continent” when
they began their explorations. They
saw it as a vast and dangerous place
filled with savage people, but Africa
has been home to many advanced,
exotic civilizations. Many have been
buried beneath the sands of time, but
we know of others, and archaeologists
continue to uncover more clues about
ancient African civilizations.
West Africa has a great oral tradition.
A griot is a learned storyteller,
entertainer, and historian. Often a griot
will memorize the genealogy, or
family history, of everyone in a village going back centuries.
American writer Alex Haley met a griot in 1966 that had
memorized the entire story of the village of Juffure to a date two
centuries in the past when his ancestor was enslaved.
“The old griot had talked for nearly two hours up to then
. . . ‘the oldest of these fours sons, Kunta, went away
from his village and he was never seen again’ . . . I sat
as if I were carved of stone. My blood seemed to have
congealed. This man whose lifetime had been in this
back-country African village had no way in the world to know that
he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years
on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee.”
--Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Dell, 1976.
Page 719.
A great deal of what we know about West Africa comes from the
griots, but archaeologists are often surprised by new finds. In the
last twenty-five years, scholars have concluded that civilization
developed in West Africa as much as one thousand years earlier
than expected. We now know that Africa had an Iron Age culture
with cities and trade routes about 250 years Before the Common
Era.
The Nok
In 1928, archaeologists unearthed artifacts from an
amazing culture that flourished from about 500BC to
AD200. The archaeologists referred to the ancient
culture as the Nok, the name of a modern Nigerian
village where they made their discovery.
The Nok artifacts included sculptures of animals and
people made of terra cotta, or fired clay. The
complex Nok sculptures were probably based on
woodcarvings, but any wooden artifacts would have disintegrated
long ago in the humid climate of West Africa. This
leads archaeologists to believe that the Nok
civilization may have been much older than even the
oldest artifact.
The Nok discovered that by heating certain rocks
they were able to “smelt” iron. Iron is very malleable,
so it can be reshaped to make weapons and plows.
Most ancient cultures discovered copper and bronze
before iron, but the Nok apparently moved directly
from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
The Phoenicians and
Carthage
The Phoenicians came from
the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea in land we
now call Lebanon. Their
homeland was arid and
inhospitable for farming, so
the Phoenicians turned to the
sea to become the greatest
travelers and traders of their
time. The Phoenicians
invented the alphabet, and taught several cultures their advanced
system of writing.
The Phoenicians built a trading post in North Africa they called
Carthage. The Phoenicians chose Carthage because it was located
in the center of North Africa, a short distance away from Sicily and
the Italian Peninsula. When the Assyrians and the Persians
conquered the original homel and of the Phoenicians, Carthage
became an independent state.
Carthage grew to become one of the mightiest cities of the ancient
world, but the city was destroyed after three brutal wars with the
Italian city-state of Rome. The wars were known as the Punic Wars
because Puncia was the Roman name for Carthage. The Roman
navy surprised the sea trading people in the first war in 238BC. The
Carthaginians acquired a new base in Spain from which a great
military leader named Hannibal led a team of elephants across
southern France and into Italy. Hannibal won some early victories
but his forces were outnumbered, allowing Rome to win brutal
fifteen year war that ended 204BC.
Carthage lost all political and
military power by the end of the
second Punic War, but the
Romans moved a half-century
later to destroy what was left of
the city. The Roman army did
not attempt to break down the
walls surrounding Carthage, but
they did surround the city and
put a three years siege on
Carthage. Finally, in 146BC, the
Romans broke through
Carthage’s city walls, and went
from house to house slaughtering
the Carthaginians. The few survivors were sold into slavery, the
city and harbor were destroyed, and the Romans poured salt over
the farmland to ensure its barrenness.
Trade
The civilizations that
flourished in ancient
West Africa were all
based on trade, so
successful West African
leaders tended to be
peace makers rather
than warriors. Caravans
from North Africa
crossed the Sahara
beginning in the seventh century of the Common Era. Gold from
West Africa was exchanged for something the West Africans
prized even more: salt. Salt was used as a flavoring, a food
preservative, and for retaining body moisture.
The first people to make the trek across the desert were the Berbers
of North Africa, who brought their strict Islamic faith across the
Sahara. The Berbers converted many of the merchants of West Afr
beliefs. The ancient West Africans, like Native Americans and the
Sumerians, believed that many gods existed in nature. They did not
accept the Muslim belief in one God.
Merchants and traders in West Africa saw many
advantages in converting to Islam
* Literacy spread because belief in Islam encourages Muslims to
learn the Quran.
* Many Muslims speak Arabic, the language of the Quran. In
time, Arabic became the common language of the merchants and
traders of West Africa.
* Strict Muslims follow Islamic law. It is easier to solve disputes
when both parties agree on the laws.
* Conversion to Islam opened up new trading possibilities across
North Africa and in Arabia. Many Muslims journey to Mecca at
least once. This encouraged them to meet new people and discover
new cultures.
Ghana
An ancient African civilization we
call Ghana existed in West Africa
between the Niger and the Gambia
Rivers from about AD300 to about
1100. The rivers were important to
Ghana because its economy was
based on trade, and before the modern
age, rivers were the fastest way to
carry goods. Ghana became wealthy
by collecting taxes from traders who
passed through the kingdom. The
people called their nation Wagadu; we know it as Ghana because
that was the name of their war chief.
Ghana managed the gold trade despite having few natural
resources of its own. The gold and salt mines all lay beyond the
borders of the empire, but the power of Ghana was based on the
superior skill of their people in working with iron. Ghanaian
warriors used iron tipped spears to subdue the neighbors, who
fought with less efficient weapons made of stone, bone, and wood.
Muslim warriors known as Almoravids called a jihad (“struggle”
in Arabic) on Ghana because the Ghanaian people kept their
traditional beliefs and refused to accept Islam. The Almoravids
were successful in weakening Ghana, but the empire continued to
exist for more than a century. Many local warriors throughout the
formerly mighty kingdom formed small states that threatened the
vital trade routes through West Africa.
The people south of the Sahara Desert had
little contact with the rest of the world.
• The Sahara Desert is hot and dry. It was almost impossible to
cross without modern transportation.
• The few rivers that flow from sub-Saharan Africa contain many
high waterfalls that make travel difficult.
• Both the sub-Saharan Africans and the people north of the desert
were fearful of venturing into the ocean.
• The tsetse flies that live on the edge of the desert carry deadly
diseases.
Sundiata
The griots of West Africa still tell the 700 year old story of a sickly
boy named Sundiata,
who grew up to become
a great warrior,
expelled a brutal
warrior, and united the
Mandinka people.
Samanguru was a tyrant
who ruled the small
state of Kaniaga, but he
managed to conquer a
great deal of West
Africa. Samanguru was
hostile to the Mandinka
people who lived in the
region. His taxes were high, he felt it was his privilege to carry off
Mandinka women, and he failed to maintain law and order along
the trade routes that once prospered in ancient Ghana.
Sundiata was one of twelve brothers who were the children of a
Mandinka warrior. Samanguru killed eleven of the brothers, but
spared Sundiata because he believed the boy would soon die
anyway. That mistake would lead to Samanguru’s downfall. The ill
child boy recovered and eventually assembled an army to confront
Samanguru. Sundiata’s forces killed Samanguru and destroyed his
forces in the Battle of Kirina in 1235. Sundiata then became
mansa, or king, of a new empire that we know today as Mali. Mali
means “where the king resides.”
Sundiata proved himself a great warrior, but he was less interested
in power than in once again making West Africa a safe place to
travel and trade. He converted to Islam, but only as a gesture of
goodwill to the merchants and traders. To his own people, Sundiata
presented himself as a champion of traditional West African
religion.
Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa captured
the attention of the
Arab world when he
left his home in the
West African kingdom
of Mali to make a
pilgrimage to Mecca
in 1324. Unlike his
grandfather Sundiata,
Mansa Musa was a
devout Muslim. Islamic law requires that all faithful Muslims
make a hajj, or holy visit, to the city on the Arabian Peninsula
where the faith was started.
Mansa Musa was a very rich king. He was said to have taken more
than 500 people with him on the hajj, each carrying a staff of solid
gold. When Mansa Musa passed through Cairo, legends say he
gave away so much gold that the price of it fell and the economy
was affected for more than twenty years. The appearance of a
wealthy king from a faraway land made a deep impression on the
people he encountered, causing Mali to appear on maps throughout
the Middle East and Europe. For the first time, sub-Saharan Africa
became well known north of the Sahara Desert for the first time.
The kingdom of Mali eventually weakened and the neighboring
kingdom of Songhai developed into the last black empire of precolonial West Africa. Songhai was destroyed after a bloody war
with Morocco. Morocco’s sultan wanted West African gold, so in
1590, he sent an army of 3000 men south across the Sahara Desert.
The spears and lances of the Songhai warriors were no match for
the cannons and muskets of the Moroccan army, but the fighting
continued long after the Songhai government had been destroyed.
After ten years, the Sultan lost interest and abandoned his army in
Songhai. The Moroccan soldiers were either killed or absorbed into
the local population. The Moroccan invasion destroyed Songhai,
and with it the trade routes that had brought prosperity to the
region for hundreds of years.
Timbuktu
No name brings the splendor ancient
Africa to mind more than Timbuktu, a
great city that flourished on a bend in
the Niger River for more than four
hundred years. Timbuktu was at the end of the camel caravan route
that linked sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Arabia. Gold,
ivory, and kola nuts passed through Timbuktu, but the most
important commodity was salt. Timbuktu was located near several
salt mines. Caravans hauled salt from nearby mines to trade for
gold.
Timbuktu began as a trading city,
but in time the developed into the
intellectual and spiritual center of
West Africa. By 1330, Timbuktu
became part of the kingdom of
Mali. Mansa Musa built a great
mosque, or Islamic temple, in
Timbuktu. The mosque attracted
scholars from as far away as
Saudi Arabia.
Timbuktu began to decline in
influence when the Portuguese showed that it was easier to sail
around the coast of Africa than travel through the desert. The city
was destroyed at the end of the sixteenth century by the war
between Morocco and Songhai. At one time, historians estimate
that more than 100,000
people lived in Timbuktu, but
today it remains a shadow of
its former self, a mud-built
town of 20,000 people on the
edge of the Sahara Desert.
Zimbabwe
The Karanga people
ruled a great inland
African empire from
about AD1000 to
AD1600. The Karanga
were traders and sailors
who smelted gold and
traded it on the shores of the Indian Ocean for glass beads and
porcelain from as far away as China. European explorers
discovered vast stone ruins of the Karanga in 1867. The site of the
ruins was called Zimbabwe, which means “stone dwelling” in the
native Bantu language of the region.
The ruins seem to have been the
spiritual and religious center of a
city of perhaps as many as 20,000
people. The sixty-acre site is situated
atop a high plateau. Its builders used
granite and other stones to form
walls up to thirty-six feet high and
twenty feet thick. Evidence suggests
that the structure was built in the
tenth century and abandoned about
five hundred years later.
Many Europeans were unwilling to
believe that sub-Saharan Africans
could have built anything as grand
as Zimbabwe; they theorized that
ancient Phoenicians, Arabs,
Romans, or Hebrews created the
structures. British museum director Richard Hall destroyed
portions of the site in an unsuccessful attempt to prove that it had
been built by a foreign civilization. Later excavations in by
archaeologists David Randall-MacIver and Gertrude CatonThompson proved that the Africans created the ruins.
The European colonial government of Rhodesia attempted to deny
the Great Zimbabwe’s African origin. The leaders of Rhodesia
argued the land was empty of people and culture before they
arrived. When the government allowed people of all races to vote
in 1980, the black majority Rhodesia discarded their colonial name
and, looking to the past for nobler origins, chose to rename their
nation Zimbabwe.
Prince Henry the
Navigator
Prince Henry the Navigator seldom left
Portugal, but he helped make it possible for
the first Europeans to explore Africa. In
Henry’s time, the ocean was very
dangerous and Africa was a mysterious
place that seemed to contain endless miles
of sand. Today we know this sand as the
Sahara Desert. Although it isn’t endless, the
Sahara is the largest desert in the world. On
the other side of the Sahara were many
great cultures that were isolated from the
rest of the world.
Henry wanted to find a water route to India. The passage to India
over land was long, slow, and dangerous. A ship could carry more
goods to and from India than the largest caravans, but Europeans
could only guess that sailors could circumnavigate, or go around,
Africa.
Prince Henry helped unlock the secrets of Africa. Henry set up a
school for sailors to learn the secrets of the ocean. He paid for
many sailing expeditions out of the Portuguese treasury. Henry
also employed cartographers who created the most sophisticated
maps of their time. The maps made it possible for sailors to learn
from previous expeditions.
Henry was a visionary. A visionary is someone who can imagine
something that hasn’t yet happened. Henry owned a globe when
many people believed the world was flat. He knew that Africa was
more than endless land, and that if his sailors could circumnavigate
the continent; he would find a water route to India.
When Henry died in 1460, his sailors had
only reached as far as the Canary Islands in
West Africa. Twenty-eight years later,
Bartholomeu Dias proved that Africa could
be circumnavigated when he reached the
southern tip of the continent. This is now
known as the “Cape of Good Hope.” In
1499, Vasco da Gama was the first sailor to
travel from Portugal to India. Just a few
years earlier, Queen Isabella of Spain hired
a sailor from Genoa to reach India by
sailing west. It wasn’t until years later that
anyone understood that the “Indians” he
encountered weren’t from India after all.
Maafa
Maafa is a Kiswahili
term for "disaster" or
"terrible occurrence.” It
is used to describe more
than five hundred years
of exploitation of Africa
through slavery,
colonialism, and
imperialism. A colony
is a settlement in one land supported by another land, and
imperialism is the practice of building empires to support trade.
The barbarous “triangle trade” began shortly after Europeans
began exploring the west coast of Africa. Ships leaving Europe
first stopped in Africa where they traded weapons, ammunition,
metal, liquor, and cloth for captives
taken in wars or raids. The ships then
traveled to America, where slaves were
exchanged for sugar, rum, salt, and
other island products. The ships
completed the triangle loaded with
products popular with the European
people, and were ready to begin their
journey again.
The Europeans explored the interior of
Africa to expand trade. By the 1880s a
“scramble for Africa” occurred. Five
European powers--Britain, France,
Germany, Belgium, and Italy colonized
almost the entire continent by 1900.
They exploited the great mineral wealth of Africa and sought to
expand their borders by moving into the continent.
The colonial rulers were often cruel and had little regard for the
Africans. King Leopold II of Belgium obtained personal title to the
Congo in central Africa. He forced the native people to work under
cruel conditions in his rubber plants. Every village was required to
donate four people a year to work for Leopold. Villagers who
failed to complete their duties were flogged; others had their hands
or their heads cut off. When the Belgian government learned what
was happening, they took Leopold’s grotesque colony from him
and made reforms. France attempted to annex Algeria in the 1830s,
but made little effort to understand the Muslim Berbers who lived
there. The Algerians resisted, often violently. The French finally
withdrew from the colony in 1962 after the Algerians voted
6,000,000 to 16,000 to ask the French to leave.
The End of African Colonialism
Colonialism ended surprisingly quickly and quietly in most of Africa after World
War II. The British granted Gold Coast independence in 1957. The indigenous
government of the former colony reached into Africa’s glorious past to rename
itself Ghana. These factors contributed to the end of colonialism in Africa:
• Mohandas Gandhi’s successful campaign to end British colonial rule in India
inspired many African leaders.
• The United States and the Soviet Union became military “superpower” nations
after the war. Both sides sought to influence Africa by encouraging nationalist
movements.
• The colonial governments educated an elite class of Africans in western
universities. The educated Africans saw how the colonial rulers exploited their
nations.
• Much of Europe’s economy was destroyed in the Second World War, and the
European governments could not afford to send armies to Africa to suppress
nationalist movements.
The Missionaries
Africa has more than 250 million Christians,
making Christianity the second most prevalent
faith on the continent. Africans learned of the faith
through devout Christians who traveled to Africa
on a mission to teach their religion. The
missionaries did more than share their faith; they
also taught the African people modern science and
medicine.
David Livingstone was the most famous African missionary.
Livingstone first planned to become a medical missionary in
China, but the Opium Wars made China a bad place for a
westerner with good intentions. Livingston turned instead to Africa
and, after a four-month journey, landed in Cape Town, in modern
South Africa, in 1841.
Livingstone treated the Africans with respect. He learned their
languages and customs and explored a great portion of the
continent. Livingstone believed the best way to share his faith with
the Africans was to teach them about the outside
world. Livingstone supported his missionary
work by writing books about his travels.
Livingstone was a very religious man who was
appalled by the way the Dutch and Portuguese
colonists treated the African people. His writings
told the world about the slave trade, which
Livingstone called “the open sore of Africa.”
When he died in 1873, most of his body was
returned to England, but Livingstone’s many
friends buried his heart in Africa.
Liberia
Liberia is a West African nation
originally founded by freed slaves
from the American South
between 1820 and 1865. President
James Monroe’s administration
furnished the funds for the
freedmen and is honored by
Liberia’s capital city: Monrovia.
Liberia is unique among African
nations in that a colonial government has never controlled it.
The former slaves subjugated the indigenous Mande, Kwa, and
Mel people in the same manner that white colonists later did. A
ruling class of “Americo-Liberians” dominated the government,
despite comprising less than three percent of the population. The
last Americo-Liberian leader, William R. Tolbert, was the
grandson of freed South American slaves. He was believed to have
stolen about $200 million dollars from the Liberian treasury.
Tolbert was killed in a 1980 coup led by Samuel K. Doe, the first
of several military dictators who opposed the privilege of the
Americo-Liberians. Doe
brutally ruled Liberia for ten
years until being killed by rebel
forces in a civil war. A civil war
is a war within a nation, as
opposed to a war with other
nations. Liberia’s civil war
lasted from 1989 to 2003, when
another military strongman
Charles Taylor, fled the the
nation. Civil strife has destroyed much of Liberia's economy and
caused business people to leave the nation. Liberia’s recent history
is a sad chapter for a nation whose founding was steeped in
freedom.
The Boers
In 1652, a group of Europeans
settled in South Africa. These
settlers came to be known as Boers
because Boer is the Dutch word for
farmer. The Boers thought that their
new home was empty, but it was a
homeland for nomadic Bantu people.
Nomads travel from place to place in search of food. They need a
large area to dwell in because they do not cultivate crops. The
Bantus attempted to fight for their land, but their spears were no
match for the Europeans’ guns. The Boers enslaved many of the
Bantus and forced them to work on the colonists’ farms.
Great Britain assumed control of South Africa in 1795, after the
Napoleonic Wars in Europe. The Dutch settlers were unhappy with
British rule and became even angrier when the British outlawed
slavery in 1835. The British government paid owners for their
slaves, but the Boers complained the payments were too small. The
British outlawed slavery twenty-three years before the United
States. Gold and diamonds were discovered in South Africa in
1867, causing a large number of people from Great Britain to move
to the colony. Tensions between the parties led to the “Boer Wars”
from 1899 to 1902, where the British soundly defeated the Boers.
Apartheid
British granted South Africa
independence in 1910, but gave
power only to white people. In
1948, the National Party gained
office in an election where only
white people were allowed to
vote. The party began a policy
of racial segregation known as
apartheid, which means
“apartness.”
The Population Registration Act classified the people as Bantu
(black Africans), coloured (people of mixed race), white (the
descendants of the Boers and the British), and Asian (Indian and
Pakistani immigrants).
The Group Areas Act established separate sections for each race.
Members of other races were forbidden to live, work, or own land
in areas belonging to other races. Pass
Laws required non-whites to carry a
“pass” to prove they had permission to
travel in white areas.
The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act
created several small “nations” within
South Africa for black South Africans.
All black South Africans, regardless of
where they lived, were made citizens of
the homelands and thus were excluded
from participating in the governing of South Africa.
Other South African laws forbade most social contacts between
races, authorized segregated public facilities, established separate
school systems with lower standards for non-whites, and restricted
each race to certain jobs.
More than eighty percent of South Africa’s land was set aside for
its white residents, despite the fact that they comprised less than
ten percent of the population. South Africa’s black majority had
resisted apartheid for many years. They began rioting in 1976,
when the South African government tried to force black children in
the Soweto township to learn Afrikaans, one of the languages of
the white minority. The rioting continued for the next fourteen
years until the apartheid laws were repealed.
The world community made South
Africa a pariah because of its racial
policies. The nation was forced to
leave the Commonwealth, an
alliance of former British colonies,
in 1961. In 1985, both the United
Kingdom and the United States
imposed restrictions on trade.
White South African yielded to world pressure and domestic
violence in 1990 by repealing most of the apartheid laws. Three
years later, a new constitution gave people of all races the right to
vote, and the following year South Africans elected a black man,
Nelson Mandela, as president.
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela led the
African National Congress,
a black liberation group that
opposed South Africa’s
white minority government
and apartheid. Mandela was
initially opposed to
violence, but after a
massacre of unarmed black
South Africans in 1962, he
began advocating acts of
sabotage against the
government.
In 1962, Mandela began a
twenty-seven year stay in
prison. Most of his
confinement was spent
during hard labor at the notorious Robben Island maximumsecurity prison.
During his imprisonment, Mandela became a symbol of the antiapartheid movement among South Africa’s black population and
among the international community that opposed apartheid.
Mandela rejected several government offers to allow him to leave
prison on the condition that he renounce violence. Mandela was
released from prison and instantly became an international
celebrity.
Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with F.W. deKlerk,
South Africa’s last white president. Their combined efforts ended
apartheid and brought about a peaceful transition to nonracial
democracy in South Africa.
Three years after his release, South Africans of all races were
allowed to vote for the first time in a national election. They
selected Mandela as their president, giving him 62% of the vote.
The same person who was once was a symbol of black resistance
in South Africa later eventually because the nation’s first black
president.
Mandela’s government was praised for its treatment of South
Africa’s white minorities. One white South African told our class
in 1996 that "[Mandela] has treated us better than we treated him.”
In the interviews I conducted over the Internet in the late 1990s, no
South African of any race had kind words for apartheid. Mandela's
government had its critics. Crime increased during his term, but the
violent war between the races ended. Every South African I spoke
with said life is better today than it was before Mandela took
power.
Mandela married for the third time on his 80th birthday in 1998. A
year later he retired from the presidency. The 400-year-old prison
on Robben Island is now a museum.