By any measure, Africa’s contribution to world history is immense and diverse. From the monumental pyramids of ancient Egypt to the towering twentieth-century figures of Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan, continental Africa has produced innumerable cultural and political moments and people of great historical importance. As part of the many world systems that have ebbed and flowed over millennia, Africa has also made its mark. From the earliest geological and fossil remains; through ancient civilizations in Nubia; to the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, and the Third World Non-Aligned Movement, African men and women actively participated in the establishment of new ideas, concepts and movements. And aside from the historical record, the role of African history looms large in the development of a body of scholarship known as “world history.”
On the African continent archaeologists have found the earliest evidence of the evolution of humans. Several sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa have produced fossils of human ancestors, known as hominids, enabling anthropologists to trace the history of humans back to primates living between four and one million years ago. The earliest group, known as australopithicus, was succeeded by a larger species with tool-making skills, Homo habilis. Besides these earliest hominids, skeletal remains of Homo erectus have demonstrated that this more humanlike ancestor was responsible for the migration of primates out of Africa and into Asia and Europe. Modern man, Homo sapiens, is believed to have first appeared in Africa c.200,000 to 100,000. From tropical Africa, humans spread to all major regions of the world by 10,000. But while the basic physiology of this species is evident from fossils, direct links to the many variations of skin color and appearance of Africans and other peoples today is impossible. Because of this extensive archaeological record, continental Africa, and in particular the Great Rift Valley running through Tanzania and Kenya, is often referred to as the “cradle of humankind.”
Stone Age cultures developed in Africa as they did throughout the world, sometimes in tandem, other times at vastly divergent speeds. Hunter-gatherer societies flourished throughout the continent by c.10,000 and detailed documents of their lifestyles are depicted in rock art in the savannah regions. The movement and settlement of these peoples was marked by changes in the environment over millennia. Africa in 7000 was much wetter and more densely forested than it is now. The Kho-San peoples are one of the last remaining traditional hunter-gather communities, and many of their practices bear striking similarity to information collected from archaeological deposits in southern and south central Africa. Neolithic culture eventually gave way to regularized agriculture and pastoralism, which foreshadowed the rise of the first organized farming communities along the riverine systems of northeast Africa in Egypt and Nubia.
During the mid-fourth millennium the first centralized agricultural kingdoms arose along the Nile River. Small towns consolidated into two regions, Upper and Lower Egypt. In approximately 3100 Narmer (also known as Menes) conquered the lower region of the Nile Delta and established the first dynasty of ancient Egypt. The kings, known as pharaohs, ruled with divine authority over an authoritarian and bureaucratic state. The wealth for the kingdom came from trade and peasant labor along the Nile Valley and gold in Nubia (present-day Ethiopia). The Egyptians constructed monumental tombs for their kings, including possibly the largest single building constructed by hand, the Great Pyramid at Giza (c.2500bce). Among the many legacies of ancient Egypt are the hieroglyphic script, a panoply of religious, mathematical, and scientific texts, and an early form of monotheism attributed to the pharaoh Akhenaton.
While Egyptian politics looked toward the Mediterranean, the empire was deeply African; several generations of kings and important civilizations, such as the Meroe, came from the highlands of Nubia. By 500bce much of West Africa became part of a much larger African-European network of trade in textiles, slaves, and precious commodities. In central Nigeria, “Nok culture” established a powerful influence over the Niger-Benue River network. Copper, iron, and bronze working came early to Africa, and large deposits of these metals meant that north and east Africa became quickly the center of Afro-Asiatic trade in metal goods. With gold, plentiful grain supplies, and other valuable commodities, Egypt and Libya became major players in the evolving Mediterranean civilizations. First Asia Minor, and then Greece, Carthage and Rome, drew on Egyptian and Nubian culture and bounty. North African civilizations, such as Carthage and other Phoenician cities, penetrated into the Sahara Desert and West Africa. Early trans-Saharan trade routes exchanged iron products for salt and gold. With the rise of Christianity, Egyptian Christians challenged the authority of Rome and founded the independent Coptic Church. St. Augustine of Hippo, a north African, fought against their variations in doctrine and practice.
The next 1000-year period was marked by important changes in the relationship between North and Sub-Saharan Africa and the outside world. A slow but steady movement of Iron Age peoples from the forested regions in the center westward and southward put pressure on Stone Age cultures. To the north the brief ascendancy of the Christian church was displaced by Islam from the seventh century. To the south civilizations arose around the Great Lakes region, and in the west the kingdom of Ghana grew replete on the gold and salt trade. By 711 all of north Africa had come under Muslim rule, and Islam began to spread up the Nile, along the east coast, and across the Sahara. First as an army of conquest, and slowly over many decades, Islamic identities permeated and mixed with indigenous African cultures. By the mid-twelfth century, trans-Saharan trade routes were controlled by Islamized Berber communities, and Arabic writers told of untold wealth. Ghana declined as the Almoravids from North Africa encroached on the trade routes. Other powerful states arose in its place, including Mali and Songhay. The region maintained strong ties with the northern Islamic states, and after the reign of Sundiata (c.1250) Mali also became Islamic. During this period Timbuktu rose to prominence as a center of Islamic scholarship. To the east, Christianity maintained a firm hold in Ethiopia despite the incorporation of much of the Swahili coast in Islamic Indian Ocean trading networks. Elsewhere, the kingdom of Zimbabwe extended its political control over much of the southeast.
By the sixteenth century, all of coastal Africa and much of the interior was part of one or several internationalized trading networks. In the 1470s the first European forts were built along the Fanti coast to control metal and cloth trading. Soon after, Sao Tome and Principe were colonized for slave-run sugar plantations. In 1498 Portuguese navigators sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and met Chinese, Arab and Indonesian merchants operating in the commercial infrastructures of Madagascar, Pemba, and Zanzibar. Portuguese raids along the Swahili coast were to some extent a continuation of the Crusader wars of the European Middle Ages. Plantations, manufacturing, and mining industries along both coasts were soon manned exclusively by slave labor. The arrival of Columbus in the Western Hemisphere created further opportunities for plantations and mines, and thus began the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The first slaves came from the Gambia River; the first slave cargo to be taken directly across the Atlantic dates to 1532. But with Portuguese infiltration of the Kingdom of Kongo and Dutch settlement in Cape Town, the entire western seaboard was drawn into the trade.
Until the mid-nineteenth century only Algeria and South Africa were sites of European colonization. White settlement grew rapidly and the pressures put on local African communities by the French invasion (1830) and Boer Treks (1830s-1840s) resulted in massive displacement and violence. Elsewhere European and Arabic merchants and military bases controlled small frontier enclaves. In the mid-1800s, however, Europeans took a renewed interest in Africa. Peanut farming in the Senegal River Valley and Christian missionary activity throughout the continent were two new activities that shifted the world’s attention away from Africa as a source of slaves to a new site for “legitimate commerce.” Powerful African states arose on the fortunes of the slave trade, including Dahomey and the Asante kingdom. Others, such as the British colony Sierra Leone and the independent state of Liberia (1847), were built by freed slaves. Europe’s fascination for luxuries such as ivory and its insatiable demand for gold as a base for its currencies drew investment and interest as part of wider European imperialism.
European imperial designs on Africa were both internal and external in origin. European and North American economies urgently needed raw materials for their industrializing economies. Moreover, the continent was increasingly viewed from outside as a battleground among the Christian, Islamic, and pagan religions. Within the continent various events fueled European concerns, including the Mahdist empire (from the 1870s on) in Sudan threatening the Suez Canal, the discovery of huge deposits of diamonds (1870s) and gold (1880s) in southern Africa, and various powerful Islamic and non-Islamic kingdoms in West Africa. From the 1840s on, the British and French governments increased their presence along the western coast, and by the 1880s European rivalries eventually gave way to real competition. After French and Belgian forces began to encroach farther into Senegal and the Congo Rivers regions, a conference was convened in Berlin (1884) at which the ground rules for the European “Scramble” were established. Between 1880 and 1895 the greater part of Africa was partitioned and violently conquered. Ethiopia, however, valiantly withstood an Italian invasion in 1896 at the Battle of Adowa.
Over the next several decades much of Sub-Saharan Africa was drawn into the evolving world economic system. In southern Africa, gold and diamond deposits were exploited with black and white labor. In the Congo and elsewhere, rubber was harvested in slavish conditions resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands. In South Africa the British, African, and Boer settlers went to battle in the first imperial war enjoining support from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Throughout the continent millions of Africans resisted and engaged colonial rule; the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanganyika and the formation of the African National Congress (1912) in South Africa are two important examples. Railways, often built by forced labor, paved the way for the extraction of raw materials. During World War I the European powers, using African troops, fought throughout Africa, with Tanzania and Cameroon being sites of particularly violent clashes. Many thousands of Africans also fought in Europe and Asia. After Germany was expelled from its African colonies (1914-1919), the League of Nations administered these territories via Britain, France, and Belgium; both Liberia and Abyssinia were admitted as members of the Geneva-based organization. The 1920s-1940s witnessed the most developed and exploitative years of colonial rule, but Africans also turned their hands to economic opportunities and developed cash crops of cotton, peanuts, coffee, and cocoa.
The Great Depression inflicted immense misery on Africa; by 1931 salaried Africans were receiving 50 per cent of their 1929 income. This economic disaster was fundamental for the mobilization of organized labor and politics, and Africans formed welfare associations, political parties, and unions as part of a continentwide movement that was to develop into a full-fledged independence struggle. African politics was deeply influenced by the politics of the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Blaise Daigne, among others were instrumental in the development of a Pan-African political and cultural identity. The independence of Egypt, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, and the 1936 Italian invasion of Abyssinia were important moments that helped this ideology crystallize into a continentwide movement, uniting North Africans, their southern cousins, and even Indian migrant workers in South Africa. North Africa was a major battlefield of World War II; the Allied invasion of Europe began after Morocco and Algeria were retaken from Axis control. While Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia also saw significant fighting, the rest of continental Africa was belabored by unparalleled European demands for raw materials.
World War II unleashed tremendous opposition to colonial rule, and Europe began to lose control of its empire. In 1944 the Brazzaville Conference heralded a change of direction for French colonies. In 1945 Anglophone Pan-Africanists met in Manchester, England, to plan a concerted campaign for independence. The independence struggle (1945-1960) was at times bloody and at other times negotiated. In Kenya, South Africa, and Algeria guerrilla wars began in earnest; Ghana blazed a trail in peaceful transition; and Guinea unleashed the wrath of France by rejecting closer ties with its colonial master. The 1958 All African People’s Conference in Accra brought together independence leaders from throughout the continent. Although in 1960 Belgian and French governments simply pulled out and African elites slid into the reigns of power, to the south white supremacists held sway for many years in the Portuguese colonies, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa.
The African independence struggle drew world attention and was part of much larger anticolonial protest. Although Ethiopia, Egypt, and Liberia were founding members of the United Nations (1945), it was not until 1960 that dozens of newly independent African nations tipped the balance away from Europe and America, making it a truly world body. Following the Bandung conference (1955) in Indonesia, many African governments joined to form the Non-Aligned Movement (1961). Also known as the Third World, these nations positioned themselves apart from the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. Despite this maneuver Africa was a site of great Cold War tension, especially in Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia. While many of Africa’s democracies faltered in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Zimbabwean war of liberation and the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa kept alive hopes for a continent free of foreign domination. During the same period, African scholarship, diplomacy, and culture made daring and important contributions to world movements. Two Africans have served as secretary general of the United Nations; Africans have been awarded ten Nobel Prizes (three in literature, two in medicine, and five for peace) and many other distinctions. With the 2001 United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the anti-child labor, “blood diamonds,” AIDS medications, and debt cancellation campaigns, Africa today continues its role as the progenitor of popular international movements.
African historical writing has played an important role in the development of the historiography of world history, and this final section considers this body of scholarship. While Africa was the location of important advances in anthropological and archaeological scholarship from the 1920s, African history, as distinct from imperial history, only established itself as an independent subfield in 1960. Since then there has been an ever-increasing interest in African historical traditions. Early researchers recorded oral histories and nationalist historians focused on important moments such as anticolonial revolts as part of the nationbuilding project. In spite of these developments, in the academy the canon of Western history remained relatively unchallenged.
With the growth of multiculturalism, scholars and students began to dispute Western constructions of the historical past as well as profoundly one-sided “Western civilization” undergraduate programs. The first calls for change erupted in the United States during the era of the Black Power movement (1965-1975), as students demanded classes on African and African American cultures and history, as well as increased placement of people of color in the academy. Many Black Power advocates drew on the powerful black consciousness ideology of the South Africa militant Steve Biko. Biko himself drew on the experience of Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and the virulent racism of South Africa’s apartheid.
By the early 1980s, this struggle over the nature of knowledge and the shape of its transmission entered a new phase. Students and teachers, as well as governments and legislators, began to discuss openly the implications of teaching policies. The most important scholarly development was the growth of “subaltern studies”: scholarship that investigated the previously unknown “other,” the silenced voices of history, the dispossessed, and the displaced. Much of this scholarship focused on South Asia; it strove to recover the lives of people forgotten in narratives of global exploitation and national mobilization. In so doing, scholars called into question the very narratives themselves, the source material, theoretical frameworks, and the subject positions of historians. One view interprets this scholarship as demonstrating that all histories of colonized regions, Africa included, as they are written, exist in the shadow of Europe, not solely because of the powerful intrusion of colonization into other continents, but also because Europe’s self-perceived movement toward state-building, capitalist development, and modernity marked—and still mark—a vision of historical progress against which African history is a failure.
Responding to the changing political and social fabric of the United States and elsewhere, historians embraced this vision, and multiculturalism’s challenge to “Western culture” for greater minority inclusion was paralleled by a shift away from the study of Western civilization to world history. Instead of one Western culture, students explored many world cultures; and instead of one Western civilization, teachers professed many world civilizations. Thus it was argued that incorporating underrepresented minorities in a set of analytical categories that remain unchanged only left intact a cultural and political architecture of the study of the past that privileged certain forms of cultural and intellectual expression. Echoing Cheikh Anta Diop in linguistic scholarship, people like Martin Bernal have even argued for the African origins of Western classical cultures. Furthermore, teachers of history have attempted to move beyond the restricting organizing concepts of the term civilization. Some have chosen to abandon the “West” altogether in an effort to permit students to appreciate the great diversity of human responses to common problems. With increasing frequency, universities advertise studies in World History. In each of these pedagogical moves to de-Westernize the center, and to de-center the West, African history continues to play a fundamental role.
Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance
See also: History, African: Sources of.
Further Reading
Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. London, 1987.
Curtin, Philip, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina. African History: From Earliest Times to Independence, 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1995.
Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997.
Roberts, Richard. “Teaching Non-Western History at Stanford.” In Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics, edited by Donald Reid Kramer and William L. Barry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
World History
