South+Africa;+selected+history


 * History of Africa **

** Africa Before the Europeans ** It is a well known fact that evidence points to a common human ancestry originating in Africa from the emergence of a humanlike species in eastern Africa some 5 million years ago. Africa came a long way since then through the development of: the first true human beings (Homo //sapiens,// dating from more than 200,000 years ago), the use of fire, a hunter-gatherer way of life, and the making of crude stone tools. Discoveries suggest Africa was the primary gene-center for cultivated plants like cotton, sorghum, watermelon, kola-nuts, and coffee as well as the first site of the domestication of certain plants for food. About 6000 years ago, ancient African civilizations established & flourished in the Nile Valley. Nubia, Egypt’s southern neighbor with its own civilization, probably preceded the ancient Egyptian (Kemet) civilization. The great ancient Egyptian civilization became one of the cradles of Western knowledge and thought. Ancient Kemet, as the Egyptians called their kingdom, dates from ca. 3,100 BC.

Beginning about 3,000 years ago, Bantu ("the people") migration spread through sub-Saharan Africa for over a period of 2,000 years. Bantu, a linguistically related group of about 60 million people living in equatorial and southern Africa, probably originated in West Africa and gradually migrated down into southern Africa. The Bantu migration was one of the largest in human history. The cause of this movement is believed to be related to a population increase, a result of the introduction of new crops (such as the banana) which allowed for more efficient food production. Large kingdoms would later develop in western and central Africa.

The Aksum civilization was formed from the mix of Kushitic speaking people in Ethiopia and Semitic speaking people in southern Arabia who settled the territory across the Red Sea around 500 BC. Around the same time, ancient Nok culture thrived in forests of central Nigeria until 200 AD. The rulers of Nubia established their capital at Meroë around 300 BC; the kingdom lasted for more than nine centuries.

By the 1st century AD, Rome had conquered Egypt, Carthage, and other North African areas; which became the granaries of the Roman Empire (the majority of the population were converted to Christianity). Then, from 300 to 700 AD, the Aksum empire in Ethiopia rose and was covered to Christianity. The Axum Empire displayed its religious zeal by writing and interpreting religious texts and carving out churches from rocks.

Meanwhile, Bantu migration extended to southern Africa; Bantu languages became predominate in central and southern Africa. The emergence of southeastern African societies created the stone city-states of Zimbabwe, Dhlo-Dhlo, Kilwa, and Sofala, which flourish through 1600.

From 639-641, Khalif Omar conquered Egypt with Islamic troops, and, from 700 AD, Islam swept across North Africa. The Islamic faith eventually extended into many areas of sub-Saharan Africa until 1500. The Arab Slave Trade, from A.D. 700 to 1911, caused astonishing numbers of people to be sold. The number of Africans sold in this system is estimated to be somewhere around 14 million: at least 9.6 million African women and 4.4 million African men. In Western Africa, a number of black kingdoms emerged; their economic base lay in their control of trans-Saharan trade routes. Gold, kola nuts, and slaves were sent north in exchange for cloth, utensils, and salt. This trade enabled the rise of the great empires—Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.

** The Beginning of European Influence in the 16th Century ** The story of Africa became a story of outsiders in search of plunder or trade. North Africa began receiving the attention of powerful Mediterranean nations. The so-called Barbary coast (stretching from Algeria to modern Libya) was disputed between the Spanish and the Turks (with the Turks prevailing). The rest of the continent, from Morocco down to the Cape and then up the east coast, was dominated by the Portuguese.

** The Beginning of Portugal's Empire ** The Portuguese Empire is said to have begun in the 15th century. The Portuguese started reaching the coast of Africa and discovered new trade opportunities. Their settlements in Guinea and Angola were due to slave trade and they were drawn east to Mozambique and the Zambezi river due the gold mines of a local ruler, Munhumutapa. Initially, when the Portuguese entered Africa, they did not had any rivals but it changed when the British created the East India Company and the Dutch began to trade with Africa.

** Dutch and British Trade: 17th- 18th Centuries ** The East India Company’s interest was focused on the spice islands of the East Indies. They needed infrastructure for loading and unloading goods, water, and food supplies so they made the Island of St. Helena, far out in the Atlantic, their main port. Later, in 1659, the company developed a settlement there.

In 1652, the Dutch picked a harbor at the southern tip of Africa, beneath the Table Mountain at the Cape, to act as an important port. European ships, mostly from Britain, picked up slaves along the West coast of Africa and transported them across the Atlantic to plantations in the West Indies and continental America.

** The European Scramble ** Commercial greed, territorial ambition, and political rivalry all fuelled the European race to take over Africa. This culminated in Africa's partition at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. The whole process became known as "The Scramble for Africa".

**Anglo – French Rivalry** Until the 19th century, the French played a smaller role in Africa than the British. However, their defeat in the Napoleonic War made them look to Africa for compensation. North Africa became a theatre for Anglo-French rivalry, illustrated most dramatically by the Fashoda incident, where troops from both powers marched from opposite directions to meet in the wilderness in southern Sudan, bringing the two European powers to the brink of war. There were few French explorers, but there was growing interest in the idea to use North Africa to play off the Germans against the British.

**Egypt** For centuries, Egypt was ruled by the Ottomans based in what is now Turkey. In 1811, an Albanian army officer, Mohammed Ali, took power. Under his rule Egypt's economy and infrastructure expanded. Sudan fell under Egyptian control in the 1820s. By the middle of the century, Britain grew concerned about Egypt's influence in the region and increasingly intervened in the commercial and political direction of the state. By the late 1870s, a nationalist movement began to take root. Because the French and British imposed dual control, riots and military rebellions began which prompted the British to send in an army of occupation in 1882. This created a rift between the British and the French. Finally, after much rioting, Egypt finally gained independence in 1922.

**Algeria** In 1830, the French occupied Algeria; they subsequently came up against the Berber jihad launched by the Qadiriyya brotherhood under the leadership of Abd al-Kadir. Persistent and tireless in his opposition to the French, Abd al-Kadir was not defeated until 1847 when he was sent into exile. But Berber and Arab fighters continued to resist the French until well into the 20th century.

** Tunisia ** At the beginning of the 19th century, Tunisia had a prosperous economy and cosmopolitan culture. Under Ahmed Bey there was a modest program of modernization. However, the debts for the program mounted up, giving France an excuse to establish a Finance Commission. Tunisia became a French Protectorate in 1881.

** Morocco ** Morocco, alone in North Africa, remained independent in the 19th century. European style modernization was instituted under Mawlay al-Hasan (1873-94) but plans for secular education and the levying of taxes met with resistance from Muslim clerics. Morocco finally lost independence in 1912 and was partitioned between France and Spain.

** Libya ** <span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">In 1911 Italy invaded Libya (then under Ottoman rule). Ottoman resistance collapsed and Libya was accorded nominal independence (without consulting the people of Libya). However, Italy continued to occupy Libya. The commander of the fighting force of the Sanussi brotherhood, Umar al Mukhtar, defied the Italians until 1931 when he was executed**.**

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">In 1854, Louis Faidherbe began the French conquest of the Senegal valley. In 1863, Porto Novo (capital of modern Benin) was declared a French protectorate. There followed a series of treaties with rulers in the Ivory Coast.
 * Senegal**


 * Colonial Africa **



** Later Struggles ** <span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">There were certainly differences in occupational style: the French had a type of colonial rule which was highly centralized and made little effort to involve local rulers. This contrasted with the British colonial style which, in northern Nigeria, took the form of indirect rule through the local Emirs and Chiefs. Despite the missionaries and the search for new trading outlets, Europeans in the first 80 years of the 19th century were not driven by any desire to rule and administer Africa. In 1865 the House of Commons committee in Britain recommended that Britain give up all its concerns on the West coast of Africa except for Sierra Leone. Elsewhere in West Africa, leading African merchants still worked on equal terms with European traders in the 1860's and even enjoyed the attention of Queen Victoria.

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">In the second half of the 19th century, the British and the French were determined to put things in order and establish a clear administrative hierarchy with Europeans at the top and Africans below. Meanwhile, some of the oldest trading nations in Europe abandoned Africa and new players emerged. The Dutch and Danes left the continent whilst Germany, Italy, and Belgium moved in. The Belgian claim to the Congo proved the most disastrous of all. Eventually casual commercial dealings were replaced by systematic exploitation and control. At the beginning of the 19th century, the European grasp of African geography was confined mainly to the coast. But, by the end of the century, Europeans were covering the continent with railways and roads. It was then possible to take control politically and commercially.

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">All the tradeoffs and alliances could not disguise the fact that Imperial Germany was on a collision course with Britain and France. For the first time, Africans found themselves dragged into a conflict which had its origins in the war rooms of Berlin and London. The moral posturing of European powers, supposedly representing civilization, wisdom, reconciliation and order, soon disintegrated into the chaos, death, and destruction of World War I.

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">At the beginning of the 20th century, Europeans were still hugely ignorant of the continent. The systematic colonization of Africa, which gathered momentum in the 1880's, was not even on the horizon in the first half of the 19th century. Europeans had confined themselves to trading mainly along the coast. Inland the trade in slaves and commodities was handled by African and Arab merchants. With the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the British navy took to patrolling the coasts to intercept other nations’ slave ships.

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">In the last two decades of the 19th century, conflicts and rivalries in Europe began to affect people in Africa directly. In the 1880's European powers divided Africa up amongst themselves without the consent of people living there and with limited knowledge of the land they had taken. In 1914 conflict in Europe came to a head and the First World War broke out. The contribution of African people to the war effort was crucial.

<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Germany lost WWI and its African colonies to France and Great Britain, who were expected by the League of Nations to prepare the colonies for independence. In the 1920s the Pan-African Congresses met in Paris to discuss anti-colonial unrest and African nationalism among black missionaries and Western-educated elites. This unrest was expressed in strikes in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria.

** Period of Africa independence **



<span style="color: black; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">The Second World War created theaters of battle in the European colonies of North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. This fueled the unrest even further, and decolonization became increasingly inevitable. Kenya, with its large white population, was led by into a lengthy campaign of terror and guerrilla warfare against the British, who labeled the rebels "Mau Mau." Despite a British victory in 1956, thousands of lives were lost and negotiations finally forced preparations for Kenyan independence. In 1957 Ghana become the first independent state in Africa. In December 1958 the All-African People's Conference in Accra declared a Resolution on Imperialism and Colonialism. In the late 50s-early 60s French colonies in Africa opposed continued French rule despite concessions, though many were eager to maintain economic and cultural ties to France (except of Algeria with a white settler population of 1 million). A vicious civil war in Algeria continued until independence was gained in 1962 (over 900,000 white settlers were forced to leave the newly independent nation), six years after Morocco and Tunisia had received their independence. In 1958, White Afrikaners officially gained independence from Great Britain in South Africa. Zaire, formerly Belgian Congo and the richest European colony in Africa, became independent from Belgium in 1960. In 1963, Kenya declared independence from the British. In the mid 1960s, most former European colonies in Africa had gained independence and the European colonial era effectively ended. Finally, in the 1970s, Portugal lost its African colonies, including Angola and Mozambique. Unfortunately, the corruption of African leaders and political parties intensified the multiple problems facing the newly independent nations.