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* produced in 1980 - Please research for current data.
AFRICA IS THE CRADLE of mankind, some anthropologists believe, yet most of its nations are among the world's youngest and poorest. In the Great Rift system, where manlike beings were walking upright 3.6 million years ago, Ethiopians today subsist on an annual per capita income of a hungred dollars. In Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), only 6 percent of the people can read, and a newborn child is not expected to celebrate its 40th birthday.
Many of Africa's 450 million people (2011 data 1,032,532,974), who speak more than a thousand languages, till drought-prone farmland. Their governments struggle with the challenge embraced in 1953 by Kwame Nkrumah in arguing for the Gold Coast's (Ghana) independence: “The mistakes we may make will be our own mistakes, and it will be our responsibility to put them right.”
The colonial era was not a complete disaster for Africa. European railroads and industrial infrastructures paved the way for the development of natural resources. Missionaries established primary education and health care. What proved disastrous was the imposition of foreign political systems and arbitrary boundaries, which often divided language and cultural groups. The resulting ethnic fragmentation has helped touch off some fifty successful coups during the post-independence period.
External influences compromise the professed allegiances of emerging nations to a nonaligned Third World. Economic ties to former paternal powers, especially France, remain strong in countries such as Tunisia, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal. An African connection is imperative for the United States, which depends on Nigeria, Libya, and Algeria for 30 percent of its imported oil.
Meanwhile, Marxist intrusions have proliferated. China's forays include Tanzania, Zaire, Madagascar, an the Central African Republic. Soviet arms and advisers fueled liberation movements in Mozanbique and Angola, with Cuban troops active both in the latter country and in Ethiopia, where they helped defeat Somali forces in 1978. The allied “front line” stats of Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, Angola, and Mozanbique have actively supported a guerrilla war waged since 1972 by two rival militant factions in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia at a cost of an estimates 20,000 lives.
South Africa also battled insurgents in Namibia (South-West Africa), who spurned South Africa's plan–also rejected by the United Nations–for Namibia's independence. At home, South Africa pursued its policy of creating separate nations out of black homelands despite widespread opposition; the third, Venda, was declared independent last September (re-absorbed into South Africa, April 1994).
As the continent faces a new century, it bears the promise and peril foreseen by French-African poet David Diop of an Africa “whose fruit little by little learn The bitter taste of liberty.”
KINGDOMS AND EMPIRES
No shaper of civilization can eclipse anceint Egypt during the New Kingdom beginning in the 16th century C.C. As the pharonic star slowly dimmed, the kingdom of Kush rose to the south. Its power was forged in iron smelters–a technology possibly exported to the sourthwest, sparking a quantum leap in the development of societies there. Kush's knowledge was inscribed in an alphabet that has yet to be deciphered. The use of stonemasonry without mortar distinguished Axum, the successor to Kush after A.D. 300. The Axumites brought Christianity to Ethiopia, a faith introduced to Africa by the Greeks.
Meanwhile, West Africa was waking to a growing demand for trade from the Barbary Coast. There the Berbers became the middlemen for the Phoenicians of Carthage and their Roman conquerors after 146 .BC. With the Romans came the camel, a fuel-stingy Asian import that threatened to put Saharan horse traders out of business. For centuries Tripoli and other other northern terminals on the trans-Saharan caravan routes imported gold, slaves, ivory, and hides from the south in exchange for salt, cloth, iron, and copper goods that funneled into the western Sudan. There, a series of empires began to evolve. They found themselves squarely in the path of a tidal wave: the Islamic jihads, crusades that brought unity to North Africa and everlasting isolation to Christian Ethiopia.
Arab scholars were amazed at the wealth and wisdom of the African kingdoms they encountered. Ghana, whose roots may date to A.D. 400, boasted “the wealthiest of all kings on the face of the Earth on account of ... hoards of gold ...,” wrote Ibn Hawqal in the tenth century. The Muslims of Mali, at their acme by 1350, had “a greter abhorrence of injustice than any other people.” observed Ibn Battuta. Gao, metropole of the Songhai empire, was full of ”exceeding rich merchats,” Leo Africanus reported around 1510, marveling “how costly and sumptuous all things be.” Centers of power shifted to the coast, drawn by European trade.
The Sahara continued to grow more desiccated–perhaps a factor in a great migration that had begun two thousand years earlier. From their homeland in what is now eastern Nigeria, the Bantu drifted south and east. They gradually adapted their life-styles to the changing landscape, assimilated indigenous peoples, and absorbed their innovations. Thus grew several major states of southern Africa–Kongo, Luba, Lunda, Bunyoro, Buganda, Rwanda, and Munhumutapa. To the east Bantu interaction with Arabs created the Swahili culture.
Bantu power shook Africa in 1786 with the birth of a boy named Shaka, whose war machine would fuse the Zulu nation. Meanwhile, from the coasts, an invasion was advancing, one that not even Shaka's warriors could stem, and one that would forever affect African politics.
(Inset map with routes of European explorer's routes.)
EUROPEAN EXPLORATION
“OUR COUNTRY is being completely depopulated. ... it is our will that in these kingdoms there should be any trade of slaves. ...”
In 1526 Affonso, Christianized king of the Kongo, was crying in a wilderness of exploitation. Eighty-five years earlier the Portuguese had brought the Gospel to western Africa and taken home their first sack of gold and their first batch of people. By the mid-19th century, European, American, and Arab slavers–had robbed the continent of perhaps as many as 25 million human beings.
Colonial inroads came slowly, with Portugal scattering 16th-century beachheads along the east and west coasts that other powers would ultimately overrun, leaving Lisbon with Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. The British, French, and Dutch were all trading on the Guinea coast by 1600. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company, vying for control of the Indies trade, extablished a resupply station on the Cape of Good Hope. Cape Town mushroomed in spite of company policy restricting the immigration of Dutch farmers, or Boers. Britain won control of the cape in the early 1800s and in 1833 abolished slavery. The Boers trekked inland and met the Zulu, whom they defeated in Blood River in 1838.
While the lay of Africa's southern lands was thus learned, the interior as late as 1790 was“still but a wide extended blank, on which the Geographer ... has traced, with a hesitating hand, afew names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.” james Bruce had explored the blue Nile, but it remaine for others to penetrated the rain forests nd entrall Europe with vivd tales. mungo Park attacked the mystery of the Niger. David Livingstone, dean of the pathfinders, mapped the Zambezi and crossed the continent. John Speke and Richard Burton sought the source of the Nile, for decades a topographical combination lock.
Colonization folloewd hot on their heels. History records Henry Morton Stanley not only as the “finder” of Livingstone but also as the land hunter who helped win for King Leopold II of Belgium the mineral-rich Congo Free State. The countrymen of adventures like Rene Caillie dreamed of “Africa French from Algeria to Congo.” Britons cherished a “Cape to Cairo” corridor to complement their holdings in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria. In Togo, Kamerun, South-West Africa, and East Africa, Germany wedged footholds betwen other colonial claims. “My map of Africa lies in Europe,” declared Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. In 1884 he convened the Berlin conference, in which the competing powers gerrymandered Africa with their own political boundaries. In 1891 a Nigerian editor mourned, “A forcible possession of our land has taken the place of a forcible possession of our persons.”
THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE
TREMORS OF NATIONALISM rocked the colonials around the turn of the 20th century. Italy's dream of Ethiopian conquest ended at the battle of Adowa. In German East Africa as many as 120,000 Africans died in the futile maji-Maji rebellion. Britain struggled to suppress the Ashanti in the Gold Coast and took 17 years to crush Sudan's Madhists.
A different revolt that would have greater long-range impact raged in southern Africa's Anglo-Boer war. Cecil Rhodes had thrust a pioneer column north into Becuanaland (today's Botswana) and into the Matabele kingdom that would long bear Rhodes' name. His fellow British also held a protectorate in Eart Africa nd coveted huge lodes of diamonds and gold in the Boer republics. The Boers lost the battle but won the war, in a sense, when the black vote was precluded in Boer strongholds by the constitution of the Union of Soth Africa in 1910.
German sympathy for the Boers enraged the British, foreshadowing World War I. With German's defeat came the partitioning of its colonies. Britain and France split Cameroun and Togo. Tanganiyika was mandated to Britain, Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium, and South-West Africa to South Africa. Resentment smoldered among thousands of Africans co-opted by the warring powers. Black anger crystallized in 1935 when Italy again invaded Ethiopia, a prelude to the Second World War.
In its aftermath, a “wind of change” swept south, beginning with Libya's independence in 1951. Britain reeled under the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya and withdrew its troops from the Suez Canal, which Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized in 1956. The same year saw a Sudanese republic born. the Gold Coast became independent Ghana in 1957, and black rule spread quickly through British Africa–save for maverick Rhodesia, where a defiant white minority government declared unilateral independence in 1965. Belgium's withdrawal from the Congo touched off a bloody upheaval. A frustrating eight-year war in Algeria spelled the end of French rule in Africa. In 1975, beset by guerrilla warfare in Mozanbique, Angola, and Guinea, Portugal withdrew. Spain's last major enclave, Spanish Sahara, was absorbed by Morocco. As Africa began to regain control of its destiny, the political vise tightened on Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and Namibia (South-West Africa). while South Africa stared unblinking at the prospect of a continent united against it.
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