History

Historical and General Facts of Africa

Geography

Pre-Arab Egypt, Africa's first great historical kingdom and a major cradle of civilization, flourished for nearly 3,000 years from approximately 3000 BC. The whole of North Africa fell to the Romans after 146 BC. The Arab Islamic invasions of Africa began in the 7th century AD. The first empire of which there is extant knowledge was ancient Ghana with its capital at Kumbi, which flourished from the 5th to the 11th century AD. During the same period came the rise of the empire of Kanen-Bornu around Lake Chad, which reached the height of its power in the 17th century. Muslim empires were Mali (c. 1250-1400) and its successor, the Songhai of Gao (c. 1400-1591). East African-Arab settlements developed into powerful city-states: Mogadishu, Mombasa, Lamu, Kilwa, and others, by the 13th century. In the 16th century, those city-states were destroyed by the Portuguese. The Portuguese were in turn ousted by the Omani Arabs who established the slave-trading state of Zanzibar. The Bantu-speaking empire of Mwene Matapa and other dynasties arose inland from the East African coast. The kingdom of the Kongo was located near the mouth of the Congo River, and others lay farther south. Most of these empires were weakened and in many cases destroyed by the early colonial powers from Europe and Arabia that coveted their trade and supplanted them, turning much of the trade to external rather than internal markets and creating new trade goods, notably slaves. The number of slaves actually taken from Africa probably numbered about 10,000,000. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to undertake systematic voyages of discovery along the African coast (15th century). The Dutch presence in South Africa dates from 1652. By 1884 European countries had begun a scramble to partition Africa. By 1920 every square mile of Africa except for Ethiopia, Liberia, and the Union of South Africa was under colonial rule. Independence movements in Africa developed primarily in Ghana and became widespread after 1950, and, one by one, the colonies became independent.