Africa’s rich and ancient history is often overshadowed by the dramatic changes that came with European colonialism, beginning about 600 years ago. These changes were so powerful that even today many countries are still struggling with the lingering effects of the colonial era.

Africa’s rich past has often been misunderstood and dismissed by people from outside the region. European slave traders and colonizers called Africa the Dark Continent and assumed it was a place where little of significance had occurred in human history. The substantial and elegantly planned cities of Benin in western Africa, Djenné in the Niger River basin, and Loango in the Congo Basin, which European explorers encountered in the 1500s, never became part of Europe’s image of Africa. Even today, most people outside the continent are unaware of Africa’s internal history or its contributions to world civilization, let alone its role in the emergence of humankind as a species.

Africa is the original home of humans (Figure 7.11A). It was probably in eastern Africa (in what are today the highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda) that the first human species (Homo erectus) evolved more than 2 million years ago. Homo erectus differed anatomically from humans today. These early, tool-making humans ventured out of Africa, reaching north of the Caspian Sea and beyond as early as 1.8 million years ago. Anatomically, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved about 250,000 years ago from earlier hominoids (probably Homo erectus) in eastern Africa. Like the migrations of earlier human species, those of modern humans radiated out of Africa, first toward the eastern Mediterranean (Homo sapiens reached the eastern Mediterranean about 90,000 years ago), then spreading across mainland and island Asia, and only later turning west into Europe. After coexisting with earlier dispersions of Homo erectus and other Homo species (all originating in Africa) in Eurasia and Europe, Homo sapiens eventually outcompeted them all.

In Africa, people began to cultivate plants as far back as 7000 years ago in the Sahel and the highlands of present-day Sudan and Ethiopia. Agriculture was brought south to equatorial Africa 2500 years ago and to southern Africa about 1500 years ago. Trade routes spanned the African continent, extending north to Egypt and Rome and east to India and China. Gold, elephant tusks, and timber from tropical Africa were exchanged for salt, textiles, beads, and a wide variety of other goods.

About 3400 years ago, people in the vicinity of Lake Victoria learned how to smelt iron and make steel. By 700 c.e., when Europe was still recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire, a remarkable civilization with advanced agriculture, iron production, and gold-mining technology had developed in the highlands of southeastern Africa in what is now Zimbabwe. This empire, now known as the Great Zimbabwe Empire, traded with merchants from Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, and China, exchanging the products of its mines and foundries for silk, fine porcelain, and exotic jewelry. The Great Zimbabwe Empire collapsed around 1500 for reasons not yet understood (see Figure 7.11B).

Complex and varied social and economic systems existed in many parts of Africa well before the modern era. Several influential centers, made up of dozens of linked communities, developed in the forest and the savanna of the western Sahel. There, powerful kingdoms and empires rose and fell, such as Djenné; Ghana (700–1000 c.e.), centered in what is now Mauritania and southwestern Mali; and the Mali Empire (1250–1600 c.e.), centered a bit to the east on the Niger River in what became the famous Muslim trading and religious center of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), originally founded about 1100 c.e. by Tuareg nomads as a seasonal camp (see Figure 7.11C). Some rulers periodically sent large trade caravans carrying gold and salt through Tombouctou on to Makkah (Mecca), where their opulence was a source of wonder.

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Africans also traded slaves. Long-standing customs of enslaving people captured during war fueled this trade. The treatment of slaves within Africa was sometimes brutal and sometimes reasonably humane. Long before the arrival of Islam, a slave trade developed with Arab and Asian lands to the east. After the spread of Islam began, around 700 c.e., the slave trade continued, and Muslim traders exported close to 9 million African slaves to parts of Southwest, South, and Southeast Asia (Figure 7.12). When slaves were traded to non-Africans, indigenous checks on brutality were abandoned. For example, to ensure sterility and to help promote passivity, Muslim traders often preferred to buy castrated male slaves.

The course of African history shifted dramatically in the mid-1400s, when Portuguese sailing ships began to appear off Africa’s west coast. The names given to stretches of this coast by the Portuguese and other early European maritime powers reflected their interest in Africa’s resources: the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Pepper Coast, and the Slave Coast.

By the 1530s, the Portuguese had organized a slave trade with the Americas. The trading of slaves by the Portuguese, and then by the British, Dutch, and French, was more widespread and brutal than any trade of African slaves that preceded it. African slaves became part of the elaborate production systems supplying the raw materials and money that fueled Europe’s Industrial Revolution.

To acquire slaves, the Europeans established forts on Africa’s west coast and paid nearby African kingdoms with weapons, trade goods, and money to make slave raids into the interior. Some slaves were taken from enemy kingdoms in battle. Many more were kidnapped from their homes and villages in the forests and savannas. Most slaves traded to Europeans were male because they brought the highest prices and the raiding kingdoms preferred to keep captured women for their reproductive capabilities. Between 1600 and 1865, about 12 million captives were packed aboard cramped and filthy ships and sent to the Americas. One-quarter or more of them died at sea. Of those who arrived in the Americas, about 90 percent went to plantations in South America and the Caribbean. Between 6 and 10 percent were sent to North America (see Figure 7.12).

The European slave trade severely drained parts of Africa of human resources and set in motion a host of damaging social responses within Africa that even today are not completely understood (see Figure 7.11D). The trade enriched the African kingdoms that could successfully conquer their neighbors and impoverished or enslaved more peaceful or less powerful kingdoms. It also encouraged the slave-trading kingdoms to become dependent on European trade goods and technologies, especially guns.

Slavery persists in modern Africa and is a growing problem that some argue exceeds the transatlantic slave trade of the past. Today, slavery is most common in the Sahel region, where several countries have made the practice officially illegal only in the past few years (Figure 7.13). People may become enslaved during war. They may be sold by their parents or relatives to pay off debts or forced into slavery when migrating to find a job in a city. Some are even enslaved by gangsters in Europe, where they become street vendors, domestic servants, or prostitutes. In Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria, forced child labor is used increasingly in commercial agriculture such as cacao (chocolate) production. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Congo, young boys have been enslaved as miners and soldiers. It is hard to know exactly how many Africans are currently enslaved, but estimates range from several million to more than 10 million.

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The European slave trade wound down by about the mid- nineteenth century, as Europeans found it more profitable to use African labor within Africa to extract raw materials for Europe’s growing industries.

European colonial powers competed avidly for territory and resources, and by World War I, only two areas in Africa were still independent (Figure 7.14): Liberia on the west coast (populated by former slaves from the United States) and Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) in East Africa. Ethiopia managed to defeat early Italian attempts to colonize it. Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor who convened the 1884 Berlin Conference at which the competing European powers formalized the partitioning of Africa, revealed the common arrogant European attitude when he declared, “My map of Africa lies in Europe.” With some notable exceptions, the boundaries of most African countries today derive from the colonial boundaries set up between 1840 and 1916 by European administrators and diplomats to suit their purposes (see Figure 7.11E). These territorial divisions lie at the root of many of Africa’s current problems.

In some cases, the boundaries were purposely drawn to divide tribal groups and thus weaken them. In other cases, groups who used a wide range of environments over the course of a year were forced into smaller, less diverse lands or forced to settle down entirely, thus losing their traditional livelihoods. As access to resources shrank, hostilities between competing groups developed. Colonial officials often encouraged these hostilities, purposely replacing strong leaders with leaders who could be manipulated. Food production, which was the mainstay of most African economies until the colonial period, was discouraged in favor of activities that would support European industries: cash-crop production (cotton, rubber, palm oil) and mineral and wood extraction. Eventually, many formerly prosperous Africans became hungry and poor.

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One of the main objectives of European colonial administrations in Africa, in addition to extracting as many raw materials as possible, was to create markets in Africa for European manufactured goods. The case of South Africa provides insights into the European expropriation of African lands and the subjugation of African peoples. In this case, these aims ultimately led to the infamous system of racial segregation known as apartheid (see the Case Study below).

The era of formal European colonialism in Africa was relatively short. In most places, it lasted for about 80 years, from roughly the 1880s to the 1960s. In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African colonial state to become independent. The last sub- Saharan African country to gain independence was South Sudan in 2011, not from a European power, but from its neighbor Sudan, after more than 40 years of civil war.

Africa entered the twenty-first century with a complex mixture of enduring legacies from the past and looming challenges for the future. Although it has been liberated from colonial domination, most old colonial borders remain intact (compare the colonial borders in Figure 7.14 with the modern country borders in Figure 7.4). Often these borders exacerbate conflicts between hostile groups by joining them into one resource-poor political entity. Other borders divide potentially powerful ethnic groups, thereby diminishing their influence; or cut off nomadic people from the resources they use on a seasonal basis.

For many years and with few exceptions, governments continued to mimic the colonial bureaucratic structures and policies that distanced them from their citizens. Corruption and abuse of power by bureaucrats, politicians, and wealthy elites stifled individual initiative, civil society, and entrepreneurialism, creating instead frustration and suspicion. Too often, coups d’état were used to change governments. Democracy, where it existed, was often weakly connected only to voting and not to true participation in policy making at the community, regional, and national levels.

Even today African policy makers, like their colonial predecessors, are often insensitive to the widespread poverty and hardship around them. This was demonstrated during the summer of 2010 when South Africa hosted the 2010 World Cup, the world’s largest sporting event and a first for this region, which up to that point had never hosted a global sporting event of similar scale. The preparations involved demolishing the homes of tens of thousands of poor, urban residents who were relocated to make way for the elegant new soccer stadiums (see Figure 7.11F). More recently, in an August 2012 crackdown reminiscent of those under apartheid, police shot dead 34 miners during a strike at a platinum mine in Marikana in Northwest Province. (More strikes followed.)

Other relics of the colonial era can be seen in the dependence of African economies on relatively expensive imported food and manufactured goods as well as on the production of agricultural and mineral raw materials for which profit margins are low and prices on the global market highly unstable. Many sub-Saharan African countries often end up competing against each other and remain economically entwined in trade relationships that rarely work to their advantage. The wealthiest country in the region remains South Africa, where the economy has highly profitable manufacturing and service sectors as well as extractive sectors.