AFRICA 1500-1800

In the 16th century Europeans began to transport African slaves across the Atlantic. However
slavery was nothing new in Africa. For centuries Africans had sold other Africans to the
Arabs as slaves. However the trans-Atlantic slave trade grew until it was huge. In the 18th
century ships from Britain took manufactured goods to Africa. They took slaves from there to
the West Indies and took sugar back to Britain. This was called the Triangular Trade. (Many
other European countries were involved in the slave trade).

Some Africans were sold into slavery because they had committed a crime. However many
slaves were captured in raids by other Africans. Europeans were not allowed to travel inland
to find slaves. Instead Africans brought slaves to the coast. Any slaves who were not sold
were either killed or used as slaves by other Africans. The slave trade would have been
impossible without the co-operation of Africans many of whom grew rich on the slave trade.
Meanwhile from the 16th to the 18th centuries Barbary pirates from the North African coast
robbed Spanish and Portuguese ships.

In the 16th century a people called the Turks conquered most of the North African coast. In
1517 they captured Egypt and by 1556 most of the coast was in their hands. Further south
Africans continued to build powerful kingdoms.

Meanwhile the Europeans founded their first colonies in Africa. In the 16th century the
Portuguese settled in Angola and Mozambique while in 1652 the Dutch founded a colony in
South Africa

. After 800 AD organised kingdoms emerged in northern Africa. They traded with the Arabs
further north. (Trade with the Arabs led to the spread of Islam to other parts of Africa). Arab
merchants brought luxury goods and salt. In return they purchased gold and slaves from the
Africans

West Africa

By the 9th century AD a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states,
stretched across the sub-saharan savannah from the western coast to central Sudan. The most
powerful of these states were Ghana, Gao, and the Kanem-Bornu Empire. Ghana declined in
the 11th century but was succeeded by

11th century. Islam then spread through the interior of West Africa, as the religion of the
mansas of the Mali Empire (c. 12351400). Following the fabled 1324 hajj of Kankan Musa
I, Timbuktu became renowned as a centre of Islamic scholarship and as the location of sub-
Saharan Africa's first university. That city had been reached in 1352 by the great Arab
traveler Ibn Battuta, whose journey to Mombasa and Quiloa (Kilwa) provided the first
accurate knowledge of those flourishing Muslim cities of the Swahili on the east African
seaboards.
Mali
Mali was founded in the 13th century. By the 14th century Mali was rich and powerful. Its
cities included Timbuktu, which was a busy trading center where salt, horses, gold and slaves
were sold. However the kingdom of Mali was destroyed by Songhai in the 16th century.
Songhai was a kingdom situated east of Mali on the River Niger from the 14th century to the
16th century. Songhai reached a peak about 1500 AD. However in 1591 they were defeated
by the Moroccans and their kingdom broke up. Mali Empire which consolidated much of
western Sudan in the 13th century. Kanem accepted Islam

Nigeria

In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew up with little
influence from the Muslim north. Ife, historically the first of these Yoruba city-states,
established government under a priestly king, or Oni. 11th century the city of Ife in
Southwest Nigeria was the capital of a great kingdom. From the 12th century craftsmen from
Ife made terracotta sculptures and bronze heads. However by the 16th century Ife was
declining to a new location.Ife was noted as the religious and cultural centre of the region,
and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. The Ife model of government was
adapted at Oyo, where a member of its ruling dynasty controlled several smaller city-states.
By the 15th century the Oyo Empire had cut off the mother city from the savanna.
Yorubaland established a community in the Edo-speaking area east of Ife at the beginning of
the 14th century. This developed into the Benin Empire (The medieval kingdom of Benin
was bigger than the modern country). From the 13th century Benin was rich and powerful..
By the 15th century Benin had become an independent trading power, blocking Ife's access to
the coastal ports. Benin, which may have housed 100,000 inhabitants at its height, spread
over twenty-five square kilometres, and was enclosed by three concentric rings of
earthworks. By the late 15th century Benin was in contact with Portugal. At its apogee in the
16th and 17th centuries, Benin encompassed parts of southeastern Yorubaland and the
western Igbo.

Central Africa

Around 1000 BC, Bantu migrants had reached the Great Lakes of East Africa. Halfway
through that millennium, the Bantu had also settled as far south as the countries of what are
now Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One of the major events that
occurred in Central Africa during this period was the establishment of the Kanem Empire in
what is now Chad. The Kanem Empire would flourish in the coming centuries setting the
stage for future great states in the Sahel region of Africa.

East Africa

Historically, the Swahili could be found as far north as northern Kenya, and as far south as
Rovuma River in Mozambique. Although once believed to be the descendants of Persian
colonists, the ancient Swahili are now recognized by most historians, historical linguists, and
archaeologists as a Bantu people who had sustained and important interactions with Muslim
merchants beginning in the late 7th and early 8th century AD. Middle Age Swahili Kingdoms
are known to have had trade port islands and trade routes with the Islamic world and Asia and
were described by Greek historians are "metropolises".Famous African trade ports such as
Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Kilwa[17] were known to Chinese sailors such as Zheng He and
medieval Islamic historians such as the Berber Islamic voyager Abu Abdullah ibn Battua.
Only in Egypt under Arab rule, and where independence was maintained in Ethiopia, did
Christianity survive in any strength. In this period Islamic influence spread slowly south
toward sub-saharan kingdoms like the Songhai Empire, and along the Indian Ocean coast,
although it never penetrated the Benin Empire or the other civilisations of the forest-belt
south of the savannah.

ANSWER NO2

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave
traders of enslaved African people, mainly from Africa to the Americas, and then their sale
there. The slave trade used mainly the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and
existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were enslaved and
transported in the transatlantic slave trade were Africans from central and western Africa,
who had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders (with a small
number being captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids), who brought them to the
Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies especially were dependent on the
supply of secure labour for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to
sell in Europe.

The Portuguese were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century. In
1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other European
countries soon followed. Ship owners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the
Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible,[2] there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco,
cocoa, sugar and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry,
cutting timber for ships, in skilled labour, and as domestic servants.

MAJOR FACTORS IN THE UNDER DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICA

The transatlantic slave trade caused the forced removal from Africa of millions of Africans.
This number included a large percentage of skilled tradesmen and women from a range of
occupations and professions who were making their contribution to African societies.
Without them, African societies themselves were weakened. ".

By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with the slaves and
their offspring being legally the property of their owners, and children born to slave mothers
were also slaves. As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and
were sold at markets with other goods and services.

Europeans destroyed these systems in large areas of Africa when they developed the trade in
enslaved Africans. Local systems were badly affected and overwhelmed by the demands of
the new trade in enslaved Africans, a trade imposed by the better developed guns and ships of
the Europeans.

Europeans did not want African states to develop their own technology. They did not want
them to be able to make their own manufactured goods. Europe tried to control Africa and its
wealth.
REFERENCES:

www.focac.org

www.localhistories.org/africanhistory.html

Transatlantic Interests In Asia, Russel, Daniel R., United States Department of State, 13
January 2014

Phillip Inman. Prospect of TTIP already undermining EU food standards, say campaigners.
The Guardian. 18 October 2015.

http://www.revealinghistories.org.uk/africa-the-arrival-of-europeans-and-
the-transatlantic-slave-trade/articles/the-underdevelopment-of-africa

www.chathamhouse.org/publication/politics-and-development-tanzania-
shifting-status-quo

www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/feature

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People's Republic of China Copyright@2004