The name Africa came into European use through the Romans, who administered as the province of Africa the territory formerly of Carthage (location of modern Tunisia) The historian Leo Africanus attributes the origin to the Greek word phrike (φρικε, meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix a-, so meaning a land free of cold and horror. But the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century, so could not really be the origin of the name. Others have suggested it is from a name Afer, related to the modern name Berber. Egypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients, and first assigned to Africa by the geographer Ptolemy, who made the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge.
For the evolution of hominids, which occurred in East and Central Africa, and particularly of Homo sapiens, see under paleontology and other entries.
The earliest human migration out of Africa and within the continent are indicated by linguistic and cultural evidence, and increasingly by computer-analyzed genetic evidence (see Cavalli-Sforza). The Khoisan languages are almost unique in using glottal clicks - the only other languages that do this are the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa, such as Xhosa and Zulu. Khoisan languages are now spoken mostly by isolated islands of genetically and culturally distinct populations of hunter-gatherers on marginal lands such as the Kalahari Desert.
This seems to indicate that the Bantu people have emigrated into former Khoisan ranges and displaced them. The Bantu used a distinct suite of crops suited to tropical Africa, including cassava and yams. This farming culture is able to support more persons per square mile than hunter-gatherers. The traditional Bantu range goes from the northern deserts right down to the temperate regions of the south, in which the Bantu crop suite fails from frost. The Bantu peoples tend to be large, prone to fat, with wide lips and noses. Their primary weapons historically are bows and short stabbing spears with shields.
Farther in the north central area, the people that speak Swahili were the traditional prey of Arab slave-traders. Some scholars believe that Swahili, an agglutinative language with peculiar root words, was actually an early synthetic language imposed on a slave culture by slave owners in order to avoid learning the numerous prehistoric languages believed to exist in the slave-capturing regions. Traces of these languages exist all through the regions, and oddly, many root-words of Swahili seem to come from these other languages.
Ethiopia is a distinct, ancient culture with an intermittent history of contact with Eurasia (such as Christianity). It has a unique language, culture and crop system. The crop system is adapted to the dry northern highlands and does not partake of any other area's crops. The most famous member of this crop system is coffee, but one of the more useful plants is sorghum, a dry-land grain.
Neolithic rock engravings, or 'petroglyphs' and the megaliths in the Libyan desert attest to early hunter-gatherer culture in the dry grasslands of North Africa during the glacial age. The region of the present Sahara was an early site for the practice of agriculture. However, after the desertification of the Sahara, settlement in North Africa became concentrated in the valley of the Nile, where the pre-literate Nomes of Egypt laid a base for the culture of ancient Egypt, usually considered separately from the other cultures of the continent. Egyptian culture had considerable contact with the upper Nile valley, south of the cataracts of the Nile: see Nubia, history of Sudan, etc.
Separated by the 'sea of sand', the Sahara, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa have had separate histories, tenuously linked by fluctuating trade routes. Phoenician, Greek and Roman history of North Africa can be followed in entries for the Roman Empire and for its individual provinces in the Maghreb, such as Mauretania, Africa, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Egypt etc.
(For the period of recorded history, much of Africa was dominated by Asiatic and European conquerors and colonizers, Ethiopia being the only state which throughout historic times had (except for a brief period during World War II) maintained its independence. The countries bordering the Mediterranean were first exploited by the Phoenicians, whose earliest settlements were made before 1000 B.C. Carthage, founded about 800 B.C., speedily grew into a city without rival in the Mediterranean, and the Phoenicians, subduing the Berber tribes, who then as now formed the bulk of the population, became masters of all the habitable region of North Africa west of the Great Syrtis, and found in commerce a source of immense prosperity.)
In the meantime, the first European colonists had planted themselves in Africa. At the point where the continent approaches nearest the Greek islands, Greeks founded the city of Cyrene (c. 631 B.C.). Cyrenaica became a flourishing colony, though being hemmed in on all sides by absolute desert it had little or no influence on inner Africa. The Greeks, however, exerted a powerful influence in Egypt. To Alexander the Great the city of Alexandria owes its foundation (332 BC), and under the Hellenistic dynasty of the Ptolemies attempts were made to penetrate southward, and in this way was obtained some knowledge of Ethiopia.
Neither Cyrenaica nor Egypt was a serious rival to the Carthaginians, but all three powers were eventually supplanted by the Romans. After centuries of rivalry for supremacy, the struggle was ended by the fall of Carthage in 146 BC. Within little more than a century from that date Egypt and Cyrene had become incorporated in the Roman empire. Under Rome the settled portions of the country were very prosperous, and a Latin strain was introduced into the land. Though Fezzan was occupied by them, the Romans elsewhere found the Sahara an impassable barrier. Nubia and Ethiopia were reached, but an expedition sent by the emperor Nero to discover the source of the Nile ended in failure. The utmost extent of geographical knowledge of the continent is shown in the writings of Ptolemy (2nd century A.D.), who knew of or guessed the existence of the great lake reservoirs of the Nile and had heard of the river Niger.
Still, to Europe "Africa" remained simply the countries bordering the Mediterranean. Prominent examples of political contact between Europe and North Africa during this period include the continual struggle between Rome and the Berber tribes; the introduction of Christianity and the effects of the churches in Egypt and Ethiopia; the invasion and conquest of Rome's African provinces by the Vandals in the 5th century; the passing of the supreme power in the following century to the Byzantine Empire. All of these topics are expounded upon in their respective articles.
In the 7th century A.D. occurred an event destined to have a permanent influence on the whole continent. Beginning with an invasion of Egypt, a host of Arabs, believers in the new faith of Islam, conquered the whole of North Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and continued into Spain. Throughout North Africa Christianity nearly disappeared, save in Egypt (where the Coptic Church was allowed to continue), and Upper Nubia and Ethiopia, which were not subdued by the Muslims.
In the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries the Arabs in Africa were numerically weak, holding the countries they had conquered only by military superiority; but in the 11th century there was a great Arab immigration, resulting in a large absorption of Berber culture. Even before this the Berbers had very generally adopted the speech and religion of their conquerors. Arab influence and the Islamic religion thus became indelibly stamped on northern Africa. Together they spread southward across the Sahara. They also became firmly established along the eastern seaboard, where Arabs, Persians and Indians planted flourishing colonies, such as Mombasa, Malindi and Sofala, playing a role, maritime and commercial, analogous to that filled in earlier centuries by the Carthaginians on the northern seaboard. Until the 14th century, Europe and the Arabs of North Africa were both ignorant of these eastern cities and states.
The first Arab invaders had recognized the authority of the caliphs of Baghdad, and the Aghlabite dynasty—founded by Aghlab, one of Haroun al-Raschid's generals, at the close of the 8th century—ruled as vassals of the caliphate. However, early in the 10th century the Fatimid dynasty established itself in Egypt, where Cairo had been founded AD 968, and from there ruled as far west as the Atlantic. Later still arose other dynasties such as the Almoravides and Almohades. Eventually the Turks, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453, and had seized Egypt in 1517, established the regencies of Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli (between 1519 and 1551), Morocco remaining an independent Arabized Berber state under the Sharifan dynasty, which had its beginnings at the end of the 13th century.
Under the earlier dynasties Arabian or Moorish culture had attained a high degree of excellence, while the spirit of adventure and the proselytizing zeal of the followers of Islam led to a considerable extension of the knowledge of the continent. This was rendered more easy by their use of the camel (first introduced into Africa by the Persian conquerors of Egypt), which enabled the Arabs to traverse the desert. In this way Senegambia and the middle Niger regions fell under the influence of the Arabs and Berbers, but it was not until 1591 that Timbuktu—a city founded in the 11th century—became Muslim. That city had been reached in 1352 by the great Arab traveller Ibn Battuta, whose journey to Mombasa and Quiloa (Kilwa) provided the first accurate knowledge of those flourishing Muslim cities on the east African seaboards. Except along this seaboard, which was colonized directly from Asia, Arab progress southward was stopped by the broad belt of dense forest, stretching almost across the continent somewhat south of 10° North latitude, which barred their advance much as the Sahara had proved an obstacle to their predecessors. The rainforest cut them off from knowledge of the Guinea coast and of all Africa beyond. One of the regions which was the last to come under Arab rule was that of Nubia, which had been controlled by Christians up to the 14th century.
For a time the Muslim conquests in South Europe had virtually made of the Mediterranean an Arab lake, but the expulsion in the 11th century of the Saracens from Sicily and southern Italy by the Normans was followed by descents of the conquerors on Tunisia and Tripoli. Somewhat later a busy trade with the African coastlands, and especially with Egypt, was developed by Venice, Pisa, Genoa and other cities of North Italy. By the end of the 15th century Spain had completely thrown off the Muslim yoke, but even while the Moors were still in Granada, Portugal was strong enough to carry the war into Africa. In 1415 a Portuguese force captured the citadel of Ceuta on the Moorish coast. From that time onward Portugal repeatedly interfered in the affairs of Morocco, while Spain acquired many ports in Algeria and Tunisia.
Portugal, however, suffered a crushing defeat in 1578 at al Kasr al Kebir, the Moors being led by Abd el Malek I of the then recently established Sharifan dynasty. By that time the Spaniards had lost almost all their African possessions. The Barbary states, primarily from the example of the Moors expelled from Spain, degenerated into mere communities of pirates, and under Turkish influence civilization and commerce declined. The story of these states from the beginning of the 16th century to the third decade of the 19th century is largely made up of piratical exploits on the one hand and of ineffectual reprisals on the other. In Algiers, Tunis and other cities were thousands of Christian slaves.
See Ethiopia, Great Zimbabwe, Mali, Oba of Benin
With the Battle of Ceuta Africa had ceased to belong solely to the Mediterranean world. Among those who fought there was one, Prince Henry "the Navigator son of King John I, who was fired with the ambition to acquire for Portugal the unknown parts of Africa. Under his inspiration and direction was begun that series of voyages of exploration which resulted in the circumnavigation of Africa and the establishment of Portuguese sovereignty over large areas of the coastlands.
Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Verde in 1445, and by 1480 the whole Guinea coast was known. In 1482 Diogo Cão discovered the mouth of the Congo, the Cape of Good Hope was rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama, after having rounded the Cape, sailed up the east coast, touched at Sofala and Malindi, and went thence to India. Over all the countries discovered by their navigators Portugal claimed sovereign rights, but these were not exercised in the extreme south of the continent.
The Guinea coast, as the first discovered and the nearest to Europe, was first exploited. Numerous forts and trading stations were established, the earliest being Sao Jorge da Mina (Elmina), begun in 1482. The chief commodities dealt in were slaves, gold, ivory and spices. The discovery of America (1492) was followed by a great development of the slave trade, which, before the Portuguese era, had been an overland trade almost exclusively confined to Muslim Africa. The lucrative nature of this trade and the large quantities of alluvial gold obtained by the Portuguese drew other nations to the Guinea coast. English mariners went there as early as 1553, and they were followed by Spaniards, Dutch, French, Danish and other adventurers. Much of Senegambia was made known as a result of quests during the 16th century for the "hills of gold" in Bambuk and the fabled wealth of Timbuktu, but the middle Niger was not reached. The supremacy along the coast passed in the 17th century from Portugal to the Netherlands and from the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries to France and England. The whole coast from Senegal to Lagos was dotted with forts and "factories" of rival powers, and this international patchwork persisted into the 20th century though all the hinterland had become either French or British territory.
Southward from the mouth of the Congo to the inhospitable region of Damaraland (in what is present-day Namibia), the Portuguese, from 1491 onward, acquired influence over the Bantu inhabitants, and in the early part of the 16th century through their efforts Christianity was largely adopted in the Kongo Empire. An incursion of cannibalistic tribes from the interior later in the same century broke the power of this semi-Christian state, and Portuguese activity was transferred to a great extent farther south, Sao Paulo de Loanda (present-day Luanda) being founded in 1576. Prior to Angolan independence, the sovereignty of Portugal over this coast region, except for the mouth of the Congo, had been once only challenged by a European power, and that was in 1640-1648, when the Dutch held the seaports.
Neglecting the comparatively poor and thinly inhabited regions of South Africa, the Portuguese no sooner discovered than they coveted the flourishing cities held by Arabized peoples between Sofala and Cape Guardafui. By 1520 all these Muslim sultanates had been seized by Portugal, Mozambique being chosen as the chief city of her East African possessions. Nor was Portuguese activity confined to the coastlands. The lower and middle Zambezi valley was explored (16th and 17th centuries), and here the Portuguese found semi-assimilated Bantu tribes, who had been for many years in contact with the coast Arabs. Strenuous efforts were made to obtain possession of the country (modern Zimbabwe) known to them as the kingdom or empire of Monomotapa, where gold had been worked by the natives from about the 12th century AD, and whence the Arabs, whom the Portuguese dispossessed, were still obtaining supplies in the 16th century. Several expeditions were despatched inland from 1569 onward and considerable quantities of gold were obtained. Portugal's hold on the interior, never very effective, weakened during the 17th century, and in the middle of the 18th century ceased with the abandonment of the forts in the Manica district.
At the period of her greatest power Portugal exercised a strong influence in Ethiopia also. In the ruler of Ethiopia (to whose dominions a Portuguese traveller had penetrated before Vasco da Gama's memorable voyage) the Portuguese imagined they had found the legendary Christian king, Prester John, and when the complete overthrow of the native dynasty and the Christian religion was imminent by the victories of Muslim invaders, the exploits of a band of 400 Portuguese under Christopher da Gama during 1541-1543 turned the scale in favor of Ethiopia and had thus an enduring result on the future of North-East Africa. After da Gama's time Portuguese Jesuits travelled to Ethiopia. While they failed in their efforts to convert the Ethiopians to Roman Catholicism they acquired an extensive knowledge of the country. Pedro Paez in 1615, and, ten years later, Jeronimo Lobo, both visited the sources of the Blue Nile. In 1663 the Portuguese, who had outstayed their welcome, were expelled from the Ethiopian dominions. At this time Portuguese influence on the Zanzibar coast faded before the power of the Arabs of Muscat, and by 1730 no point on the east coast north of Cape Delgado was held by Portugal.
It has been seen that Portugal took no steps to acquire the southern part of the continent. To the Portuguese the Cape of Good Hope was simply a landmark on the road to India, and mariners of other nations who followed in their wake used Table Bay only as a convenient spot wherein to refit on their voyage to the East. By the beginning of the 17th century the bay was much resorted to for this purpose, chiefly by English and Dutch vessels.
In 1620, with the object of forestalling the Dutch, two officers of the East India Company, on their own initiative, took possession of Table Bay in the name of King James, fearing otherwise that English ships would be "frustrated of watering but by license." Their action was not approved in London and the proclamation they issued remained without effect. The Netherlands profited by the apathy of the English. On the advice of sailors who had been shipwrecked in Table Bay the Netherlands East India Company, in 1651, sent out a fleet of three small vessels under Jan van Riebeeck which reached Table Bay on the April 6, 1652 when, 164 years after its discovery, the first permanent white settlement was made in South Africa. The Portuguese, whose power in Africa was already waning, were not in a position to interfere with the Dutch plans, and England was content to seize the island of Saint Helena as her half-way house to the East. Until the Dutch landed, the southern tip of Africa was inhabited by a sparse Xhosa-speaking culture of hunter-gatherers. Europeans found it a paradise for their temperate crop suites.
In its inception the settlement at the Cape was not intended to become an African colony, but was regarded as the most westerly outpost of the Dutch East Indies. Nevertheless, despite the paucity of ports and the absence of navigable rivers, the Dutch colonists, freed from any apprehension of European trouble by the friendship between Great Britain and the Netherlands, and leavened by Huguenot blood, gradually spread northward, stamping their language, law and religion indelibly upon South Africa. This process, however, was exceedingly slow.
During the 18th century the slave trade reached its highest development, the trade in gold, ivory, gum and spices being small in comparison.
See also: Colonization of Africa, Scramble for Africa
Although the Napoleonic Wars distracted the attention of Europe from exploratory work in Africa, those wars nevertheless exercised great influence on the future of the continent, both in Egypt and South Africa. The occupation of Egypt (1798-1803) first by France and then by Great Britain resulted in an effort by Turkey to regain direct control over that country, followed in 1811 by the establishment under Mehemet Ali of an almost independent state, and the extension of Egyptian rule over the eastern Sudan (from 1820 onward). In South Africa the struggle with Napoleon caused Great Britain to take possession of the Dutch settlements at the Cape, and in 1814 Cape Colony, which had been continuously occupied by British troops since 1806, was formally ceded to the British crown.
Meantime considerable changes had been made in other parts of the continent, the most notable being the occupation of Algiers by France in 1830, an end being thereby put to the piratical proceedings of the Barbary states; the continued expansion southward of Egyptian authority with the consequent additions to the knowledge of the Nile. The city of Zanzibar, on the island of that name, founded in 1832 by Seyyid Said of Muscat, rapidly attained importance. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the discovery in 1840-1848, by the missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johann Rebmann, of the snow-clad mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated in Europe the desire for further knowledge.
At this period, the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were carrying on active propaganda on the Guinea coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. Their work, largely beneficent, was being conducted in regions and among peoples little known, and in many instances missionaries turned explorers and became pioneers of trade and empire. One of the first to attempt to fill up the remaining blank spaces in the map was David Livingstone, who had been engaged since 1840 in missionary work north of the Orange. In 1849 Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami, and between 1851 and 1856 he traversed the continent from west to east, making known the great waterways of the upper Zambezi. During these journeyings Livingstone discovered, November 1855, the famous Victoria Falls, so named after the queen of England. In 1858-1864 the lower Zambezi, the Shire and Lake Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first reached by the confidential slave of Antonio da Silva Porto, a Portuguese trader established at Bihe in Angola, who crossed Africa during 1853-1856 from Benguella to the mouth of the Rovuma.
Henry Morton Stanley, who had in 1871 succeeded in finding and succouring Livingstone, started again for Zanzibar in 1874, and in one of the most memorable of all exploring expeditions in Africa circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and, striking farther inland to the Lualaba, followed that river down to the Atlantic Ocean—reached in August 1877 -- and proved it to be the Congo.
While the great mystery of Central Africa was being solved explorers were also active in other parts of the continent. Southern Morocco, the Sahara and the Sudan were traversed in many directions between 1860 and 1875 by Gerhard Rohlfs, Georg Schweinfurth and Gustav Nachtigal. These travellers not only added considerably to geographical knowledge, but obtained invaluable information concerning the people, languages and natural history of the countries in which they sojourned. Among the discoveries of Schweinfurth was one that confirmed the Greek legends of the existence beyond Egypt of a "pygmy race". But the first discoverer of the dwarf races of Central Africa was Paul du Chaillu, who found them in the Ogowe district of the west coast in 1865, five years before Schweinfurth's first meeting with them; du Chaillu having previously, as the result of journeys in the Gabon region between 1855 and 1859, made popular in Europe the knowledge of the existence of the gorilla, perhaps the gigantic ape seen by Hanno the Carthaginian, and whose existence, up to the middle of the 19th century, was thought to be as legendary as that of the Pygmies of Aristotle.
In the last quarter of the 19th century the map of Africa was transformed. After the discovery of the Congo the story of exploration takes second place; the continent becomes the theatre of European expansion. Lines of partition, drawn often through trackless wildernesses, marked out the possessions of Germany, France, Great Britain and other powers. Railways penetrated the interior, vast areas were opened up to Western occupation, and from Egypt to the Zambezi the continent was startled into new life.
The causes which led to the partition of Africa may now be considered. They are to be found in the economic and political state of western Europe at the time. Germany, strong and united as the result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, was seeking new outlets for her energies—new markets for her growing industries, and with the markets, colonies.
Yet the idea of colonial expansion was of slow growth in Germany, and when Prince Bismarck at length acted Africa was the only field left to exploit, South America being protected from interference by the known determination of the United States to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, while Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain already held most of the other regions of the world where colonization was possible.
For different reasons the war of 1870 was also the starting-point for France in the building up of a new colonial empire. In her endeavour to regain the position lost in that war France had to look beyond Europe. To the two causes mentioned must be added others. Great Britain and Portugal, when they found their interests threatened, bestirred themselves, while Italy also conceived it necessary to become an African power. Great Britain awoke to the need for action too late to secure predominance in all the regions where formerly hers was the only European influence. She had to contend not only with the economic forces which urged her rivals to action, but had also to combat the jealous opposition of almost every European nation to the further growth of British power. Italy alone acted throughout in cordial co-operation with Great Britain.
It was not, however, the action of any of the great powers of Europe which precipitated the struggle. This was brought about by the ambitious projects of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The discoveries of Livingstone, Stanley and others had aroused especial interest among two classes of men in western Europe, one the manufacturing and trading class, which saw in Central Africa possibilities of commercial development, the other the philanthropic and missionary class, which beheld in the newly discovered lands millions of "savages" to Christianize and "civilize". The possibility of utilizing both these classes in the creation of a vast state, of which he should be the chief, formed itself in the mind of Leopold II even before Stanley had navigated the Congo. The king's action was immediate; it proved successful; but no sooner was the nature of his project understood in Europe than it provoked the rivalry of France and Germany, and thus the international struggle was begun.
The part of the continent to which King Leopold directed his energies was the equatorial region. In September 1876 he took what may be described as the first definite step in the modern partition of the continent. He summoned to a conference at Brussels representatives of Great Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Russia, to deliberate on the best methods to be adopted for the exploration and Westernization of Africa, and the opening up of the interior of the continent to commerce and industry. The conference was entirely unofficial. The delegates who attended neither represented nor pledged their respective governments. Their deliberations lasted three days and resulted in the foundation of "The International African Association," with its headquarters at Brussels. It was further resolved to establish national committees in the various countries represented, which should collect funds and appoint delegates to the International Association. The central idea appears to have been to put the exploration and development of Africa upon an international footing. But it quickly became apparent that this was an unattainable ideal. The national committees were soon working independently of the International Association, and the Association itself passed through a succession of stages until it became purely Belgian in character, and at last developed into the Congo Free State, under the personal sovereignty of King Leopold.
For some time before 1884 there had been growing up a general conviction that it would be desirable for the powers who were interesting themselves in Africa to come to some agreement as to "the rules of the game," and to define their respective interests so far as that was practicable. Lord Granville's ill-fated treaty brought this sentiment to a head, and it was agreed to hold an international conference on African affairs.
From 1885 the scramble among the powers went on with renewed vigour, and in the fifteen years that remained of the century the work of partition, so far as international agreements were concerned, was practically completed.
1900s. Conflict between the UK and Dutch settlers.
The Boer War.
All of the continent claimed by European powers, except for Ethiopia ("Abyssinia") and Liberia.
After World War I, the formerly German colonies in Africa were taken over by France and Great Britain.
In 1935 Benito Mussolini had Italian troops invade Ethiopia, the last African nation not dominated by a foreign power.
Apartheid in South Africa.
See historical African place names for names not used in present-day states.
Origins of the Name
Prehistory
Neolithic North Africa and Phoenician and Greek colonization
Islamic North Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa: Medieval empires
European exploration and conquest
Portuguese
19th Century European explorers
Partition among European Powers
For details, see the main article Scramble for Africa.Conflicting ambitions of the European powers
The Berlin Conference of 1884-85
Main article: Berlin Conference
Africa at the start of the 20th century
Map of Africa just before World War I
(456kb)
Africa Between the World Wars
World War II Era
1940s. Pre-WW2 and World War II in Africa.
1940s - 1990s
1960s. De-colonialization of much of sub-Saharan Africa.History of African Nations
Central Africa
Eastern Africa
Northern Africa
Southern Africa
Western Africa