History of West Africa

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The partial history of West Africa can be divided into five major periods:

1. Its prehistory, in which the first human settlers arrived, agriculture developed, and contact made with the Mediterranean civilizations to the north.
2. The Iron Age empires that consolidated trade and developed centralized states.
3. The slave-trading kingdoms, jihads, and colonial invaders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
4. The colonial period, in which France and Great Britain controlled nearly the whole of the region.
5. The post-independence era, in which the current nations were formed.

Contents 1 Prehistory 2 Empires 3 Jihad and colonization 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Prehistory

Archaeological studies at Mejiro Cave have found that early human settlers had arrived in West Africa around 12,000 B.C.E. Microlithic stone industries have been found primarily in the region of the Savannah where pastoral tribes existed using chiseled stone blades and spears. The tribesmen of Guinea and the forested regions of the coast were without microliths for thousands of years, but prospered using bone tools and other means. In the fifth millennium, as the ancestors of modern West Africans began entering the area, the development of sedentary farming began to take place in West Africa, with evidences of domesticated cattle having been found for this period, along with limited cereal crops. Around 3000 BCE, a major change began to take place in West African society, with microliths becoming more common in the Sahel region, with the invention of primitive harpoons and fish-hooks.

Ancient West Africa included the Sahara, as the Sahara only became a desert in around 3000 BC (see Sahara).

A major migration of Sahel cattle farmers took place in the third millennium BCE, and the pastoralists encountered the developed hunter-gatherers of the Guinea region. Flint was considerably more available there and made the use of microliths in hunting far easier. The migration of the Sahel farmers was likely caused by the final desiccation of the Sahara desert in this millennium, which contributed greatly to West Africa's isolation from cultural and technological phenomena in Europe and the Mediterranean Coast of Africa. Nevertheless, the increased use of iron and the spread of ironworking technology led to improved weaponry and enabled farmers to expand agricultural productivity and produce surplus crops, which together supported the growth of urban city-states into empires.

By 400 BCE, contact had been made with the Mediterranean civilizations, including that of Carthage, and a regular trade in gold being conducted with the Sahara Berbers, as noted by Herodotus. The trade was fairly small until the camel was introduced, with Mediterranean goods being found in pits as far south as Northern Nigeria. A profitable trade had developed by which West Africans exported gold, cotton cloth, metal ornaments, and leather goods north across the trans-Saharan trade routes, in exchange for copper, horses, salt, textiles, and beads. Later, ivory, slaves, and kola nuts were added to the trade.

[edit] Empires

The development of the region's economy allowed more centralized states to form, one of the first being the Ghana Empire. The empire was founded in the eighth century by Soninke, a Mandé peoples who lived at the crossroads of this new trade, around the city of Kumbi Saleh. After 800, the empire expanded rapidly, coming to dominate the entire western Sudan; at its height, the empire could field an army of 200,000 soldiers. In the tenth century, however, Islam was steadily growing in the region, and due to various influences, including internal dynastic struggles coupled with competing foreign interests (namely Almoravid intervention) lead to its demise in the late 11th century.

The first successor to the Ghana Empire was that of the Sosso, a Takrur people who built their empire on the ruins of the old. Despite initial successes, however, the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté was defeated by the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita at the Battle of Kirina in 1240, toppling the Sosso and guaranteeing the supremacy of Sundiata's new Mali Empire.

Under Sundiata's successors, most notably his son Wali Keita (r. c. 1255–1270) and his grand-nephew Kankou Musa I (r. c. 1312–1337), the Mali Empire continued to expand, eventually creating a centralized state including most of West Africa. Trade flourished, while Kankou Musa I founded a university at Timbuktu and instituted a program of free health care and education for Malian citizens with the help of doctors and scholars brought back from his legendary hajj.

Kankou Musa's successors, however, weakened the empire significantly, leading the city-state of Gao to make a bid for independence and regional power in the fifteenth century. Under the leadership of Sunni Ali (r. 1464-1492), the Songhai of Gao formed the Songhai Empire, which would fill the vacuum left by the Mali Empire's collapse. By the end of the century, the Songhai Empire was the dominant force in the region, and through the leadership of Askia Mohammad (c. 1442-1538), underwent a revival in trade, education, and Islamic religion. A civil war over succession greatly weakened the empire, however, leading to a 1591 invasion by Moroccan Sultan Ahmed el-Mansour that sacked Gao and crippled the empire.

Meanwhile, south of the Sudan, strong city states arose in Ife, Bono, and Benin around the fourth and fifth centuries. Further east, Oyo arose as the dominant Yoruba state and the Aro Confederacy around the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the far east in modern-day Nigeria.

[edit] Jihad and colonization

Following the collapse of the Songhai Empire, a number of smaller states arose across West Africa, including the Bambara Empire of Ségou, the lesser Bambara kingdom of Kaarta, the Peul/Malinké kingdom of Khasso (in present-day Mali's Kayes Region), and the Kénédougou Empire of Sikasso. The 19th century, though slavery in the Americas persisted in some capacity through the century in the Americas; the last country to abolish the institution was Brazil in 1888. Descendants of West Africans make up large and important segments of the population in Brazil, the Caribbean, the United States, and throughout West Africa, they had previously mostly controlled trading ports along the coasts and rivers. Samory Ture's newly-founded Wassoulou Empire was the last to fall, and with his capture in 1898, military resistance to French colonial rule effectively ended.

[edit] See also

• History of Africa
• History of Benin
• History of Burkina Faso
• History of Côte d'Ivoire
• History of the Gambia
• History of Ghana
• History of Guinea
• History of Guinea-Bissau
• History of Liberia
• History of Mali
• History of Mauritania
• History of Niger
• History of Nigeria
• History of Senegal
• History of Sierra Leone
• History of Togo

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Davidson, Basil. Africa in History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ISBN 0-684-82667-4
• Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Paul E.H. Hair, Jesuit Documents, 1989
• Paul E.H. Hair (Ed.), Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Description of the Coast of Guinea (1684), 1985

[edit] External links

• Timeline of Western Sudan