The Kongo cosmogram is the foundation of Kongo society. The circle made by the sun's movement is the first geometric picture given to human beings. We move the same way the sun moves: we wake up, are active, die, then come back. The horizon line is the kalunga line between the physical and spiritual world. It is a way to come closer to the core of the community.
Europeans did not introduce slavery to Africa. As African rulers rose and fell, their political opponents, people of high social status, and their families were sold to promote internal political stability. Poor people were sold to reconcile debts owed by themselves or their families. Chiefs sold people as punishment for crimes. Gangs of Africans and a few marauding Europeans captured free Africans who were also sold into slavery.
Domestic slaves were resold and prisoners of war were sold. Africans themselves carried out the capture and sale of other Africans for enslavement -- few Europeans ever actually marched inland and captured slaves themselves.
At the same time, had Europeans not wanted African slave labor for their American colonies, there would not have been any market for African slaves. African wars fed the slave trade, and the slave trade, in turn, fueled internal Africal wars.
All of these African people were bartered for European trade goods. The low cost of slaves greatly encouraged the slave trade. During the late seventeenth century, merchants in the Senegambia region of West Africa paid as little as one pound sterling for young males, which they sold to European traders for the equivalent of three-and-a-half pounds sterling, or eleven muskets, thirty-one gallons of brandy, or ninety-three pounds of wrought iron.
Initially, many slaves were acquired from regions within fifty or a hundred miles of the West African coast. During the eighteenth century, though, rising prices led slavers to search for captives in interior regions, to 1, miles inland. As the slave trade continued, more and more wars broke out between African reconcile principalities. Whatever the reconcile ostensible causes of these wars, they produced prisoners of war that supplied slave factories along the West and West Central African coast.
The fighting between African societies followed a pattern. Wars weakened the centralized African governments and undermined the authority of associations, societies, and the elders who exercised social control in societies with decentralized political forms.
Both winners and losers lost people from niches in lineages, secret societies, associations, guilds and other networks that maintained social order. Conflict brought about loss of population and seriously compromised indigenous production of material goods, cash crops and subsistence crops. Seventeenth-century Capuchin monks reported that the Angolan Ndongo slave catchment area was rapidly becoming a wasteland as countless people died in war or as slaves in transit to slaving depots, were exported as slaves, or fled the advance of slave-catching warriors.
Both winners and losers in the African wars came to rely upon European trade goods. Eventually, European money replaced cowrie shells as a medium of exchange. European trade goods supplanted indigenous material goods, natural resources and products as the economic basis of West African society. At the same time, Europeans increasingly required people in exchange for trade goods.
Once this stage was reached, an African society had little choice but to trade human lives for European goods and guns -- guns that had become necessary to wage wars for further captives in order to trade for goods upon which the African society was now dependent. The effects of the trade on African civilization and culture were devastating. African societies lost kinship networks and agricultural laborers and production capacity.
The loss of people meant the loss of indigenous artisans and craftsmen along with their knowledge of textile production, weaving and dying, metallurgy and metalwork, carving, basket making, potting skills, architecture, and agricultural techniques upon which their societies depended.
These were the same expertise and skills that Africans brought to the New World along with their physical labor and ability to acclimate to harsh environments that made them indispensable in the development of the new colonies and nations of the Western Hemisphere. Curtin, Philip D. Newman, James L. Boahen, A. Boahen, Topics in West African History. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Boahen, Topics in West African History , Available online retrieved on January 16, Map of the major African regions that contributed to the translatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Skip to main content. Board of Education and School Desegregation Brown v. Bush: U. Reading Primary Sources: an introduction for students Appendix B. Wills and inventories: a process guide Appendix C. Who created this source, and what do I know about her, him, or them? When was the source produced? Where was the source produced?
Contextualize the Source What do I know about the historical context of this source? Indeed it was the wealth of West Africa, especially as a source of gold, that encouraged the voyages of the early European explorers.
By the 15th century the African continent was already one of great of diversity. The existence of great kingdoms and empires, such as Mali in the west and Ethiopia in the east were in many ways exceptional rather than typical.
In many part of the continent no major centralised states existed and many people lived in societies where there were no great divisions of wealth and power. In such societies there were generally more democratic systems of government by councils of elders and other kinship and age based institutions.
As a consequence there was also a diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs. In many areas these beliefs remained traditional and stressed the importance of communing with common ancestors. The Ethiopian kingdom was unusual because the Orthodox Christian church, which was of ancient origin in that region, had increasingly important state functions.
In Mali, and in some other areas of western and eastern Africa, as well as in throughout North Africa, Islam had already begun to play a significant role before Most importantly African societies were following their own patterns of development before the onset of European intervention.
There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences. Whilst some changed slightly over time, there were still some who continued to hold these derogatory views.
We now know that, far from Africa having no history, it is almost certain that human history actually began there. All the earliest evidence of human existence and of our immediate hominid ancestors has been found in Africa. The latest scientific research points to the fact that all human beings are likely to have African ancestors.
Africa was not just the birthplace of humanity but also the cradle of early civilisations that made an immense contribution to the world and are still marvelled at today.
The most notable example is Kemet — the original name of ancient Egypt — which first developed in the Nile valley more than 5, years ago and was one of the first monarchies. However, even before the rise of Egypt, an even earlier kingdom was founded in Nubia, in what is present-day Sudan. Ta Seti is thought to be one of the earliest states in history, the existence of which demonstrates that, thousands of years ago, Africans were developing some of the most advanced political systems anywhere in the world.
Kemet, more commonly referred to as the Egypt of the pharaohs, is best known for its great monuments and feats of architecture and engineering, such as the planning and construction of the pyramids, but it also made great advances in many other fields.
The Egyptians produced early types of paper, devised a written script and developed a calendar. They made important contributions in various branches of mathematics, such as geometry and algebra, and it seems likely that they understood and perhaps invented the use of zero.
They also made important contributions to mechanics, philosophy and agriculture, especially irrigation. Some historians now believe that Egypt had an important influence on ancient Greece, pointing to the fact that Greek scholars such as Pythagoras and Archimedes studied there and that the work of Aristotle and Plato was largely based on earlier Egyptian scholarship.
The continent progressed on its own path of development without major external intervention apart from the Arab invasions of North Africa that began after the rise of Islam in the mid-7th century. Those invasions and the introduction of Islam served to integrate North Africa, as well as parts of East and West Africa, more fully into the Muslim-dominated trading system of that period and generally enhanced the local, regional and international trading networks that were already developing throughout the continent.
The Arabic language also provided a script that assisted the development of literacy, book-based learning and record-keeping. The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle were studied there, as well as subjects such as law, various branches of philosophy, dialectics, grammar, rhetoric and astronomy.
In the 16th century, one of its most famous scholars, Ahmed Baba — , is said to have written more than 40 major books on such subjects as astronomy, history and theology and had a private library that held over 1, volumes.
These explorers in turn wrote their own volumes about their travels to inform the wider world about Africa and its riches. Accounts by African writers such as Ibn Battuta also survive. According to the historian John Iliffe, the narrative of the Arab geographer Al-Bakri tells of the scene at the royal court of Ghana: 'Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the [vassal] kings wearing splendid garments and their hair plaited with gold.
Old Benin was the forest kingdom of the Edo-speaking people. From the early 15th century, the Oba ruler of Benin, Ewuare, built up a powerful standing army and expanded Benin towards the Niger Delta and Lagos in the west. The Oba was head of government and established a well-structured society. He collected taxes and owned all the land in the country. As early as the 8th century, contact between Africa and Europe increased dramatically with the conquest of Spain and Portugal by Muslim forces from North Africa and also, later, from Northwest Africa , called Moors by the Spanish.
Their leader was Tarik Ibn al-Walid, who also gave his name to a rocky island off the southern tip of Spain - 'Jabal [mount of] Tarik', or Gibraltar, as it is now known. The Moors extended their influence via trade into northern Europe. They were scholars, engineers and also great builders consequently, Moorish architectural influence is visible in many parts of Spain today.
Islamic political power ended in , however, with the conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchy.
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