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‘Slaves’ and ‘Slave Owners’ or ‘Enslaved People’ and ‘Enslavers’?
- James Robert Burns
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- Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , First View
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- 17 November 2023, pp. 1-18
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Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware of the change or agrees with it. Despite this, few historians have justified their terminology. After surveying the extent of the preference for ‘enslaved person’, I discuss arguments for and against it. Supporters of using ‘enslaved person’ argue that this term emphasises that a person was forced into slavery – but this emphasis means it is less able to accommodate early medieval cases where people sold themselves into slavery. The accompanying preference for ‘enslaver’ over ‘master’ obscures dynamics of ownership and manumission. In addition, ‘enslaved people’ and ‘enslaver’ do not necessarily bring us away from the perspective of slaveholders to the perspective of slaves. Nor are they essential for readers to appreciate the humanity of slaves. Overall, historians should use this issue as an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which scholarship of transatlantic slavery should set the terms of debate for slavery studies in general.
Chapter 15 - China’s Medical Technology Sector
- from Part V - Product Manufacturers
- Edited by Lawton Robert Burns, University of Pennsylvania, Gordon G. Liu, Peking University, Beijing
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- China's Healthcare System and Reform
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- 26 January 2017
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- 26 January 2017, pp 383-427
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7 - The Aravind Eye Care System
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- By R. Carter Clement, University of Pennsylvania, Arunavo Roy, University of Pennsylvania, Ravi Shah, University of Pennsylvania, James Calderwood, University of Pennsylvania, Lawton Robert Burns, University of Pennsylvania
- Edited by Lawton R. Burns, University of Pennsylvania
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- India's Healthcare Industry
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- 05 June 2014
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- 13 January 2014, pp 290-316
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Introduction
The Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind) is a massive network of ophthalmologic hospitals and primary eye care centers in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, joined by educational and research institutes, community outreach programs, an eye bank, and a manufacturing arm for lenses. Aravind is famous for its immense contributions to provision of healthcare to the poor. Over the course of its history, Aravind has treated millions of impoverished people in need of eye care. Most remarkably, Aravind has found ways to deliver this care in a financially profitable way.
This history constitutes one of the greatest success stories of providing business solutions to the “bottom of the pyramid,” or BOP (see Chapter 11). The BOP refers to the poorest and largest segment of the population. This is a challenging population segment to serve for several reasons: they have been traditionally underserved, and thus have greater healthcare needs; they have few resources (both capital and human capital); they are a dispersed and heavily rural population; and they enjoy few logistical supports to access care. As a result, the BOP has traditionally not been seen as a favorable customer base. Recently, however, they have begun to attract attention as a viable target for generating revenues and profits. Serving them requires unconventional and innovative strategies.
Aravind's experience in serving this segment has provided both inspiration and valuable lessons for healthcare providers throughout the developing world who wish to reach out to the impoverished masses. This chapter chronicles Aravind's past and present roles in the Indian healthcare space, drawing implications both for Aravind as it looks into the future and for other organizations that wish to provide healthcare to the bottom of the pyramid.
25 - Cold War Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 366-376
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The decade of hope was followed by two decades of crisis. Much of the optimism that had greeted independence evaporated as economic development stalled, living standards declined, and African states faced new challenges to their stability. There had been warnings of the coming crises almost from the moment colonial flags were run down their poles. The appearance of a one-party state in Ghana, the bloody and failed secession movements in the Katanga (Congo) and Biafra (Nigeria), and the massacre of ethnic minorities shortly after independence in Rwanda were all the harbingers of future political conflict and humanitarian disasters. During the 1970s most African states were racked by some form of insurrection, coup d’état, or civil war. These internal conflicts continued in the 1980s, often exacerbated by drought, epidemic, and famine. During these two decades, a second era of decolonization developed in southern Africa, as white rule in Portuguese Africa, Rhodesia, and eventually in South Africa came to an end. At the same time, the states that had achieved independence during the 1950s and 1960s were overwhelmed by a bewildering array of political and economic problems in which ethnic – or “tribal” – identities emerged to challenge national unity. When governments proved incapable, or unwilling, to deal effectively with these challenges, opposition to political ineptitude, tyranny, and corruption coalesced along ethnic lines. The specter of tribal separatism hung over many African states from their inception, and some leaders used the threat as an excuse to dismantle democratic institutions and suppress dissent. Minorities that could not be suborned or coopted by the ruling party frequently faced discrimination, persecution, and, in some cases, ethnic cleansing.
Index
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 391-405
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Part III - Imperial Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 247-248
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21 - The colonial legacy
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 308-328
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The colonial enterprise in Africa has been condemned as exploitative and praised as constructive. The West Indian scholar Walter Rodney asserted that European pressure distorted African economic growth and led to the underdevelopment of the continent. Rodney's critics counter that colonialism drew capital and investment into the continent that ultimately built an infrastructure that proved beneficial to the African peoples. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, controversy continues without respite, but there are two aspects of European colonialism in Africa on which the antagonists agree: European colonialism dramatically transformed Africa, and the Africans played a critical role in shaping the nature of colonialism and exposing its limitations.
The colonial experience in Africa can be roughly divided into two periods. At the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of European colonialism was characterized by the imposition of imperial administrations accompanied by violent economic expropriation which imposed tremendous hardships on their African subjects. By the end of the First World War, most European states had indicated that the excessive abuse of Africans that had taken place during the preceding decades would no longer be tolerated, but during the interwar years, the British and French found it difficult to maintain coherent colonial policies. Their efforts were complicated by the world economic depression of the 1930s and then the Second World War, which found them allied with the anti-imperialist powers of the United States and the Soviet Union. To respond to the growing criticism of colonial rule, Britain in 1940 and France in 1946 launched programs for development that would mobilize African resources to restore their own economies but also provide employment and improved conditions for African wage laborers. When it became increasingly clear that these plans for economic revitalization drafted in London and Paris had failed to transform the colonial economic structure, European rulers were faced with the choice of either using massive force to suppress unrest or undertaking dramatic political reforms within their colonies. In most cases, the colonial powers determined that the latter option was the lesser of two evils.
26 - Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 377-390
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After traversing more than three millennia of the African past, it is time to pause and take stock, to look back in history as well as forward, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over the past half-century, scholars have scoured archaeological sites, colonial archives, published works, and oral traditions; utilized social science methodologies – anthropology, linguistics, and demography; and developed an appreciation of African art, music, and literature, to construct a new paradigm for understanding the continent's past. We hope that readers of this text will have recognized the themes in the last several thousand years of the African past that thread their way through the text into the twenty-first century. They are indeed the themes of this book, and they will most certainly reappear – in different forms, to be sure – in the twenty-first century.
Environment continues to shape the lives of the African peoples. As seen in the previous chapters, population has long been tied to the interaction between humans and the unique African environment. In relation to its landmass, Africa has, historically, been under populated. Two thousand years ago, Africa south of the Sahara had only an estimated population one-fifth that of China or the Roman Empire. During the next 1,500 years, this ratio continued to decline so that by 1500, Africa contained less than an estimated 15 percent of the world's human beings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Africa accounted for only about 1 percent of the 2 billion people inhabiting the earth. The reasons for this low rate of growth remain unclear to this day. Was this creeping rate of reproduction caused by a harsh climate, disease, poor soils, conflict, and slavery? One can only reflect and suggest that the reasons lie in the complex interaction between humanity and nature in Africa.
1 - The historical geography of Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 7-22
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So Geographers in Africa-Maps
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o'er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.
Jonathan Swift, “On Poetry: A Rapsody”The history of the African people has been indelibly stamped by their continent's geography – its deserts, Sahel, savanna, swamps, rainforests, plateaus, mountains, rivers, and lakes have shaped both the evolution of humankind in the geologic past and the historical development of African societies in the past several millennia. Africa's diverse geology and geography are reflected in the varied histories of its people.
Africa is an enormous landmass, 12 million square miles, larger than North America and four times the size of the United States. It is also the oldest continent, from which Europe, Asia, and the Americas floated away on tectonic plates many millions of years ago. They left in their wake a solid, vast, uplifted flat plateau 2,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level, which slept in its geologic continuity. Its rocks and sediments remained horizontal throughout millions of years, undisturbed by the gigantic metamorphic upheavals of the Himalayas, European Alps, and the American and Andean cordillera on the new continents.
11 - The peoples and states of southern Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 25 November 2013, pp 159-172
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Southern Africa is a region of high savanna, the veld (Afrikaans, “field”), mountains, and narrow coastal plain severed by short rivers lying south of the Zambezi River and comprising the modern states of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland, and the Republic of South Africa, which surround the independent kingdom of Lesotho. Although Europeans had established stations along the coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the strategic Dutch colonial station at Cape Town near the southernmost point of the continent, they knew little of the interior of southern Africa until the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, although it is relatively new to Europeans, it is in fact geologically the oldest region of the African continent. Rocks formed more than 1 billion years ago still lie in their horizontal plane, untouched by the upheavals that have elsewhere shaped the configuration of the global landmass. Here in southern Africa, protruding upward from the molten core of the earth, is the massive plug of rock called the Kaapvaal Craton, which resisted the geologic turbulence that floated the other continents away to their present locations. When the African continent became stabilized about 500 million years ago, the Kaapvaal Craton, 234,000 square miles of southern Africa, remained undisturbed, along with its prodigious mineral wealth.
Part IV - Independent Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 329-330
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19 - Southern Africa, 1486–1910
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 279-294
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At the end of the fifteenth century, southern Africa was populated by peoples who spoke languages of either the Khoisan or Bantu families. Some of the Khoisan-speakers were hunter-gatherers, whereas others lived in small communities, raising livestock. The Bantu speakers clustered roughly into two cultural groups: the Sotho-Tswana, who occupied the highveld, and the Nguni, who had settled on the coast. The Khoisan-speaking herders lived along the fertile valleys of the Cape Peninsula. Although the enormous landmass of this southern subcontinent of Africa seemed very large for the Khoisan and Bantu-speaking peoples, they had successfully exploited its diverse environment – the arid Karoo of the San (often pejoratively called Bushmen), the grasslands of the Khoi (often pejoratively called Hottentots), and the moist grasslands of the coast and drier savanna of the highlands of the Bantu speakers. This was the world into which the first Portuguese mariners made landfall in southern Africa in 1486, to be followed in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope as far as Algoa Bay, and on his return voyage discovered the safe and strategic anchorage of Table Bay, modern Cape Town.
12 - The arrival of Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 175-189
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Although Africa north of the Sahara and the coasts of the Red Sea and East Africa were well known to the ancient Mediterranean world, Africa south of the desert was not. By the fifteenth century, European perceptions of the land and people of sub-Saharan Africa were shrouded in myth, distorted by legends of ferocious peoples with bizarre physical features. Africans were collectively called Ethiopians, a pejorative term having nothing to do with the Ethiopians of northeast Africa. From the middle of the fifteenth century, the dramatic discovery of Africa by Europe was made possible by the Portuguese voyages of exploration around the African coast. These voyages were carefully planned, but their execution down the African coast was painfully slow. The long, inhospitable western African coast had few natural harbors and dangerous shores, shoals, and ocean currents that required methodical exploration to understand and chart accurate nautical maps; this could only be achieved by substantial innovations in shipbuilding, seamanship, and navigation, which required more than six decades to devise before the Portuguese captains could round the Cape of Good Hope.
22 - Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 331-343
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In 1915, a Baptist minister, John Chilembwe (c. 1871–1915), led an ill-fated insurrection against British rule in Nyasaland (Malawi). As a young man, he had believed that colonial rule would “civilize” his native Nyasaland by introducing Christian values and British liberalism. In 1892, he came under the influence of the popular radical Baptist missionary Joseph Booth (1851–1932), whom he accompanied to the United States, where he studied at the black Baptist seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Upon his return in 1900, he established the Providence Industrial Mission where, inspired by Booker T. Washington, he preached the gospel of hard work, cleanliness, and respect for the colonial authorities. He became increasingly critical, however, of the harsh treatment and brutality of white settlers toward African laborers on their plantations and the indifference of British officials to these abuses. Convinced that his colonial government would never make good on the promise of social equality he found in English law and the Christian Bible, Chilembwe published a letter in the Nyasaland Times on November 26, 1914, that ran under the heading “The Voice of the African Natives in the Present War,” in which he laid out his complaints against colonial policies. His message of African grievances and hopes was ignored, and two months later, on January 29, 1915, Chilembwe and two hundred of his followers launched their uprising to establish an independent African state. The colonial authorities retaliated swiftly and ruthlessly. Two weeks later, Chilembwe and many of his supporters were dead and their brick mission church razed to the ground.
6 - Empires of the plains
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 78-95
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In the eleventh century, reports circulated in the bazaars of North Africa of a powerful African monarch who reigned far to the south, beyond the expanse of the Sahara Desert. His empire sent gold and slaves across to the Maghrib, where they percolated into the economy of the burgeoning Islamic world. This mysterious ruler, known as the ghana, was reputed to be the most powerful king in all of Africa. His wealth, and that of his successors, became legendary.
The ghana was not a myth but the ruler of an African kingdom called Wagadu, the capital of which, Koumbi Saleh, lay on the desert's edge in modern Mauritania. From there the rulers of Wagadu dominated a vast commercial empire that stretched from the Niger River in the south to the desert's edge in the north, and from the Senegal River valley in the west to the inland Niger delta in the east. Later it would be eclipsed by an even larger empire, Mali, which in time would itself be supplanted by the still larger empire of Songhai. Between and around the borders of these empires mushroomed an array of cities and states, all connected in a commercial web that stretched north to the Atlantic and south to the tropical forests of Central Africa.
18 - The European conquest of Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 263-278
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After four hundred years during which Europe had displayed little or no interest in Africa beyond its coastline, suddenly – in the twenty years between 1878 and 1898 – the European states partitioned and conquered virtually the entire continent. To observers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this sudden conquest was a frantic, often unseemly, and largely unexpected scramble for territory in a continent about which the Europeans knew little and for which most cared nothing. Their sentiments were encapsulated in the famous remark by the English historian John H. Seeley that his generation had conquered half of the world “in a fit of absence of mind.” Today, however, with the advantage of hindsight historians have perceived several fundamental causes and events that combined to upset four hundred years of equilibrium between Africa and Europe and precipitate the European conquest of virtually the entire continent. The Industrial Revolution created demands for new raw materials from Africa, and made Africa an attractive potential market for European manufactured goods. Moreover, the new technologies produced by the Industrial Revolution provided the instruments that upset the long-standing balance of power between Africa and Europe. Imperialism was propelled as well by popular nationalism, which pressed European statesmen into pursuing expansionist policies in the name of imperial defense. Changing terms of trade required European merchants to seek political stability in Africa, where for centuries they had profited from the instability that had fostered the slave trade. European Christianity was also changing in the nineteenth century, as the new and powerful Evangelical movement inspired aggressive missionary activity, which in the past had been largely confined to the African coast, deeper into the continent.
10 - Kingdoms and trade in Central Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 143-158
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East Central Africa
South of the equatorial rainforest stretches a vast region of woodlands and savanna that includes parts of northern Angola and Zambia and the Shaba region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Central African savanna is bounded in the east by Lake Tanganyika, on the west by the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and in the south by the lower tributaries of the Zambezi River. The territory is interlaced with rivers and streams that feed the southern branches of the Congo and the upper reaches of the Zambezi. This immense, often inhospitable region is home to several of the most remarkable states in the history of Africa.
The early history of the Central African savanna emerges with greater clarity after the immigration into the region by Bantu-speaking farmers from West Africa, their dispersal into small isolated communities, and the reintegration of these communities under new political institutions after 1400. Isolation was the inevitable result of the environmental challenges farmers confronted on the central savanna. The soils are generally poor in nutrients and not conducive to cereal agriculture. In the northern zone, which lies just south of the equator, the annual rainfall is dependable but steadily declines as one moves southeastward, and in the far south, years of drought are frequent. The valleys of the tributaries to the Congo and Zambezi are lush and heavily wooded, but the uplands between the rivers consist of lightly forested, sandy grasslands ill suited for agriculture. Thus the early farmers descended into the valleys, lakes, and floodplains where the soils were more fertile and water more dependable. Disease also limited the size and productivity of agricultural communities in Central Africa. Malaria and sleeping sickness remain two of the most prevalent endemic diseases, the widespread presence of the tsetse fly carrying sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) to domestic animals, known as nagana, prevented the raising of cattle and horses, depriving the inhabitants of meat, milk, and transport. The environment and disease conspired to inhibit the concentration of people into larger communities, leaving the farmers to disperse into small and scattered rural settlements.
5 - Northeast Africa in the age of Aksum
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 64-77
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Towering above the vast Sudanic plain to the west and the Horn of Africa to the east are the massive highlands of Ethiopia, which have captured the imagination of foreigners for more than two thousand years. The ancient kingdom of Ethiopia was celebrated by the Hebrews in the Bible. In Islamic traditions and history, Ethiopia has been regarded as special and unique, for the Prophet Muhammad requested asylum for his followers from the Christian negus (king) al-Asham of al-Habasha (the Abyssinians) who enthusiastically agreed to give them sanctuary in the first hijra (Arabic, “migration”: flight of the Prophet's adherents from Mecca) to celebrate their beliefs free from the persecution they had experienced in Mecca. Medieval Europeans and Crusaders knew of a Christian kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands, which they hoped to enlist against their Muslim enemies, but its isolation prevented the consummation of any grand alliance. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese mercenaries arrived to prevent the kingdom from being overwhelmed by the Muslims from the plains of Somalia. Thereafter, European interest in Ethiopia waned until the resurgence of the empire in the nineteenth century, which precipitated the invasion by a British expeditionary force to rescue the British ambassador incarcerated by the emperor Tewodros (Theodore) II (1818–68). The British stormed the capital at Magdala on April 13, 1868, and secured the release of the ambassador; Tewodros took his own life and the British withdrew. The cult of Ethiopia, however, continued well into the twentieth century, as the descendants of freed slaves in Jamaica revered the historic kingdom as the birthplace of their divine leader, the emperor Haile Selassie, and it was no coincidence that Addis Ababa was selected as the site of the new Organization of African Unity in May 1963. As the only African nation to successfully resist European invasion, Ethiopia holds a special place in independent Africa and throughout the African diaspora.
8 - The Lake Plateau of East Africa
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 114-128
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In 1860, the English explorer John Hanning Speke (1827–64), seeking the source of the Nile, had left Bagamoyo on the Swahili coast of East Africa en route to the unexplored plateau of the interior. On his journey he was harassed by African chiefs demanding hongo (tolls) to pass, compromised by the Arab and Swahili slave traders, and abandoned by his porters before he arrived in 1862 at Kampala, the royal capital of the kingdom of Buganda, located in the lush vegetation of the Lake Plateau on the northeastern shore of Lake Victoria, to be enthusiastically welcomed by the kabaka (king), Mutesa I (1838–4). He was astonished to discover that Buganda was a stable monarchy supported by an industrious peasantry whose markets were connected by well-maintained roads and administered by civil servants loyal to the kabaka, whose command of a regular army and navy held in check a subservient nobility.
Buganda was but one, albeit the most powerful, of several interlacustrine (between the lakes) states – Bunyoro, Busoga, Karagwe, and others – with complex political and social systems. Most were monarchies, and several were dominated by pastoralist aristocracies. Their economies were based on a combination of farming – particularly the cereals millet and sorghum, but also bananas – and the domestication of cattle. The peoples of these states spoke dialects of the Bantu (Congo-Niger) family of languages. Speke pondered in his journals how such large, well-organized kingdoms, so unlike the petty chieftaincies through which he had passed, had evolved in seeming isolation deep in the interior of the continent. He concluded that this remarkable state building on the Lake Plateau could only have been accomplished by the intervention of a race of “light-skinned” pastoral “Hamites” who were assumed to have come from the north to impose their political domination over the Bantu-speaking farmers.
17 - Upsetting the equilibrium
- Robert O. Collins, James M. Burns, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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- 05 June 2014
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- 25 November 2013, pp 249-262
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In 1787, a party of settlers disembarked from a British ship moored at the mouth of the Sherbro River in West Africa. Many of the new arrivals were freed slaves from England and its North American colonies, some of whom had found themselves destitute on the streets of London. Their passage had been paid by a group of affluent British abolitionists, who symbolically called their new settlement Freetown. These idealistic humanitarians envisaged that this new colony would become a model for the regeneration of freed African slaves by a combination of Protestant Christianity and European capitalism that would then spread their civilizing mission throughout the continent. Although many African settlers died from disease and violent confrontations with the indigenous Temne peoples, the Freetown colony eventually flourished to become a safe haven for tens for thousands of freed slaves, an important West African base for the Royal Navy of the antislave trade patrol, and a hub of commercial activity. The descendants of the original colonists developed their own distinctive culture, which was thoroughly Western in outlook, and the subsequent diaspora of this Krio population, as they called themselves, proved instrumental in disseminating Christianity and commerce throughout West Africa.
At the time when Freetown was founded, before it became the colony of Sierra Leone, no one perceived that this philanthropic enterprise was a harbinger of the changing relationship between Africa and Europe. During the first four hundred years of their contact with sub-Saharan Africa, Europeans were confined to a handful of scattered trading stations along the coast. There was a vigorous trade in gold and slaves, profitable to Europeans and Africans alike, but African rulers and merchants were determined to prevent any Europeans from venturing beyond their coastal enclaves for trade or exploration. Moreover, European traders had little incentive to seek out the interior regions when the Africans themselves could supply slaves and other commodities for the European sea merchants. On the West African coast strong kingdoms – Asante, Dahomey, and the Niger delta states – controlled the passage to the interior. On the East African coast, the independent Swahili city-states – Mombasa, Malindi, and Kilwa – blocked the way to the interior despite the theoretical suzerainty of Portugal. Among the Europeans, only two groups – the Dutch on the Cape Colony frontier and the Portuguese in the Zambezi River valley – made successful, although sporadic, efforts to venture into the interior.