This volume is concerned with a period of African history which has traditionally been defined by events emanating from Europe. The year 1790 roughly marks the beginnings of the effective impact of the British anti-slavery movement on West Africa, where the freed slave colony of Sierra Leone was already struggling to establish itself. Protestant missionary enterprise in West and South Africa had begun. In 1795 the British first occupied the Cape of Good Hope, while three years later Napoleon's occupation of Egypt launched the movement of ‘modernization’ in North Africa. In succeeding decades the impact of European traders, missionaries and consuls increasingly began to affect the internal social, political and economic balances within African societies. The choice of 1870 as the terminal date for this volume is obviously dictated by the beginnings of the European scramble for African territory which will be a major theme of volume 6. The period can thus be considered as one dominated by the theme of Africa's growing contact with Europe, as a time of slow penetration and preparation by Europeans for the coming of partition and colonial rule.

Such a perspective, however, offers a somewhat irrelevant pattern for the history of the continent as a whole. Though Bantu in South Africa, or Arabs in Algeria, felt the direct impact of European settler colonization, elsewhere in the continent the vast mass of Africans rarely saw a European, and Europe influenced their lives only indirectly or at second-hand, except for those who lived in coastal areas where there was a direct European presence.

THE EUROPEAN PRESENCE IN AFRICA

The history of every continent is the product of a complex amalgam of forces, some of internal, others of external origin. In Africa, where the technique of literacy was introduced to most indigenous communities only in comparatively recent times, the exploits of outsiders are far more richly documented than those of local people. Thus there exists a bias tending to overstress the importance of external influences inherent in most of the written material available to the student of the African past, a bias that needs constantly to be corrected by an imaginative awareness of the achievements of African societies in developing their own varied and elaborate cultures. Obviously modern Africa has been profoundly affected by the techniques, the institutions and the ideas introduced by men and women of European origin; but in historical terms the impact of Europe must be regarded as a relatively recent development, to be measured in most parts of the continent in terms not of centuries, but merely of decades. When this comparatively brief involvement with Europe is set against the long span of intercourse with Asia, it becomes clear that Africa, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, was far more deeply affected by the greater of her two continental neighbours.

For it was from Asia that there had come, probably as early as the sixth millennium BC, the revolutionary techniques of cereal cultivation and of pastoralism. Later innovations of Asian origin, each capable of exercising a profound influence on the lives of those who adopted them, included the craft of iron-working, the camel, the banana, the largest of the yams and a variety of other food-crops.

WHITE EXPANSION AND THE BRITISH OCCUPATIONS

When the British took possession of the Cape in 1795 they inherited from the Dutch East India Company a situation which already exhibited many of the most significant features which were to characterize the history of South Africa until well into the nineteenth century. Outside the wheat and wine-growing areas of the Cape, the settlers had developed a system of stock ranching, requiring the exploitation by individual white farming families of large farms worked with the assistance of non-European labour. This resulted in a continuous territorial expansion of the white settlement, which by 1795 had already resulted in the extension of the original tiny settlement around Cape Town to the Fish river, the Sneeuwbergen and the Khamies Bergen. This vast expansion, by scattering the white population so thinly that the growth of urban areas was severely restricted, inhibited the development of alternative economic opportunities for whites and encouraged further expansion.

At first there was little resistance from San and Khoi, but white expansion at length resulted in a situation of endemic frontier conflict. In the north-eastern districts of Tarka, Sneeuwberg and Agter Bruintjies Hoogte, the San hunters mounted a ferocious resistance against further encroachment on their hunting grounds. In the Zuur-veld, where white and African farmers were settled alongside each other, two frontier wars had left the issues between them unresolved.

European relationships with West Africa in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century were to a large extent dominated by the European effort to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade and to replace it by trade in the agricultural produce of West Africa. This led in part to the foundation of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the strengthening of British and French trading depots in other parts of the coast, a new European curiosity about the interior of Africa, and a renewed interest in effecting social and cultural change in Africa through Christian missions. This range of activities became an integrated programme of the abolitionists – stopping the slave trade, maintaining an anti-slavery naval squadron to enforce the prohibition, expanding ‘legitimate trade’, supporting missionary activities and exploration of the interior. These activities encouraged the involvement of Europeans in Africa, and several European and American nations came to participate in them to a greater or lesser extent. Abolition of the slave trade became the most common ideology to justify to the European public the expense and the fact of this involvement. This ideology was particularly strong in Britain, and from Britain it affected other countries. For example, owing to the tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in West Africa, the British example ensured the wholesale adoption of the abolitionist programme in France. Consequently, in the written European sources on Africa in this period, whether from missionaries, explorers, ‘legitimate’ traders, naval officers or government officials, the theme of abolition looms large, often disproportionately large, and the period 1807 to about 1870 in West African history has often been called the anti-slave trade or abolitionist era.

The eastern coast of Africa looks out over the Indian Ocean, which, though vast, is comparatively easily navigated. Consequently there has been much contact over the past two thousand years among the peoples who inhabit its shores. This, coupled with similar climatic and ecological conditions in most of the surrounding coastal lands, has resulted in a considerable degree of cultural homogeneity, particularly marked in the western part of the ocean. Communication between the African coast and the interior was, on the other hand, difficult.

Voyages in this part of the Indian Ocean would have been facilitated by the pattern of the monsoon regime, the winds blowing from a north-easterly direction towards East Africa for half the year, and from the south-west for the other half. This renders voyages by sailing ship from the Persian Gulf and north-western India particularly easy; those from Aden and the Yemen are rather more difficult. To the south, the South Equatorial Current facilitates voyages from the Far East to Africa, and the return is assisted by the monsoonal drift setting to the east between that current and India, together with predominantly westerly winds in this region.

The main motive for voyages to East Africa was trade, but the pressure of population in the arid lands bordering the northern margin of the Indian Ocean provided a stimulus to migration. In the traditions of the coast, religious persecution figures as the reason for migrants leaving their homelands in the Persian Gulf, but it is probable that the attractions of well-watered lands, coupled with the prospect of wealth and a comfortable life in an agreeable environment, played at least as great a part.

Southern Africa can be divided into two ecological regions with sharply contrasting historical evolutions. The huge western zone consisting of South-West Africa, Botswana and the western Cape remained until 1600 a predominantly non-agricultural area. The peoples who occupied sparsely the vast expanses of acacia scrubland at the centre of the Kalahari were necessarily hunter-gatherers. At its fringes, however, pastoralism was possible, and in the far north, the pastoralists had become iron-using and Bantu-speaking by the end of the period. It seems likely that Iron Age pastoralists such as the Herero had spread in a westerly direction towards the plateau of southern Angola. Elsewhere pastoralists remained Late Stone Age peoples, who were very different in language, culture and appearance from their Bantu-speaking neighbours. They lived in association with closely related hunter-gatherers, and their contacts ranged from open conflict over waterholes, grazing lands and game, to various forms of clientship and trade.

The eastern half of southern Africa, comprising Rhodesia, southern Mozambique and eastern South Africa, has a rather more complex history than the south-west. With richer soils and vegetation, heavier rainfall and more abundant mineral resources, it has been able to support a far larger population. In modern times, this population has been classified into two broad cultures. In the north-east, between the Zambezi and Limpopo, are the Shona. In the south-east, south of the Limpopo, are the South-Eastern Bantu, comprising the Sotho-Tswana of the plateau, the Nguni of the coastlands, and the Tonga-Tsonga of southern Mozambique.

MUSLIM SETTLEMENTS ON THE COAST

Until the end of the eighteenth century the inhabitants of the islands and ports of East Africa had very little to do with those of the interior. The East African coastal belt belonged to the rest of the continent only in a geographical sense. Events at the coast passed almost unnoticed in the interior, while people living along the coast were rarely touched by what happened up country. The East African littoral was more a part of the Indian Ocean world than of the African continent. From the second century at least, Arabs from the south of Arabia and the Persian Gulf had been trading to East Africa, following the monsoon winds. They transacted their business in the ports and went back with the trade winds to India or beyond. During Muslim times, some of these Arabs and Persians, especially the Shirazi, began to build fortified urban settlements on the coast and the offshore islands. The earliest of these known so far was at Manda in the Lamu archipelago, and dates to the ninth century. Zanzibar and Pemba were probably occupied soon after this. The Islamic settlements at Mafia and Kilwa were built mainly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a score of other stone-built towns were added during the next two hundred years. Thus by the fifteenth century a considerable population of immigrants had settled in the islands and ports of East Africa.

PROLEGOMENA AND ORIENTATIONS

The sources available for the history of Guinea before the seventeenth century are not good. The Arabic writers whose works enable historians with some confidence to reconstruct the main political outlines of the West African Sudan from about the eleventh century onwards, and even to gain some insight into aspects of its economic and social history, were in general uninformed about developments further south. Literacy in Arabic did spread to some of the peoples of Guinea, but it did not do so significantly before about the seventeenth century, and there are few if any surviving documents of historical value whose origins relate to earlier than the eighteenth century. With the advent of European traders to the Guinea coasts in the fifteenth century, a considerable corpus of documentation in European languages did begin to build up. But centuries were to pass before Europeans began to penetrate significantly into the interior. Their direct knowledge, and that of the Africans who acquired literary skills from them, was therefore confined to the coastlands. Even here there must have been much which escaped their notice, and even more that was at best imperfectly understood, while what they had to say about what was going on further than a few miles from the coast was essentially hearsay.

Some of the historical traditions maintained orally by the peoples of Guinea themselves certainly relate to times before 1600. In lower Guinea, for example, there are some traditions, such as those of the Yoruba, the Edo of Benin, and the Akan, which have something to say about events which may have occurred as far back as the thirteenth century – in extreme cases, perhaps even to as far as about the eleventh century.

THE FATIMIDS

The Fatimid conquest of Egypt in AD 969 was accomplished without much difficulty, as the country had for some time already been in internal chaos and had suffered heavily from famines. The skilful political and religious propaganda of the Fatimids also prepared the ground for a ready acceptance of the new dynasty by the population. When the Fatimid general Jawhar (a former slave of Dalmatian origin), after overwhelming the last feeble resistance of the Ikhshidid army, entered al-Fustāt on 1 July 969 and formally proclaimed the new regime by introducing the khutba (Friday sermon) in the name of his master, the caliph al-Mu'izz (952–75), the event had a more profound significance and more far-reaching consequences than a simple change of dynasty so common in the annals of the Islamic world. The coming of the Fatimids marked a new epoch in the history of Egypt which, for the first time since the Ptolemies, became not only the seat of a completely sovereign dynasty, but also the centre of an empire that survived its original founders and lasted for more than five centuries.

The imperial idea was, indeed, inherent in the Ismā'ili ideology, of which the Fatimids were the most prominent champions, and only they, among all the Ismā'ili Shi'a branches, came within reach of attaining the ecumenical goal of the doctrine. They considered their North African period merely a preparatory stage, and the conquest of Egypt only one of the stepping-stones, on the road to the creation of the universal Ismā'ili empire, ruled by the Prophet's descendants in accordance with the esoteric doctrine of the Ismā'iliya.

ALMORAVIDS AND ALMOHADS TO c. 1250

During the second half of the eleventh century the Almoravids, who had emerged from the south-western Sahara, extended their conquests from Ghana in the south, and over the Maghrib to Spain in the north. Morocco, which had previously been divided among rival dynasties, was united and began to assume its own political identity. Muslim Spain, which had previously attempted to exert political influence over Morocco, now came under the rule of a Berber dynasty. It was under this union that the Muslim civilization of Spain made its greatest impact on Morocco. The western Sudan, which had previously been connected with the Maghrib by enterprising traders only, became more closely attached to the Maghrib, and not only for the relatively short period of the Almoravid occupation. Greater intensity of Islamic activity south of the Sahara and the ever-increasing trade fostered relations between the Maghrib and the western Sudan. A good illustration of the greater integration of the Muslim Occident, from the Sudan to Spain, is the group of Muslim royal tombstones dated between 1100 and 1110, which in all probability had been sculptured and inscribed in Spain, and then carried across the Sahara to be erected on the graves of two kings and a queen of Gao, who were recent converts to Islam.

About 1055, after they had forced the Sanhaja of the southern Sahara into the Almoravid movement, the spiritual leader 'Abdullāh b. Yāsin and the military commander Yahyā b. 'Umar led these nomads northwards to conquer Sijilmasa from the Maghrawa dynasty of the Zanata (for the earlier history of the Almoravids, see Volume 2).

A principal underlying theme for the central Sahara and Sudan in this chapter, in the period roughly from AD 1050 to 1600, is supplied by the basic pattern of penetration. New people, new ideas, new goods were crossing, or sometimes emerging from, the Sahara, and becoming established in the Sudan. There was considerable mobility, too, within the central Sudan itself, most dramatically illustrated by the exodus of the court of Kanem into Bornu about 1400. In the corresponding chapter in the next volume, concerned with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is more the tendency towards consolidation of states and societies which runs through the whole story.

The countries of the Sudan were by no means inactive partners in the trans-Saharan relationship. Sudanese gold was of critical importance for the Mediterranean economy; Sudanese slaves coloured the societies into which they were received. Even Islam, that most outstanding of all the gifts of the outside world to the Sudan in this early period, was influenced in its North African base by the beliefs and observances which these same slaves brought with them. Nevertheless, what was received in the Sudan countries had, on balance, a more profound historical influence than what was exported thence. Just what form this influence took in the Sudan depended upon the strengths and weaknesses, the needs and ambitions and preferences, of the receiving societies. And it is by rivetting our attention upon the local contribution that the new school of the historiography of black Africa has performed its most signal service.

THE EROSION OF SLAVERY

Africa, like Europe, is a continent which has exported millions of colonists, who through their labours and initiative created the ‘New World’ of North and South America, with all that implies for the shape of the modern world. The African emigrants, almost without exception, were taken from Africa by force, and colonized America and the Caribbean as slave labourers. Thus, whilst helping to create the New World by their labour, the historical legacy of African immigration to the American hemisphere has left deep and bitter social, economic and political problems which are still far from solution. The period 1790– 1870 represents a great watershed in this historical movement of world significance. It is not, perhaps, a theme of Africa's domestic history, but none the less one which, through its effects on the relationships of ‘white’ and ‘black’ races and their attitudes to one another, has constantly had the effect of directly influencing the development of African, as well as European and American history.

The essential feature of the period under review is that it witnessed a revolutionary transformation in the legal and civil status of Africans and people of African descent living overseas. In 1770, although there were significant groups of free ‘people of colour’ in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Britain, they were small in number, and emancipated by individual acts, as part of no movement hostile to slavery as such. In general in 1770 white people felt it to be acceptable and normal that the status of black men outside Africa should be that of slavery.

Strictly speaking, the only European colony on the Western side of Africa before the end of the eighteenth century was Portuguese Angola. Elsewhere Europeans who settled to trade paid rent for their settlements to African rulers. Sovereignty was not surrendered. African rulers followed the precedent set in 1482, when the Portuguese were grudgingly permitted to build a fort at Elmina in return for a regularly paid rent. There were a few exceptions to this rule, but normally European traders were only allowed to settle in West Africa if they made regular payments in return. There was no transfer of sovereignty in these settlements.

All along the coast African rulers and European traders were united by the reciprocal obligations of ‘landlord’ and ‘stranger’. The land-lords protected their strangers and undertook to provide them with trade. Hence, in the period of the slave trade, Europeans did not appear in West Africa north of the equator as invaders or masters, but as equal trading partners.

Whatever misery they brought to those they purchased and shipped across the Atlantic, European slave traders were welcomed by their African customers. They offered, in return for slaves, a wide range of manufactured goods otherwise unobtainable in West Africa. Both trading partners, African and European, received the commodity they wanted, and made the best bargain they could. Yet, though individual Africans might often outwit their European customers, the overall economic advantage lay with the Europeans. In return for slaves, wealth-creating human machinery, they gave expendable consumer goods, turned out in growing volume by the expanding economy of industrializing Europe.

THE AFRICAN PEOPLES OF SOUTH AFRICA, c. 1800

By the mid-eighteenth century the greater part of South Africa had been settled by Bantu-speaking peoples through a prolonged process which may have begun as early as the third century AD. The Bantu replaced or absorbed earlier populations of San hunters and gatherers, and in some areas Khoi pastoralists also, though some survived in rugged or poorly watered country, or in dependence on Bantu groups. From these peoples the South African Bantu speakers had acquired a number of distinctive click consonants and incorporated them in their languages.

Bantu settlement was densest in the south-east, along the eastern coastal corridor between the Drakensberg mountains and the sea where the relatively high rainfall and fertile soils provided the most congenial conditions for human settlement. By 1800 the Bantu had reached the Great Fish river and had begun to spread into the lands to the south-west, between the Fish and Sunday rivers, named Zuurveld by the Cape Dutch settlers.

On the high veld, west of the Drakensberg and east of the Kalahari, the Bantu occupied much of the area of the modern Transvaal, Botswana, Orange Free State and the less mountainous parts of Lesotho, but had not in general advanced as far south as the Orange river.

Two main linguistic and cultural groups had differentiated themselves among the South African Bantu. The Nguni-speaking peoples lived along the eastern coastal belt between the Drakensberg and the sea, while the Sotho- and Tswana-speaking peoples occupied the interior plateau. West of the Kalahari, the Ambo and Herero in South-West Africa (Namibia) belonged to a third linguistic grouping.

The third chapter of this volume has already shown how little connection there was between the brilliant medieval civilization of the East African coast and most of the vast interior which lay behind it. The Waqwaq of the tenth-century Arabic geographer al-Mas'ūdl might be the Makua of northern Mozambique. The Matamandalin of the Kilwa Chronicle might be the Matambwe of southern Tanzania. The sixteenth-century Portuguese identified by name three small ethnic groups living in the immediate hinterland of Malindi and Mombasa. There is one late medieval reference to people from the interior arriving at Mombasa carrying ivory tusks and skins on their heads. But there is no record of any penetration of the interior by Arabs or Swahili before the eighteenth century, and the only notable overland journey carried out by a Portuguese to the north of the Zambezi was that of Gaspar Bocarro from Tete to Kilwa in 1616. No significant collection of imported objects has yet been found at any interior site north of the Zambezi dating to the period before 1600.

The reasons for this strange disjunction between coast and interior are certainly in large measure geographical. Behind the narrow coastal plain, the land rises towards the great central plateau, in shelf after shelf of dry thorn scrub, hard to inhabit and difficult to cross. Much of the plateau stands at approximately 1,200 metres above sea level, and its eastern rim rises in places much higher. The Iringa highlands, the Ngulu mountains, the Usambara and Pare hills all rise above a height of 1,800 metres.

The nineteenth-century history of the portion of Africa bordered by the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean, the Juba River, and approximately the 35th degree west and the 5th degree north is a story of the transformation of a conglomeration of tribes, principalities and kingdoms, some loosely connected with the Ethiopian state of those days, others independent, into a united Ethiopia and a series of European colonies along the coasts. Though the final stages of this process took place in the last quarter of the century, the forces which caused it appeared much earlier. The peoples of the area, who had not been part of any major international developments after the interests of the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks had clashed there in the sixteenth century, were faced, within the span of a generation or two, with a completely new political and economic environment, caused by the rise of Muhammad ‘Alī's Egypt and the reawakening of European interest in the area. After two centuries of relative isolation and stagnation, the pace of events began to quicken; new challenges brought new responses, and a period of important developments was inaugurated.

ETHNIC, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL DIVISIONS,o c. 1800

As far back as recorded history goes, the two main elements of the region's population were the peoples speaking Cushitic and Semitic languages. By the beginning of the nineteenth century large migrations and a continuous process of assimilation had created a very complex picture with a number of Cushitic tribes or population groups surrounding as well as interspersed among more or less semitized Cushites in the northern and central highlands.