David Fieldhouse suggested this book. In writing it, I have strayed far from my expertise as a documentary historian. John Sutton is partly to blame for that because he first interested me in African prehistory through his lectures at Dar es Salaam. David Phillipson kindly read and commented on my initial typescript, as did John Lonsdale, who has taught me so much. John Alexander and Timothy Insoll helped with books.

In this new edition, I have recast the final chapters, now current to early 2016, extensively revised the sections on prehistory and the Atlantic slave trade, and made substantial changes to take account of recent scholarship on other periods. In doing so, I have relied heavily on the magnificent resources of the Cambridge University Library and have been grateful for the support and companionship of the members of my College.

AFRICA'S LEADING HISTORIANS DISAGREE PROFOUNDLY ABOUT THE COLONIAL period. For one among them it was merely ‘one episode in the continuous flow of African history’. For another it destroyed an ancient political tradition that had survived even the slave trade.1 They disagree partly because one was thinking of western Nigeria and the other of the Belgian Congo, for the colonial impact varied dramatically from place to place. But they differ also because colonial change was contradictory and subtle. New did not simply replace old, but blended with it, sometimes revitalised it, and produced novel and distinctively African syntheses. Capitalism, urbanisation, Christianity, Islam, political organisation, ethnicity, and family relationships – central themes of this chapter – all took particular forms when Africans reshaped them to meet their needs and traditions. To see colonialism as destroying tradition is to underestimate African resilience. To see it as merely an episode is to underestimate how much industrial civilisation offered twentieth-century Africans – far more than colonialism had offered sixteenth-century Latin Americans or eighteenth-century Indians. Africa's colonial period was as traumatic as it was brief. Its major consequence, refuting any notion of mere continuity, was rapid population growth, which underlay the nationalist movements that began to liberate the continent during the 1950s. (See Map 12.)

ECONOMIC CHANGE

If railways vitalised early colonial economies, the main innovation of the midcolonial period was motor transport. The first ‘pleasure cars’ (in the pidgin term) appeared in French West Africa at the turn of the century. By 1927 ‘the Alafin's car, a Daimler-de-luxe in aluminium with sky ventilator and nine dazzling headlights, was the cynosure of all eyes’.2 More functional was the lorry, which became common in the 1920s, the great period of road-building. Lorries halved the cost of transporting Senegal's groundnuts to the railhead between 1925 and 1935 and then reduced it by another 80 per cent during the next thirty years. Lorries also released labour and provided opportunities for Africans to move from farming and local trade into large-scale enterprise.

THE LIBERATION OF THEIR CONTINENT MADE THE SECOND HALF OF the twentieth century a triumphant period for the peoples of Africa, but it ended in widespread disappointment with the fruits of independence. The new millennium has revived growth and optimism, reinforcing the need to understand the place of recent events in the continent's long history. That is the purpose of this book. It is a general history of Africa from the origins of mankind to the present, but it is written with the contemporary situation in mind. That explains its organising theme.

Africans have been and are the frontiersmen who have colonised an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human race. That has been their chief contribution to history. It is why they deserve admiration, support, and careful study. The central themes of African history are the peopling of the continent, the achievement of human coexistence with nature, the building up of enduring societies, and their defence against aggression from more favoured regions. As a Malawian proverb says, ‘It is people who make the world; the bush has wounds and scars.’ At the heart of the African past, therefore, has been a unique population history that links the earliest human beings to their living descendants in a single story. That is the subject of this book.

The story begins with the evolution of the human species in Africa, whence it spread to colonise the continent and the world, adapting and specialising to new environments until distinct racial and linguistic groups emerged. Knowledge of food production and metals permitted concentrations of population, but slowly, for, except in Egypt and other favoured regions, Africa's ancient rocks, poor soils, fickle rainfall, abundant insects, and unique prevalence of disease composed an environment hostile to agricultural communities. Until the later twentieth century, therefore, Africa was an underpopulated continent. Its societies were specialised to maximise numbers and colonise land. Agricultural systems were mobile, adapting to the environment rather than transforming it, in order to avert extinction by crop failure. Ideologies focused on fertility and the defence of civilisation against nature.

HUMAN EVOLUTION

AFRICA IS IMMENSELY OLD. ITS CORE IS AN ELEVATED PLATEAU OF ROCKS formed between 3,600 million and 500 million years ago, rich in minerals but poor in soils. Unlike other continents, Africa's rocks have experienced little folding into mountain chains that might affect climate. Lateral bands of temperature, rainfall, and vegetation therefore stretch out regularly northwards and southwards from the equator, with rainforest giving way to savanna and then to desert before entering the belts of winter rainfall and Mediterranean climate on the continent's northern and southern fringes. The great exception is in the east, where faulting and volcanic activity between about 23 million and 5 million years ago created rift valleys and highlands that disrupt the lateral climatic belts.

This contrast between western and eastern Africa has shaped African history to the present day. At early periods, the extreme variations of height around the East African Rift Valley provided a range of environments in which living creatures could survive the climatic fluctuations associated with the ice ages in other continents. Moreover, volcanic activity and the subsequent erosion of soft new rocks in the Rift Valley region have helped the discovery and dating of prehistoric remains. Yet this may have given a false impression that humans evolved only in eastern Africa. In reality, western Africa has provided the earliest evidence of human evolution, a story still being pieced together from surviving skeletal material and the genetic composition of living populations. The story begins some 6 to 8 million years ago with the separation of the hominins (ancestral to human beings) from their closest animal relatives, the ancestors of the chimpanzees, perhaps when a cooler and drier climate privileged walking over climbing. The skull of the earliest candidate for hominin status, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, was discovered in 2001 by an African student examining the shores of an ancient Lake Chad. Apparently some 6–7 million years old, its small brain – no bigger than a chimpanzee's – and disputed upright stature have left its hominin status uncertain.1 Similar doubts surround the earliest fossils found in the East African Rift Valley, but there is wide agreement that some of the Australopithecines, who appeared there about 4.4 million years ago, were human ancestors.

MODERN SOUTH AFRICA, THE LAST PART OF THE CONTINENT TO BE LIBERATED in 1994, warrants separate treatment, not only because the discovery of gold at the Witwatersrand in 1886 gave the south a trajectory different from the rest of the continent, moving towards an industrial economy, the entrenchment of local white power, and a unique system of racial repression culminating in the apartheid programme of 1948, but also because South Africa displayed in extreme form many historical processes taking place throughout the continent. The most fundamental was demographic growth, from perhaps 3 or 4 million in 1886 to 39 million in 1994. As elsewhere, this bred competition for rural resources, mass urbanisation, generational conflict, and the over-extension of the state. In the early 1990s these conditions, together with industrial development and the international context, enabled black people to force their rulers to seek security in a long-term settlement conceding majority rule.

MINING AND INDUSTRIALIZATION

The Witwatersrand goldfield in 1886 differed greatly from the early diamond diggings at Kimberley. There were no black claim-owners, for the Witwatersrand was not in the officially multiracial Cape Colony but in the South African Republic (Transvaal), whose Afrikaner government immediately confined mining claims to white men. Nor did small white miners long survive, for in the unique geology of the Witwatersrand tiny flecks of gold were scattered in a narrow seam of hard rock – one ounce of gold in every four tons of rock – demanding deep mining, heavy machinery, and the most modern chemical extraction technology. By the late 1890s, shafts were eleven hundred metres deep and the Rand was producing more than a quarter of the world's gold. From the beginning, therefore, the Witwatersrand was dominated by giant mining houses, drawing some capital from Kimberley but most from Europe. Industrial nations bought gold at fixed prices but in practically unlimited quantities. The mining houses therefore had no incentive to restrict production or compete with one another. As early as 1889, they formed a Chamber of Mines, chiefly to reduce African wages, for with prices fixed and labour taking more than half of production costs, mining profitability depended on controlling wage levels.

WHILE BANTU-SPEAKING PEOPLES WERE COLONISING SOUTHERN AFRICA, THE north was entering one of its greatest historical periods. Perhaps only in pharaonic times had it been more central to human progress than in the third and fourth centuries ad, when it was the intellectual spearhead of Christianity, and again 800 years later, when it was the pivot of Islam and a commercial network encompassing most of the Old World. This leadership, already threatened, was destroyed during the fourteenth century by the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death, from which the region took five hundred years to recover. But in their time of greatness, North Africans adapted Christianity and Islam to their own cultures and transmitted both religions to Black Africa, where centuries of internal development had prepared social environments for their reception and further adaptation.

CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AFRICA

Legend said that St Mark himself brought Christianity to Alexandria in ad 61. In reality the church in Jerusalem probably sent missionaries to Alexandria' large Jewish community. The first firm evidence of Christianity there comes from an early second-century controversy between Jews who had and those who had not accepted the new faith. Shortly afterwards Christianity expanded beyond this Jewish nucleus. By ad 200 there was a Greek-speaking church under a Bishop of Alexandria, with many Christians in Upper as well as Lower Egypt. They saw Christ as a great teacher in the Greek manner; their first major theologian, Origen (c. 185–253/4), believed that humans should elevate themselves towards God through wisdom and asceticism. Once the first bishops outside Alexandria took office early in the third century, Christianity spread among Egyptians as well as Greeks. By 325 Egypt had fifty-one known bishoprics and the Bible was widely available in the vernacular Coptic language (ancient Egyptian written in Greek script). The chief leaders of popular Christianity were monks: first individual hermits like St Antony, who lived in the desert from about 285 to 305, then disciplined communities pioneered in c. 321 by Pachomius. Monasticism may have had models in ancient Egyptian priestly asceticism, just as the Coptic Church's elaborate charity inherited an ancient tradition of famine relief. Both exemplified the indigenisation of Christianity at a time when Egypt's old religion and culture were disintegrating.

DURING THE LAST TWENTY YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, EUROPEAN Powers swiftly and painlessly partitioned the map of Africa among themselves. To implement the partition on the ground, however, was anything but swift or painless. Widespread possession of arms, codes of military honour, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance to conquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in India. In creating states in a turbulent and underpopulated continent, colonial administrators faced the same problems as their African predecessors and often met them in the same ways, but they had technological advantages: firepower, mechanical transport, medical skills, literacy. The states they created before the First World War were generally mere skeletons fleshed out and vitalised by African political forces. But European conquest had three crucial effects. Although some colonial boundaries divided hitherto unified peoples, more amalgamated together a diversity of small-scale societies, creating conditions for future conflict. As each colony became a specialised producer for the world market, it acquired an economic structure that often survived throughout the twentieth century, with a broad distinction between African peasant production in western Africa and European capitalist production in eastern Africa perpetuating the ancient contrast between the two regions. And the European intrusion had profound effects on Africa's demography.

PARTITION

The slow European penetration of Africa during the nineteenth century began to escalate into a scramble for territory during the late 1870s, for a complex of reasons. One was a French initiative in Senegal launched in 1876 by a new governor, Brière de l'Isle. Faidherbe had pursued an expansionist policy there twenty years earlier, but his departure in 1865 and France's defeat by Prussia in 1871 had aborted it. Brière de l'Isle, however, belonged to a faction determined to revitalise France with colonial wealth, especially that of the West African savanna. The faction included many colonial soldiers, eager for distinction and accustomed in Algeria to extreme independence of action, and certain politicians who secured funds in 1879 to survey a railway from Senegal to the Niger. The military used the money to finance military advance to the river at Bamako in 1883. This forward policy extended to two other West African regions. First, French agents sought treaties with local notables on the lower Niger that threatened long-established British trading interests.