A HISTORY OF AFRICA MUST GIVE A CENTRAL PLACE TO THE ATLANTIC slave trade, both for its moral and emotional significance and for its potential importance in shaping the continent's development. The view taken here is that its effects were extensive, complex, and understandable only in light of the character that African societies had already taken during their long struggle with nature. At the least, slave exports interrupted western Africa's demographic growth for two centuries. The trade stimulated new forms of political and social organisation, wider use of slaves within the continent, and more brutal attitudes towards suffering. Sub-Saharan Africa already lagged technologically, but the Atlantic trade helped to accentuate its backwardness. Yet amidst this misery, it is vital to remember that Africans survived the slave trade with their political independence and social institutions largely intact. Paradoxically, this shameful period also displayed human resilience at its most courageous. The splendour of Africa lay in its suffering.

ORIGINS AND GROWTH

The Atlantic slave trade began in 1441 when a young Portuguese sea-captain, Antam Gonçalvez, kidnapped a man and woman on the western Saharan coast to please his employer, Prince Henry the Navigator – successfully, for Gonçalvez was knighted. Four years later, the Portuguese built a fort on Arguin Island, off the Mauritanian coast, from which to purchase slaves and, more particularly, gold, which was especially scarce at this time. After failing in 1415 to capture the gold trade by occupying Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, Portuguese mariners groped down the West African coast towards the gold sources. Arguin was designed to lure gold caravans away from the journey to Morocco. Yet slaves were not merely by-products, for a lively market in African slaves had existed since the mid-fourteenth century in southern Europe, where labour was scarce after the Black Death and slavery had survived since Roman times in domestic service and pockets of intensive agriculture, especially the production of sugar, which Europeans had learned from Muslims during the Crusades. As sugar plantations spread westwards through the Mediterranean to Atlantic islands like Madeira and eventually to the Americas, they depended increasingly on slave labour. The Atlantic slave trade was largely a response to their demand.

EGYPT

STONE-USING PEOPLES HAD PIONEERED THE COLONISATION OF AFRICA. THEIR successors carried it forward with the aid of metals: first copper and bronze, then iron. Only northern Africa had a bronze age; agriculturalists used iron to colonise most of eastern and southern Africa.

The earliest evidence of metalworking in Africa comes from southern Egypt late in the fifth millennium bc. At first pure natural copper was probably used to make pins, piercing instruments, and other small articles. Smelting of copper ore to remove impurities probably began in the first half of the fourth millennium, either invented locally or imported from western Asia. It caused no discontinuity in Egyptian history, for stone tools were widely used until the first millennium bc, but the new technique spread until a fixed weight of copper became Egypt's standard unit of value. Moreover, the innovation coincided closely with the creation of Africa's first great agricultural civilisation in the Nile Valley. It was an African civilisation, for Egypt's peoples, although heterogeneous, contained a core of Afro-Mediterranean race and spoke an Afroasiatic language. Egyptian civilisation displayed many cultural and political patterns later to appear elsewhere in the continent, although Egypt also illuminated wider African history by means of contrast.

The contrast was rooted in the environment. Pioneers had practised agriculture in the Fayum depression and on the southwestern edge of the Nile Delta since about 5200 bc. During the following millennium, desiccation drove others from the eastern Sahara to settle on ridges bordering the Nile Valley, where lower floods made land available for pastoralism and agriculture. Dependence on the river made these settlers more amenable to political control than Africans who retained their ancient freedom of movement. During the fourth millennium bc, both Lower Egypt (the Delta) and Upper Egypt (the narrow valley southwards to Aswan) practised a culture characterised by exploitation of the floodwaters, use of copper as well as flint, weaving of linen cloth, trade with southwestern Asia, temples dedicated to deities like Horus and Seth (later prominent in the Egyptian pantheon), a social stratification displayed by the plain graves of commoners and the elaborate painted

EVEN WHERE THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE HAD NOT COMPOUNDED THE difficulties, underpopulation had retarded Africa's development and obstructed attempts to overcome political segmentation by creating enduring states. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries almost every part of the continent was drawn into a world economy dominated by Europe and a political order dominated by the growing use of firearms. These both threatened African peoples and gave them new techniques and opportunities to overcome segmentation, techniques that supplemented ancient strategies and new devices of African invention. Ultimately most attempts to enlarge the scale of economic organisation and political loyalty in nineteenth-century Africa failed, partly because European aggression overwhelmed them, but also because they did not meet the underlying problem of underpopulation, often rather compounding it by the demands they placed on existing populations. Beneath the surface, however, more profound changes took place. For the first time, certain regions escaped ancient constraints and embarked on rapid population growth. Others, by contrast, experienced demographic stagnation or decline comparable to Angola'. This regional diversity – the lack of an overall continental trend – was a major feature of nineteenth-century Africa and makes it necessary to treat each region in turn: first the north, then the Islamic west, the south, and finally the east.

NORTHERN AFRICA

The incorporation of North Africa (excluding Morocco) into the Ottoman empire began in 1517, when Turkish musketeers defeated Egypt's outdated Mamluk cavalry in twenty minutes. Further west, Turkish privateers contested theMaghribian coastline with local rulers and Iberian invaders until anOttoman force took Tunis in 1574 and made it a provincial capital, along with Tripoli and Algiers. During the next two centuries, control from Istanbul weakened to the advantage of provincial forces. In Egypt the army so overawed the governors that they turned for support to the survivingMamluks, whose leaders (knownas beys) regained predominance in the eighteenth century. In Tunis and Tripoli, where Ottoman garrisons were recruited from the soldiers’ children by local women, military commanders founded semi-independent dynasties in 1705 and 1711, respectively. In the frontier province of Algiers, by contrast, the soldiers remained more alien, electing an officer as dey and governing the hinterland by using favoured tribes to extract taxes from the others.

METAPHORICALLY, 1995 WAS THE YEAR WHEN THE RAINS CAME. HOPES of containing the AIDS epidemic emerged. Economic growth returned. External debt and levels of poverty began to decline. New methods of combating disease and impoverishment were pioneered. Not all was hopeful, however. The sustainability of economic recovery was uncertain. Youthful anomie still festered. Civil wars continued. Competition for land and local power escalated. Islam was in turmoil. The peak of demographic transition was past but its future course remained uncertain. Yet the entire continent was now free, hope had returned, and independent Africa had its second chance.

CONTAINING THE AIDS EPIDEMIC

Hope of checking the spread of HIV came from the most unlikely source, heavily infected southern Uganda, where reports in 1995 suggested that prevalence among pregnant women in Kampala had fallen between 1989 and 1993 from 28 to 16 per cent.1 The reports met scepticism. Some thought the figures unreliable or politically distorted. Specialists suggested that the epidemic might be slowing because the virus had killed most highrisk people, because it was losing its pristine virulence, or because mortality had increased to overtake new infections. Optimists replied that reduction in prevalence had been greatest among people aged 15–19. Whether new infections had really fallen – the crucial indication of a declining epidemic – required elaborate research. One team triumphantly confirmed it in 2002; another denied it in 2005. By then, however, evidence was accumulating that young Ugandans were changing their sexual behaviour in response to the suffering around them and intensive propaganda urging them to ‘Abstain, Be faithful, or use Condoms’. Researchers claimed that between 1989 and 2001 the average age of sexual debut had risen from 14 to 16 years, that in 2000–1 some 78 per cent of youths aged 15–19 denied having had sex during the previous twelve months, and that between 1989 and 1995 the proportion of men and women admitting casual sex had fallen by more than 60 per cent. All their findings were contested. Uganda's policies weakened early in the new century, behavioural change faltered, and overall adult HIV prevalence stabilised at between 5 and 8 per cent.

EQUIPPED WITH AGRICULTURE AND IRON, THE PEOPLES OF WESTERN Africa sought to build up their numbers, humanise the land, fertilise it with their dead, consolidate their societies, and send out more colonists to extend the struggle with nature. These were tasks so compelling that they gave social organisation and culture a character that still underlies African behaviour today. This chapter describes the evolution of colonising societies in the savanna and forest of West and West-Central Africa between the eleventh and mid-seventeenth centuries, before the Atlantic slave trade made its most widespread impact. But some evidence is also taken from later centuries when it illuminates long-standing social patterns.

COLONISATION AND AGRICULTURE

From Senegal to Angola, most western Africans of the forest and the immediately adjoining savanna spoke Niger-Congo languages. North of them, also in the savanna, were survivors of groups probably driven southwards by the desiccation of the Sahara, speaking either Nilo-Saharan languages (possibly including the Songhay people of the middle Niger) or Afroasiatic tongues (the Hausa of modern northern Nigeria). Desert peoples – Berbers, Moors, Tuareg – also spoke Afroasiatic languages. Further desiccation in the north and laborious forest clearance in the south bred a continuing southward population drift.

This drift was not the only pattern of colonisation. The West African savanna had no single moving frontier like North America or Siberia. Rather, clusters of pioneer agriculturalists were scattered through the region at favoured and defensible locations like the early settlements along the middle Niger or on mounds above the floodplain south of Lake Chad. By the early second millennium ad, such areas of intensive crop production and rich culture had multiplied, often in river valleys or defensible highland outcrops where the hoe and digging-stick were the only practicable tools. During the eleventh century, for example, a people known to their successors as Tellem settled on the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment in modern Mali, cultivating the plateau margins, barely storing their grain and interring their dead in accessible caverns in the cliffs, and making some of the earliest cloth and the oldest wooden objects – hoes, statuettes, musical instruments, neck-rests for the dead – yet found in sub-Saharan Africa.

THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS THE REGIONS EAST AND SOUTH OF THE equatorial forest during the thousand years between the end of the early iron age and the outside world's first extensive penetration in the eighteenth century. The central themes were the same as in western Africa: colonisation of land, control over nature, expansion of populations, and consolidation of societies. But the circumstances were different. Because neither Muslims nor Europeans commonly penetrated beyond the coast, few written sources for this region exist to compare with Islamic and early European accounts of West Africa, while oral traditions seldom extend back reliably beyond three centuries. Much therefore remains uncertain, although archaeological and linguistic research indicates the wealth of knowledge awaiting recovery. Moreover, whereas West Africa's lateral climatic belts tended to separate pastoralists from cultivators, the two were interspersed in eastern and southern Africa, where faulting and volcanic action had left dramatic local variations of height, rainfall, and environment. The grasslands in which humanity had evolved now supported cattle as the chief form of human wealth. Settlements were dispersed and often mobile, with few urban centres to rival Jenne or Ife. Interaction between pastoralists and cultivators created many of the region's first states, although others grew up in the few areas with extensive trade. Pastoral values shaped social organisation, culture, and ideology. Not only people but their herds were engaged in a long and painful colonisation of the land.

SOUTHERN AFRICA

By about ad 400, early iron age cultivators speaking Bantu languages occupied much of eastern and southern Africa, although sparsely and unevenly. Archaeological evidence shows that they usually preferred well-watered areas – forest margins, valleys, riversides, lakeshores, and coastal plains – suggesting that they relied chiefly on yams, sorghum, fishing, hunting, and small livestock rather than millet or many cattle. In East Africa their remains have been found especially around Lake Victoria (where forest clearance was already well advanced), on the foothills of high mountains like Mount Kenya, and close to the coast, but not in the grasslands of western and northern Uganda, the Rift Valley, or western Tanzania, which were either uninhabited or occupied by earlier populations.

INDEPENDENCE BROUGHT GREAT OPTIMISM. UNPRECEDENTED DEMOGRAPHIC growth swelled Africa's population from perhaps 270 million in 1956 to more than 700 million in 1995. A youthful, liberating momentum drove attempts to catch up with other continents and create modern nation-states. A generation of global economic growth brought new prosperity to many parts of the continent. ‘The possibilities for us were endless,’ the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recalled. Only during the 1970s did the costs of expansion become clear as numbers outran employment and resources, nationalist heroes hardened into ageing autocrats, and global recession precipitated an economic and political decline that was not checked until the mid-1990s.

RAPID POPULATION GROWTH

Around 1950 population growth accelerated swiftly. In the Belgian Congo, for example, the annual growth rate increased between the earlier 1940s and the late 1950s from about 1 per cent to nearly 2.5 per cent. By the 1980s, the African average was 2.8 per cent. In Kenya in 1979, it was 4.1 per cent, the highest figure recorded. The chief reason for acceleration was a continued fall in death-rates, from 26 per thousand in sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1950s to 16 per thousand in the later 1980s. This was due chiefly to lower infant mortality, which fell between 1952 and 1992 from 180 to 105 per thousand in sub-Saharan Africa and from 188 to 67 per thousand in North Africa.

One reason for lower death-rates after 1950 was that crisis mortality, already much reduced between the wars, declined still further. Even the famines that began in 1968 had little lasting impact on population totals, while mass immunisation curbed several epidemic diseases and eradicated smallpox in 1977. Equally important was the use of cheap synthetic drugs developed during the Second World War. Their most spectacular successes were against severe complaints such as tuberculosis and syphilis, but their chief demographic impact was on endemic childhood complaints such as pneumonia and malaria, which could at last be attacked – along with measles, poliomyelitis, diarrhoea, and malnutrition – through the extension of health services to children and mothers.

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.