Africa’s Rich History Has Impacted the World

Africa is a vast continent. It contains over 11,500,000 square miles and is three and four times as large as the United States. From Cape Town to Cairo is 5000 miles, and the farthest points, East and West, are 4650 miles from each other. The lake system of Central Africa is equal only to that of our own Great Lakes, and four mighty rivers – the Nile in the North, the Zambezi in the Southeast, and the Niger and the Congo on the West Coast – rival the Mississippi.

Fertile lands

Not all the land is equally fertile, for between the Barbary States and the Sudan is the desert of the Sahara. The central and southern portions, however, are the most notable flora and fauna in the world. Here are the antelope, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the ostrich, the Python, and the crocodile. In the North are the olive, the date, the fig. In the South, the baobab, the banana, and cotton. The gold and diamond mines are unsurpassed in richness. Neither Asia nor Europe can equal, this desolate continent’s wealth or goals. It was the home of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra. It has nourished the Carthaginians and the Ethiopians. It has also seen traffic in human lives as the world in all its history has never seen before.

Different Populations

The population is of many different types. The natives (perhaps a 150 million) are anywhere from four to seven feet in height. They range from the Central African bushman to the warlike Zulu and the cultivated Egyptian. The Algerians and the Moors are in the North people partly of Hamitic or Semitic stock. The Ethiopians are in the Upper Nile region, even more a mixed nation. On the West Coast are the Negroes, and in the vast area extending two thousand miles south of the Sudan are the many related Bantu tribes. On the continent also are three million Europeans -Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and Boers – living mainly in cities and towns near the coast. What might not be the future of Africa with such a medley of races?

Modern explorers

When, in the 15th century, the first modern explorers came to the continent, they found the country by no means entirely savage. Five hundred years before, there flourished in the Sudan the Negro Kingdom of Ghana. By the middle of the 11th century, this capital was built partly of stone and a king with an army of 200,000 men. Early in the 19th century, the Kingdom of Mali, 500 miles north of the Gulf of Guinea, began to take the place of the older Ghana and, for 100 years, was the leading power in this part of the world.

Three hundred years later, in the Great Bend of the Niger River rose Songhay, the largest of the Negro empires. Its chief ruler was Askia, a student and organizer who built up an empire nearly as large as Europe. We are told that he was obeyed in the farthest corner of his dominions and in his palace. Such was Africa at its best before the European came with his greed and fire- water.

The slave trade

The center of the slave trade was the coast for two hundred miles east of the Niger River. From this region came as many slaves as from all the rest of Africa. In 1441, Prince Henry of Portugal sent out Antam Gonsalves, who captured three Moors on the African coast. These men offered as ransom ten Negroes whom they had taken. The Negroes were brought to Lisbon the following year, and in 1444, Portugal began the regular trade from the Guinea coast. For 50 years, this country enjoyed a monopoly of the traffic, the slaves being taken first to Europe and then to the Spanish possessions in America.

Spain herself joined in the trade in 1517, and as early as 1530, William Hawkins, a merchant of Plymouth in England, took from the Guinea coast a few slaves. In 1562, Captain John Hawkins, son of William, also went to the West Coast, intending to take to the New World persons whom he captured. From that time forth, there were many such voyages. England thought the slave-trade so crucial that in 1713, in making the Peace of Utrecht, she insisted on having for 30 years the exclusive right to transport slaves to the Spanish colonies in America.

This traffic in human lives continued throughout the eighteenth century and some decades into the nineteenth early as 1726, the three cities, London, Bristol, and Liverpool, alone had seventy-one ships engaged in the trade. But This was not to continue indefinitely. Through the efforts of such men as William Cowper, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson, the last English people’s conscience was finally awakened. Even men who had profited from the traffic were shocked at the stories unfolded. Slavery in the British dominions was abolished by the act of 1833 and in the United States by a proclamation thirty years later.

Revealing The Dark Continent

Now rose another evil. The travels of Livingstone and Stanley revealed to Europe the riches of the so-called Dark Continent, and soon there was a mad scramble for territory. The Most notable advance was that of the British in South Africa. By 1890, she had not only widened her boundaries over Bechuanaland and Zululand extended her influence to Rhodesia but had also won the province of Nigeria and gained a foothold in Egypt. France came to control the whole of Northwest Africa from Tunis to the Congo from Senegal to Lake Chad and the island of Madagascar.

In 1884, Bismarck declared the West Coast from Angola to Cape Colony under German protection, and thus, German Southwest Africa appeared on the map. In the same year, Bismarck also declared a protectorate over the little Kingdom of Togoland and Kamerun (Cameroons), a much larger territory farther east. German East Africa also took shape, and Belgium won the region of the upper Congo.

When the World War broke out in 1914, France had under control 4,400,000 square miles of the continent of Africa, Great Britain 3,700,000 square miles, Germany 931,000, Belgium 909,000, Portugal 794,000, and Spain 590,000. While France possessed the most significant number of square miles, a portion included the Desert of Sahara. England held the, wealthiest parts of the continent.

The prize of war

It thus appears that Africa was, to a large extent, the prize of war. When Germany invaded Belgium, she had as one of her aims to enhance her empire. Her African colonies were at the points of a triangle, and in the heart of that triangle was the Belgian Congo. To win that vast territory was supremely important. One officer said: “A victorious war would give us the Belgian Congo, and, if Portugal continues to translate her hostile intentions towards us into actions, would also give us the Portuguese colonies on the East and West Coast of Africa. We should then have a colonial empire our fathers could never have dreamed of.”

That hope was not to be realized. Germany lost, and her colonies passed to England or France. She told to herself that those colonies would have to be returned someday. She noted that those colonies would have to be replaced eventually.

Fighting against invaders

Meanwhile, the Africans themselves were restless. For 100 years, they had fought against the invaders of their country South Africa, two outstanding Zulu chieftains, Chaka and his nephew Cetewayo. Chaka, who lived from 1783 until 1828, was a strong and capable leader, ruthless in dealing with his enemies. He amassed his troops in a crescent formation with a reserve force in a parallelogram and used enclosures for his warriors. His skill and prowess made him a master of most of Southern Africa. His nephew, Cetewayo, Became king of the Zulus in 1872 on the death of his father Panda, brother of Chaka. He had disputes with the Boers, and later with the English, about boundary lines. In 1878, a Commission gave a decision in his favor, but the British continued to press their demands so the war began.

On January 22, 1879, the Zulus surprised an English force at Isandlwana and practically wiped out a regiment. It is said that 806 Europeans lost their lives in the event. Reinforcements came from England; on July 4th, the Zulus were defeated, and on August 28, Cetewayo was captured. The Chieftain was taken to London, where he excited great interest. He died in 1884.

In our own time, in the summer of 1935, the world’s attention centered on Ethiopia and Italy, having determined to possess that country. Against a people that ask only to be left alone in their home, the invader reigned death-dealing chemicals. For weeks, the resistance of The Ethiopians was brave, even surprising, but the contest was unequal. With limited ammunition and a few old-model planes, the whole for fleets of swiftly moving aircraft. By the 1st of May 1936, the Italians were approaching the capital, and within a few days, Addis Ababa had fallen.

By the League of Nations covenant, of the League of Nations; the powers’ task was to act against any aggressor. The emperor, Haile Selassie, appealed to Geneva. Weeks passed, and nothing was done. More weeks passed, and it appeared that nothing would be done. Both England and France feared to act with the decision. A British fleet was massed in the Mediterranean, but the show of strength was only a gesture. The great wrong remained unredressed.