Part II:
African Empires
AD /
CE 1st - 15th centuries
African Timelines Table of Contents History, Orature, Literature, & Film
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Part II: African Empires
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Axum
[Ethiopia] | Advent of
Islam |
[Glossary: sahel,
Sub-Saharan Africa, & savanna] |
Trans-Saharan Cross-Cultural
Contact |
Mali
Empire | Sundjata Keita, Griots,
Nyama
& the Nyamakawa |
Early
Written Literature of Sub-Saharan West Africa | Zimbabwe
| Swahili Cities
|
Great
Zimbabwe | East
African Literature Emerges |
Beginning of European Slave Trade in Africa & Slavery in
Africa | Timbuktu
|
"Let's
face it -- think of Africa, and the first images that come |
|
| ca.
300 (to 700) |
Rise
of Axum
or Aksum (Ethiopia) and conversion to Christianity. (By CE 1st century, Rome had conquered Egypt, Carthage, and other North African areas; which became the granaries of the Roman Empire, and the majority of the population converted to Christianity). Axum spent its religious zeal carving out churches from rocks, and writing and interpreting religious texts. |
|
|
| ca.
600 (to 1000) |
Bantu migration extends to southern Africa; Bantu languages will predominate in central and southern Africa. Emergence of southeastern African societies, to become the stone city-states of Zimbabwe, Dhlo-Dhlo, Kilwa, and Sofala, which flourish through 1600. |
| 610 639-641 |
Advent
of Islam Khalif Omar conquers Egypt with Islamic troups. |
| 700-800
|
Islam sweeps across North
Africa; Islamic faith eventually extends into many areas
of sub-Saharan African (to ca. 1500)
Arab Slave Trade, from A.D./C.E. 700 to 1911: Estimates place the numbers of Africans sold in this system somewhere around 14 million: at least 9.6 million African women and 4.4 African men. The Forgotten Holocaust: The Eastern Slave Trade KAMMAASI / Sankofa Project Guide, 1999: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/9912/easterntrade.html |
| 740 | Islamicized Africans (Moors) invade Spain, and rule it unti1 1492. The Moors brought agriculture, engineering, mining, industry, manufacturing, architecture, and scholarship, developing Spain into the center for culture and learning throughout Europe for almost 800 years until the fall of Granada in 1492. |
|
|
| 800 (to 1100) |
[Glossary]: Growth of
trans-Sahara gold trade across the sahel
("sahel"
is Arabic for "shore" or "coast") at southern boundary of the Sahara
Desert, which was likened to a sea. The desert was not an
impossible barrier; many trade routes cross it from early
times. The sahel was the intensive point of contact and
trade between sub-Saharan Africa (Africa
south of the Sahara Desert),
and North Africa and the world beyond, along with
contact and trade along Atlantic and Indian Ocean
seacoasts. In western Africa a number of black kingdoms
emerge whose economic base lay in their control of
trans-Saharan trade routes. Gold, kola nuts, and slaves
were sent north in exchange for cloth, utensils, and
salt. This trade enabled the rise of the great
empires—Ghana, Mali, and Songhai--of the
savanna ("savanna"
refers to a treeless or sparsely forested plain.)
|
Trans-Saharan
Cross-Cultural Contact:
"Not only people and goods move across the Sahara
[from 800-1100]
but also ideas"
(Prof. Pekka Masonen,
Dept. of History, Univ. of Tampere,
Finland; African Timelines web contribution, 17
October 2002). After "...Arab merchants...first connected
sub-Saharan Africa with their vast commercial network, reaching from
Spain and Russia to the Far East," available evidence suggests
"that some black Africans were observing the wider world, including
Europe, outside their home villages rather keenly long before Western
geographers knew anything about the true course of the Niger or the
Nile" (Masonen, "Trans-Saharan
Trade"). "The voluntary traffic of West Africans to
the Mediterranean began with the adoption of the Muslim faith.
Pilgrimage to Mecca is one the five pillars of Islam, . . . an
obligation for all Muslims" (Masonen, "Trans-Saharan Trade").
West African Muslims with the economic means--most notably West
African rulers Mansa Musa of the Mali empire (in 1324) and Askia
Muhammad of the Songhay Empire (in 1496-98)--made the long journey to
Mecca and Egypt, and "[p]ilgrimage by common people became more
general from the fourteenth century onwards . . ." (Masonen,
"Trans-Saharan Trade"). Via " commercial, intellectual and
physical contacts with Northern Africa through the trans-Saharan trade
and pilgrimage, we may conclude that West Africans certainly knew more
than something about the Mediterranean and perhaps a little about
Europe too, before the beginning of the Portuguese discoveries in
1415—some individuals may even have possessed quite a detailed picture
of their contemporary world," though "this knowledge was restricted to
a narrow group only, consisting mostly of rulers, scholars, noblemen,
and wealthy merchants, who all had a practical need for accurate
information of the wider world and means to achieve it . . . " (Masonen,
"Trans-Saharan Trade").
|
|
| ca 1000 | Ghana
Empire of Soninke peoples (in what is now SE Mauritania)
at height of power. The earliest of the 3 great West
African states (emerging ca. 300 CE), Ghana equipped its
armies with iron weapons and became master of the trade
in salt and gold, controlling routes extending from
present-day Morocco in the north, Lake Chad and
Nubia/Egypt in the eat, and the coastal forests of
western Africa in the south. By the early 11th century,
Muslim advisers were at the court of Ghana.
|
| 1076 | According to traditional
historical interpretations, a Berber army from Morocco led
by militant religious reformers called Almoravids
attacked Ghana, led it into a period of internal
conflicts and disorganization, then by 1087,
lost control of the empire to the Soninkes. Several smaller states
emerged,
including Kangaba out of which the empire of Mali arose.
Modern historians, however, have seriously challenged the hypothesis of Almoravid military conquest and political influence over the medieval Ghana Empire, as an unsubstantiated "myth" of colonialist "European creation" (Pekka Masonen [Dept. of History, Univ. of Tampere, Finland], and Humphrey J. Fisher [School of Oriental and African Studies]). "We know only that Islam was spreading in Ghana by the time of Almoravids (1054-1147), which is confirmed by Arabic sources, . . ." [Masonen and Fisher, Note 7 ]; and Prof. Masonen concludes, "It seems more probable that Islam spread to Sudanic Africa peacefully and gradually through trans-Saharan trade" (African Timelines web contribution, 17 October 2002).
|
| 13th c. | Rise
of the Mali Empire of the Mande (or Mandinka)
peoples in West Africa.. The Mali Empire
was strategically located near gold mines and the
agriculturally rich interior floodplain of the Niger
River. This region had been under the domination of the
Ghana Empire until the middle of the 11th century. As
Ghana declined, several short-lived kingdoms vied for
influence over the western Sudan region.
|
| 1235 | The
small state of Kangaba, led by Sundjata
Keita,
or Sundiata Keita, defeated
the nearby kingdom of Susu at the Battle of Kirina in
1235. The Susu had been led by king Sumanguru Kante. The
clans of the heartland unified under the vigorous
Sundjata, now king of the vast region that was to become
the Mali Empire, beginning a period of expansion. The
rulers of Mali nominally converted to Islam,
though this did not preclude belief and practice
of traditional Mande religions.
|
| 1260 | Death of Sundjata Keita, Mali’s "Lion Prince." |
| Sundjata
Keita, Old Mali, and the Griot Tradition: The Mali
Empire, centered on the upper
reaches of the Sénégal and Niger rivers, was the second
and most extensive of the three great West African
empires.. The Mali Empire served as a model of statecraft
for later kingdoms long after its decline in the 15th and
16th centuries.. Under Sundjata and his immediate
successors, Mali expanded rapidly west to the Atlantic
Ocean, south deep into the forest, east beyond the Niger
River, and north to the salt and copper mines of the
Sahara. The city of Niani may have been the capital. At
its height, Mali was a confederation of 3 independent,
freely allied states (Mali, Mema, and Wagadou) and 12
garrisoned provinces. The king reserved the right to
dispense justice and to monopolize trade, particularly in
gold. Sundjiata Keita is the
cultural hero and ancestor of the Mande (or Mandinka)
peoples, founder of the great Mali Empire, and
inspiration of the great oral epic tradition of the griots or professional bards (like
Djeliba in the Hum 211 film Keita: The
Heritage of the Griot
), keepers
of tradition and history, trusted and powerful advisors
of kings and clans.
Nyama & the Nyamakalaw: These oral artists are specialists of the spoken/sung word and the great power--called nyama, among the Mande--it releases. They may belong to special castes (nyamakalaw - handlers of nyama) and/or inherit their calling through generations of the same family, for example, in Mande (or Mandinka) West African cultures. From Anthropology
students' webwork at Franklin and Marshall College: "The Mande
see nyama as a hot, wild energy that is the animating
force of nature. Nyama is present in all the rocks,
trees, people and animals that inhabit the Earth. It is
similar to the Western notion of the soul but is more
complete than that. It controls nature, the stars and the
motions of the sea. Nyama is truly the sculptor of the
universe. While nyama molds nature into its many forms,
the nyamakalaw can shape nyama into art. The
nyamakalaw spend their entire lives perfecting special
secret skills that are passed down from generation to
generation. The nyamakalaw are the only people in Mande
that can use magic
|
|
Links updated to this point-LL080503
| ca.
1250 |
Zimbabwe
(meaning "stone house" or
building), some of
which are massive, constructed in southeastern Africa by
ancestors of the Shona peoples of modern Zimbabwe.
|
| 1260 | Ife-Ife, Yoruban
culture of non-Bantu Kwa-speakers, flourished in western
Africa, producing remarkable terra cotta and bronze
portrait heads, continuing Nok creative traditions.
|
| 1324 -1325 | Mali
Emperor Mansa Musa's sensational pilgrimage to Mecca,
spreads Mali’s fame across Sudan to Egypt, the
Islamic and European worlds. ["Mansa"
means "emperor."]
He brought with him hundreds of camels laden with gold.
Under Mansa Musa, diplomatic relations with Tunis and
Egypt were opened, and Muslim scholars and artisans
brought into to the empire; and Mali appeared on the maps
of Europe. .Islam penetrated Mali’s elaborate court
life and thrived in commercial sahel centers such as
Jenne and Tombouctou or Timbuktu, on the
great bend of the Niger River. Mali's legacy is the
enduring cultural affiliation shared by the Mande peoples
(especially Malinke, Bambara, and Soninke speakers) who
today occupy large parts of West Africa.
|
Early written literature of Sub-Saharan West Africa was influenced by Islamic writings, in both form and content, as transmitted by North Africans. |
|
| After 1400 | Court intrigue and succession disputes sapped the strength of the extended Mali Empire, and northern towns and provinces revolted, making way for the Empire of Songhai to emerge from the vassal state of Gao. One of the first peoples to become independent, the Songhai, began to spread along the Niger River. Much of Mali fell to the Songhai Empire in the western Sudan during the 15th century. |
| 14th c. | Complex, advanced lake states, located between Lakes Victoria and Edward, were established, including kingdoms ruled by the Bachwezi, Luo, Bunyoro, Ankole, Buganda, and Karagwe--but little is known of their early history. Engaruka, a town of 6,000 stone houses in Tanzania, played a key role in the emergence of Central African empires. Bunyoro was the most powerful state until the second half of the 18th century, with an elaborate centralized bureaucracy: most district and subdistrict chiefs were appointed by the kabaka ("king"). Farther to the south, in Rwanda, a cattle-raising pastoral aristocracy founded by the Bachwezi (called Bututsi, or Bahima, in this area) ruled over settled Bantu peoples from the 16th century onward. |
| ca. 1400 | Swahili cities flourish on east African coast of
Indian Ocean; trading esp. in ivory, gold, iron, slaves.
Indonesian immigrants reached Madagascar during
the 1st millennium CE bringing new foodstuffs, notably
bananas, which soon spread throughout the continent, and
Arab settlers colonized the coast and established trading
towns. By the 13th century a number of significant Zenj
city-states had been established, including Mogadishu,
Malindi, Lamu, Mombasa, Kilwa, Pate, and Sofala.
An urban Swahili culture developed through mutual
assimilation of Bantu and Arabic speakers. The
ruling classes were of *mixed Arab-African ancestry; the
populace was Bantu, many of them slaves. These
mercantile city-states were oriented toward the sea, and
their political impact on inland peoples was virtually
nonexistent until the 19th century.
|
| 14th
- to 15th centuries |
Great Zimbabwe, impressive stone construction
of the Karanga--ancestors of the Shona peoples of southeastern
Africa--is the center of Bantu peoples that controlled a
large part of interior southeast Africa. The Karanga
peoples formed the Mwene Mutapa Empire, which derived its
wealth from large-scale gold mining. At
its height in the 15th century, its sphere of influence
stretched from the Zambezi River, to the Kalahari, to the
Indian Ocean and the Limpopo River.
|
| East African
Literature Emerges:
An early known
example of East African literature, dated 1520 and
written in Arabic, is an anonymous history of the
city-state of Kilwa Kisiwani. Soon after, histories of
East African city-states written in Swahili appeared, as
well as "message" poems, usually written from a
moral/religious viewpoint. In 1728, the earliest known work of (imaginative) literature is written in original Swahili: the epic poem Utendi wa Tambuka (Story of Tambuka). Swahili epic verse writers borrowed from the romantic traditions surrounding the Prophet Muhammad, then freely elaborated to meet tastes of their listeners and readers.
|
|
| 1439 | Portugal
takes the Azores and increases expeditions along
northwest African coast, eventually reaching the Gold
Coast (modern
Ghana). The
Portuguese explorations were motivated by a desire for
knowledge, a wish to bring Christianity to what they
perceived as pagan peoples, the search for potential
allies against Muslim threats, and the hope of finding
new and lucrative trade routes and sources of wealth.
Wherever the Portuguese—and the English, French, and
Dutch who followed them—went, they eventually
disrupted ongoing patterns of trade and political life
and changed economic and religious systems.
|
| 1441 | Beginning of European
slave trade in Africa
with first shipment of African slaves sent directly from
Africa to Portugal. With the complicity and blessings of the Catholic church.
the Portuguese would come to dominate the gold, spice and slave trade
for almost a century before other European nations became
greatly involved.
|
Slavery in Africa: It is true that African
societies did have various forms of slavery and dependent
labor before their interaction with Arabs and Europeans
that invaded Africa, especially in nonegalitarian
centralized African states, but scholars argue that
indigenous slavery was relatively a marginal aspect of
traditional African societies. Many forms of servitude
and slavery were relatively benign, an extension of
lineage and kinship systems. Slaves and servants were
often well-treated and could rise to respected positions
in households and communities. African social hierarchies
and conditions of servitude were mitigated by complex,
extended kinship relationships, based on community,
group, clan, and family. Ethnic rivalries and hostilities
did exist, as did ethnocentrism (a belief that one's
group and its lifeways are superior to those of other
groups), but the concept of race was a foreign import.
Muslim conquests of North Africa and penetration in the
south made slavery a more widely diffused phenomenon, and
the slave trade in Africans—especially women and
children--developed on a new scale. The adoption of
Islamic concepts of slavery made it a legitimate fate for
non-believers but an illegal treatment for Muslims. In
the forest states of West Africa, such as Benin and
Kongo, slavery was an important institution before the
European arrival, African rulers seeking to enslave other
African groups, rather than their own people, to enhance
their wealth, prestige, and control of labor. However,
the Atlantic Slave Trade opened up greatly expanded
opportunities for large-scale economic trade in human
beings--chattel slavery--on an unprecedented scale.
Expanding, centralized African states on/near the coast
became major suppliers of slaves to the Europeans, who
mobilized commerce in slaves relatively quickly by
tapping existing routes and supplies (adapted from Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz).
|
| 1468 | Songhai
(or Songhay) Empire, centered at Gao, dominates the
central Sudan after Sunni Ali Ber’s army defeated
the largely Tuareg contingent at Tombouctou (or Timbuktu, site of the famous University of Sankore,
center of Islamic
learning & book trade)
and captured the city. An uncompromising warrior-king,
Ali Ber extended the Songhai empire by controlling the
Niger River with a navy of war vessels. He also refused
to accept Islam, and instead advanced African traditions. Civilizations in Africa: Songhay (Richard Hooker, World Civilizations, WSU): http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CIVAFRCA/SONGHAY.HTM
|
| 1480s | First
Europeans (Portuguese) visit Benin (Edo*-speaking ruling
culture)
and
arrive at east coast of Africa, increasing trade in gold,
ivory, and slaves
(*and thanks to
Paula Girshick Ben-Amos for the correction). According
to Microsoft Encarta Africana 1998, "[b]etween
the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Edo ruled the
powerful kingdom of Benin. Today approximately 1 million people consider themselves
Edo."
|
| 1481-2 | El Mina is founded on the West
African "Gold Coast," the most
important of the chain of trading settlements hat the
Portuguese established here. African gold, ivory,
foodstuffs, and slaves were exchanged for ironware,
firearms, textiles, and foodstuffs.
|
| 1492 | The death of Sunni Ali Ber created a power vacuum in the Songhai Empire, and his son was soon deposed by Mamadou Toure who ascended the throne in 1492 under the name Askia (meaning "general") Muhammad, another subject of great oral epics. During his reign which ended in 1529, Askia Muhammad made Songhai the largest empire in the history of west Africa. He restored the previously discouraged tradition of Islamic learning to the University of Sankore, and Timbuktu (or Tombouctou, population 50,000) became known as a major center of Islamic learning and book trade. Askia Muhammad’s consolidation of Muslim power worked against encroaching Christian forces. The empire went into decline, however, after 1528, when the now-blind Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son. |
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European Imperialism
15th -
early 19th centuries
COCC Home > Cora Agatucci Home > Classes > HUM 211 Home > African Timelines > Part II: African Empires
African
Timelines Table of Contents
History,
Orature, Literature, & Film
Part I | Part II
| Part III |
Part IV
| Part V | Works Cited
| Bibliography
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African
Timelines Part II:
African Empires, AD/CE
1st - 15th centuries
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Last updated:
30 December 2009
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Humanities Department,
Central Oregon
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