[...]... Capuchin missionary in the kingdom of Kongo 21 74 Biblioteca civica centrale di Torino, Sezione Manoscritti e rari 14 22 A student at Yaba College, Lagos A slave coffle 80 Biography of Mahommah G Baquaqua 23 Voting in Accra Zanzibar’s ivory market 89 Mahdist commander Mahmud Ibn Ahmad 98 24 Demonstration in Southern Rhodesia Apolo Kaggwa and Ham Mukasa 25 Rialto Pictures/Photofest 26 African American... the idea of Africa The first to do so were Western-educated intellectuals from the black diaspora, men like the celebrated anti-slave trade campaigner Olaudah Equiano and 19th-century African Americans like Alexander Crummell, Martin Delany, and Edward W Blyden Able to perceive Africa because of their very removal from it, these thinkers laid the foundations of what came to be known as ‘pan-Africanism’... medieval Arabic writing on the bilad as-Sudan, even that by sophisticated thinkers such as the famous North African historian Ibn Khaldun, often expresses a disdain for ‘primitive’ Africans that goes beyond their status as pagans For Muslim North Africans too, black Africa was conceived as a ‘paradigm of difference’ North Africa has in turn presented a problem for those who have sought to define Africa and... arrival of North African traders, Jenne-jeno was part of a 19 The idea of Africa That, at least, is the old-fashioned version of events Even before the emergence of African history as an academic endeavour, the GhanaMali-Songhay sequence featured prominently in interpretations of the continent’s past For sympathetic colonial administrators, as well as for pioneering African American scholars, it was... of lateral bands as rainfall levels decline either side of the equator Northwards, the equatorial rainforest of the Congo basin and the West African coast gives way to woodland and then savanna grassland, which in turn are succeeded by the semi-arid Sahel, the vast expanse of the Sahara desert, and finally the wetter Mediterranean littoral of North Africa South of the equator, the pattern is repeated,... Arabic name for a state that appears to have been called Wagadou by its own rulers (and which was thousands African History of miles from the Gold Coast in present-day Mali and Mauritania) With greater historical continuity, the French Soudan became Mali, while only the eastern part of the ‘sudanic’ zone (from bilad as-Sudan) retained the name Sudan Perhaps the most striking renaming of a postcolonial African. .. Africa before 1914 95 This page intentionally left blank Chapter 1 The idea of Africa This book is a very short introduction to a very big topic In fact, it is a very short introduction to two very big topics On the one hand, it is about a place and its people: Africa On the other, it is about the past of that place, as it has been envisaged by Africans and written about by historians The sheer scale... some of Africa’s earliest art, in the form of striking rock paintings that can still be seen on the mountainous desert outcrops of the Adrar des Iforas in Mali, and Ahaggar and Tassili in Algeria About 5,000 years ago, rainfall began to decline and over succeeding millennia the Sahara became the great desert that we know today The process of desiccation impacted in a variety of ways on human settlement,... English-speaking communities of the trading towns of coastal West Africa By then, the continent stood on the cusp of European colonial conquest, a condition that would further consolidate for many what it meant to be African African History faith Thus, North Africa became an integral part of the Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, while the region across the Sahara desert to the south lay in the Dar al-Kufr,... between the realms of belief and unbelief A similar process was underway on Africa’s eastern coast, which became connected into Muslim networks of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean Like later Atlantic commerce, trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean trade also included the export of slaves, although for Muslims it was ‘paganism’ rather than skin colour that remained the principal justification for enslavement Yet . EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew.