West Africa

I know this thread is doomed from the start, but what the hell.

Can we talk about West African history? Anything from prehistory up to the 1800s.

I put together a summary of the region's history that I find useful, but it's pretty incomplete (like I don't know where the Hausa would fit into this);
>c. 5000-2500 BC: Pastoral nomads in the Sahara
>c. 2500-500 BC: Crop-based farming emerges in the Sahel and spreads south into the forest regions
>c. 500 BC - 700 AD: Ironworking spreads across the region, increasingly complex cultures like the Nok and Djenne-Djenno emerge
>c. 700 AD - 1450 AD: Trans-Saharan trade opens up and stimulates economic and social development, true 'civilization' emerges and flourishes in places like Ghana, Mali, and Yorubaland, Islam is introduced
>c. 1450-1650 AD: Europeans contact coastal regions, open up coastal trade, Benin flourishes, Songhai and the Morocco dominate the Sahel
>c. 1650-1880 AD: Economy and society increasingly dominated by slave trade, population declines, economic and social development stagnates, culture regresses, Jihadists dominate Islamic regions, Dahomey, Oyo, and Ashantis dominate coastal regions
>c. 1880-1960: Colonial rule

Some stuff worth discussing;
>Did ironworking develop independently or was it introduced from Carthage or Meroe?
>Did the black death effect the region, and to what extent?
>Why was there no use of wheels?
>What effect did the slave trade have on the region, was it only limited to coastal regions?

Other urls found in this thread:

unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/general-history-of-africa/
www-personal.umich.edu/~baileymj/Whatley_Gillezeau.pdf
scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/the_long_term_effects.pdf
princeton.edu/~lwantche/The_Slave_Trade_and_the_Origins_of_Mistrust_in_Africa_Use_This_One
piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Heywood2009JAH.pdf
mortenjerven.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-development-of-Commercial-Agriculture-in-Pre-Colonial-West-Africa-2013-doc.pdf
blogtalkradio.com/thetruthdr
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Because west African history is filled with losers and losers are BORING

So every non-European people ever?

Was there any trans-Saharan travel prior to the existence of camels and the trade routes? I'd like to imagine that the Garamantians and people like that didn't just have their backs against the wall pre-1200.

I do think there was some exchange, but it wasn't really significant until the 8th century or so. I've seen other sources claiming it emerged in the 4th century though, so I'm not sure.

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Is nobody interested at all?

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o fug benin :DDDDD

Check the Unesco African history collection

unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/general-history-of-africa/

Good starting point to jump off of.

That's pretty cool lookin'.

They did not use wheels there? Could it have something to do with the foreign colonial regime?

>why was there no use of wheels?

I read a jstor article that said something to the effect that because of the tsetse fly problem and sleeping sickness that would kill livestock coupled with the amount of human powered labor (mostly from slavery) the incentive to use these technologies like the water wheel and a drawn plow were diminished. Water wheels were out of the question because people avoided living directly next to water to avoid mosquitoes.

I wonder. If Africa was to be made into a nice society. Would this lead to a new economical revival in the West too. With not a bad ending. To install such a society knowledgeable and charged people to do this could be necessary.

Unless they can't be trusted and start creating slowth and problems to keep a job.

Wheels, for practical use, were invented once like most inventions. They were invented, and then they spread and people adapted it. Sub-Saharan Africans had no beasts of burden, thus they made use of the wheel later on than others.

Wheels weren't used in tsetse fly-free regions either though, and slavery in sub-Saharan Africa was nothing unusual before the 16th or 17th century so there's no reason it would disincentivise wheels there any more than it would anywhere else.

>Sub-Saharan Africans had no beasts of burden
They had plenty. Cattle, horses, camels, donkeys, etc.

Personally my guess is that practical use of wheels, like you said, was only invented once or twice and then spread to other cultures. Carts and chariots probably couldn't cross the whole Sahara, so it never spread to West Africa. I'm sure it's more complicated though.

Looking at this behind the link:

UNESCO launched the elaboration of the General History of Africa with a view to remedy the general ignorance on Africa’s history.

The challenge consisted of reconstructing Africa’s history, freeing it from racial prejudices ensuing from slave trade and colonization, and promoting an African perspective.

And
>negative about how interesting a thread about West Africa is and why

My thought is that why Africa never did what e.g. Germany did after the world wars. Or Europe and the colonial settlers in America, Australia, New Zealand.

I think slavery was a disincentive because technological advances would run counter to the institution of slavery. Why waste resources on building this newfangled contraption when I can get my slaves to do the same thing for free? At least that's how I interpret the situation

Slavery existed almost everywhere though. Why would they disincentivise wheels in Africa but not everywhere else? The Greeks and Romans were huge slaveholders and look at everything they invented. I'm sure a reliance on slavery can slow down economic development in many ways, but I just don't think it applies here.

Ethiopians and Somalians did use the wheel.

Is there anything known about the numbers of smart people in West Africa, or the average intelligence of people living there?

Over the years, up to 1800.

>Homo Genus spends over 1 million years with no technology better than a rock and no civilization beyond the largest tribal gathering of perhaps 300 people
>Homo Sapien spends over 200,000 years with no technology better than a rock and no civilization beyond the largest tribal gathering of perhaps 300 people
>The Middle East and parts of China get civilisation ~6000 years ago, about 6000 years after agriculture began
>Europe gets civilisation around ~3500 years ago, about 8500 years after agriculture began
>Sub Saharan Africans get civilisation ~1000 years ago, about 11000 years after agriculture began
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>Europeans thus consider Sub Saharan Africans to be sub humans of very slow development incapable of civilisation due to them developing civilisation a just a couple of millennia later

I think the main thing about intelligence here is that it is just never encouraged or given peace as an ''''ídea''''. And say the questions of an IQ test can eventually be used to get the highest score. Because of looking at the kind of questions, that represent intelligence. Which is all but fraud. Even, the other way around. So not doing this if interested in a high score.

>population declines, economic and social development stagnates, culture regresses
Slavery only involved a tiny minority of the population.

>economic
Trade introduced new technology and crops such as maize which led to population growth in South Africa and the rise of the Zulu.

>social development stagnates, culture regresses
How do you measure social stagnation and cultual regression? You can't know that.

Not saying this to diminish the suffering of slaves or justify colonialism bla bla, they could have adopted the technology without a slave trade, just saying.

All these race IQ tests are bullshit, made with complete disregard for the scientific method. I once delved into it and found the actual raw data. It was doing shit like comparing the IQ test results of ten 8 year old Congo children with the results from 40,000 Australian adult white males.
For one, even disregarding the numbers, the only variable must be race, everything else must be the same, so they must have at least a similar life style and upbringing and be the same age.
Intelligence is of course heavily dependent on childhood and nourishment, twin studies prove that, the separated poor and malnourished twin will be much stupider than the wealthy well fed and raised twin.

There's also emotional intelligence which is a whole other ball game but very interesting.

I should have specified West Africa.

I think it's better to put it this way;
>Middle East gets civilization around 3000 BC, 5000 years after crop-based agriculture begins there (c. 8000 BC)
>China gets civilization around 1500 BC, 5000 years after crop-based agriculture begins there (c. 6500 BC)
>Mesoamerica gets civilization around 1000 BC, 5000 years after crop-based agriculture begins there (c. 6000 BC)
>West Africa gets civilization around 1000 AD, 3500 years after crop-based agriculture begins there (2500 BC)

If anything Africa developed faster than usual, probably because of the economic stimulation provided by the trans-Saharan trade

>Why was there no use of wheels
For their to be wheels they would need beasts of burden for them to serve a purpose, which they did not have.

they aren't incapable of civilization, but when you're 2000 years behind the other guy, he's not going to wait for you to catch up

I imagine it would be higher than it is now; the reason why it's low at the moment is because of all of the post-colonial famines of hte 60s/70s that stunt IQ growth of children developing in them.

>Slavery only involved a tiny minority of the population.
That's not really the point. It's the economic stagnation, political turmoil and social breakdown that the slave trade caused that was the problem.

>Trade introduced new technology and crops such as maize which led to population growth in South Africa and the rise of the Zulu.
This has nothing to do with the slave trade.

>How do you measure social stagnation
The decentralization of states and the breakdown of civilized society in general. Read the link below about the Kongo to get an idea of what I mean; they went from a tightly controlled state that ensured the protection of its free citizens in the 16th century to a nearly defunct dystopia where anyone could be enslaved arbitrarily by corrupt officials and even the monarchy, and where people literally sold their own families. Also check the link about mistrust.

>and cultual regression?
I know it's not something you can say objectively, but I see a big difference between the cultured and artistic courts of Ife, Owo and Benin and the glorified raiding part that was Dahomey. To be fair the Ashanti were still very cultured and stable, but they relied on the gold trade more than the slave trade.

Economic effects;
>www-personal.umich.edu/~baileymj/Whatley_Gillezeau.pdf
>scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/the_long_term_effects.pdf

Social effects;
>princeton.edu/~lwantche/The_Slave_Trade_and_the_Origins_of_Mistrust_in_Africa_Use_This_One

The collapse of civil society in the Kongo:
>piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Heywood2009JAH.pdf

There's loads more literature on this.

It's still an amazing source though.

Also this, mostly about agriculture but also other economic areas and population decline;
>mortenjerven.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-development-of-Commercial-Agriculture-in-Pre-Colonial-West-Africa-2013-doc.pdf

>Contrary to popular belief, our analysis of the evidence presented in the paper makes it clear that the export of captives did not stimulate the growth of internal trade in West Africa; it retarded it. The growth of inter-regional trade and specialization that had been advancing in the centuries preceding the mid-seventeenth—driven by population growth and inter-continental trade — was terminated.

>All this reinforced the adverse effects of the absolute population decline and the decline of inter-continental trade, the two main drivers of the commercializing process in the centuries prior to the mid-seventeenth. This is what is reflected by the stagnant agricultural prices and the decline of demand for local exchange currencies. This is also the reason why Curtin found lack of progress in agricultural technology in Senegambia in the two hundred years preceding 1850, after the changes in the earlier two hundred years. It is, thus, no surprise that the process of agricultural commercialization stalled in the two hundred years period, 1650-1850, resulting in the overwhelming dominance of subsistence agriculture on the eve of European colonial rule in West Africa.

It could be interesting to save. Personally I sent an email here blogtalkradio.com/thetruthdr .
-Hows this for a resource (^:

Why wouldn't they be thinking of this
>why Africa never did...

I mean how they feel about white people. And not even thinking about this. While the template is there.

what?

Are you not a native English speaker? I can't figure out what you're saying in either of these posts.

I can't figure out whether or not this is the infamous other opinion trick, or some truth behind it. What is the problem? Could you give an example?

Why yes ...
But I'm not sure whether or not he, they will listen.
If they would, it would mean an enormous improvement. But somehow this sort of deafness can jump in.

I could post what I sent

>deafness
Which is certainly not this. Or, if it is true I will just change it in my writing. After I saw an example.

10 seconds left to give an example

10

2

Crash .....

It must be other opinion lies

I remember one user had an extensive map of west african states

I came buckets from the detail

Better than these ones?

Anyway, what is it? CAN you give an example?

What do you think of this?

Ile Ife's art is cool as hell, especially considering it's completely unprecedented in the region. It doesn't seem to be influenced by any other style of sculpture which is pretty amazing considering its naturalism. I think it's comparable to Egyptian sculpture, which was similarly naturalistic at an early stage.

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The rest of tsetse free Africa was founded by people who lived in tsetse zones.

Cattle weren't found in many parts of Africa, most livestock except goats that miniaturized as a result of tsetse and disease pressures.

Actually all animals in periphery tsetse zones dwarfed to cope with the disease load.

Horse riding actually seems to have developed in the Sahel similar to how it began in the prairie States of the u.s. the adoption of mustangs running feral but Arabs abandoned the wheel by then for camels.
Did you know there are people who claim those are Caucasoid because their features are too "europid".

They never stop.

The first European to see them actually thought they were from Atlantis, which he though was a Greek or Etruscan colony in Nigeria.

I think the descendants of the people who made that art still can make it which is better off then other peoples where they lost their knowledge or only the elders do and it's dying off. The Haya with steel making only a small group of elders knew it which stresses the importance of generational knowledge!

>>Did ironworking develop independently or was it introduced from Carthage or Meroe?

Introduced by the Berbers, who live mostly in North Africa but who also cross the Sahara a fair bit.

>Did the black death effect the region, and to what extent?

Probably, but there are no records so who knows.

>Why was there no use of wheels?

lack of domesticated horses coupled with the high natural fertility of African spoils, leading to less need for ploughing

>What effect did the slave trade have on the region, was it only limited to coastal regions?

It devastated it, but the main participants in African slavery were always the Arabs, the European slave trade was a drop in the ocean.

If these findings are such bullshit, you should have no trouble finding a set of results that contradicts them.

>lack of domesticated horses
Don't wheels predate horses?

the insides of black holes taste like chocolate pudding

berber is not a racial group its a linguistic group and you have no proof that iron working was truly imported.

Secondly even if this were true among the Tuareg (the sole berber group in contact with Sahelians regularly) they themselves claim it was blacks who were metallurgists whom they required to weaponry.

These people are called Inhædˤæn and were the original peoples of the deep Sahara who inhabited the oases after the Neolithic Subpluvial and whom were made into a private caste within Tuareg society for their skills and suppose powers.

The blacksmith caste exists not only in Tuareg society but everywhere in Africa, to act as though some "white" berbers created it all is hilariously incorrect and shows your ignorance.

Yeah because that's totally comparable! You fucking monkey.

Where did I call Berbers white? Go fuck yourself antifa bigot.

whats bigoted, its you who claim black africans could not have independently formed metallurgy.

>being a false flagger from /pol/

Die

you can call me a false flag but that doesn't change the fact that you stated berbers introduced metallurgy insinuating blacks didn't develop it on their own.

>Introduced by the Berbers, who live mostly in North Africa but who also cross the Sahara a fair bit

>Introduced by the Berbers, who live mostly in North Africa but who also cross the Sahara a fair bit.
The main theories regarding West African iron-working are that it was either introduced from Carthage (possibly through Berbers) or Meroe, or that it was developed independently. No consensus has been reached.

>the main participants in African slavery were always the Arabs, the European slave trade was a drop in the ocean
That 'drop in the ocean' comment was pretty stupid, but can you show me that the trans-Saharan trade was larger or more devastating than the Atlantic one? Unless you're talking about the completely unrelated Indian Ocean trade.

Fuck off to some other thread/board. This has nothing to do with the thread topic.

Again

You're a /pol/fag

You're acting like a liberal faggot on purpose

Yes sub saharans independently developed iron working, but you're calling anyone who disagrees racist instead of just misinformed

No I'm not and stating that people who perpetuate the myth that SSA advancement came by the hands of "non-black" outsiders is in fact racist and commonly posted on here, pol and int.

So anyone who thinks Europeans advanced partly due to middle easterners is racist?

the fact of the matter is Eurocentricism is the basis with which foreigner theories have been propagated in Africa.

Nobody seriously questions European achievement on here but every fucking african thread but especially when they talk about my people Habesha thats all thats spoken on.

fasle equivalency

It's almost like we share a website literal nazis who could skew your perception of normality

FFS nobody thinks what you're saying IRL

Albeit meme faggots from /pol/ will actually claim Africans were literal cavemen until the 20th century

there are literally eurocentric academics still purporting this, don't be fooled into thinking the only people with such views are literal nazis or memers most people on here actually do believe this seriously.

I'm not sure who's serious and who's trolling, but either way it makes me sad for this thread.