General African history thread

Go to your local library or the li rary at your local college or community college. Find the history section containing books on African history. Look at those books and their bibliographies.

decent shitpost. Could be better.

>literally a sand castle!
LMAO

Because it is a seething jungle. That is like saying why didn't the Amazon have any civilizations. With that said the more transitional regions had caliphates.

Am I supposed to think that Djenne is a better looking building than westminster?

The angle really makes a difference

it was also built by the French.

You can say the same for most of Asia, East Europe and South America.

Not much interest in them.

>posts a sand structure built by the french in the 1900's

>B-but they weren't kings!!!

Funded by the French user.
France has always done a lot of destruction of it's colonies buildings but a lot of funding in it's local styles as well.

>English are French meme

The only interesting part of this is David Duke telling you about the evil Jews at 1:10

Oxford University is older than Timbuktu

Africa's not a big jungle and has plenty of fertile land. Aside from tsetse-fly infested regions, the environment isn't what held them back.

There's no single answer to explain it all, Africa is composed of a bunch of distinct regions with often barely related histories. That said, probably the biggest reasons for historic underdevelopment in most of Africa (specifically West, Central and Southern Africa) are that sedentary agriculture was introduced really late compared to other regions of the world and that most of these regions were geographically isolated from more developed regions. West Africa had some crop-based agriculture around 2500 BC, but it wasn't until around 1500 BC that sedentary cultures became widespread across the region, and not until about 500 BC that this sedentism reached the fertile highlands of the Great Lakes and Southern Africa. That meant there was very little time to develop urbanism or statehood, which in other parts of the world like the Middle East and China only emerged several thousand years after the rise of agriculture (about 8000 and 6000 BC respectively).

Only West Africa had enough time to develop civilization in the late first millennium AD, but it didn't have enough time to develop into something more complex. They produced brilliant art and were innovative in some areas, but they had only an archaic form of urbanism and lacked a lot of basic technologies like the wheel. Bantu Africa had even less time, though some areas achieved complexity in the second millennium AD like the Kongo.

The other big reason is that these regions were geographically isolated. Other regions where agriculture was introduced late, like the Horn of Africa, South Arabia, Japan and Southeast Asia, still developed civilizations on par with other parts of the world because they were closely connected with more developed regions, and could adopt their cultural and technological developments and engage with their economies.

West Africa did have contacts with North Africa, adopting religion and writing from them and having their economy stimulated by trade with them (see the Hausa leatherworking industry for example). That said, these contacts only grew significant later than they did in the other regions I mentioned above and the vast geographic barrier of the Sahara meant that West Africa was never fully integrated into Islamic civilization. They did engage in Islamic scholarship, but unfortunately this was at a time when Islamic intellectual life was in steep decline. Also the fact that the trans-Saharan trade featured slaves so prominently could cause chaos and fragmentation in some regions.

In Bantu-speaking Africa contact with Europeans came even later, and even though it could lead to developments in places like the Kongo (which adopted religion and literacy from the Portuguese), the effects of the slave trade and then colonisation quickly wiped out any positive influence. The Atlantic slave trade also devastated the urban civilizations of coastal West Africa. The only part of Bantu-speaking Africa that did have long-standing contacts with more developed regions was the Swahili Coast, and they did build a complex Islamic civilization. However, their commercial contacts with societies further inland weren't really conductive to the spread of their civilization, as they only interacted indirectly before the 19th century.

So basically West Africa had enough time and enough contact with more developed regions to build a number of civilizations, but not enough of either to develop to the extent of Eurasian or North African civilizations. Bantu-speaking Africa didn't have enough of either to build much civilization at all, with a handful of exceptions.

Those are completely different buildings.

They commissioned it, it was built by local masons on the site of the previous mosque of roughly equal size and layout, after it had been left to decay by Islamists.

Has anyone here ever been to Namibia? It seems like a really interesting country.

>those sincere comments

WE

The Swahili/Zimbabwe coast had very traditional Greek style coastal settlements. They lived in stone buildings and practiced trade with the man eating natives of the interior who brought luxuries like slaves and ivory to trade with Muslims. They were Al experienced seamen and we're used on Arab trade vessels going as far as Canton

WEST AFRICA IN THE 12TH CENTURY, THEY WERE AS ADVANCED AS EUROPE...

Nigga you aren't going to get any (you)s with well thought out, insightful posts. Just post b8 like the rest of us.

(Interesting posts m8, nicely done)

>university
>of
>timbuktu

No one insults Mongols for not having massive cities that weren't conquered yet it remains the standard for other plains people who also inhabited regions were rain is inconsistent.

If you understand the impetus for Agricultural development in the whole world it's related in great part to droughts and the concentrations of humans to river bottom lands relying more and more on grains and pulses with fattening of captured animals.

The Neolithic arose from this BUT it did not occur in Sahelian Africa because they weren't at the time anywhere near as "rain rich" so to speak.

So basically by the time of the Neolithic Subpluvial's first of two phases you have evidence of Barbary goats being kept in cave pens, large amounts of fishing and I'd argue the exploitation of Chufa.

There was a hyper arid "pause" that scattered these peoples and by the second phase you have people coming back from the north, south and east with cattle, goats, maybe sheep. They are eating more grass seeds but their primary focus is dairy that fermented and without lactose.

Then as the second phase ends you have Dhar Tichitt, Nabta Playa and other sites form. This is the basis of African society of the Sahelian belt from West Soudan to the Red Sea in the far off east.

The ability to migrate is very important, that's why rain fed Agricultural regions were relatively sparse and why agro-pastoralists made up the bulk. Only in the rivers did these people make up the majority and both cattlemen and farmers had symbiotic/mutualistic relationships with one another.

West Africa is not ISOLATED, the formation of Sao is local in development but Kanem was founded by Nilosaharan Tebu of southern Libya in the Sahelian steeps, Hausa were from Southern Libya and northern Niger and migrated down assimilating into Niger-Congo, Fulani proper have been a people going all around the Sahelian belt and montane Sahara sense arguably their ancestors 4-5kya, deep Roots persisted.

Good posts are best posts

>Only West Africa had enough time to develop civilization in the late first millennium AD

West Africa already had some developed culture in the second millenium bc which built stone structures, but they collapsed and probably migrated south around 500 bc

Yeah, but the Tichitt culture (I assume that's what you mean) wasn't complex to the extent that it could be regarded as a civilization. They were more like other Neolithic cultures around the world that could build stone structures, like those of Atlantic Europe or Easter Island.

That's the dumbest statement I've heard in my entire life. If this isn't bait you should kill yourself. Africa had little if any, technology at this time. Europe was developing stone and brick work as well as writing systems. Most of Africa lacked a writing system until colonialism.

>Totally ignoring pre-Columbian civilisations

Good posts, user.

But you have to contextualize the fact that for herders it was a civilization.

They don't really change anything. Agriculture in Mesoamerica began around the same time as in China, 6000 BC or so, they developed complex civilization around 1200 BC with the Olmecs, then this spread throughout Mesoamerica and developed over the course of two and a half millennia giving rise to the incredible civilizations that existed there. West Africa developed agriculture over three thousand years later around 2500 BC, complex civilization arose between about 700 and 1000 AD, and this had only about millennium to develop. They had nowhere near as much time to develop.

Are your retarded

>Europe was developing stonework

I've just psoted these African buildigns datung back to the middle ages