African History

Introduction:
"Soldiers of France: Forty centuries of history look down upon you!"
– Napoleon Bonaparte, at the Battle of the Pyramids (1798)

Since the dawn of recorded history, Africa has been the home to empires. The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt built a realm that endured for nearly 3,000 years. The warrior-traders of Carthage ruled from the Atlantic to Tripoli, and hammered at the gates of Rome. To the south, Meroe and Axum, Ghana and Mali, built vast kingdoms, and traded in salt and ivory and gold. At one time Timbuktu had libraries and universities greater than any in Western Europe. Later, the warrior nations of the Ashanti, the Fulani and the Zulus built disciplined armies and conquered wide areas. From the middle of the 15th century, Europeans worked their way down the coasts, carving out new empires in fire and blood. In the 19th century came the "Scramble for Africa", with Britain and France, Germany and Belgium trampling on each other, and the indigenous Africans, to build empires many time the size of their respective homelands.

Africa has known the tread of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, Caesar and Cleopatra, Mansa Musa and Shaka Zulu, Henry Morton Stanley and Cecil Rhodes, Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela. From the grim slave pits of Elmina to the brooding towers of Zimbabwe, from the battlefield of Zama to the blood stained diamond mines of Katanga and Sierra Leone, Africa has known conquerors and rebels, heroes and villains, idealists and tyrants. Herein follows something of its history.