African History

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African History

• Key concepts
• 2.3 Emergence of regional/transregional networks
  of communication and change
• 3.2 Continuity and Innovation of State forms and
  their interactions
• 3.3 Increased economic productive capacity and
  its social consequences

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Review Ideas

• Increase of long distance trade amongst large
  scale empires
• Raw materials and luxury goods
• Exchanges of technology, religious and cultural
  beliefs, food crops, domesticated animals and
  disease

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Axum, 4th --7th c. CE
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Indian Ocean Trade
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North African and Trans-Saharan Trade
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Key Concept 3.2 Continuity and Innovation of
State forms and their interactions

• Empires collapsed and were reconstituted, New
  forms of government emerged (Islamic states,
  Mongol Khanates, city states)
• Inter-regional contacts and conflicts encouraged
  technology transfers

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Kilwa

• Height in the 1300s but from 900
• Arab, Indian and Swahili influence
• Ibn Battuta visit in 1330
• World Heritage endangered list due to climate
  change

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Great Zimbabwe

• Cattle Gold Trade
• Portuguese Cecil Rhodes

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I was the archaeologist stationed at Great
Zimbabwe. I was told by the then-director of the
Museums and Monuments organization to be
extremely careful about talking to the press
about the origins of the Great Zimbabwe state.
I was told that the museum service was in a
difficult situation, that the government was
pressurizing them to withhold the correct
information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum
displays, school textbooks, radio programmes,
newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once
a member of the Museum Board of Trustees
threatened me with losing my job if I said
publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said
it was okay to say the yellow people had built
it, but I wasn't allowed to mention radio carbon
dates... It was the first time since Germany in
the thirties that archaeology has been so
directly censored.
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Ghana
Mali
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Key Concept 3.3 Increased economic productive
capacity and its social consequences

• Intensification of hemispheric trade
• Increased significance of urban centers
• Increasing cross-cultural contact and conflict
• Dissemination of ideas (East Asia and Dar al
  Islam cultural and intellectual engines with
  missionaries, merchants and military personnel)
  ----including Mongols as the conduits.
• Decline of urban areas in some areas due to
  invasion, disease, declining agricultural
  productivity and Little Ice Age.
• New forms of coerced labor emerged

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Sundiata

• West African monarch
• Founded what becomes Mali
• Nominally Muslim
• Kept traditional religious functions of W.
  African rulers
• Lots of trade
• Imperial system he set up lasted after death 1255