Africa is a giant continent with over 11 million square miles (over 30 million square kilometers), boasts a population of 1.2 billion people, has over 1200 languages spoken, and includes 54 countries. The land size of the continent is enormous – it is more than the land areas of the United States, China, Europe, and India combined.
Did you know that among Africa’s 1.1 billion people, over half of them were born after 1990? Also, did you know that according to anthropologists, the earliest humans came from Africa, eventually spreading over the entire planet? Also, did you know that most of the nations in Africa were originally created by European powers claiming portions of the continent for themselves, and once Europe left, independent nation states were created by those boundaries? There are a lot of interesting facts to be found about Africa.
Here’s another interesting fact: during the last ice age, some 12-15,000 years ago, the climate in the Sahara was quite different. Much of the area was covered in grasslands similar to the Great Plains in North America. It was fertile for pastureland and for growing some cereals. But, between 5,000-3,500 B.C., rapid desertification took place, forcing many of its inhabitants to migrate elsewhere. Many of these people settled around the Nile River, helping to give rise to one of Earth’s oldest civilizations, the Egyptians. In other words, we wouldn’t have Egypt if it weren’t for environmental changes taking place in what became the Sahara.
Another interesting fact is that what we think of as “black African” or “Sub-Saharan African” had its origins in what today is Nigeria and Cameroon, eventually spreading out over almost all of Africa, south of the Sahara, between 1,000 B.C. and 500 A.D., except for a few pockets of other people-groups here and there. This means that most of this happened after Egyptian civilization reached its climax and started to wane.
Historically, the Roman Republic’s biggest rival was Carthage, a Phoenician settlement that grew to become a powerful trading city. Where was Carthage located? On the south coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in what today is Tunisia in northern Africa. It was Rome’s destruction of this city that led to her expansion, as an empire, to control the lands in northern Africa.
In the Roman Empire, Christians took advantage of the Roman trade network and roads to spread the Gospel to the farthest reaches of the empire and beyond. In fact, many of Christianity’s early saints came from northern Africa, including Augustine, Cyril, Clement, Denise, Boniface, Monica, and many others. In the 7th century, when the religion of Islam began, it made it way, through the conquest of people who spread the religion, not only across the Middle East, but also across northern Africa, displacing the previous Christian strongholds with ones under Muslim control – this included the Mediterranean coast, as well as the lands of the Sahara.
Before Europeans started to have an influence on the continent, Africa went through a period where it saw many kingdoms rise and fall. This included the Hausa, Ghana, Mali, Nri, and Ife kingdoms.
When it comes to the slave trade, Arabs were taking Africans to be slaves centuries before Europeans got involved in that trade. In fact, the rise of the European slave trade can be traced back to Arab slave trading networks, which European powers and businessmen took advantage of. This was until the trade took a steep decline in the 19th century, leading to cultural transformation across sub-Saharan Africa, as the kingdoms that flourished due to the slave trade went into decline or were forced to alter their economies to stay intact. Here’s an interesting fact: around the same time, that is, from the 1500’s to the 1800’s, more than a million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery by Barbary pirates from northern Africa.
The decline of the slave trade and the revamping of the African economy made way just in time for European powers scrambling all over Africa to claim territories for themselves before other powers could. This culminated in the Berlin Conference, held by Belgium’s King Leopold II, in 1884-5, which helped to iron out differences and create proper boundaries between territorial claims. It was these boundaries between European land claims that are became the boundaries between the nation-states, when almost all of them acquired their independence in the mid-to-late 20th century. Most of these are still the same boundaries today, reminiscent of the European conquest of Africa – many times these boundaries went right through the middle of tribal land, causing irreparable damage to African people. In my opinion, the African people should come together, throw off their present boundaries, and create a new African nation that encompasses all of them, and while creating the new nation, negotiate with each other to create new localized units of government that unite each tribe or clan.
There are many more interesting things that could be said about Africa – much more than could be said here.
P.S. Did you know that the camel did not originate in Africa, but in North America?
