African History
(this is page 2 - click here for page 1)
After the 400’s AD, the Bantu expansion slowed down. Most of
the good farmland in southern Africa had already been settled. What
was left was mainly desert or thick jungle or for some other reason
no good for farming. So the Bantu left that land to the native Khoikhoi
and San. But now it was North Africa’s turn to see changes.
In 429 AD, the Vandals
invaded North Africa, and then after a short Roman
reconquest the Arabs
took over North Africa in the late 600’s AD.
By this time, Africa was becoming more and more involved with Asia
through trade. The Islamic
faith quickly spread across the Sahara to West
Africa, where the kingdom of Ghana was forming. By 900 AD, Ghana
was wealthy and powerful thanks to trading slaves and gold across the Sahara
desert with the North Africans
for salt and silk from China.
Ghana fell to Mali in the 1200’s AD, and the great Malian king
Mansa Musa built the trading city of Timbuktu. By 1468, Mali in turn
fell to the Songhai. But the trade in salt, slaves, and gold across
the Sahara continued.
At the same time, the Bantu settled seaports on the eastern coast
of Africa and began trading with the Arabs
and the Indians
there, like the people of Aksum (which was
still Christian). The Bantu traded ivory,
gold, iron,
furs and slaves
for cotton, silk, glass beads,
and Chinese porcelain.
By 1000 AD, the people of south-east Africa had developed a culture
that mixed Bantu and Arab together. People there spoke a language
called Swahili that was mainly Bantu but with a lot of Arabic words.
Like the Ghanians, many of these Bantu converted to Islam.
By 1300, the kingdom of Aksum had also converted to Islam.
Just before 1500 AD, the first Portuguese explorers reached African seaports. These first European arrivals were traders like the Arabs, but after them would come the waves of colonists who gradually conquered most of Africa.
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