Africa's History With Europe

by Marika Sherwood

In Europe, we generally find out very little about Africa's past, apart from possibly transatlantic slavery. This means we grow up with very negative ideas about Africa and of people who's ancestors are African. This means we must begin to understand some general areas of African history to begin to get a better view of the world and people around us. Africa being a vast and diverse continent means that this is a vast subject, so in this short space we will look at a few areas that introduce some key aspects of Africa and its history.

Africa is about three times the size of Europe. Its people speak well over a thousand languages: for example, there are about 200 languages spoken in Congo and about 500 in Nigeria.

Europeans needed a moral excuse to transport enslaved Africans and then to divide Africa among themselves. So they invented the myth of there being no African history and no African civilisation. This justified their exploitative dealings with the ‘savages'. The absence of African history from our textbooks today continues this myth of inferiority - if people have no history, they have no culture, no civilisation and are therefore inferior to Westerners.

Yet one of the earliest civilisations was developed by Africans, in Egypt. The high level of sophistication is shown by the fact that writing, arithmetic, architecture, medicine, surgery, legal systems and organised government were there six thousand years ago. The library at Alexandria (ancient Egypt, about 290BC) was the first internationally used storehouse of written knowledge.

Though desert areas seemingly divide the North of Africa from the rest of the continent, trade routes crossed the Sahara desert and there were also routes from East to West. Africans, Arabs and Europeans have traded with each other for thousands of years. People also migrated within Africa, in all directions, looking for more fertile lands, for minerals, for proximity to the trade routes and to rivers, and in search of accessible, drinkable water - or to escape marauders and conquerors.

Africa is about three times the size of Europe. Its people speak well over a thousand languages: for example, there are about 200 languages spoken in Congo and about 500 in Nigeria.