Kerr - A short history of Africa : from the origins of the human race to the Arab spring

Africa. The cradle of civilisation. From the dawn of human time in prehistoric Africa right through to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, Gordon Kerr offers a comprehensive introduction to the sprawling history of this enormous continent.

He begins with the origins of the human race and the development of stone age technology, through ancient and medieval times and the significance of the Arab presence, the Muslim states and the trans-Saharan trade.

Kerr continues with the rise and fall of nation states and kingdoms prior to the arrival of Europeans , Ghana, the Kingdoms of the Forest and Savanna, Yoruba, Oyo, Benin, Asante, Luba, Lunda, Lozi and many others, on to the beginning of the slave trade, and the European conquest and colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, the Scramble for Africa.

Finally moving onto the often bitter struggles for independence from that period of colonization and exploitation, Kerr concludes with an assessment of Africa in the 21st century.

Gordon Kerr is a writer and editor who has worked in bookselling, publishing, journalism and the wine trade. He is the author of several titles including A Short History of Europe published by Pocket Essentials.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European explorers began to penetrate the West African interior. It had been ignored for centuries, partly because of the risk of disease and death but also because there was little reason to venture beyond the safety of the coastal strip. The trade in slaves worked well and there was no need to change it.

Christian missionaries followed, seeking to spread the word of God and realising that the interior held a huge number of potential converts. For the first seventy-five years or so of the nineteenth century, however, governments were reluctant to become involved in anything away from their coastal enclaves and imperial aspirations were far from their thoughts. There was little to be gained, they believed, and quite a lot to lose.

The movement for the abolition of the slave trade had revived interest in Africa, however. Replacing that shameful trade with legitimate commerce became an aspiration for abolitionists and, for that to happen, a greater knowledge of the African continent was required. Religion was also believed to be a way to supplant the slave trade. The evangelical churches that had arisen in Europe in the previous century, to assuage the grinding poverty of the Industrial Revolution, created their own missionary societies. But little was known of the traditional religions that Christianity would come up against in the interior Europeans on the coasts knew nothing of life inland. In the first half of the nineteenth century, missionaries deduced, therefore, that the most effective way to get their message heard would be to convert and train Africans to be clergymen. Meanwhile, African rulers were anxious to benefit from the skills of the European missionaries and their African acolytes, and to obtain the luxury goods to which they had access. More often than not, therefore, they converted to Christianity for practical, rather than spiritual, reasons.

An enormous number of explorers travelled to Africa. Their reasons were various some were engaged in scientific enquiry; some were adventurers or seekers of fame or fortune. All were certain, however, that their explorations would help to drive trade in the future that would ultimately benefit Europe. In 1788, the African Association had been formed by a group of wealthy Englishmen who wanted to dispatch an expedition to Timbuktu to investigate the course of the Niger river in the hope that there might be gold reserves in the area. Mungo Park (17711806) was the associations first explorer. He visited the Niger twice, but died during his second attempt to follow the course of the river to the sea. In 1827, the Frenchman Ren Cailli (17991838) became the first European to reach Timbuktu and return safely. In 1830 two Cornish brothers John (18071839) and Richard Lander (18041834) followed the Niger from the town of Bussa to the sea, proving that there was a navigable river that flowed deep into the heart of Africa.

Malaria, however, would maintain Africas reputation as the White Mans Grave for another two decades until the discovery of quinines efficacy against the disease quickened the pace of European exploration. Other potential trading arteries the upper Nile, the Zambesi and the Congo rivers were also explored during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. British explorers Sir Richard Burton (182190), John Hanning Speke (182764) and James Augustus Grant (182792) located the source of the White Nile at Lake Victoria Nyanza, while, further south, Scottish explorer, missionary and fervent advocate of the abolition of slavery David Livingstone (181373) crossed the continent from east to west and back again. He spent his last years exploring Lake Malawi and the waterways of southern-central Africa. Henry Morton Stanley carried on Livingstones work by following the Congo River from its upper tributary, the Lualaba, to its entry into the Atlantic Ocean at Boma in the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. To the north, the German explorers Heinrich Barth (182165) and Gustav Nachtigal (183485) were following the trade routes of the Sahara and the Sahel.

As explorers opened up potential trade routes and European merchants pushed their contacts deeper into the interior, European governments slowly began to take interest. The French had established a colony along the banks of the Senegal river as far as Medina while the British declared the Fante states located in modern-day Ghana a Crown Colony following a challenge by the Ashanti Confederacy to the British trading monopoly on West Africas Gold Coast. The British consolidated their position with a victory over the Ashanti in 1874. Around this time, British merchants were also taking control of the trade on the lower Niger.

When Stanley announced his discovery of the Congo River, the Belgian King Leopold II (ruled 18651909) commissioned him to return to the mouth of the river to build a road linking Boma with Malebo Pool. It was the start of the kings colonisation plans. It was also the start of the so-called scramble for Africa.

Although they had shown little or no interest in Africa beyond their enclaves on the coast for the past 400 years, by 1898 the European states had swallowed up almost the entire continent. The speed at which this occurred was certainly puzzling, leading one eminent British historian of the time, Sir John Seeley, to say that the empire had been acquired in a fit of absence of mind (The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures London, Macmillan, 1883).

It had been made possible to a large extent by European technological developments such as steamboats, railways and the telegraph, plus the decisive factor modern firearms. Africans had no answer to weapons such as the magazine repeating rifle or Hiram S. Maxims (18401916) Maxim gun, the first machine gun and the weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest (A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume One; 19001933, Martin Gilbert, William Morrow and Company, New York). Although Africans had long been able to acquire firearms, none ever managed to get their hands on a Maxim gun. British anti-imperialist poet Hilaire Belloc summed it up in a famous couplet:

Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim-gun; and they have not.

Europeans justified their African land-grabbing by claiming that it was their duty to bring civilisation or, at least, the European version of it to Africa. The European had a moral duty to improve the life of the African, a sentiment characterised as the white mans burden in Rudyard Kiplings 1899 poem of the same name written to celebrate Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee. Of course, those who refused to accept the new culture were ruthlessly dealt with.