Terms : Hide Images
| 5757611735 | African Politics and Society in Early Modern Times | - Between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, powerful kingdoms and imperial states ruled the savannas of west Africa. - Ghana was earliest one, however Mali took over - By the fifteenth century the Mali empire had begun to weaken, and the expansive state of Songhay emerged to take its place as the dominant power of the western grass- lands. - The Songhay empire dominated west Africa for most of the sixteenth centur y, but it was the last of the great imperial states of the grasslands. - In 1505 a massive Portuguese naval expedition subdued all the Swahili cities from Sofala to Mombasa. Portuguese forces built administrative centers at Mozambique and Malindi and con- structed forts throughout the region in hopes of controlling trade in east Africa. They did not succeed in that effort, but they disrupted trade patterns enough to send the Swahili cities into a decline from which they never fully recovered. | 0 | |
| 5757634278 | The Kingdoms of Central Africa and South Africa | - Kongo, Ndongo, Luba, and Lunda in the basin of the Congo River - Best known of them was the kingdom of Kongo, since abundant written records throw light on its experience in early modern times. - Its rulers built a centralized state with officials overseeing military, ju- dicial, and financial affairs, and by the late fifteenth century Kongo embraced much of the modern-day Republic of Congo and Angola. | 1 | |
| 5757643309 | Kongo | - Relations with Portugal brought wealth and foreign recognition to Kongo but also led eventually to the destruction of the kingdom and the establishment of a Portu- guese colony in Angola. - In spite of periodic invasions, Kongo remained strong until the mid-seventeenth century. Portuguese forces aided Kongo in expelling invaders, but at the same time they continued to trade in slaves. | 2 | |
| 5757657324 | Ndongo | - Meanwhile, Portuguese explorers were developing a brisk slave trade to the south in the kingdom of Ndongo, which the Portuguese referred to as Angola from the title of the king, ngola. - small chiefdom subject to the kings of Kongo to a powerful regional kingdom, largely on the basis of the wealth it was able to attract by trading directly with Portuguese merchants rather than through Kongolese intermediaries. - steadily increased their influence inland by allying with neighboring peoples who delivered increasing numbers of war captives to feed the growing slave trade. Over the next several decades, Portuguese forces campaigned in Ndongo in an effort to establish a colony that would support large-scale trading in slaves. - When Nzinga died, Portuguese forces faced less capable resistance, and they both extended and tightened their control over Angola, the first European colony in sub-Saharan Africa. | 3 | |
| 5757673257 | Islam and Christianity in Early Modern Africa | - Islam was most popular in the commercial centers of west Africa and the Swahili city-states of east Africa. In the sixteenth century the trading city of Timbuktu had a prominent Islamic university and 180 schools that taught the Quran. - Most African Muslims blended Islam with indigenous beliefs and customs. - Christianity made compromises with traditional beliefs and customs when it spread in sub-Saharan Africa. The Portuguese community in Kongo and An- gola supported priests and missionaries who introduced Roman Catholic Christianity to central Africa. They found strong interest among rulers such as King Afonso I of Kongo and his descendants, who eagerly adopted European-style Christianity as a foundation for commercial and political alliances with Portugal. Beyond the ruling courts, however, Christian teachings blended with African traditions to form syn- cretic cults. Some Africans regarded Christian missionaries as magicians and wore crosses and other Christian symbols as amulets to ward off danger from angry spirits. | 4 | |
| 5757686508 | Social Change in Early Modern Africa | - Kinship groups, for ex- ample, the most impor tant social units that emerged after the Bantu migrations, continued to serve as the basis of social organization and sometimes political organi- zation as well. Within agricultural villages throughout sub-Saharan Africa, clans under the leadership of prominent individuals organized the affairs of their kinship groups and disciplined those who violated community standards. In regions where king- doms and empires had not emerged, clan leaders consulted with one another and governed large regions. Indeed, even in lands ruled by formal states, clan leaders usually implemented state policy at the village level. - This strong demographic expansion is all the more remarkable because it took place precisely when millions of Africans underwent an involuntary, forced migration to destinations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Despite that migration, American food crops supported expanding populations in all regions of sub-Saharan Africa during early modern times. | 5 | |
| 5757695784 | The Atlantic Slave Trade | In exchange for slaves, African peoples received European manufactured products—most notably firearms, which they sometimes used to strengthen military forces that then sought further re- cruits for the slave trade. Only in the early nineteenth century did the Atlantic slave trade come to an end. During the course of the century, most states abolished the in- stitution of slavery itself . | 6 | |
| 5757706882 | Human cargoes | - they were delivering five hundred slaves per year to Portugal and Spain. In Europe, African slaves usually worked as miners, porters, or domestic servants, since free peasants and serfs cultivated the land. - Slave traders also delivered their human cargoes to Portuguese island colonies in the Atlantic. - The demand for labor in the western hemisphere stimulated a profitable com- Triangular Trade merce known as the triangular trade, since European ships often undertook voyages of three legs. On the first leg they carried horses and European manufactured goods— mostly cloth and metalwares, especially firearms—that they exchanged in Africa for slaves. The second leg took enslaved Africans to Caribbean and American destina- tions. Upon arrival merchants sold their human cargoes to plantation owners for two to three times what they had cost on the African coast. | 7 | |
| 5757720657 | middle passage | Following capture, enslaved individu- als under went a forced march to the coast where they lived in holding pens until a ship arrived to transport them to the west- ern hemisphere. Then they embarked on the dreadful "middle passage," the trans- Atlantic journey aboard filthy and crowded slave ships. Enslaved passengers traveled below decks in hideously cramped quar- ters. Most ships provided slaves with enough room to sit upright, although not to stand, but some forced them to lie in chains on shelves with barely half a meter (twenty inches) of space between them. Conditions were so bad that many slaves attempted to starve themselves to death or mounted revolts. Ship crews attempted to preser ve the lives of slaves, intending to sell them for a profit at the end of the voyage, but often treated the unwilling pas- sengers with cruelty and contempt. Crew members used tools to pry open the mouths of those who refused to eat and pitched sick individuals into the ocean rather than have them infect others or waste limited supplies of food. - approximately 25 percent of in- dividuals enslaved in Africa did not survive the middle passage. | 8 | |
| 5757735149 | The Impact of the Slave Trade in Africa | - During the seven- teenth century, slave exports rose dramatically to twenty thousand per year, as Euro- pean peoples settled in the western hemisphere and called for African labor to cultivate their lands. The high point of the slave trade came in the eighteenth century, when the number of slaves exported to the Americas averaged fifty-five thousand per year. - Other societies flourished during early modern times and benefited economically from the slave trade. Those Africans who raided, took captives, and sold slaves to Europeans profited handsomely from the trade, as did the port cities and the states that coordinated trade with European merchants. Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo peoples, for example, took advantage of the slave trade to obtain firearms from European merchants and build powerful states in west Africa. | 9 | |
| 5757748922 | Plantation Societies | - Most African slaves went to plantations in the tropical and subtropical regions of the western hemisphere. When European peoples arrived in the Caribbean and the Amer- icas, they found vast stretches of fertile land and soon began to envision huge profits from plantations that would satisfy the growing European demand for sugar and other agricultural commodities. - Many of these plantations produced sugar, which was one of the most lucrative cash crops of early modern times. But plantations produced other crops as well. Dur- ing the seventeenth century, tobacco rivaled sugar as a profitable product. Rice also became a major plantation product, as did indigo. By the eighteenth centur y many plantations concentrated on the cultivation of cotton, and coffee had begun to emerge asaplantation specialty. | 10 | |
| 5757759653 | The Making of African-American Cultural Traditions | More often they spoke a creole tongue that drew on several African and European languages. In the low countr y of South Carolina and Georgia, for example, slaves made up about three-quarters of the population in the eighteenth century and regularly communicated in the creole languages Gullah and Geechee, respectively. Like their languages, slaves' religions also combined elements from different soci- eties. Some slaves shipped out of Africa were Christians, and many others converted to Christianity after their arrival in the western hemisphere. Most Africans and African- Americans did not practice European Christianity, however, but rather a syncretic faith that made considerable room for African interests and traditions. Because they devel- oped mostly in plantation societies under conditions of slavery, these syncretic religions usually did not create an institutional structure or establish a hierarchy of priests and other church officials. - As in their languages and religions, slaves relied on their African traditions in cre- ating musical forms attuned to the plantation landscape. For many of these involun- tary laborers, the playing of African music brought a sense of home and community to mind | 11 | |
| 5757766325 | The end of the slave trade and the Abolition of Slavery | - Fre- quent slave revolts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made the institution of slavery an expensive and dangerous business. Some freed slaves contributed to the abolitionist cause by writing books that exposed the brutality of institutional slavery. - Quite apart from moral andpo- litical arguments, economic forces also contributed to the end of slavery and the slave trade. Plan- tations, slavery, and the slave trade continued to flourish as long as they were profitable, notwithstanding the efforts of abolitionists. - The abolition of the institution of slavery itself was a long and drawn-out process: emancipation of all slaves came in 1833 in British colonies, 1848 in French colonies, 1865 in the United States, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil. Saudi Arabia and An- gola abolished slavery in the 1960s. | 12 |
