AFRICAN REALITY Naturally, Africans had a somewhat different understanding of their culture and institutions in the 19th century. While it is impossible to generalize about the entire continent in a few sentences, it is accurate to say that the continent that produced the first humans, and which developed universities as early as the 11th century, was in a state of turmoil by the 19th century. Much of the cause can be traced to the resumption of regular contacts with Europeans beginning in the 15th century and the impact of European expansion on the Muslim world. Among the consequences were ... the development of the overseas slave trade which created African states whose power was based on guns the end of the overseas slave trade in the early 19th century, undermining those states -- mostly along the coast -- which had grown strongest due to the slave trade Muslim reform movements that developed in response to the adoption of some aspects of European modernization by the Ottoman Empire, the center of the Muslim political world the expansion of the trade in slaves and ivory along the East African coast following efforts to end the slave trade in West Africa the proliferation of guns obtained from European and (to a lesser extent) Muslim sources European military officers often had a more realistic view of Africa, at least after serving for a few years. As the French learned in West Africa, the coastal states in Senegal were small and relatively weak, but beyond the town of Mèdine in the Upper Senegal River Valley, two large interior states were still healthy enough to block French efforts for roughly forty years. The leaders of one of them, Samory Touré, created an empire by employing smiths to manufacture guns, using Islam as a unifying ideology and making an alliance with "the business community" of long distance traders
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 17:56:05 +0000
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