We might have studied Africa for a few weeks in school or glanced occasionally at newspaper headlines about genocide, AIDS, Ebola, or civil war, but rarely have we actually thought seriously about Africa.
This part of the text is a media stereotype because people get put an image of Africa into their mind where the only things that happen in Africa are bad, like how newspapers are about aids, genocide, Ebola, or civil war.
One originated in what is now South Africa and had a large influence as far afield as Malawi. This Zulu polity-building process in South Africa set in motion the Mfecane, a period of wars and disturbances that led to migrations and the conquest of thousands of people. The Mfecane, which in the Zulu language means “the era of the crushing or breaking,” may have been directly influenced by the presence of expanding white settlement in South Africa.
The Zulu State was created from both indigenous and external forces. Which the Mfecane was a shaping part in South Africa political stand.
It is quite likely that the first regional states in Africa were those that united independent farming communities below the first cataract in Egypt about 5,500 years ago.
Though there is no name of what was said to be the first regional state we could be Sudan since that would be under Egypt. But these communities were based from the drying of the desert and crop growers due to the Nile floods.
The once commonly accepted premise that the first states in Africa were the result of common patterns of “divine kingship,” diffused from Egypt or elsewhere, have been gradually abandoned by most knowledgeable scholars of African history. The equally misguided view that civilization originated in sub-Saharan Africa is also unacceptable to most scholars
This theory wrongly African political development to outside influences like Egypt, implying that sub-Saharan Africans couldn’t have developed complex systems on their own.
Under the right conditions, such systems could accommodate several million people. On the local level, lineage sys-tems depended on a balance of power to solve political problems. People in these societies controlled conflict and resolved disputes through a balance of centers of cooperation and opposition, which appear to have been almost universal in human societies. This human ethic of cooperation was
They created social systems based on lineage (kinship) systems. These systems allowed communities to maintain political order through cooperation and balance of power. This later helped them resist European colonial rule by making it difficult for colonizers to impose centralized control over locally governed societies. One interesting aspect is how these systems could effectively govern millions of people without a single central authority.
A brief case study on the Igbo-speaking peoples shows that stateless societies can be culturally and socially sophisticated. The Igbo live in the southeastern part of contemporary Nigeria.
Two characteristics of the Igbo stateless society that stood out are their politically autonomous villages and the council-based decision-making system. These stood out because they show how effective governance and social balance can be achieved without centralized authority, promoting shared power and community involvement.
All of these peoples spoke languages with the word-stem ntu, or something very similar to it, meaning “person.” The pre-fix ba denotes the plural in many of these languages so that ba-ntu means, literally, “people.” The source of these languages and the farming and herd
This defines the Bantu as groups of people who speak related languages characterized by the stem "ntu" and the prefix "ba-", meaning "people."
Because of the continent’s location on the equator, Africa generally has very fixed wet and dry seasons. This limits agricultural production and animal pasturing during the six or seven dry months. Three-fifths of the continent is desert, much of the rest has large areas of poor soil, and the more humid areas are home to the malaria-carrying mosquito and the parasitic, infection-carrying tsetse fly. Africa’s relatively light pop-ula
Due to Africa's location on the equator they have very fixed wet and dry seasons which cause problems with production in the 6 or 7 dry months.
com-munities. They carved intricate harpoon barbs and fishhooks out of bone; fired some of the earliest pottery in Africa; probably wove baskets and nets of reeds; and hunted crocodiles, hippopotami, and waterfowl.
This passage of text state that settlements were "clustered around the lakes and rivers of what are now the dry southern reaches of the Sahara," and specifically mentions the inland delta of the Niger in present-day Mali as a region with thriving fishing communities.
Until about 7,000 years ago, when increasing populations—and the climatic shift that would ultimately recre-ate the Sahara Desert—made food cultivation and animal herding neces-s
7,000 years ago they went from being gatherers and hunters to food cultivation and herding due to the climate shift and increasing population.
We should note that some scholars claim that the Afro-Asiatic languages, of which Hebrew and Arabic are the best known, originated in southwest Asia. We are not sure, though, that one can identify such subsistence/linguistic groupings with physical features as some scholars do.
The said they weren't sure about the claims because they question the validity of linking linguistic or subsistence groupings with physical features, as some scholars attempt to do.
To see Africa in its historical context is to grasp the complexity of the continent and to appreciate the ingenuity and dynamism of African peoples as they respond to the challenges posed by history
This shows there is a unique history to learn about Africa but also what challenges happened in their past, which brings them to making their own history.
One interesting case comes down to us from the Greek historian Herodotus, who in the fifth century BCE . . . wrote a brief but tan-talizing report of a sea journey by Phoenicians, organized by King Necho II of Egypt, around the landmass we call Africa
Herodotus wrote a report on a sea journey by the Phoenicians which was organized by King Necho the 2 of Egypt in which there were many landmass that we call Africa.
The victory and expansion of the Roman Empire after it defeated the Carthaginian Empire in the Third Punic War in 146 BCE fostered a greater international understanding of African geography. Indeed, it is noted that the term “Africa” potentially emerged from this era
They bring to us that with the expansion of the Roman Empire after defeating the Carthaginian Empire found a more international understanding of African geography.
Although we recognize that specific geographical regions, countries, and even regions within countries may embody varying degrees of uniqueness, this book nonetheless seeks to examine the continental trends that transcend individual regions and thus provide us with a com-prehensive
Peter J. Schraeder tells us that his book will be going over the continental trends that go beyond individual regions that gives us an understanding of Africa.
colo-nial rule took place during the 1950s as marked by the independence of Libya (1951), Morocco (1956), Tunisia (1956), the Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957), and Guinea (1958). Since that time, the African continent has been marked by a series of historic developments.
Time periods of when these countries in Africa gotten their independence.
Perhaps a more significant reason for television’s preference for rural over urban Africa is our ongoing romance with the exotic. We consider nature and the life of people with less contact with modern cultures more interesting and more enlightening than studies of everyday modern African life.
This suggests that they come from unconscious bias and cultural preferences rather than misinformation. I think this is true because media tends to prioritize what captures attention over what provides accuracy, and audiences are often unaware of the stereotypes they make.
For example, Africans are sometimes referred to in everyday America as “natives.” You may or may not think that native is a negative word, but its use is a legacy of the colonial period in Africa, when words were weapons employed by outsiders to keep Africans in their place.
This is a popular shortcoming because it reflects how colonial era language and stereotypes persist in everyday speech, often without awareness of their harmful origins.