History of West Africa

The partial history of West Africa can be divided into five major periods:

  1. Its prehistory, in which the first human settlers arrived, agriculture developed, and contact made with the Mediterranean civilizations to the north.
  2. The empires that consolidated trade and developed centralized states.
  3. The slave-trading kingdoms, jihads, and colonial invaders of the 18th and 19th centuries.
  4. The colonial period, in which France and Great Britain controlled nearly the whole of the region.
  5. The post-independence era, in which the current nations were formed.

Read more about History Of West Africa:  Prehistory, Empires, Jihad and Colonization, Postcolonial West Africa

Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, west and/or africa:

    “If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
    —Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

    “The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    “Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa.... We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bought them; white people changed their names ... my maiden name is supposed to be Townsend, but really, what is my maiden name? What is my name?”
    —Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)

    “For Africa to me ... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
    —Maya Angelou (b. 1928)