War in Africa for Kids
Early African soldiers, like the soldiers of Europe and West Asia and India, were generally men. These African soldiers also generally fought with the same weapons as in Asia and Europe - spears, leather shields, and bows and arrows. Nubian archers were so good at killing people that they were hired as mercenaries for the Egyptians beginning in the Middle Kingdom, about 2000 BC.
Carthaginian weapons (from the Byrsa museum in Carthage, Tunisia)
In North Africa, about 200 BC, Carthaginian soldiers killed people with iron spears and knives, but also stone balls shot from catapults. One famous Carthaginian general was Hannibal, who fought in the Punic Wars with Rome.
We don't know much about West African warfare before about 1000 AD, but by that time there were certainly soldiers there fighting with spears and bows and arrows, just like in East Africa. This is an archer, from Djenne (modern Mali), from around 1400 AD.
But when men came from Portugal and attacked the people of Ghana and Mali in the late 1400s AD, these Portuguese people had new weapons - cannons. Cannon (metal tubes that used exploding gunpowder to shoot big stone balls) had just been invented in Europe and China in the 1300s, and inventors in West Africa hadn't heard about them yet. So the African armies were at a big disadvantage.
Learn by Doing - Bows and Arrows
To find out more about African warfare, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
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(a project)
The Punic Wars
Main war page
Main Africa page
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