African History

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After the 400’s AD, the Bantu expansion slowed down. Most of the good farmland in southern Africa had already been settled. What was left was mainly desert or thick jungle or for some other reason no good for farming. So the Bantu left that land to the native Khoikhoi and San. But now it was North Africa’s turn to see changes. In 429 AD, the Vandals invaded North Africa, and then after a short Roman reconquest the Arabs took over North Africa in the late 600’s AD.

By this time, Africa was becoming more and more involved with Asia through trade. The Islamic faith quickly spread across the Sahara to West Africa, where the kingdom of Ghana was forming. By 900 AD, Ghana was wealthy and powerful thanks to trading slaves and gold across the Sahara desert with the North Africans for salt and silk from China. Ghana fell to Mali in the 1200’s AD, and the great Malian king Mansa Musa built the trading city of Timbuktu. By 1468, Mali in turn fell to the Songhai. But the trade in salt, slaves, and gold across the Sahara continued.

At the same time, the Bantu settled seaports on the eastern coast of Africa and began trading with the Arabs and the Indians there, like the people of Aksum (which was still Christian). The Bantu traded ivory, gold, iron, furs and slaves for cotton, silk, glass beads, and Chinese porcelain. By 1000 AD, the people of south-east Africa had developed a culture that mixed Bantu and Arab together. People there spoke a language called Swahili that was mainly Bantu but with a lot of Arabic words. Like the Ghanians, many of these Bantu converted to Islam. By 1300, the kingdom of Aksum had also converted to Islam.

Just before 1500 AD, the first Portuguese explorers reached African seaports. These first European arrivals were traders like the Arabs, but after them would come the waves of colonists who gradually conquered most of Africa.