Created \t02\/03\/2006 2:54 am<\/p>\n
\tBecause humans evolved in Africa, their parasites and diseases
\n\tare uniquely prevalent there too. Disease spreads rapidly among
\n\tpeople congregating in large numbers and has been a major
\n\tconstraint on the establishment of urban centers in Africa. —
\n\tthroughout the grater part of its evolutionary history, the human
\n\tpopulation of Africa has lived in relatively small groups.
\n\tdemonstrating that people are perfectly capable o living
\n\tpeacefully in small communities for millennia without establishing
\n\tcities and states.<\/p>\n
\t— Subsistence farming in Africa often demands more labor than can
\n\tfed with the food that farmers produce, but where conditions have
\n\tbeen amenable, innovative agricultural practices have overcome
\n\tthis problem and established a highly successful community. Until
\n\tcomparatively recently recent times, elephants have been a major
\n\tconstraint on agricultural developments in Africa. — ukara is
\n\tan island lying off the south-eastern shore of lake victoria
\n\tBambara-Nuts — Crops, cattle and iron formed the matrix around
\n\twhich African society and economy developed. A gerontocratic
\n\tsocial order prevailed. Salt probably stimulated the first
\n\tinstances of long-distance trade between groups, camels
\n\tfacilitated the exploitation of Sahara deposits. — The ancient
\n\tsettlement of Igbo-Ukwu in Nigeria was an outpost of West Africa’s
\n\tlong-distance trade routes. The inroads of the trans-Saharan gold
\n\ttrade stimulated the inception of centralized states in the Sahel;
\n\tenvironmental constraints predicated their demise. — Chinua
\n\tAchebe’s novel Things Fall Apart 1958 — The idea that generations
\n\tof Africans enjoyed congenial lives in well-integrated, smoothly
\n\tfunctioning societies prior to the era of European exploitation is
\n\twidespread but wrong. Few communities had sufficient labour to
\n\tsatisfy their needs. Life was arduous and unpredictable. Slavery
\n\twas commonplace. — A history of slavery in Africa claims that
\n\tbetween 30 and 60 per cent of the entire population were slaves
\n\tduring historical times. If this is correct, the number of people
\n\tenslaved in Africa far exceed the number taken from the continent
\n\tby the slave trade. In fact, given the volume of the demand of
\n\tslaves within the continent, the shipping of slaves across the
\n\tAtlantic should be seen as an extension fo the internal market. —
\n\tBananas and plantains, introduced to Africa from southeast Asia
\n\tmore than 2,000 years ago, produce high yields with minimal
\n\tlabour. They revolutionized food production throughout the
\n\tequatorial regions and rapidly became a staple food–most
\n\tespecially in Uganda, where cattle simultaneously became valued as
\n\tsymbols of prestige and wealth. — Cattle converted grass into
\n\ttimes of wealth that could be owned, exchanged and inherited. In
\n\tthe extensive grasslands of southern Africa a new order of values
\n\temerged, characterized by a degree of social stratification that
\n\tis epitomized at Great Zimbabwe. The gold trade initiated by Arabs
\n\tcalling on the East African coast introduced a disruptive dynamic
\n\tto the region. — Chinese fleets visited East Africa in the early
\n\tfifteenth century and took a giraffe back to Beijing in 1415;
\n\tPortuguese caravels began exploring the coast of West Africa
\n\tduring the same period. The Portuguese sought gold, but found
\n\tAfricans willing to supply slaves as well. Nearly 1,000 African
\n\tmen, women an children were shipped to Portugal between 1441 an
\n\t1446. — The Portuguese outflanked the trans-Sahara gold trade
\n\twhen they reached the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in 1472. The first
\n\tEuropean buildings in Africa were erected in El Mina (the mine)
\n\twith materials imported from Europe; gold and slave-trading
\n\tcontacts were firmly established in east Africa while the Portuguese
\n\tcarried European influence around the southern tip of the
\n\tcontinent: the Cape of Good Hope. — Though Europeans first
\n\tVisited Ethiopia in 1407, Ethiopians had been visiting Europe since
\n\t1306 at the latest. These early visitors told of a great Christian
\n\tking, Prester John, who ruled Ethiopia. Portuguese voyages around
\n\tthe continent were intended to make contact with Prester John and
\n\tgain his support for the Christian crusade against Islam. — The
\n\tPortuguese harnessed Africa to Europe. The continent and its
\n\tpeople were assessed in terms o their significance to Europe, but
\n\tthe stress of ecological imperatives on human society in Africa
\n\tremains strikingly evident fro documentary evidence, which joins
\n\tarchaeology as the principal sources on African history. —
\n\tEuropean descriptions of rich and densely populated kingdoms
\n\tnotwithstanding, the exigencies of human ecology kept Africa
\n\tthinly populated. Rural settlements were dispersed, urban centres
\n\tsmall, population growth rates low–but the foreign demand for
\n\tslaves became relentless. — Over nine million slaves were shipped
\n\tacross the Atlantic between 1431 and 1870. Another million or more
\n\tdid not survive the voyage, wile untold numbers died on the
\n\tjourney from their point of capture to the coast. Europe’s taste
\n\tfor sugar was the principal incentive of the trade. — island
\n\tGoree off-present-dat Dakar stories of white men from the ships
\n\teating their black captives were legion in the slave homelands.
\n\thuge copper kettles stood boiling on the foredecks, they had been
\n\ttold; African meat was salted, and fed to the crew; red wine was
\n\tAfrican blood; cheese was made from African brans; the victims’
\n\tbones were burned and became the ashlike, lethal grey powder that,
\n\twhen placed in iron tubes, transformed itself back into the flames
\n\tfrom which it had come and spewed pain an destruction against any
\n\twho tried, unprepared, to resist their demands… — African
\n\tentrepreneurs grew prosperous on the slave trade; slaves were
\n\texchanged for European goods by barter–a fickle method of trade
\n\tto which the cowrie shell brought a standard measure of value when
\n\tit was introduced from the Maldives n the 1510s. — African
\n\tchiefs and wealthy elites took people whom customary practice ha
\n\tenslaved within the indigenous economy, where the practice
\n\tbestowed at least a measure of benefit on all parties, and sold
\n\tthem abroad for goods that brought little benefit ao anyone other
\n\tthan the traders themselves–the inflow of foreign goods
\n\tseriously disrupted the development of indigenous economies. Like
\n\tasset-strippers on Wall Street, African slave-traders plundered
\n\tthe accumulating human resources over which they had gained
\n\tcontrol wit no thought for the wider implications and long-term
\n\tconsequences of their actions. They sold their brothers, their
\n\tcousins, their neighbors, the only conceivable justification
\n\tbeing that slaves were a commonplace feature of African
\n\tsociety–chattels, valued less highly than the goods offered by
\n\tEuropean traders. — The significance o the slave trade for Africa
\n\tlay less in the number of people lost than in the changed social
\n\tpatterns an reproductive capabilities of those who remained behind.
\n\tThe importation of firearms had a profound effect on these
\n\tdevelopments\/ — The slave trade commercialized African
\n\teconomies; after abolition indigenous slavery kept the economies
\n\tturning–throughout the continent the incidence of slavery
\n\tincreased. — french island of Saint-Domingue<\/p>\n
\tClimate exercised a major influence on the slave trade, with both
\n\tgood and bad conditions serving to maintain the trade. The effect
\n\tcontinued in the aftermath, when African economies relied upon a
\n\twork force of about 6 million slave in total, and annual
\n\trecruitment was ten times the number shipped form the continent
\n\teach year while the Atlantic trade was at its height. — When the
\n\tDutch established a permanent settlement at the Cape in the 1650s
\n\tthe introduction of European land-use strategies clashed with
\n\tthose of the indigenous population. Conflict was inevitable. —
\n\tThe British took control of the Cape form the Dutch in 1806, and
\n\tin 1820 shipped 4,000 settlers to the eastern frontier as a buffer
\n\tagainst advancing Xhosa populations. The Xhosa wanted land, the
\n\tsettlers desperately needed labour–a conflict of interest that
\n\twas exacerbated by treachery. — Massive population movements
\n\twhich convulsed southern Africa in the early 1800s have been
\n\tattributed to the formation and expansion of the Zulu state in
\n\tNatal. The predations of slave-traders shipping captives from
\n\tDelagoa Bay to Portuguese plantations in Brazil are a more likely
\n\tcause. — Edit | Delete | Back to Notepad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Created 02\/03\/2006 2:54 am Because humans evolved in Africa, their parasites and diseases are uniquely prevalent there too. Disease spreads rapidly among people congregating in large numbers and has been a major constraint on the establishment of urban centers in Africa. — throughout the grater part of its evolutionary history, the human population of Africa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","spay_email":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}