The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [75]
Islam made inroads in Northern Africa—above the Congo basin—after AD 1000, and they began trading in gold, ivory, and slaves from AD 600 onward. Some northern areas of Africa became totally Muslim, but the southern areas managed to retain their own religious structures. Muslim traders first began trading slaves from Africa to the Muslim world in the Middle East. Muslims were by far the world’s greatest slave traders. European slavers arrived in 1441 (Portuguese). By the time the European slavers arrived African tribes were already familiar with raiding other tribes to capture slaves for outsiders. It was a very lucrative operation for the African tribes and for the Muslim and European entrepreneurs engaging in the practice. By the 1500s, the Ottoman Turks held Northern Africa and the trading routes across the Sahara, thus controlling important trading centers and trade routes.
On the eastern coast of Africa an excellent trade system evolved into the Indian Ocean trade network. This trading area brought in, and disbursed all over Africa, goods from far away China, India, and the Mediterranean world. Areas all along the eastern coast of Africa prospered from this trading arrangement. The Europeans would spoil this trading system in the 1500s when Portuguese explorers looking for a way to the orient interrupted the sea routes used by the network. Soon the Europeans dominated the oceans off eastern Africa and determined what sea trade passed between various regions. In essence, Europeans began taking the trade to Europe and destroyed the lucrative trading system in the Indian Ocean.
The African slave trade went on with Europe and the Americas until banned by England in 1808 in a unilateral act of conscience. It was England’s sea power that allowed the nation to embark on the scheme that challenged much of Europe and the Middle East. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, Britain convinced nearly all of Europe to sign off on banning slavery. By the 1820’s, both the British and French were trying to end the slave trade; however, the African tribes and states that made large profits from slavery were resisting this change. After all, the slave trade was extremely profitable for the African businessmen. The British even bombarded the coastal fortresses of the African slave traders who opposed the Euorpean attempt to limit their power. By 1880 the combined efforts of England, Europe, and America ended the African slave trade; however, this in turn caused economic problems in Africa causing a general financial collapse. The African economic problems led European colonial powers into opportunistically absorbing the entire continent into their empires by 1914 in the notorious “Scramble for Africa.” When the European powers completed the scramble only two nations, Liberia and Ethiopia, remained free of colonial control. After World War I the victors redrew the lines of demarcation for African “nations” because Germany lost their colonial empire, most of which was in Africa, and the English and French seized these colonies. These lines of control only displayed European concerns, not African realities.
The colonial collapse after World War II led to African states gaining their freedom rather quickly. Unfortunately, they proved unable to effectively govern themselves. England was careful to develop its colonies so they could handle independence, but most other European nations, such as Belgium, just left, thereby allowing everything to fall apart behind them. The poorly drawn lines of nationhood left over from the Treaty of Versailles