There is a misconception that before the arrival of European colonists in Africa, there were only savages in loincloths who had neither civilization nor states. At different times, there existed strong state formations, which, in their level of development, sometimes surpassed the countries of medieval Europe.
Today little is known about them - the colonialists grossly destroyed all the rudiments of an independent, unique political culture of black peoples, imposed their own order on them and left no chance for independent development.
Tradition has died. The chaos and poverty that are now associated with black Africa did not arise on the green continent because of European violence. Therefore, the ancient traditions of the states of black Africa today are known to us only thanks to historians and archaeologists, as well as the epic of local peoples.
Three gold-bearing empires
Already in the XIII century BC. The Phoenicians (then masters of the Mediterranean) traded iron and exotic goods such as elephant tusks and rhinoceroses with tribes that lived in what is now Mali, Mauritania and the Greater Guinea region.
It is not known whether there were full-fledged states in this region at that time. However, it can be said with confidence that by the beginning of our era there were state formations on the territory of Mali, and the first unconditional regional dominant was formed - the empire of Ghana, which entered the legends of other peoples as the fabulous country of Wagadu.
Nothing concrete can be said about this power, except that it was a strong state with all the necessary attributes - everything that we know about that era, we know from archaeological finds. The person who owns the letter first visited this country in 970.
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It was the Arab traveler Ibn Hawkala. He described Ghana as the richest country drowning in gold. In the XI century, the Berbers destroyed this, perhaps a thousand-year-old state, it disintegrated into many small principalities.
The empire of Mali soon became the new dominant of the region, ruled by the same Mansa Musa, who is considered the richest man in history. He created not only a strong and rich, but also a highly cultured state - at the end of the 13th century, a strong school of Islamic theology and science was formed in the Timbuktu madrasah. But the Mali empire did not last long - from about the beginning of the XIII century. to the beginning of the 15th century It was replaced by a new state - Songhai. He became the last empire of the region.
Songhai was not as rich and powerful as his predecessors, the great gold-bearing Mali and Ghana, which provided gold for half of the Old World, and was much more dependent on the Arab Maghreb. But, nevertheless, he was the successor of that one and a half thousand years of tradition that puts these three states on a par.
In 1591, the Moroccan army, after a long war, finally destroyed the Songhai army, and with it the unity of the territories. The country splits into many small principalities, none of which has been able to reunite the entire region.
East Africa: Cradle of Christianity
The ancient Egyptians dreamed of the semi-legendary country Punt, which was located somewhere in the Horn of Africa. Punt was considered the ancestral home of the gods and Egyptian royal dynasties. In the understanding of the Egyptians, this country, which, apparently, actually existed and traded with late Egypt, seemed to be something like Eden on earth. But little is known about Punta.
We know much more about Ethiopia's 2,500-year history. In the VIII century BC. on the Horn of Africa settled Sabeans - natives of the countries of southern Arabia. The Queen of Sheba is their ruler. They created the kingdom of Axum and spread the order of a highly civilized society.
The Sabeans were familiar with both Greek and Mesopotamian culture, and possessed a very developed writing system, on the basis of which the Aksumite script appeared. This Semitic people spread across the Ethiopian plateau and assimilate the inhabitants of the Negroid race.
At the very beginning of our era, a very strong Aksumite kingdom appears. In the 330s, Axum adopted Christianity and became the third oldest Christian country, after Armenia and the Roman Empire.
This state existed for more than a thousand years - until the XII century, when it collapsed due to an acute confrontation with Muslims. But already in the XIV century the Christian tradition of Aksum was revived, but under a new name - Ethiopia.
South Africa: little-studied, but ancient traditions
States - namely, states with all attributes, and not tribes and chiefdoms, existed in southern Africa, and there were many of them. But they did not have a written language, did not erect monumental buildings, so we know almost nothing about them.
Perhaps the hidden palaces of forgotten emperors await explorers in the Congo jungle. Only a few centers of political culture in Africa south of the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa that existed in the Middle Ages are known for certain.
At the end of the 1st millennium, a strong state of Monomotapa emerged in Zimbabwe, which fell into decay by the 16th century. Another center for the active development of political institutions was the Atlantic coast of the Congo, where the Congo empire took shape in the 13th century.
In the 15th century, its rulers converted to Christianity and submitted to the Portuguese crown. In this form, this Christian empire existed until 1914, when it was liquidated by the Portuguese colonial authorities.
On the shores of the great lakes, on the territory of Uganda and the Congo in the XII-XVI centuries, there was the Kitara-Unyoro empire, which we know about from the epic of local peoples and a small number of archaeological finds. In the XVI-XIX centuries. in modern DR Congo, there were two empires Lunda and Luba.
Finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, the state of the Zulu tribes emerged on the territory of modern South Africa. Its leader Chaka reformed all the social institutions of this people and created a truly effective army, which spoiled a lot of blood for the British colonists in the 1870s. But, unfortunately, she could not oppose anything to the guns and guns of the whites.
Alexander Artamonov