Driving Questions
1. Explain the heterogeneous nature of the African Geography. What are the different geographic zones and climate zones?Why is this important?
2.WHat was the fundamental unit of african society? Be sure to include the preeminence of lineage groups and from where we derive our knowledge about african society.
3. Explain the assiduously conducted religious rituals of the african people.How did they manifest their religious conviction?
4. With no written language, how were the societies able to perpetuate the stories about the ages of antiquity and the history of Africa?
5. What were some example of the Kingdoms and States of Africa, and what activities led to the prosperity and affluence of these nations?
2.WHat was the fundamental unit of african society? Be sure to include the preeminence of lineage groups and from where we derive our knowledge about african society.
3. Explain the assiduously conducted religious rituals of the african people.How did they manifest their religious conviction?
4. With no written language, how were the societies able to perpetuate the stories about the ages of antiquity and the history of Africa?
5. What were some example of the Kingdoms and States of Africa, and what activities led to the prosperity and affluence of these nations?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN OVERVIEW
The African Geography |
The African
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The African
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Africa is essentially a miscellaneous assortment of several distinct geographic zones. It is a heterogeneous conglomerate of a variety of very diverse environments. For example, Africa’s Mediterranean coast is mountainous and the south of these mountains lies in Earth’s largest desert, the Sahara. The vast Sahara desert stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. East of this widely recognized landmark is the Nile River, and past the bleak and desiccated Nubian desert is the red sea, which separates Africa from Asia. There are snow-capped mountains, upland plateaus, and lakes up in the east. Additionally, Africa is home to a distinctive feature called the Great Rift Valley where imperious and imposing mountains loom over deep canyons. South rests the Congo Basin. Also, more than simply having many disparate and diversified geographic zones, Africa is incisively and methodically divided into four different and distinct climate zones as well. The first is a mild climate zone that stretches across the northern coast of Africa and the southern tip of Africa, and this region is characterized by moderate rainfall, warm temperatures, and fertile land with the felicitous potential to produce prodigiously abundant crops and sustain large populations. The next climate zone is made up of deserts, notorious for its arid conditions, and the Kalahari and Sahara are encompassed in this climate zone. A third climate is the rain forest that stretches along the equator and covers ten percent of the continent. Finally, the savannas exist as the fourth climate zone. Savannas are broad grassland dotted with small trees and shrubs.
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Early African societies included places such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and many of these societies had many traits in common, so much so that an almost ubiquitous culture pervaded the majority of the continent. First off, African towns began as fortified villages and gradually, but steadily, grew into larger communities. An infelicitously adverse reality about these socities what that they did not have written languages. Because of this, our knowledge of thes populations are impotently contingent upon the descriptions recorded by foreign visitors. While this could be seen as advantageous as you are reading the scrutiny and inspection of an outsider, and this person may be more unidealized as one of the town may be, this also leaves a lot of room for bias. For example, if the nonnative had had an unsatisfactory or at all deleterious, they may leave a very denunciatory report on the civilization. Even in the absence of any kind of inimical experience, the things that travelers or tradesman chose to document was completely haphazard and arbitrary, so they may have excluded indispensably essential parts of the African culture. However, experts in this field have pieced together many accounts, including one from the traveler Ibn Battuta. The most detrimental repercussion of this recording system is that there is little known about the lives of ordinary, undistinguished civilians, because people were more compelled to write about the lives of the resplendent upper class, only taking note of the sumptuously wealthy and the powerful.
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A majority of Africans, a generalization included those living in the east, west, and south, lived in unpretentiously diminutive dwellings and in small rural villages. They lived, particularly in small round dwelling made of tightly placed and harden mud thatched with plant materials such as straw. One’s identity in the village was determined by one’s membership in an extended family and lineage group. These lineage groups were the fundamentally basic unit of African society. As part of this methodology, each member of a lineage group was awarded the unalienable prerogative to claim that they were descended from either a real of legendary common ancestor. With authority similarly arranged as that in china, the elders, or the preeminent and principal leaders in the lineage group had much unbridled and uncurbed power over all of the members of the tribe. As a part of the lineage group there was a mutal contract or covenant per say that obligated each member to provide support and consolation, a testament of the strong conviction that compassion and solicitude for others was central to one’s life. Women where typically subordinate to men, but they were held in high regard for their work, and they could earn the reverence or felicitations of others by conceiving children and consequently increasing the size of the lineage group. A tribute to women, however, was the widely sanctioned procedure of characterizing a family’s lineage based on the mother rather than the father. This behavior, which earned the women the deference and respect of their husbands, is called a “matrilineal” practice.
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Religious beliefs and culture
Religious RitualsIn the early African establishments, religious belief varied from placed to place. However, most of the African communities did share some common doctrinal beliefs. Of these shared spiritual convictions is the idea that there was a single creator god. For instance, the people of Yoruba cultivated the belief that their chief god sent his son Oduduwa down from heaven in a modest an unostentatious canoe sculpt and create the first humans. Sometimes, the divine and sanctioned creator god was accompanied by lesser gods, and the Ashanti people of Ghana are an illustration for this reality as they though that the supreme God, Nyame, had sons who were lesser gods. However, these Ashanti Gods were not to be trusted. They were inauspiciously predisposed to irascibility, so to conciliate their anger, humans worked to assiduously to have commendable behavior. Many believed that the creator God had once roamed the earth but retreated to Heaven in a state of absolute detestation and abhorrence because of the unscrupulous, exploitive, and reprobate ways of the world. However, this repugnance, as briefly touched on, could be mollified by righteous and virtuous actions. Ritual, or communicating with the Gods, was executed by way of a special class of diviners, people who claimed to have this aptitude or faculty of working with supernatural forces. It was also though that the ancestors had the adept capacity of influencing the lives of their descendants. These African beliefs were challenged by the arrival of Islam, which swept across norther Africa in the wake of the conquest of the caliphate. At first, conversion to Islam was undertaken at a personal level. But, starting with the royal family of Gao’s conversion, these conversions began to be predominantly omnipresent. In many levels, the ideas of Islam were discrepantly inharmonious with those of African beliefs and customs. With time, a composite amalgamation of the two religions was breed, an idiosyncratically unique brand of Africanized Islam.
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African Culture The arts have traditionally been a way of manifesting one’s conviction or serving ones relgions. These could be through a wide variety of arts, including different departments such as painting, literature, or music. For example, wood carvers in African constructed masks and statues to represent gods, spirits, or ancestral figures, and these small statuettes or figurines per say were believed to have encompassed or somehow have assimilated the spiritual powers of the depicted subjects. As their sculpting technologies had advanced, metalworkers produced bronze and iron statues. Similar to woodcarving or sculpting, African music and dance served the same purpose of deferentially worshiping or extoling the gods. African dance was allegedly a method of communicating with the spirits, and, quite interestingly, the strong rhythmic overtones of African dance African music eventually influenced modern western music. The music was founded in this stimulatingly rhythmic pulsating of the beat, and it is this core attribute of African dance that has allowed it to pass the test of time. African music also had a social purpose. Because there was an egregious paucity of a written language, transmitting folk legends and religious traditions from generation to generation was done by virtue of song. Storytelling, a consecrated art of itself, was usually officiated by priests or a special class of storytellers referred to as griots. These distinguished and eminent storytellers with tasked with the imperatively important role of being oral historians and genealogist, keeping alive the people’s recollection of the past.
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a Glimpse of Kingdoms and States of Africa
Kingdom of GhanaThe Kingdom of Ghana was the first affluent trading state in West Africa, and it emerged as early as A.D. 500. It was located in the Upper Niger river valley, the grass covered region between the Sahara and the Tropical Forest along the West African Coast. The majority of the people who populated Ghana were farmers living in villages under the authority of a local ruler, and as one cohesive whole, the people made up the Kingdom of Ghana. The Kings of Ghana were vigorous and passionate authorities with cogent arguments. They used written laws to systematically and punctiliously govern their kingdoms. As a safeguard for their kingdom and to enforce the wishes of the government, the Ghanaian kings were depended upon well-trained armies of thousands of men. Ghana had a profuse cornucopia of gold, and the heart of the state was located near an area simple abounding with gold-producing areas. It was Ghana’s gold that made Ghana the hub or nucleus of an enormous and sumptuous trade empire. By the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslims had begun to partake in the trade. Muslim merchants were known for buying goods from Ghanaian traders and them selling the goods to Berbers. In exchange for gold, ivory, hides, and slaves, the Ghanaian traders would receive metal goods, textiles, and salt. Salt was a highly cherished and treasured item for the Ghanaians as it was an indispensable ingredient in the preserving of foods and could be used to replace the salt that their body lost in the blisteringly torrid environment. The Berber camel caravans became known as the “fleets of the desert.” Camels were of paramount importance in the trans-Sahara trade patterns as they were acclimated to the practically unendurable desert climate.
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Kingdom of MaliWhile the burgeoning and prosperous kingdom of Ghana flourished for several hundred years, it collapsed during the 1100s. In the wake of the disintegration of the Ghanaian Kingdom, many new trading states arose in its place, the most buoyant and flourishing being the Kingdom of Mali. The Kingdom of Mali was established by Sundiata Keita when he intrepidly defeated Ghana and captured its capital in 1240. He subsequently united the people of Mali and created a strong and assertive central government. His empire extended from the Atlantic coast to the famous trading city of Timbuktu. The kingdom of Mali built its opulent and sumptuous wealth on gold and salt trade. Most people were farmers, and the farmers lived in villages with local rulers who served as religious and administrative authorities. Renowned for his resplendent splendor, one of the richest and most powerful kings was Mansa Musa who doubled the size of the kingdom of Mali and created a strong central government. He also divided the kingdom in provinces rules by governors who he appointed to be more methodical and systemized about his kingdom’s organization. After being sufficiently satisfied of the invulnerability of his kingdom, Mali, being a fervidly devout Muslim, made a pilgrimage to Makkah. Everywhere he went, he munificently bestowed splendid gifts of gold on his host. However, this altruistically magnanimous deed had detrimental repercussions. The introduction and circulation of Gold in such a short time caused a major plummet in its value. Finally Mansa Musa was determined to leave a legacy that exceeded such a superficial and inconsequential such as wealth. So, he was inspired to make Timbuktu a hub of Islamic learning and culture and he constructed mosques and libraries.
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- https://pixabay.com/en/photos/desert/
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