In recent years, Ethiopia has been hit by a wave of protests led by Oromos, who have been complaining about political and economic marginalisation. The Nobel Peace Prize winner who went to war. Ethiopia seeks to end deadly Eritrea feud. Image source, AFP. Clashes broke out after the flag of a former rebel group was displayed in the capital. The rally to welcome back the exiled leaders of the OLF passed off peacefully.
In addition to its role in inter-regional trade, Aksum was also known for its early conversion to Christianity. Ethiopian tradition traces the establishment of Christianity in the region back to two shipwrecked Syrians. One of the Syrians, Frumentius, was particularly influential because he became the first bishop of Ethiopia in CE and guided the king of Aksum, King Ezana r.
As bishop, Frumentius also encouraged Christian merchants to settle in Aksum. About a century later, Christianity in Ethiopia grew further as the state offered refuge to Christians fleeing persecution due to doctrinal disputes within the Church. Members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church also incorporated local beliefs, such as the legendary connection to King Solomon, into their religious traditions. The ruling family, coastal elites, and military leaders amassed significant wealth during the height of Aksumite power.
Like the Aksumite kings before him, Ezana amassed wealth by collecting tribute from surrounding states and taxing trade. Aksum and its surrounding states were agriculturally productive with fertile soils and effective irrigration systems.
Their agricul-tural productivity meant that the work of peasants and the wealth generated through foreign trade supported the ruling classes and elites. Building a powerful miitary, King Ezana expanded the empire and claimed control over most of Ethiopia, Nubia, and Saba Yemen. One section reads:. And as he now has conquered my enemy, so May he conquer for me, where I but go!
So will I rule in right and justice, doing no wrong to the peoples. And I placed. The throne, which I have set up, and the Earth which bears it, in the protection of the Lord of Heaven, who has made me king… [9]. Ezana is known to us because of archaeological findings, including the aforementioned conquest stones. He and other Aksumite kings also famously commissioned the construction of stelae singular: stele.
The most ornate stelae were elaboratedly carved into a marble-like material with faux doors at the bottom and multiple stories, as indicated by windows etched into each level. Most stelae have fallen in the over years since their construction, but several do remain standing. One stele even caused international uproar as the Italians took it during their occupation of Ethiopia at the onset of the Second World War and just recently returned it at great expense.
Unfortunately, the graves marked by the stelae have been cleared out by tomb robbers in the intervening years. However, small remnants of glass, pottery, furniture, beads, bangles, earrings, ivory carvings, and objects gilded in gold attest to the wealth buried with affluent Aksumites. These artifacts also show the availability of trade goods brought from long distances.
Furthermore, the architecture of the stelae is suggestive of connections back to earlier kingdoms. Then, Muslims increasingly dominated trade along the Red Sea coast and the most profitable trade routes shifted from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.
As Muslims in coastal areas became more powerful and Christian rulers shifted their attentions away from the coast, the relationship between Ethiopian Muslims and Christians remained complex. In the seventh century CE, one king of Aksum, al-Najashi Ashama Ibn Abjar, gave sanctuary to some of the first followers of Islam before he himself converted. In subsequent years, Muslims traders and Christian elites oftentimes cooperated. For example from the tenth through fourteenth centuries, Muslims set up trading settlements in the interior that facilitated the conspicuous consumption of Christian elites who desired imported goods.
However, there were also periods of conflict, especially after Muslims unified to form the Adal Sultanate in the fourteenth century. The Adal Sultanate militarily extended its influence over much of the region and for several centuries supported a thriving, multi-ethnic state. In the sixteenth century, Ethiopian Christians allied with the Portuguese to fight against the Adal Sultanate.
After the fall of the Adal Sultanate, Ethiopian Christians rejected Portuguese attempts to convert them to Catholicism and forced Portuguese mis-sionaries out of the region in CE. Who comes to mind as the richest person ever? Many economists and historians propose a person who might surprise you: Mansa Musa.
He was so rich that the people of his own time could not even fathom his wealth. Map 9. The Western Sudan does not correspond with a modern-day African country; instead, it is a region. Much of the Sahel is grassland savannah. Straddling regions with different climates, the people of the Western Sudan developed productive agriculture, trade networks, and an urban culture.
The architecture of the Western Sudanic states stands out for its use of mud adobe to construct its monumental buildings, such as the Great Mosque in Djenne Figure 9. From roughly to CE, the people of this region organized and supported—sometimes under duress—the large states that dominated the Western Sudan. The leaders of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai came to dominate the region because they controlled access to West African gold.
An increase in the demand for West African gold corresponded with the rise of these empires. The spread of Islam and rise of new states along the North African coast and in Europe gave the biggest boost to the demand for gold.
To meet the demand, Berber traders used newly introduced camels to carry gold north across the desert. Then, they loaded up their camels with big slabs of salt to return south. The people in many parts of West Africa considered salt a valuable commodity due to their distance from the ocean and the time required to extract salt from plant, animal, and other resources.
While the demands for gold and salt drove the trade, weapons, manufactured goods, slaves, textiles, and manuscripts also passed through the desert. With the flow of all of these goods, the Western Sudanic states emerged at the nexus of the trans-Saharan trade routes.
Growing urban areas, like Timbuktu, attracted Muslim scholars. In later centuries, the kings of Mali and Songhai deliberately fostered these connections with the larger Islamic World due to their religious beliefs and, sometimes, to enhance their status and secure their positions.
The new title brought him prestige within the Islamic world and Africa. As a result, Islam influenced the culture and lifestyle, particularly of urban residents, in the Western Sudan. We associate the first powerful empire, Ghana — s CE , with people who spoke the Soninke language and lived in the area between the Niger and Senegal Rivers—parts of present day Mauritania and Mali. In this region, agricultural productivity supported labor specialization, urban areas, and eventually state formation.
Archaeological evidence found at Djenne-Jeno, one of the earliest urban areas in the Western Sudan, which has been dated to approximately BCE, suggests that people had access to plenty of rice, millet, and vegetables. Iron technologies also allowed craftsmen to make iron spears and swords so people could protect themselves. Probably for defense purposes, Soninke speakers began joining together to form the ancient state of Ghana around CE.
Then, as the populations continued to grow, the state expanded its territory. They often acted as middlemen, trading in fish from the rivers, meat from herders, and grains from farmers. After CE, Ghanian leadership began collecting tributary payments from neighboring chiefdoms.
By CE, they had consolidated their control over trade, their authority over urban areas, and their reign over tributary states. Especially in the minds of the Arab scholars chronicling the history of this period, the gold trade de ned Ghana. They heard about the large caravans with hundreds of camels passing through the Sahara Desert on their way to and from Ghana.
To build their fortunes, the Ghanian kings taxed trade goods twice. They taxed gold when it was initially brought from the forested regions in the south to their market towns and again right as the Berber traders departed for the north.
In one manuscript, Al-Bakri, an eleventh century geographer based in Muslim Spain, described how a Ghanian king was adorned in gold and guarded by dogs wearing gold and silver collars. Al-Bakri recognized the centrality of gold to the finances of the Ghanian kings.
According to him, the kings claimed all of the gold nuggets for themselves, leaving only gold dust for everyone else. He described two separate sites within the capital city, Koumbi-Saleh. To trade their wares, the merchants used one site, which was clearly Muslim with mosques, while the king lived in a royal palace six miles away.
The separation between the sites and lack of mosques near the royal palace suggest that Islam had primarily impacted the market towns; the leadership and masses of Ghana did not convert. Due to attacks from the Muslim Almoravids from the North, issues with overgrazing, and internal rebel- lions, Ghana declined in the eleventh century, opening up an opportunity for the rise of Mali. The origins of the Mali Empire see Map 9. One version written by Guinean D.
Niani in follows Sundiata as he overcomes a number of challenges, like being unable to walk until he is seven years old, being banished by a cruel stepmother, and facing tests given by witches. With loyal followers and the attributes of a born leader, Sundiata overcomes these and other challenges in the epic to found the new empire. The epic demonstrates the prevalence of syncretism or the blending of religious beliefs and practices in West Africa. Like Sundiata, most of the subsequent kings of Mali combined Muslim and local religious traditions.
In the meanwhile, they continued to use pre-Islamic amulets, maintain their animistic beliefs, and consider pre-Islamic sacred sites to be important.
Sundiata built the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century and the empire reached its height under Mansa Musa c. Through diplomacy and military victories, Sundiata swayed surrounding leaders to relinquish their titles to him. Thus, Sundiata established a sizeable empire with tributary states and became the mansa , or emperor, of Mali.
Most of the subsequent mansas of Mali maintained their control over the gold-salt trade, the basis of their wealth. Mali also developed a more diversified economy and was recognized in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East as a prosperous trading center.
Mansa Musa used a large army of approximately , soldiers to reunify the empire after several tumultuous decades. Under Mansa Musa, Mali stretched much farther east, west, and south than had its predecessor kingdom, Ghana.
With its access to very diverse environments, trade in agricultural produce became more important in Mali than it had been in Ghana. Farmers specialized in regional crops and the state operated farms where slaves grew food for the royal family and the army. With all of these achievements, Mansa Musa is best remembered for going on the hajj from to CE. He attracted a great deal of attention traveling in a huge caravan made up of almost camels, 12, slaves, and an estimated 30, pounds of gold.
Likewise, reportedly after he passed through Alexandria, the value of gold in the city stayed low for a decade. After his return to Mali, Mansa Musa further cultivated Islamic connections by building new mosques and schools. He hosted Muslim scholars and made cities, including Timbuktu, Djenne, and Gao, into centers of learning.
Mansa Musa also encouraged the use of Arabic, and the libraries, especially of Timbuktu, became repositories of Islamic manuscripts. The Catalan Atlas Figure 9. He sits atop a gold throne, wearing a gold crown, carrying a gold sceptre, and gauging or perhaps admiring a gold nugget. Awash in gold in the Catalan Atlas, Mansa Musa paid for his various projects by collecting tribute from surrounding states and taxing trans-Saharan and inter-regional trade.
The empire got increasingly smaller through the early fteenth century. The Songhai Empire is most closely associated with the Sorko people who lived alongside the Niger River, southeast of Gao. By about CE, the Sorko had created their own state, Songhai, trading along the river and building a military that used war canoes. With the growth of trans-Saharan trade and eventually the discovery of new gold fields, the Sorko and other ethnic groups in the area established market towns in Songhai.
Most of the people who moved to these market towns converted to Islam by the eleventh century. The Barbary states , under the influence of Moors expelled from Spain, degenerated into communities of pirates , and under Turkish influence civilization and commerce declined.
The story of these states from the beginning of the 16th century to the third decade of the 19th century, is largely made up of piratical exploits on the one hand and of ineffectual reprisals on the other. By the 9th century AD a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the sub-saharan savannah from the western coast to central Sudan. Ghana declined in the 11th century but was succeeded by the Mali Empire which consolidated much of western Sudan in the 13th century.
Kanem accepted Islam in the 11th century. Islam then spread through the interior of West Africa , as the religion of the mansas of the Mali Empire c. Following the fabled hajj of Kankan Musa I , Timbuktu became renowned as a centre of Islamic scholarship and as the location of sub-Saharan Africa's first university. That city had been reached in by the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta , whose journey to Mombasa and Quiloa Kilwa provided the first accurate knowledge of those flourishing Muslim cities of the Swahili on the east African seaboards.
Following the breakup of Mali a local leader named Sonni Ali founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade.
Sonni Ali seized Timbuktu in and Jenne in , building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants. His successor Askiya Mohammad Ture - made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili d. Until the 15th century these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era, paying tribute to Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east.
The rain forest cut them off from knowledge of the Guinea coast and of all Africa beyond. One of the regions which was the last to come under Arab rule was that of Nubia, which had been controlled by Christians up to the 14th century.
In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew up with little influence from the Muslim north. Ife , historically the first of these Yoruba city-states, established government under a priestly king, or Oni.
Ife was noted as the religious and cultural centre of the region, and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. The Ife model of government was adapted at Oyo , where a member of its ruling dynasty controlled several smaller city-states. By the 15th century the Oyo Empire had cut off the mother city from the savanna. Yorubaland established a community in the Edo-speaking area east of Ife at the beginning of the 14th century.
This developed into the Benin Empire. By the 15th century Benin had become an independent trading power, blocking Ife's access to the coastal ports. Benin, which may have housed , inhabitants at its height, spread over twenty-five square kilometres, and was enclosed by three concentric rings of earthworks. By the late 15th century Benin was in contact with Portugal.
At its apogee in the 16th and 17th centuries, Benin encompassed parts of southeastern Yorubaland and the western Igbo. Monomotapa was a medieval kingdom c. It enjoys great fame for the ruins at its old capital of Great Zimbabwe. In , Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to reach the southernmost tip of Africa.
Under his inspiration and direction Portuguese navigators began a series of voyages of exploration which resulted in the circumnavigation of Africa and the establishment of Portuguese sovereignty over large areas of the coastlands. Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in , Cape Verde in , and by the whole Guinea coast was known to the Portuguese.
Portugal claimed sovereign rights wherever its navigators landed, but these were not exercised in the extreme south of the continent. The Guinea coast, as the nearest to Europe, was first exploited. The chief commodities dealt in were slaves , gold , ivory and spices. The European discovery of America was followed by a great development of the slave trade , which, before the Portuguese era, had been an overland trade almost exclusively confined to Muslim Africa.
The lucrative nature of this trade and the large quantities of alluvial gold obtained by the Portuguese drew other nations to the Guinea coast. English mariners went there as early as , and they were followed by Spaniards, Dutch , French , Danish and other adventurers. Colonial supremacy along the coast passed in the 17th century from Portugal to the Netherlands and from the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries to France and Britain.
The whole coast from Senegal to Lagos was dotted with forts and " factories " of rival European powers, and this international patchwork persisted into the 20th century although all the West African hinterland had become either French or British territory. Southward from the mouth of the Congo to the region of Damaraland in what is present-day Namibia , the Portuguese, from onward, acquired influence over the inhabitants, and in the early part of the 16th century through their efforts Christianity was largely adopted in the Kongo Empire.
Before Angolan independence in , the sovereignty of Portugal over this coastal region, except for the mouth of the Congo, had been only once challenged by a European power, the Dutch, from to in which Portugal lost control of the seaports. The earliest external African slave trade was trans-Saharan. Although there had long been some trading along the Nile River and very limited trading across the western desert, the transportation of large numbers of slaves did not become viable until camels were introduced from Arabia in the 10th century.
At this point, a trans-Saharan trading network came into being to transport slaves north. Unlike the Americas, slaves in North Africa were mainly servants rather than labourers, and an equal or greater number of females than males were taken, who were often employed as chambermaids to the women of northern harems.
It was also not uncommon to turn male slaves into eunuchs. The Atlantic slave trade was a later development, but would eventually become far greater and have a much bigger impact. Workers were needed for agriculture, mining and other tasks. To meet this new demand, a trans-Atlantic slave trade developed. Powerful African kings on the Bight of Biafra might sell their captives internally or exchange them with European slave traders for trade goods such as firearms, rum, fabrics and seed grain.
It should be noted that European traders also conducted their own, quite independent, slave raids. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries, the slowly-expanding settlement was a Dutch possession.
Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope area in ostensibly to stop it falling into the hands of the French, but also seeking to use Cape Town in particular as a stop on the route to Australia and India. It was later returned to the Dutch in , but soon afterwards the Dutch East India Company declared bankruptcy, and the British annexed the Cape Colony in Although the Napoleonic Wars distracted the attention of Europe from the exploration of Africa, there were nevertheless significant developments.
The invasion of Egypt — first by France and then by Great Britain resulted in an effort by Turkey to regain direct control over that country, followed in by the establishment under Mehemet Ali of an almost independent state, and the extension of Egyptian rule over the eastern Sudan from onward. In South Africa the struggle with Napoleon led the United Kingdom to seize Dutch settlements at the Cape, and in Cape Colony , which had been continuously occupied by British troops since , was formally ceded to the British crown.
Considerable changes had meanwhile been made in other parts of the continent, the most notable being the invasion of Algiers by France in This action put an end to the independent Barbary states, a major obstacle to France's Mediterranean strategy.
Egyptian authority continued its southward expansion with consequent additions to European knowledge of the Nile. The city of Zanzibar , on the island of that name rapidly attained importance. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the "discovery" in —, by the missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johann Rebmann , of the snow-clad mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated in Europe the desire for further knowledge.
By the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were carrying on active missionary work on the Guinea coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. It was being conducted among people of whom Europeans knew little. In many instances missionaries turned explorer or became agents of trade and colonialism. One of the first to attempt to fill up the remaining blank spaces in the European map was David Livingstone , who had been engaged since in missionary work north of the Orange.
In Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami , and between and he traversed the continent from west to east, making known the great waterways of the upper Zambezi. During these journeyings Livingstone "discovered", November , the famous Victoria Falls , so named after the Queen of the United Kingdom. These falls are called Mosi-oa-Tunya by Africans. In — the lower Zambezi, the Shire and Lake Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first reached by the confidential slave of Antonio da Silva Porto , a Portuguese trader established at Bihe in Angola, who crossed Africa during — from Benguella to the mouth of the Rovuma.
A prime goal for explorers was to locate the source of the River Nile. It was eventually proved to be the latter from which the Nile flowed. Henry Morton Stanley , who had in succeeded in finding and succoring Livingstone, started again for Zanzibar in , and in one of the most memorable of all exploring expeditions in Africa circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika , and, striking farther inland to the Lualaba , followed that river down to the Atlantic Ocean-reached in August and proved it to be the Congo.
Explorers were also active in other parts of the continent. Flooding in Central Ethiopia has forced about 50, people to flee their homes around the Awash river. One faction of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a mostly Somali organization that split in , and the Oromo Liberation Front have announced their intentions to coordinate their diplomatic, political, and military activities.
The joint communique does not explicitly opt for independence on their territory but expresses their desire for a referendum on this issue. However, the negotiations faltered in April and government forces went on the offensive against ARDUF positions in the foothills of the Danakil Depression. The Afars had to abandon their bases in the region as the government troops pushed them back along the Sabba Valley close to the Djibouti frontier.
The rebels stood up to an offensive in early June which reportedly produced many casualties on both sides. Agriculture reform was introduced in Amhara Regional State. The reform dispossessed Amhara farmers suspected of being opponents of the present regime. It led to a massive peasant protest march on Addis Ababa. Ethiopia said more than , people in the Afar region are in need of emergency food aid due to lack of rainfall in the past year. In March, the government announced that emergency food aid was needed in three southers states to feed more than one million people.
In December , 34, quintals of grain were sent to drought stricken regions including Somali Regional State and Afar Regional State. There is growing fear that Ethiopia could slip into a bloody religious war, especially if its neighbors, such as Sudan, continue to encourage extremist elements within Ethiopia and the region.
Both Ethiopia and Eritrea accuse Sudan of supporting Islamic rebels trying to overthrow their governments and both Ethiopia and Eritrea have given support to rebels in Sudan trying to overthrow the government of al-Bashir. After the defeat of Mengistu, the OLF joined the government of national unity led by Meles, but its representatives quit shortly after. Ethiopian authorities reject any form of indirect rule. Thirteen Oromo soldiers defected to the Islamic forces of al-Itihad which is based in Somalia.
They were led by Izadin Ali Bali who was the commander of three units based along the Somali-Ethiopian border. The defectors said they had suffered ethnic and religious discrimination from the Tigray members of Ethiopia's army. The al-Itihad, an Islamic fundamentalist organization, was blamed for a wave of terrorist attacks throughout Ethiopia during There were reports of heavy fighting between forces from the Ethiopian government and militiamen loyal to al-Itihad al-Islam along the Somali border region of Gedo.
Early reports said Ethiopian forces captured the Somali towns of Luq and Bulo Jawo and dozens of villages. Lack of rain in 5 zones of Afar Regional State has led to severe food shortages in the region.
Over , people affected by the shortages are to receive food aid. The migration of Amhara farmers towards the Wollega region in Oromo State has sparked tensions between the Oromo and their Gumuz neighbors. Provoked by land shortages and March legislation introduced in Amhara which dispossesses farmers suspected of being opponents of the government, some young farmers moved into southern Oromo region. An estimated 1.
ONLF and ARDUF signed a document in which the two organizations agreed to cooperate and to coordinate their political, diplomatic, and military efforts to reinstate the national and democratic rights of the Afar and Ogaden people. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of disappearances in these regions. The Oromo resumed their armed struggle in , but the OLF has distanced itself from the idea of setting up an Islamic state in Ethiopia. The government has been repressing OLF supporters because it is believed to be cooperating with al-Itihad.
According to police, three OLF members were killed and two captured while carrying illegal weapons. They had reportedly attacked a village called Jeldu in western Shewa zone in July. Government officials proposed that ARDUF align itself with the government, prompting several representatives to quit the conference and vow to restart armed rebellion against the state. Floods displaced some people in Afar after three rivers burst their banks. The Djibouti and Ethiopian joint committee of administrators of the frontier regions held their 7th meeting in Tadjurah, Djibouti.
They discussed increasing cooperation between the two countries to fight smuggling and cope with Afar rebel groups. An ARDUF faction which refused to sign a peace agreement with the Ethiopian government has recently signed cooperation agreements with several other rebel groups. They include a faction of the ONLF which is in armed conflict with the Ethiopian government, the Sidama Liberation Movement which appeared in the s, ended its operations in the mids, reappearing in June , and the Kafa and Shekacho People's United Front.
Over the past few weeks, Ethiopian authorities have reportedly increased police operations against Oromos suspected of being terrorists. Other observers blamed Islamic fundamentalist movements rather than the OLF. Informal negotiations between the OLF and government during the spring broke down after splitting the OLF into two positions: that of its secretary-general Gelassa Dilbo who wanted to continue the struggle against the regime and that of his deputy Lencho Letta who was more in favor of legalizing the OLF.
Authorities arrested seven leaders of the new Human Rights League. They were arrested over the past four weeks in a government crackdown against alleged supporters of the banned OLF.
The Oromo Relief Association, which was also shut down by the government, has gone to court to challenge its closure.
The two principal parties sharing power in Somali Regional State have decided to merge into a single party. Epidemic cases of malaria, TB, measles, and malnutrition and diarrhoea have appeared in Afar and Somali states. Drought has affected at least five million people in Tigray and other northern regions.
They are in need of food aid and some have migrated out of the drought-stricken areas. Extensive flooding since November has left many people internally displaced in the Gode and Afder zones of Somali Regional State. Kassu Illala, Deputy Prime Minister for economic affairs said special development efforts are being made to redress regional developmental imbalances particularly seen in Gambella, Benishangol-Gumz, and Somali and Afar Regional States. Establishing schools and providing skilled manpower from the federal government are two priorities.
The health service bureau of Afar region says there has been a rise in health service in the region due to an increase in the number of health professionals and institutions over the past four years. Eight thousand Somali refugees from Ethiopia were repatriated. There are plans to repatriate 60, more in the coming months. Ethiopian troops crossed into Eritrea on the trail of Afar bandits and opposition groups based in the Danakil Depression.
By May 20th, Ethiopian forces had reportedly occupied Sorona and Badda. Over refugees have returned home from Sudan over the past 6 months.
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