World History in Credo: Africa

Former province, NE South Africa.

Economic heartland of Gauteng province, South Africa. Gold was first found here in 1853.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Section of the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, western Africa. Extending approximately from Axim, Ghana, in the west to the Volta River in the east, it was so called because it was an important source of gold. It was an area of intense colonial rivalry from the 17th century. Acquired as a colony by the British in the 19th century and named the Gold Coast, the area achieved independence as the Republic of Ghana in 1957.

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) occurred after the culmination of the era of free trade (1830–1880), a period characterized by the exploration and occupation of the African interior by various European countries, including France, Portugal, and Germany. Although the Berlin Conference did not formally “carve up” the African continent, it did serve as the catalyst for the colonial project. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European nations occupied more than 90 percent of the African continent. Only three countries were able to maintain their territorial integrity: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia. The colonial era fundamentally redrew the map of Africa and altered the continent's social, political, and economic structure in ways still felt in the present day.

1800–1815, conflict between the United States and the Barbary States.

From Encyclopedia of South Africa
The Great Trek began in 1836 and lasted into the 1840s, as increasing numbers of Boer farmers became disgruntled with British rule in the Cape Colony and feared that their culture and identity were being threatened. Another major impetus for the Great Trek was the fact that Boers in the Eastern Cape were running out of land for pasture since there was little additional land to conquer. These Voortrekkers, as they came to be known, journeyed into the interior of South Africa where they often came into conflict with local African ethnic groups and had to wage bloody battles for their survival, in particular with the Zulu and the Ndebele groups.

From Encyclopedia of African History
After initial prospecting success in 1886, major gold reserves were considered well proven by the early 1890s.

From The Oxford Companion to British History
At the time (29 December 1895) this was presented as a brave attempt by a troop of part-time cavalry led by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, the British South Africa Company's representative in Rhodesia, to rescue English women and children persecuted by a wicked Boer government in the Transvaal. It turned out, however, to be a sordid conspiracy by Cecil Rhodes, almost certainly with the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain's prior knowledge, to seize the Transvaal for the British empire. It failed ignominiously, and sullied Rhodes's, Chamberlain's, and the empire's reputations.

From Encyclopedia of the Early 20th Century
Also known as: Anglo-Boer War; Great Boer War; South African War. A conflict between Great Britain and the Boers, or Dutch settlers, in South Africa. The Boers were mostly farmers who had settled as early as the 18th century in South Africa. The British wanted to unify their Cape Colony and Natal colonies and the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic. The discovery of gold in Transvaal in 1886 led more English settlers to South Africa. These new settlers, called Uitlanders by the Boers, raised Boer concerns over the possible loss of valuable farmland to the English, who were predominantly interested in the mineral resources of South Africa.

From Chambers Dictionary of World History
The bellicose venture by Mussolini aimed at winning popular support at home, an increase in Italian prestige and strategic gains to pressurize the British in the Eastern Mediterranean.

From Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and HistoryIn Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
The concept of “diaspora” suggests the spread or scattering of a specific population or race of people to different and far-flung places throughout the world.

Racial-segregation policy of the government of South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Apartheid means “separateness” or “apartness” in Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, who are descendants of the Dutch settlers of South Africa. As an ideology and statutory framework, it referred to South Africa's notorious system of rigid racial segregation, through which the ruling Afrikaner-based National Party (NP) attempted to create separate cultural, political, and social spaces for white, African, Indian, and colored (mixed race) South Africans after its electoral victory in 1948.

Extension of political and economic control over an area by a state whose nationals have occupied the area and usually possess organizational or technological superiority over the native population.

Country under the control of immigrants who remain subject to the jurisdiction of the parent state. Historically, the acquisition of colonies occurred for a variety of reasons.

Broadly, the extension of rule or influence by one government, nation, or society over another. Evidence of the existence of empires dates back to the dawn of written history in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, where local rulers extended their realms by conquering other states and holding them, when possible, in a state of subjection.

Orientalism, as an area of study, has multiple definitions: It is an academic field that seeks to study the Orient, as well as a term for a more general interest in all things “Oriental.”

In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Formerly in international law, a small state under the direct or indirect control of a larger one. Former British protectorates include Aden, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Uganda.

Racism can be described as an extreme form of ethnocentrism (i.e., seeing one’s language, customs, ways of thinking, and material culture as preferable). But instead of using cultural factors to mark differences that can be overcome if some are willing and able to adopt beliefs and customs of others, racial boundaries depend on perceptions of physical distinctions between human body types, which are seen to be expressions of innate, biological divergence.

From Chambers Dictionary of World History
The name given to Europeans of a variety of national origins who flocked to the Transvaal after the discovery of gold there in 1886.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable
In the days of imperialism the duty supposed to be imposed upon the white races, especially the British, to govern and to educate the more 'backward' coloured peoples.

From Encyclopedia of World Trade From Ancient Times to the Present
Trade both within and across the Sahara has existed since prehistoric times, when the Sahara was considerably less dry, to the present.

In Encyclopedia of African History
Gold was an important staple in the trans-Saharan trade. The lure of gold spurred the Portuguese exploration down the African coast.

Institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. The enforced servitude of one person (a slave) to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is considered the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States.

A trade in Africa which started in ancient times.

From Encyclopedia of World Trade From Ancient Times to the Present
Atlantic trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

A movement culminating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that aimed first to end the slave trade, and then to abolish the institution of slavery and emancipate slaves. The movement took place in Europe, mainly in the UK, and in the USA.

Second-largest continent (after Asia), straddling the equator and lying largely within the tropics. Africa's first great civilization emerged in ancient Egypt in c.3400 BC. Carthage was founded by Phoenicians in the 9th century BC.

From Encyclopedia of African History
Africanus completed his magnum opus on African geography, according to his own words, on March 10, 1526.

French military leader and emperor, b. Ajaccio, Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte was also known as "the Little Corporal." Shortly after landing at Aboukir (Abu Qir), he won a brilliant victory over the Mamluks in the battle of the Pyramids (July, 1798). His successes, however, were made useless when the French fleet was utterly destroyed (Aug. 1–2) by Nelson in Aboukir Bay.

In his autobiography and his later Miscellaneous Verses, Equiano idealized his African past, taking pride in his race yet condemning those Africans who trafficked in slavery. Although Equiano wasn’t the first African-born former slave to tell his life experiences of enslavement and emancipation, he was the first to write his life story himself, without help or direction from white ghostwriters, amanuenses, or editors.

From An African Biographical Dictionary
Lord Frederick John Dealtry Lugard was a British imperialist and colonial administrator who drafted the most comprehensive theory of colonialism, which became the basis of much British colonial management.

English reformer. He was instrumental in abolishing slavery in the British Empire.

From Encyclopedia of African History
King of Belgium (r. 1835: 1865-1909); closely associated with the “Scramble” for Africa, the formation of the Congo State, and Belgian colonial expansion.

Scottish missionary and explorer in Africa, the first European to cross the African continent.

Fixed in the popular mind for his rescue of Dr. David Livingstone in 1872. Besides this feat, however, he was a significant explorer in his own right, crossing the continent and securing the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for the king of the Belgians.

From An African Biographical Dictionary
Founder of the Transvaal Republic; one of the leaders of the Great Trek, during which much of the Afrikaner population moved away from British dominance to establish their own independent states.

From An African Biographical Dictionary
Barnett Isaacs Barnato—financier, speculator and diamond merchant—was prominent among the White entrepreneurs who became wealthy in South Africa before the Boer War.

A trip in 1875 through the rich territories of Transvaal and Bechuanaland apparently helped to inspire Rhodes with the dream of British rule over all southern Africa; later he spoke of British dominion "from the Cape to Cairo."

From An African Biographical Dictionary
Friend and confidant of Cecil Rhodes; a leading figure in early South African politics; best remembered as the commander of a disastrous military attack against the Transvaal Republic, for which he was tried and imprisoned.

From An African Biographical Dictionary
President of the Transvaal (1883–1902), born in Colesberg, Cape Colony, SC South Africa.

From Chambers Dictionary of World History
The diamond mining company formed by Cecil Rhodes in 1887 from the amalgamation of several companies operating at Kimberley, Cape Province.

In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Drive by European nations to establish colonies in Africa. It began in the 1880s, and by 1914 only two African countries remained completely independent.

Empire covering, at its height in the 1920s, about a sixth of the landmass of the Earth, all of its lands recognizing the United Kingdom (UK) as their leader.

From Encyclopedia of African History
Between about 1770 and 1880, exploration of Africa made possible accurate maps and publishable information on the continent.

From Encyclopedia of African History
The nineteenth century saw a dramatic change in Africa's contact with Europe, as European powers sent their armies to initiate and implement their plans of colonization. The gradual European penetration into the African hinterland escalated in the 1870s, so that by the 1890s the entire map of Africa was altered, with large tracts of land nevertheless still unconquered.

From Encyclopedia of African History
Three hundred years of foreign domination and a century of formal colonial rule in Africa left political, economic, and social scars that are still conspicuously evident in contemporary African society.

From Encyclopedia of African History
After World War II, nationalists in Africa overthrew European colonial rule and regained their peoples' independence in one of the world's great revolutionary movements. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this political revolution stretched from the birth of Ghana in 1957 to the first democratically elected government of South Africa in 1994.

From Encyclopedia of Empire
The creation of overseas empires in the 19th century gave European nation-states control of much of the earth's surface, most spectacularly in Africa from 1884 to 1914, but it took less than a century for wars of independence to erupt in many of their colonies.

Fuel substance of plant origin, largely or almost entirely composed of carbon with varying amounts of mineral matter.

A tree, its seeds, and the beverage made from them. Coffee (Coffea arabica) is surrounded by myths and legends, especially those dealing with the discovery of the plant, which seems to have originated in both Yemen and southern Ethiopia (in the province of Caffa).

Mineral, one of two crystalline forms of the element carbon (see allotropy), the hardest natural substance known, used as a gem and in industry.

Gold has been known from prehistoric times and was possibly the first metal used by humans. Gold is very ductile and is the most malleable metal; it can be beaten into extremely thin sheets of gold leaf.

Type of dentin present only in the tusks of the elephant. Ivory historically has been obtained mainly from Africa.