Trace early human origins in Africa, from hominins to Homo sapiens, and connect tools, fire, art, and movement to changing ways of life. The chapter shows why African history begins deep in human time.

See how farming, herding, fishing, pottery, and settled villages changed work, family life, health, and the environment. You will compare different paths to food production instead of treating Africa as one single story.

Follow Egypt, Nubia, Kerma, Napata, Meroë, and Kush through kingship, writing, religion, trade, and war. The Nile becomes a case study in how environment and state power shaped each other.

Track how Bantu-speaking communities, ironworking, farming, and local exchange networks spread across much of central, eastern, and southern Africa. You will read language and archaeology as evidence for movement and cultural change.

Study Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, and Amazigh worlds in North Africa. The chapter connects cities, farming, trade, Christianity, and imperial rule across the Mediterranean and the Sahara.

Follow Aksum, Ethiopia’s highland kingdoms, and Red Sea trade links with Arabia, Nubia, India, and the Mediterranean. You will see how coins, inscriptions, Christianity, and long-distance commerce help reconstruct the Horn of Africa’s past.

See how Islam, Arabic literacy, law, pilgrimage, and trade entered African societies through North Africa, the Sahara, the Nile, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The focus is on local adoption and adaptation, not simple replacement.

Follow Fatimid, Almoravid, Almohad, Hafsid, Marinid, Mamluk, and Ottoman-era North Africa. You will connect cities, scholarship, ports, taxation, nomadic groups, and Mediterranean politics to wider African history.

Study Ghana and other early Sahelian states built around gold, salt, agriculture, tribute, and caravan trade. You will practice linking geography to political power without reducing kingdoms to trade alone.

Follow Mali through Sundiata, Mansa Musa, Timbuktu, Jenne, scholarship, architecture, and diplomacy. The chapter shows how stories, Arabic texts, archaeology, and traveler accounts fit together.

Study Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Hausaland, and related Sahelian and savanna states. You will compare military organization, Islamic scholarship, trade, taxation, and urban life across several political traditions.

Follow coastal towns from Somalia to Mozambique through trade in gold, ivory, cloth, ceramics, enslaved people, and ideas. Kiswahili, Islam, coral-stone architecture, and Indian Ocean navigation show Africa’s deep ocean connections.

Trace Christian highland kingdoms, Muslim sultanates, trade routes, manuscripts, churches, and conflicts in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and nearby regions. The chapter shows the Horn as a crossroads, not a margin.

Study Ife, Benin, Oyo, Asante, Dahomey, and other forest and savanna powers. Art, kingship, markets, cavalry limits, ritual authority, and diplomacy reveal how states grew outside the Sahelian model.

Follow Kongo, Ndongo, Matamba, Luba, Lunda, and related networks in central Africa. You will connect farming, mining, spiritual authority, diplomacy, and trade routes from the Atlantic coast to the interior.

Study Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Mutapa, and related southern African states. Stone architecture, cattle wealth, gold trade, and sacred leadership show how power worked in the southern interior.

Follow Khoisan communities, farming societies, pastoralists, and early Dutch settlement before full colonial rule. This chapter sets up later southern African conflicts by showing older land use, labor systems, and political change.

Trace Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Omani, and other coastal contacts from the fifteenth century onward. You will separate trade, diplomacy, mission activity, violence, and African agency in early encounters.

Study how capture, sale, transport, plantation demand, finance, and law made the Atlantic slave trade a system. The chapter also follows African merchants, rulers, communities, and captives facing terrible choices and violence.

See how warfare, state power, gender relations, farming, religion, and local economies changed during the slave-trade era. Case studies from Kongo, Angola, the Bight of Benin, Asante, and Senegambia show different African experiences.

Follow African-descended communities in the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, Europe, and the Islamic world. The chapter covers survival, family, religion, language, revolt, maroon communities, and cultural creation.

Study the end of legal slave trading, the persistence of slavery, and new trades in palm oil, ivory, cloves, gum, peanuts, and minerals. You will see how abolition changed power without ending coercion.

Follow Sokoto, Masina, Tukulor, Mahdist Sudan, Senussi networks, and reform movements across West, North, and Northeast Africa. The chapter connects scholarship, jihad, state building, slavery, taxation, and European pressure.

Trace Zulu state formation, the mfecane debates, Boer expansion, frontier wars, diamonds, gold, and migrant labor. You will learn how historians handle contested interpretations and politically charged evidence.

Study missionaries, explorers, mapmakers, scientific racism, commercial companies, and anti-slavery rhetoric before formal conquest. The chapter shows how knowledge about Africa was often used to justify empire.

Follow the Berlin Conference, military conquest, treaties, African resistance, and the making of colonial borders. You will compare conquest in places such as Algeria, Ethiopia, the Congo, Namibia, Sudan, and West Africa.

Study indirect rule, assimilation, settler rule, chiefs, courts, taxes, identity papers, and forced labor. This chapter shows how colonial states tried to make African societies governable and profitable.

Follow mines, cash crops, railways, ports, concession companies, and migrant labor systems. You will connect colonial economic choices to inequality, environmental damage, and later development problems.

Study towns, schools, churches, mosques, print culture, sport, music, family life, and changing gender roles under colonial rule. The focus is everyday life as a place of pressure, creativity, and negotiation.

Follow revolts, strikes, petitions, religious movements, legal challenges, women’s protests, and quiet forms of refusal. You will compare open rebellion with strategies that worked inside colonial systems.

Trace Pan-African congresses, Garveyism, Négritude, trade unions, student groups, veterans, newspapers, and political parties. The chapter shows how local grievances became continent-wide and diaspora-linked movements.

Study World War I, World War II, postwar reforms, mass politics, armed struggle, and negotiated independence. You will compare Ghana, Algeria, Kenya, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and other paths to sovereignty.

Follow constitutions, one-party states, federalism, military coups, development plans, language policy, education, and nation-building. The chapter shows why independence brought real change and difficult constraints at the same time.

Study Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Horn, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, and other Cold War battlegrounds. You will connect African goals with superpower pressure, arms flows, ideology, and regional rivalries.

Follow apartheid’s laws, labor controls, homelands, resistance movements, international sanctions, and the transition to democracy. The chapter also connects South Africa to Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and the wider region.

Study oil shocks, debt crises, structural adjustment, privatization, aid, remittances, and informal economies. You will see how global finance shaped daily life and state power after the 1970s.

Follow democratization, constitutional change, coups, civil wars, peacekeeping, truth commissions, and regional bodies since 1990. Case studies show how violence and reform often came from both local histories and global pressures.

Study population growth, megacities, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, malaria, public health campaigns, drought, climate change, and conservation politics. The chapter connects human history to bodies, infrastructure, and the environment.

Follow the African Union, ECOWAS, migration, peacekeeping, China-Africa relations, Gulf investment, mobile money, creative industries, and diaspora politics. You will place Africa in today’s global systems without treating the continent as one story.

Study restitution of African art and human remains, museum labels, memorials, school curricula, archives, and public debates over colonial violence. The chapter helps you judge who gets to tell the past and what evidence they use.

See how archaeogenetics, satellite imagery, climate records, digitized newspapers, online archives, and community history projects are changing African history. You will also practice spotting weak claims, missing voices, and ethical risks in new evidence.

Build a path for continued study through regions, periods, languages, maps, archives, museums, and reliable scholarship. The chapter covers research habits, proof-of-skill projects, public history work, and ways historians stay current.