The Nile has, historically and in modern times, been a key way to transport people and goods throughout the region and its floodplain enables farming in an otherwise arid environment. The Sahel is a transitional region connecting the dry Sahara to the tropical regions of the south. It is mostly grassland and has traditionally supported semi-nomadic livestock herders. The Sahel is at the front line of one of the most pressing environmental concerns in Africa: desertification see Figure 6.
Desertification refers to the process of previously fertile land becoming desert and occurs for a variety of reasons including climate change and human activities. Overgrazing, for example, can rid land of vegetation causing the erosion of fertile topsoil. Warming temperatures due to global changes in climate can change precipitation patterns and increase the speed of evaporation.
Desertification in the Sahel has caused the Sahara to expand and has led to conflict as northern farmers have migrated to the south in search of fertile soil. In addition to an array of landforms from rift valleys to mountains to deserts, Sub-Saharan Africa contains a wide variety of climate zones and precipitation patterns.
In general, the continent is relatively hot with temperate climates in the higher elevations. Some areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the tropical rainforests of West Africa, receive upwards of 3, mm inches of rain each year, while other areas such as the Namib Desert receive less than 10 mm 0.
Africa has a long history of human habitation giving rise to numerous cultural and linguistic groups. Early humans were primarily gatherers, and there is evidence of people gathering nuts, grasses, and tubers around 16, BCE in the highlands of Northern Ethiopia.
Around 10, years ago, the domestication of the first crops and livestock developed in Africa and the practice of settled agriculture began. In pre-colonial Africa, women were, and still are in many areas, the primary agriculturalists. It was the responsibility of women to understand the seasonality of crops and this, along with the role of bearing and rearing children, gave women an important role in African society. Many early religions placed a strong emphasis on female goddesses reflecting the central role of women in society.
Men were primarily the hunters and gatherers. For early Africans, the family was the basic and most important social unit. It was the family unit that owned and accessed land rather than individuals. Furthermore, land could not be bought or sold, but instead was passed down through the tradition of partible inheritance, meaning land is divided among the heirs. Elsewhere in the world, such as in the United Kingdom for much of its history, land was passed down to the firstborn male, known as primogeniture.
With partible inheritance, however, no landed aristocracy developed since every male was given an equal share rather than just the firstborn. If the family was the basic social unit in African society, it was the extended family that was the most important politically. Tribes , consisting of groups of families united by a common ancestry and language, controlled distinct tracts of territory.
In pre-colonial Africa, there were over distinct ethnic regions — and some of the ethnic regions identified by anthropologists actually had multiple distinct cultural groups within them. Tribal groups sometimes coexisted peacefully, and other times, warred over territory.
Pre-colonial Africa was also the site of a number of large empires see Figure 6. The rulers of the kingdom minted their own currency, built religious monuments, and established trading routes. The Empire of Ghana had a large capital city, markets, and a system of taxation.
The second was the start of the transatlantic slave trade in the 15th century CE. Slavery was present in Africa long before European conquest, however. In some pre-colonial African societies, as in other parts of the world, slavery was a part of the local community. Slaves might be taken from conquered groups or given as gifts. In general, though, slavery represented a relatively small segment of ancient African society and economy.
European contact with Africa was initially focused on establishing a port along the West African coast, a place to resupply along the long trip to South and Southeast Asia. Beginning in the 15th century, however, this objective shifted to gaining resources. Portugal was the first of the Europeans to begin buying enslaved Africans. Portugal then brought in slaves to help cultivate the sugar.
The Spanish then began buying slaves to send to the New World in the early 16th century, bringing them first to the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Initially, Europeans raided coastal African villages in order to secure slaves, but over time, began purchasing slaves from African rulers and traders. Europeans developed military alliances and beneficial trading partnerships with some of these groups to ensure a steady supply of slaves.
By CE, around 50, slaves were being shipped out of Africa each year, and though it is difficult to know the exact total number of people sold into slavery, it is estimated that around 12 million Africans were shipped to the New World. During this time, many African groups practiced a form of agriculture known as shifting cultivation , where one area of land is farmed for a period of time and then abandoned until its fertility naturally restores. Eventually, farmers return to the abandoned plot of land after many years, which is now overgrown, and often burn the vegetation, known as slash-and-burn, in order to return the nutrients to the soil.
Because of this, much of the land in Africa looked unused, but was actually part of a larger agricultural system. Colonial empires took over these fragments of unused land to set up their own agricultural systems. For some time, European empires had this relatively piecemeal approach to Africa, taking resources, land, and slaves without directly controlling territory.
Europeans had little interest in the interior of Africa and were primarily focused on the coastal areas. This would completely change beginning in the late 19th century as European powers scrambled for control of the continent.
As the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe, colonial empires were seeking to expand their colonial holdings in order to gain mineral resources and expand agricultural production. As Europeans began exploring the interior of Africa, and recognized its resource potential, competition among European empires grew fierce.
France, Italy, Britain, Portugal, and Belgium all raced through the interior of Africa trying to expand and strengthen their territories. In , 13 European countries as well as the United States sent representatives to the Berlin Conference. At this conference, the colonial powers established the procedure for a Western country to formally control African territory and ultimately re-shaped the map of Africa.
In a continent that had previously been divided into territories held by tribal groups and some larger kingdoms, the political boundaries were completely changed. By the early 20th century, around 90 percent of Africa was directly controlled by Europeans see Figure 6. European colonization of Africa completely reshaped the political and ethnic landscape, with lasting effects even today. Colonialism broadly refers to the control of a territory by another group and colonial policies varied across Africa.
In the Belgian Congo, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there was a racist ideology of paternalism where Africans were essentially viewed as children needing a fatherly, or paternal, authority to educate them in the ways of the West. In the far-reaching French colonies, from present-day Madagascar to Morocco, the colonizers emphasized an assimilationist policy, spreading the French culture through language, laws, and education.
In the British colonies, like present-day Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, settlers partnered with local rulers who were made representatives of the British crown. This was known as indirect rule. Handbook of Research on Social Marketing and Its Search inside this book for more research materials.
Recommend to a Librarian Recommend to a Colleague. Looking for research materials? Search our database for more Sub Saharan Africa downloadable research papers. Full text search our database of , titles for Sub-Saharan Africa to find related research papers. Critical Perspectives on Social Justice in S There is very little discussion of socially just a In Stock.
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National economies were geared toward producing goods - including such cash crops as coffee, palm oil, and cocoa - for European markets. Colonial leaders, as well as those who replaced them, devoted little attention to improving the grain and root crops upon which most Africans have depended.
Living mainly in rural areas, many Africans now make a living through a combination of agriculture, domestic animal keeping, and wage labor. About 24 million herders raise livestock both for subsistence and for sale. On the other hand, the urban population is growing rapidly; Lagos, Nairobi, and other cities already have serious shortages of housing, employment, and social services. One legacy of European-drawn borders is the ethnic diversity that characterizes almost every African state.
Nigeria contains as many as different groups. Even countries such as Swaziland that are occupied almost entirely by a single ethnic group are usually subdivided along lines of kinship and social affiliation. The picture is complicated by the fact that the various African societies speak as many as 2, different languages and have an array of religious beliefs.
These countries are governed by indigenous elites who also vary greatly in size and cultural characteristics. For the new African leaders, decolonization offered a chance to implement development programs that would benefit the citizens of independent states, although these countries faced several constraints in their efforts to develop, not least of which were access to capital and technical expertise.
But with advice supplied by Western Bank, the International Development Association, and other international agencies, African governments embarked on ambitious programs of industrial and agricultural development.
The projects they undertook ranged from state farms to large-scale efforts to develop river basins, from road-building to the establishment of schools and health services. Unfortunately, many projects have yielded mixed results. While access to social services improved in some rural areas, economic growth has been limited at best. Moreover, some government elites and their supporters have used large-scale projects for self-serving political and economic purposes.
River-basin developments, in particular, have transferred resources to those in power at the expense of indigenous peoples. For example, the erection of the Manantali Dam on the Senegal River boosted local land values.
Backed by government troops, politically well-placed individuals then began registering plots of land in their own names, forcibly relocating local people and almost touching off a war between Senegal and Mauritania. Many of the elite are reluctant to acknowledge the existence of distinct indigenous groups within their countries' boundaries.
Rather than grand one groups primacy, states maintain that all resident groups are indigenous. Thus, it is extremely difficult to obtain reliable census data broken down along tribal affiliation or ethnic group membership. Estimates of the number of indigenous Africans range from 25 million to million.
Relatively few African governments have targeted development at improving the living standards of groups that are defined on an ethnic basis.
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