the main living in Medieval Africa

Most people in Medieval Africa where peasants and lived a hard life.

Medieval Africa-History

The origin and meaning of the name of the continent are discussed elsewhere (see AFRICA, ROMAN.) The word Africa was applied originally to the country in the immediate neighbourhood of Carthage, that part of the continent first known to the Romans, and it was subsequently extended with their increasing knowledge, till it came at last to include all that they knew of the continent. The Arabs still confine the name Ifrikia to the territory of Tunisia.
The valley of the lower Nile was the home in remotest antiquity of a civilized race. Egyptian culture had, however, remarkably little direct influence on the rest of the continent, a result due in large measure to the fact that Egypt is shut off landwards by immense deserts. If ancient Egypt and Ethiopia (q.v.) be excluded, the story of Africa is largely a record of the doings of its Asiatic and European conquerors and colonizers, Abyssinia being the only state which throughout historic times has maintained its independence. The countries bordering the Mediterranean were first exploited by the Phoenicians, whose earliest settlements were made before 1000 B.C. Carthage, founded about 800 B.C., speedily grew into a city without rival in the Mediterranean, and the Phoenicians, subduing the Berber tribes, who then as now formed the bulk of the population, became masters of all the habitable region of North Africa west of the Great Syrtis, and found in commerce a source of immense prosperity. Both Egyptians and Carthaginians made attempts to reach the unknown parts of the continent by sea. Herodotus relates that an expedition under Phoenician navigators, employed by Necho, king of Egypt, c. 600 B.C., circumnavigated Africa from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, a voyage stated to have been accomplished in three years. Apart from the reported circumnavigation of the continent, the west coast was well known to the Phoenicians as far as Cape Nun, and c. 520 B.C. Hanno, a Carthaginian, explored the coast as far, perhaps, as the Bight of Benin, certainly as far as Sierra Leone. A vague knowledge of the Niger regions was also possessed by the Phoenicians.

Niger River

The Niger River is the principal river of western Africa, extending about 4180 km (2600 miles). Its drainage basin is 2,117,700 square kilometres (817,600 sq mi) in area.[1] It runs in a crescent through Guinea, Mali, Niger, on the border with Benin and then through Nigeria, discharging through a massive delta, known as the Niger Delta of the Oil Rivers, into the Gulf of Guinea. The Niger is the third-longest river in Africa, exceeded only by the Nile and the Congo River. Its main tributary is the Benue River.
The origin of the name Niger is not certain. On early European maps it applied only to the middle reaches of the river, in modern Mali, while Quorra or Kworra was used for the lower reaches in modern Nigeria. The name Niger was extended to cover the entire river on maps once Europeans realized that these were one and the same.
A good possibility for a source is the Tuareg phrase gher n gheren "river of rivers", shortened to ngher, a local name used along the middle reaches of the river around Timbuktu
It is often assumed, without evidence, that Niger derives from the Latin word for "black", niger, but it would have been more likely for the Portuguese explorers who first wrote this name on their maps to have used the Portuguese word, negro, as they did elsewhere in the world. In any case the Niger is not a blackwater river, which was the motivation for all other rivers that were called black. Some have rationalized that 'black' may have referred to the color of the people living on the river, but this did not happen to any other river in Africa. Therefore it would seem that the similarity between the name Niger and the Latin word niger is either coincidence, or that knowledge of Latin influenced the spelling of an indigenous name like ngher.
The nations of Nigeria and Niger are named after the river. The people who live along it have a variety of names for it, such as Jeliba or Joliba "great river" in Manding, Isa Ber "big river" in Songhay, and Oya, a Yoruba River Niger goddess.

11.3.08

interactive map

here is a link to a interactive map
if this does not work then go to http://www.artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/africamap.html
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Medieval Africa Info (copy and pasted from Mr.Donns)

Africa is the place where people first originated, so African history goes back further than in any other place on earth. At first there were not very many people in Africa, and they lived by gathering wild plants and by scavenging meat that other, stronger animals had killed. Gradually they began using stone tools, and fire, and then hunting for themselves. These first people probably started out in south-east Africa.

Genetic evidence shows that until about 60,000 years ago Africa was the only place on earth where modern people lived. Then some people spread out along the coasts, going around the Arabian Peninsula and India and all the way to Australia. Still most people lived in Africa. But as an Ice Age set in (not the most recent Ice Age but the one before that), people began to drift into West Asia, following the herds of animals.

Around 6000 BC, the climate in Africa (and other places) got gradually hotter and drier. The Sahara Desert was forming again. It was harder to find enough food. Some people in Africa began farming to get more food. They probably got the idea from West Asia.

But with farming the population expanded quickly. By 3000 BC, there were so many people in Africa that they started to form into kingdoms. The first African kingdom (and probably the first big kingdom anywhere) was in Egypt, where the Pharaohs built the pyramids. South of Egypt, along the upper Nile river, the kingdom of Kush (modern Sudan) developed too. Kush and Egypt traded with the Babylonians in Western Asia and the Harappans and Aryans in India.

Around 1550 BC, with the establishment of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the Egyptians conquered Kush, and they ruled Kush for the next four hundred and fifty years, until the collapse of the New Kingdom in Egypt around 1100 BC. Then Kush became independent again, and by 715 BC Kush’s King Piankhy was able to conquer Egypt.

But soon after this, West Asian people showed North Africans how to use iron to make weapons, and the people who knew how to use iron soon conquered the people who didn’t. About 700 BC, the Phoenicians conquered part of North Africa and founded the city of Carthage. In 664 BC, the Assyrians conquered Egypt. The Kushites learned how to make iron from the Assyrians, and they used their iron to become even more powerful than they were before. When the Persians conquered the Phoenicians in 539 BC, Carthage became an independent kingdom that ruled most of the Western Mediterranean.

In the more fertile parts of Africa, the population kept on growing. By 300 BC, some people called the Bantu, who lived along the Niger river in West Africa, began to get too crowded where they lived. West Africa (now Nigeria and Cameroon) had fertile land in the zone between the Sahara desert and the rain forest, but it was small. Gradually the Bantu began to spread out from their home to other parts of Africa, mainly to the south and east, through the rain forest to the grasslands on the other side. Europe, too, was getting more crowded at this time, and soon North Africa had its second major invasion when the Romans attacked in the 200’s BC. The Carthaginian general, Hannibal, terrified the Romans. But in the end, Carthage and the rest of North Africa, including Egypt, had to submit to Roman rule.

During the next several hundred years, southern Africa also saw a lot of political changes. The old kingdom of Kush was taken over by a new kingdom to their south called Aksum (modern Ethiopia), who also traded with the Parthians, the Indians, and the Romans. When Roman North Africa converted to Christianity, many Axumites converted too. At the same time, the Bantu kept expanding, and learned how to farm and how to make iron weapons. By the 400’s AD, the Bantu had taken over some of the East Coast of Africa and some of the grasslands in southern Africa.

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YO Welcome

Hey this is Nick, the owner of the blog, just saying this is a history project and if there are any questions email me at NicholasPings@gmail.com
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