Ancient Africa Geography

Much of Africa’s history is shaped by the geography and environment. In fact, a lot of people believe there was no history in Africa a long time ago because they did not have a lot of written documents. The reason there were not many written documents is because of several contributing factors including disease, weather and geography. These factors led to the rise and fall of many civilizations, as well as an interest in resources by foreigners. Although this made it difficult for information to be passed along, it changed the way that we learned about Africa. Disease was the main contributing factor to keeping foreigners out of the continent. This made it difficult for information to spread, which is one of the reasons it took so long …show more content…
The geography and weather played an important role in helping us learn about African history. Disease held an important role in keeping away foreigners for a long time, but once they were able to find ways around it they made good trading relations with the people living in Africa. This helped Africans develop writing and spread Islam all across the continent. The disease, geography and weather may have made it harder for civilizations to gain strength, but eventually the Africans learned how to get around the problems they …show more content…
Around twenty percent died on the way to Europe, and around four million died around this time. Slaves became a popular commodity because of sugar plantations. Without sugar plantations, slave trade would not have been as extensive. The French islands Martinique and Guadaloupe along with the Barbados islands were homes to main sugar plantations. The reason for this is because they are tropical which meant good soil and lots of rainfall, and the gravity of the mountain helped make transportation of the sugar cane plant easy. During this time period, Europeans realize they do not need anything from Africa and from slaves because they can get spices and peppers from the United States cheaper and easier. This created a problem for the elites trading on the West coast because they realized if they did not trade slaves, they would not get any business from the Europeans. By this time, Europeans were trading firearms for slaves, which Africans are using to go into the interior to take captive of those people and sell them in the slave trade. Oracle and slave trade elites would also pass judgment on crimes in the civilization of Oyo, which usually resulted in being traded to the Europeans. The Dutch had also come into contact with the continent of Africa. In South Africa, they set up a civilization as a stop on the way to India. They stopped here because there was no Malaria or tsetse fly and no big civilizations which meant