History of Africa
...rading patterns across the Sahara to the north and east. * In East Africa, the Swahili societies extended trade along the coast from Somalia to Mozambique. They also established links with inland societies such as Great Zimbabwe and Mwene Matapa. * The Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish regular contacts. They began trading along the coast and raiding coastal communities in the early 15th Century. They soon stopped raiding and began accomodating themselves to the landlord-stranger practices of the Africans. The Portugese moved inland along the Zambezi River to trade with the Shona and Mutapa peoples of what is now Zimbabwe. The Slave Trade. By all accounts, this was extraordinarily divisive, destructive, devastating. * There had been slave trade within Africa since the 600s. People attribute internal slaving to the freedom traders had to move within the continent, to the collusion of political elites (selling slaves for their own gain), and to economic distress --drought and famine. * Over time, millions and millions of Africans were transported as slaves. As many as 7.5 million across the Sahara, the northern route. 10 million in the trans-Atlantic trade. And perhaps 5 million to the east across the Indian Ocean. The demands of the plantation owners in the Americas (the "pull") and the human misery and social dislocation in west Africa (the "push") helped drive the trade, particularly in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. * It is estimated that 80% of the slaves were trnsported between 1701 and 1850. * By the 19th Century, virtually no area of the continent was free from slaving. * Some societies disintegrated. Most were at the least severely destabilized. Some scholars propose that disease was even more destructive. The 19th Century ...