African Geography
This is the name of the largest desert in the world, located in northern Africa.
What is the Sahara Desert?
This is the term for an African storyteller who preserved a community's history, traditions, and important events through oral tradition.
Who is a griot?
This word describes a permanent move from one country or region to another — the kind of movement the Bantu peoples made across Africa.
What is migration?
The Kingdom of Aksum was located in this present-day African country.
What is Ethiopia?
This religion spread to the Kingdom of Aksum through trade with merchants and became the kingdom's longest-lasting cultural achievement.
What is Christianity?
This dry zone located just south of the Sahara has some grass and shrubs and serves as a transition between desert and grassland.
What is the Sahel?
This belief system held by many early Africans says that spirits live inside animals, plants, and other parts of nature.
What is Animism?
The word "Bantu" translates to this simple phrase in the languages of the people who spread across Africa.
What is "the people"?
Aksum became a powerful trading kingdom because of its access to these two major bodies of water.
What are the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean?
West Africans were unique in the ancient world because they skipped these two metal ages and went straight to using iron.
What are the Copper Age and the Bronze Age?
This African landscape of open land with tall grasses and scattered trees was ideal for both farming and herding animals.
What is the Savanna?
Early African nomads were divided in their work. While men hunted, women and children were responsible for these two tasks.
What are gathering food (plants, roots, berries) and collecting water?
The Bantu-speaking peoples originally lived in this part of Africa before their long migration southward and eastward.
What is the area south of the Sahara in what is now southeastern Nigeria?
Name TWO items that the Kingdom of Aksum exported to other civilizations.
What are any two of: ivory, gold, salt, rhinoceros horns, tortoise shells, emeralds?
These TWO groups of people were already living in southern Africa when the Bantu arrived and were displaced because they only had stone weapons.
Who are the San and the Bambuti?
Africa has three major types of environments. Name all three.
What are Deserts, Grasslands (savannas), and Rain forests?
When extended families — including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins — grouped together around shared ancestors, they formed these larger social units.
What are Clans?
The Bantu brought this key technology with them as they migrated, giving them a major military and farming advantage over groups they encountered.
What is Iron Smelting (iron technology)?
The Aksumites invented this farming technique — cutting steplike ridges into mountain slopes — to grow crops in their rugged, hilly environment.
What is terrace farming?
The Aksumites built dams, canals, and these large water-holding tanks to store and manage water for farming on their mountain terrain.
What are cisterns?
The Sahara is described as having very little rainfall, extreme heat, and this quality that makes it nearly impossible to cross on foot without preparation.
What is being the largest hot desert in the world / nearly impassable due to its vast size and harsh conditions?
This West African culture, active from 500 B.C. to A.D. 200 in present-day Nigeria, holds the distinction of being the first known group in West Africa to smelt iron.
What is the Nok culture?
These are the TWO specific reasons the Bantu could not expand northward and were pushed to migrate south and east instead.
What are: (1) northern areas were already densely populated, and (2) the Sahara was advancing southward, turning savanna into desert?
Aksum earned TWO major "firsts": it was the only kingdom south of the Sahara to develop a written language, and the first outside Egypt and Meroë to do this.
What is mint its own coins (bronze, silver, and gold)?
After about 800 years, the Kingdom of Aksum finally fell to these invaders. Explain why Aksum was initially protected from them before eventually falling.
What are Islamic invaders? Aksum had protected Muhammad's family during their rise, so invaders initially avoided Aksum's coast — but eventually conquered it anyway.