1.1-1.4
African Foundations & Early Societies
African Foundations & Early Societies
This interdisciplinary field examines the experiences, cultures, histories, and contributions of people of African descent in the United States and throughout the African diaspora.
What is African American Studies?
Mali controlled and traded enormous quantities of what, which led to the empire's great wealth.
What is gold?
Rather than simply having Christianity imposed upon them, leaders of this Central African kingdom initially chose to adopt Christianity while maintaining elements of African culture.
What is the Kingdom of Kongo?
As these peoples migrated across much of sub-Saharan Africa, they spread related languages as well as agricultural and technological knowledge.
Who are the Bantu-speaking peoples?
These individuals preserved history and cultural knowledge through storytelling and oral traditions in West African societies.
Who are griots?
An African artist creates a Christian religious object using local artistic styles and African understandings of spirituality. This is an example of this process.
What is syncretic religious practices, or religious syncretism?
How did wealth and participation in trade networks create both opportunities and challenges for African societies before the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade?
In your answer, reference ONE specific example of an opportunity and ONE specific example of a challenge from what we covered this unit.
Opportunities: economic growth and powerful states; exchange of ideas and cultures; spread and adaptation of Islam and Christianity; development of centers of learning such as Timbuktu; connections to broader global trade networks.
Challenges: wealth attracted foreign interest and attempts to control African trade; Portuguese attempts to control the Swahili Coast; growing Portuguese involvement in Kongo and the slave trade strained Kongo-Portuguese relations; Portuguese expansion contributed to conflicts faced by leaders such as Queen Njinga.
Archaeologists discovered terracotta sculptures and evidence of ironworking from this early West African society, challenging the idea that complex societies developed late in sub-Saharan Africa.
What is Nok?
Archaeologists uncover Chinese ceramics at an East African coastal city. The discovery would provide evidence of participation in this major trading network.
What is the Indian Ocean trade network?
She used diplomacy, military leadership, and political alliances while resisting Portuguese expansion in Central Africa.
Who is Queen Njinga?
A historian finds similar words appearing in languages spoken thousands of miles apart in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. This historical development would help explain that linguistic connection.
What are the Bantu migrations?
This African society became wealthy by connecting resources from the African interior with long-distance trading networks along Africa's eastern coast. They were like middle men!
What is Great Zimbabwe?
Before the massive growth of the transatlantic slave trade, Europeans and Africans interacted in several ways. Name TWO.
What are trade, diplomacy, religious exchange, travel, military alliances, or Africans traveling to Europe/Europeans traveling to Africa?
This East African kingdom demonstrates that Christianity had an ancient African history independent of later European colonialism.
What is Aksum?
Arabic vocabulary, Islam, Bantu linguistic foundations, and connections with merchants from across the Indian Ocean all contributed to the development of culture in this East African region.
What is the Swahili Coast?
European plantation experiments on Atlantic islands such as São Tomé helped establish a labor system that would later expand dramatically in the Americas to produce this profitable crop.
What is sugar?
The name "Swahili Coast" comes from the Arabic word sawahil. What does sawahil mean?
Coasts