African Culture Essay

Africa has one of the most greatest cultures it was even said that “The earliest stages of human evolution began in Africa about seven million years ago.” Early African culture had many great cities and empires like the Kushite/Meroe empire (800B.C.E.-400C.E.). Even though this empire was influenced by Egypt, it developed its own culture, with unique art practices and a writing system. African groups had made contact with other cultures of course and because of this those cultures had influenced the African culture. The Axum empire (100-400 C.E.) had began when Arabic cultures infiltrated Ethiopia in northeast Africa by the seventh century B.C.E., the first Christians arrived from Syria in the fourth century C.E. But that didn’t stop soon

Trade routes were increased across the Sahara desert when the camel was introduced in 100 C.E. from Arabia. By 800 C.E. the West African Soninke people created the Ghanaian empire and controlled the Senegal and Upper Niger Rivers. But with the Ghana empire other smaller communities started to appear and a large empire known as the Mali empire became powerful after the fall of the Ghana empire in the eleventh century C.E. That was when the Mali empire converted into western Sudan to Islam and developed the city of Timbuktu and was the center of trade, Muslim religion, and education. Then other states/dynasties like: Berber, Songhay, Hausa, and Kanem-Bornu flourished, Berber began in the eleventh century C.E. and Songhay began in the fifteenth century C.E.

Throughout the continent tribal cultures developed, hundreds of them, either being hunter gatherer groups like the nomads or more like farming groups, and developed distinct systems of trade, religion, and politics. When Europeans had first appeared some groups had ran away from them while others decided to make fruitful trade with them. In 500 C.E. was the beginning of the Trans Saharan trade which allowed the Sudan people to construct a series of empires and city states, and soon Bantu speaking people started to spread creating a wide variety of distinct societies and