History
Africa
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Ancient Africa
Among the earliest forms of art in Africa are paintings left on rocks in the Sahara Desert in around 8000 BC. At this time, the Sahara was a green and fertile region. Bands of...
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African history
For millennia, Africa has been home to a wide variety of peoples and cultures. In the Middle Ages, some African civilizations, such as those of Benin and Mali, in west Africa...
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Kingdom of Benin
The Kingdom of Benin was founded by the Edo people in the rainforest of southeastern Nigeria (not the modern country of Benin) in the 10th century AD. By the 1400s, a wealthy...
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Queen Nzinga
In the late 16th century Portuguese traders and missionaries began to colonize the Central African coast. They established a port city at Luanda, present-day Angola, in 1575...
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Early history of South Africa
The first modern humans, Homo sapiens, to inhabit the region that is now South Africa were the San people (once known to Europeans as Bushmen). They probably arrived in South...
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European colonization of South Africa
By the mid-17th century, the Cape had become an important re-supply point and naval base for the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). The spice...
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South African wars
While the Cape Colony was changing hands between European rulers, the northern and eastern lands, inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples, were going through turbulent times. In the...
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Modern history of South Africa
The South Africa Act 1909 brought the Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony and the Orange River Colony into one nation, the Union of South Africa. Along with Canada...
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African history timeline