The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation
Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there’s another way to tell this story, argues Luke Pepera. And it’s one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent’s extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
In 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China’s Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin – an auspicious unicorn – which his sage governance had made appear.
This giraffe was a gift from the sultan of Bengal. But it had originally come from Africa – specifically, the city-state of Malindi in today’s Kenya.
In 1415, ambassadors from Malindi and Mogadishu sailed to China. In a special ceremony, the Malindi ambassadors gifted the Yongle emperor another giraffe. Delighted at having received his second qilin, the Yongle emperor gave an order. His senior eunuch, Zheng He, whom he’d charged with overseeing the construction of a 200-strong fleet of treasure ships, was to sail to Malindi to obtain more giraffes and other goods.
With the holds of his ships full of treasures, including gold, silver, silk and ceramics, Zheng He set sail for Malindi in 1417. He exchanged what he had for goods including live animals such as leopards and zebras, frankincense and ivory.
Sometime between then and 1423, Malindi’s king himself sailed to China to meet the Yongle emperor in Nanjing. He made it as far as Fujian, a province in south-eastern China, where he died, seemingly succumbing to illness. He was buried in Fujian, and the Yongle emperor decreed that his grave be given a small sacrifice every year.
This is an intriguing story. But for Africa, it’s not extraordinary. For at least 2,000 years, African civilisations have been plugged into international trade networks.
Third-century AD Nubia (now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) exported goods including gold, ivory and ostrich feathers to Rome and Yemen. Along Africa’s eastern coast, from northern Somalia to southern Tanzania, east African merchants exchanged similar goods for date syrup from Persian traders, swords from Yemenis and carnelian beads from Indians.
Chinese pottery and Indian beads have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe – a stone city located in southern Zimbabwe that thrived between about 1100 and 1500 AD. Great Zimbabwe’s residents obtained these treasures from east African merchants in exchange for gold, which was plentiful around Great Zimbabwe. Chinese silk also made it as far west as Mali, whose emperors had it woven into robes.
One-dimensional view
Given historical African societies’ economic, political and cultural importance, why is so little of their history generally known?
Quite simply, this is because of a tendency to focus on narratives of slavery, colonisation, victimisation and dominance. In the UK, when we tell stories about African peoples or their history, either in the classroom or in documentaries, books, films and TV series, we cover largely the events of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism.
We talk and tell stories about European ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the Atlantic triangle, abolition, anti-African racism, European presence in Africa, colonial wars and the British empire. In all of these narratives, the African is inevitably presented as a victim of superior European technology, economic might and military prowess.
This, then, becomes our view of the African throughout history, and, arguably, even our view of Africans today. We assume that this relationship between Europe and Africa has always been the natural order of things, and we do little either to scrutinise, interrogate or contradict this view.
The truth is, our conversations about African history and culture lack nuance. As far as the eras of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism are concerned, we don’t question enough how and why they happened.
To our minds, it is a simple story of dominance – European over African. We think that when the Europeans arrived in Africa, they almost immediately subdued its societies, imposed their rules and regulations and captured the poor, unwitting Africans whom they stuffed in slave ships and shipped off to the Americas.
We think that in this scenario Africans had only two options: capitulate and trade slaves willingly or be destroyed. We don’t consider for a moment African agency in these turning points in world history. If we dug a little bit deeper into the history of these events to look at things from the African perspective, we would see that in many places the scenario I’ve sketched out here wasn’t what necessarily happened.
A war on slavery
Take 18th-century Dahomey (now Benin) and arguably its best king, Agaja, as an example. Born in c1673, Agaja was crowned in 1708. From the records we have of him, including those of an English Royal African Company agent called Bulfinch Lambe (who was forced to live with Agaja for three years), we know that Agaja was handsome, majestic, intelligent and an incomparable strategist and military commander.
In 1724 and 1727, Agaja invaded the nearby kingdoms of Allada and Whydah respectively. At the time, both of these kingdoms were the region’s premier slave traders. Since the late 17th century, the Europeans in the region, including the Dutch, Portuguese, English and French, had had their slaving headquarters in one or both of these kingdoms.
We think that when the Europeans arrived in Africa, they almost immediately subdued its societies, imposed their rules and regulations and captured the poor, unwitting Africans whom they stuffed in slave ships and shipped off to the Americas... We don’t consider for a moment African agency in these turning points in world history
Annually, both Whydah and Allada ‘exported’ close to 20,000 enslaved Africans, mostly prisoners of war, those who’d committed crimes or broken serious taboos. Some historians, such as Archibald Dalzel, a late 18th-century historian and also a slave trader who had spent significant time in both Whydah and Dahomey, argued that Agaja invaded Whydah and Allada because he wanted to take over their slave-trading infrastructures.
However, Agaja immediately went about dismantling these structures, destroying ports, forts and castles almost with glee. He also showed little interest in preserving good relationships with the Europeans in Allada and Whydah. In fact, he took about 40 of them prisoner.
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When he consolidated his control over Allada and Whydah, Agaja also did nothing to repair the slave-trading infrastructures he’d destroyed. Instead, he ordered his soldiers to stop slave-traders from bringing enslaved people to the coast. He also jailed Dahomeans who tried to sell enslaved people.
When Europeans made to leave Allada and Whydah for kingdoms whose rulers were more hospitable to the idea of selling enslaved people, Agaja blocked them. The Europeans complained that trade dropped off a cliff and that they couldn’t see it returning to its previous levels as long as Agaja remained in power.
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What’s more, any difficulty Agaja faced in holding on to power came not from Europeans, but largely from other great African kingdoms who, for one reason or another, disagreed with his policies. The rulers of Oyo – a city-state of the Yoruba people in what’s now Nigeria – felt that, in conquering neighbouring kingdoms, Agaja had contravened age-old customs that had for centuries governed relations between the coastal west African kingdoms.
But stories like Agaja’s, where the African isn’t presented solely as an agency-less victim at the mercy of the Europeans with whom they dealt, are sorely missing from our conception and tellings of African history.
Another way in which our understanding of African history lacks nuance is in a poor appreciation for the true breadth and depth of African history and culture. The earliest ancestor in the evolutionary line that produced our species, Homo sapiens, is said to be Sahelanthropus tchadensis (‘Sahel man of Chad’), who lived in around that part of Africa 7 million years ago.
Until the emergence of Homo erectus some 5 million years later, early humans lived only in Africa. What’s crucial to remember is that Sahelanthropus wasn’t the only early human being who inhabited the continent. There were lots of different groups of these hominids that probably migrated back and forth across it, lived in different areas, developed differently and then mixed with others, resulting in the emergence of plenty of new groups.
It is largely this deep history, diversity and mixing that means Africans today are some of the most ethnically, culturally and racially diverse peoples on Earth.
Africans speak around a third of the world’s 7,000 languages. Africa boasts the largest language group in the world – Niger-Congo – which contains around 1,500 languages spoken by more than 300 million people. Africa also boasts one of the oldest language groups in the world – Khoisan – whose 35 languages emerged from one that’s said to have been spoken as far back as 20,000 years ago.
A misunderstanding of the depth and complexity of African cultures is often what led 19th-century European anthropologists to dismiss certain aspects of these cultures as nonsensical or unnecessary. One such aspect that comes to mind is witchcraft.
Early European anthropologists saw it largely as a universal, superstitious belief system. They mostly didn’t account for the differences in African peoples’ witchcraft beliefs, nor could they conceive of the practical purposes these beliefs served. For example, in the case of the Azande people of what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, witchcraft was about diffusing tensions and restoring social harmony.
The Azande believed that you bewitched someone by feeling negatively towards them. In other words, if a Zande (the singular of Azande) was angry, hateful or resentful towards another person, they bewitched that person, causing them to suffer some kind of misfortune (falling ill, say).
Therefore, when a Zande suffered a misfortune, they thought of someone with whom they had a problem. They then confronted that person, garnered sympathy by explaining what they’d been going through and asked for reconciliation. Customarily, the latter complied, and social harmony was restored.
Complex cultures
Another aspect that comes to mind is African female leadership. To many European observers, this represented the inverse of their societies – one in which men dominated institutions and the public sphere, whereas women were often relegated to second-class citizens. In short, these African societies represented to them Amazonia.
But this wasn’t really the case. In many female-led African societies, there was actually a balance of power between men and women.
To many European observers, African female leadership represented the inverse of their societies – one in which men dominated institutions and the public sphere, whereas women were often relegated to second-class citizens
From about 25 to 21 BC, the Nubians and the Romans (the latter under their first emperor, Augustus Caesar) were at war. Rome had conquered Egypt and northern Nubia. When the northern Nubians rebelled, their king, Teriteqas, and queen, Amanirenas, lent them the support of their royal army. In Nubia, the king didn’t have absolute authority.
In various ways, he shared this authority with his mother (the queen mother) and his wife. The Nubians believed that duality and balance was the foundation of success in any sphere. This included in rulership, which required both male and female energies to function successfully. It was not unusual then that when Teriteqas died in one of this war’s early conflicts, Amanirenas succeeded him (their young son, Akinidad, was not yet elected king).
She sacked Roman Egyptian cities, took prisoners and looted statues of Augustus, securing a victory for the Nubians and a favourable peace treaty from Augustus himself. She is the best known of the ‘Kandakes’, Nubian royal women who ruled Meröe (the last Nubian kingdom) nearly absolutely.
Gaps in the story
These stories represent just a fraction of the breadth, depth and nuance of African peoples’ history and cultures. If we not only want to understand truly the African past but also fill in a significant gap in the story of our species, we need to consider the African perspective even when it comes to well-trodden areas of history like the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism.
We need to understand and present Africans and their history more accurately. Africans haven’t historically been only the enslaved or the conquered. We’ve been emperors, sculptors, merchants, architects and scholars. We’ve navigated our continent and the globe. We’ve created world-class architecture and art. We’ve innovated, leading academic, governmental and industrial institutions.
This is some of the African history we need to see in books, documentaries, films and TV series. If we fail to explore this history, we do a disservice not just to Africans, but to peoples of other societies who otherwise come away with a woefully erroneous understanding of the peoples that have inhabited our world the longest.
Luke Pepera is a Ghanaian-born writer, broadcaster, historian and anthropologist. He is the author of Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures and Identity (W&N, 2025)
This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine