History of sub-Saharan Africa

Zulu?

They didn’t write any of it down or if they did, it didn’t survive. Also, they did not build anything that has survived the years.

It was nearly as primitive/underdeveloped as the typical American Indian tribe.

Geography was the main reason.

Sub-Sahara Africa was cut off from the rest of the world due to the Saharan desert, due to Africa lacking rivers that are easily navigable, and coastline that was likewise not easy to erect harbors on.

Ships were not advanced enough until the 15th century to travel all the day down the coast to South Africa either.


The most “advanced” pre European civilization in sub Saharan Africa was great Zimbabwe.


This is actually a fascinating subject if you want to delve further into it. I suggest you read “wealth, poverty, and politics” by Thomas Sowell. Much of the book is about just how horrid Africa’s geography is in facilitating easy travel

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The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In understanding black Africa, geography is more important than history." Much of Africa's history was in fact shaped by its geography.

Almost every great city in the world has risen on navigable waterways — and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent. An aircraft carrier can dock on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, but there is not a single river where that is possible on the vast continent of Africa, which is larger than Europe or North America.

Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level, and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and streams must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.

Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent's dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.

Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe. One among many signs of the isolation and cultural fragmentation of much of sub-Saharan Africa is that African languages are one third of all the languages in the world, even though African peoples are only about 10 percent of the world's population.

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civilizations

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sub-Saharan Africa?

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And, for that matter, what civilizations did occur in sub-Saharan Africa?

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There were quite a few. Off the top of my head:

Zulu
Songhai
Mali
Ghana
Axum
Sosso
Jolof

The Boers were the toughest SOB's in that part of the world for a long time.

Direct correlation to the USA fast ascent and the fact that we have the both best rivers AND best coastlines* on the planet earth.

*The Mississippi River Basin and virtually unlimited natural harbors.

It's all explained in this video.