The History of Africa

African history in this millennium begins in wealth and power, not in the colonial frame it is too often given. Mansa Musa of Mali crosses the Sahara in the 1320s with so much gold he disrupts the economy of Egypt; Great Zimbabwe raises its stone walls; Ethiopia carves churches from living rock and later humbles a European army at Adwa. This timeline follows the Swahili trading coast, the rise of Songhai, and then the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial partition that reordered the continent by force. It ends with the great wave of independence after 1950 and the modern states still contending with those inheritances. Each event links to a full page with its date and context.