Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Abstract

After traversing more than three millennia of the African past, it is time to pause and take stock, to look back in history as well as forward, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over the past half-century, scholars have scoured archaeological sites, colonial archives, published works, and oral traditions; utilized social science methodologies – anthropology, linguistics, and demography; and developed an appreciation of African art, music, and literature, to construct a new paradigm for understanding the continent's past. We hope that readers of this text will have recognized the themes in the last several thousand years of the African past that thread their way through the text into the twenty-first century. They are indeed the themes of this book, and they will most certainly reappear – in different forms, to be sure – in the twenty-first century. Environment continues to shape the lives of the African peoples. As seen in the previous chapters, population has long been tied to the interaction between humans and the unique African environment. In relation to its landmass, Africa has, historically, been under populated. Two thousand years ago, Africa south of the Sahara had only an estimated population one-fifth that of China or the Roman Empire. During the next 1,500 years, this ratio continued to decline so that by 1500, Africa contained less than an estimated 15 percent of the world's human beings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Africa accounted for only about 1 percent of the 2 billion people inhabiting the earth. The reasons for this low rate of growth remain unclear to this day. Was this creeping rate of reproduction caused by a harsh climate, disease, poor soils, conflict, and slavery? One can only reflect and suggest that the reasons lie in the complex interaction between humanity and nature in Africa.