Credit: afrolegends.com
Nubia is a region along the Nile river, which
is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.
There were a number of large Nubian kingdoms throughout the Postclassical
Era, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between
Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization of
much of the Nubian population. Nubia was again united within Ottoman
Egypt in the 19th century, and within Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from 1899 to 1956.
The name Nubia is derived from that of the Noba people,
nomads who settled the area in the 4th century, with the collapse of the
kingdom of Meroë.
The Noba spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, ancestral to Old Nubian.
Old Nubian was mostly used in religious texts dating from the 8th and 15th
centuries AD. Before the 4th century, and throughout classical antiquity, Nubia was known as Kush,
or, in Classical Greek usage, included under the
name Ethiopia (Aithiopia).
Historically, the people of Nubia spoke at least two varieties of the Nubian language group, a subfamily which includes Nobiin (the descendant of Old Nubian), Kenuzi-Dongola, Midob and several related varieties in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. A variety Birgid was spoken (at least until 1970) north of Nyala in Darfur but is now extinct. Read more >>
Credit: wikimedia.org (Gonder Palace)
Kingdom Of Ethiopia
(Abyssinia) was the successor Kingdom of the Axumite
Empire. The kingdom expanded Ethiopia's
borders in a more southernly trajectory.
Expansion
With the emmigration of the Axumite ruling elites to the interior of Ethiopia, due to decline in trade and environmental degradation, the Ethiopian kingdom engaged in massive expansion south, to the Shoan Plateau. This expansion came with the Zagwe Dynasty in 1150, who overthrew the old Axumite elites. Expansion was achieved with a massive military force. Read more >>
Credit: Wikipedia (Bronze plaque
of Benin Warriors with ceremonial swords. 16th–18th centuries, Nigeria.)
Benin
The Benin Empire (1440–1897) was a
pre-colonial Edo state in what is now Nigeria. It
should not be confused with the modern-day country called Benin, formerly
called Dahomey.
Most of the great West African Empires and
Kingdoms flourished in the open savannahs that make up vast areas of its
hinterland, with their strategic trading position between north and coastal
Africa, and the openness that supported cavalry based military adventure, huge
empires rose and fell in this area over the centuries. By contrast the
political structures of the coastal regions consisted primarily of City-States
and loose confederacies, one of the few exceptions to this rule was the Benin
Kingdom.
Located almost wholly with within what is now Nigeria, the
Benin Kingdom at its zenith stretched from Lagos in the west, along the coast
of Nigeria to the River Niger in the east and area that equates to about a
fifth of Nigeria's current geographic area.
Credit: wikipedia (Golden Stool (Sika ɗwa) in Asanteman, 1935.)
Ashanti Empire
The Ashanti (or Asante) Empire (or Confederacy),
also Asanteman (1701–1957), was a West
Africa sovereign state of the ethnic Akan people of Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Central region, Eastern region, Greater Accra region and Western region currently South Ghana. The Ashantis (or
Asantefo) are of Akan origin, the Ashantis are a powerful, martial,
and highly disciplined society of West Africa inhabiting an area known as
"Akanland". Their military power, which came from effective strategy
and an early adoption of European firearms, created an empire that stretched from central Ghana
to present-day Benin and Ivory Coast,
bordered by the Dagomba kingdom to the north and Dahomey to
the east. Due to the empire's military prowess, wealth, architecture,
sophisticated hierarchy and culture, the Ashanti empire had one of the
largest historiographies by European, primarily
British, sources of any indigenous Sub-Saharan African political entity.
From the 17th century AD,
Asanteman king Osei Tutu (c. 1695 – 1717),along with Okomfo
Anokye, established the Kingdom of Asanteman, with the Golden Stool of Asante as a singular
unifying force. Osei Tutu engaged in a massive Asante territorial
expansion. He built up the army based on the Ashantis introducing new
organization and turning a disciplined royal and paramilitary army into an
effective fighting machine. In 1701, the Asanteman army conquered
Denkyira, giving Ashantis access to the Gulf
of Guinea and the Atlantic
Ocean coastal trade with Europeans, notably the Dutch.
King Opoku Ware I (1720 – 1745) engaged in further
Akan territorial expansion, and king Kusi Obodom (1750
– 1764) succeeded king Opoku Ware I. Asante king Osei Kwadwo (1764
– 1777) imposed administrative reforms that allowed Asanteman to be governed
effectively. King Osei Kwame Panyin (1777 – 1803), and
King Osei
Tutu Kwame (1804 – 1824) continued Asanteman territorial consolidation.
Asanteman is location of Lake Bosumtwi,
Ghana's only natural lake, and the state's economic revenue is
mainly derived from trading in gold bars, cocoa, kola nuts and agriculture;
clearing forest to plant cassava, maize and yams.
Today the Ashanti monarchy continues as a constitutionally protected, sud-nation state and traditional state within Ghana. The current king of Asanteman is Otumfuo Osei Tutu II Asantehene. Read more >>
The Zulu Kingdom, sometimes referred to as
the Zulu Empire (or rather imprecisely as Zululand) was a
monarchy in Southern Africa that extended along the coast of the Indian Ocean
from the Tugela River in the south to Pongola
River in the north.
The small kingdom grew to dominate much of what is today KwaZulu-Natal in Southern Africa, but when it came into conflict with the British Empire in the 1870s during the Anglo-Zulu War, it was defeated despite an early Zulu victory in the war. The area was subsequently absorbed into Colony of Natal and later became part of the Union of South Africa. Read more >>
Credit: thehabarinetwork.com
The Berber Kingdom of
Morocco
It's easy to think of Islamic North
Africa as Arab, rather than African. But the land that is now Morocco once
lay at the centre of a vast African Kingdom that stretched from northern
Spain to the heart of West Africa. It was created by African Berbers, and
ruled for centuries by two dynasties that created tremendous wealth,
commissioned fabulous architecture, and promoted sophisticated ideas. But art
historian Dr. Gus Casely-Hayford reveals how the very forces that
forged the kingdom ultimately helped to destroy its indigenous
African identity.
Source: Wikipedia
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