AFRICA Informative Writing Template.

AFRICANS HISTORY FROM THE DAWN OF TIME.

The Story of Africa tells the history of the continent from an African perspective. See the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms, experience the power of religion, the injustices of slavery, and chart the expansion of trade between Africa and other continents.

The history of Africa has tended to rely on written evidence. But Africans had their own particular system of recording past events, situations and traditions, before Europeans started writing about it. In the 1960's, oral history went through a process of validation and historians began to use it as a source.

Portuguese explorer Prince Henry, known as the Navigator, was the first European to methodically explore Africa and the oceanic route to the Indies. From his residence in the Algarve region of southern Portugal, he directed successive expeditions to circumnavigate Africa and reach India.

Between March 1957, when Ghana declared independence from Great Britain, and July 1962, when Algeria wrested independence from France after a bloody war, 24 African nations freed themselves from their former colonial masters. In most former English and French colonies, independence came relatively peacefully.

Africa was tropical Africa, black Africa, tribal Africa, Africa without written records: it was the Africa that Hegel, in the Philosophy of History, had said was not a “historical continent” because it showed no development, no progress. In fact, there are more written sources than were dream of in Hegel's philosophy.

Islam gained momentum during the 10th century in West Africa with the start of the Almoravid dynasty movement on the Senegal River and as rulers and kings embraced Islam. Islam then spread slowly in much of the continent through trade and preaching.