CENTRAL AFRICA, HISTORY OF

history of the region from the time of early humans to the present. Central Africa consists of three parallel belts of tropical terrain that follow the Equator from the Atlantic to the mountains and lakes of the East African borderlands. The northern and southern belts are predominantly orchard woodland with areas of savanna grassland that are either man-made or occur naturally where altitude and soil are appropriate. The middle belt has at most times in the Earth's history been thickly forested, but an increased population dedicated to farming and timber exploitation led to extensive deforestation in the 20th century. One unifying feature of the region is the great Congo River, which rises in the far southeast, crosses the savanna and the forest, captures tributaries from the northern savanna, and recrosses the forest to enter the Atlantic in the southwestern corner of the region. The river has been a source of food and a means of communication over hundreds of generations, but it has also provided an environment in which human and animal diseases have endangered life. The population of central Africa has evolved in three broad time zones. During the earliest, which covered a million years, early humans sought food and shelter throughout the savanna regions and probably in the forest as well, though the forest may have been much thinner in the great dry phases of Africa's climatic history. In the second phase Homo sapiens, modern man and woman, came to the region and absorbed or eclipsed the thinly scattered original inhabitants over a 100,000-year stretch. The third phase covered less than 10,000 years and brought the development of the societies that have become familiar to modern history. These societies arose from a blend of old populations familiar with the ecological environment and new immigrants with fresh skills to impart. Additional reading General works Overviews of central African history can be found in J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver, The Cambridge History of Africa, 8 vol. (197586); UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, General History of Africa (1981 ); and Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, 6th ed. (1988). David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa, 2 vol. (1983), is a comprehensive survey of both northern and southern central Africa; each chapter has a bibliographic essay. Developments to the 19th century J. Desmond Clark, The Prehistory of Africa (1970, reprinted 1984), by the pioneer prehistorian of central Africa, surveys the Stone Age. David W. Phillipson, African Archaeology (1985), is a more recent overview by a specialist on the later prehistoric period. Phyllis M. Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 15761870 (1972), is a pathbreaking study of international relations on the Congo coast. David Birmingham, Central Africa to 1870: Zambezi, Zare, and the South Atlantic (1981), contains chapters from The Cambridge History of Africa. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (eds.), Pre-colonial African Trade (1970), contains several essays on the economic history of central Africa before 1900. Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen (1976), is an innovative study of the use of oral evidence for the construction of central African history; his Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 17301830 (1988) is mainly concerned with south-central Africa but illustrates the history of the slave trade in ways not hitherto attempted. Jan Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna (1966), was the pioneering survey of state formation in precolonial central Africa; his Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (1990) is a companion volume on the forest peoples and their forms of social organization. Vansina's The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (1978), radically reinterprets Kuba history as first understood by scholars of the 1950s. Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (1985), is a sophisticated analysis of the state, utilizing the extensive surviving early Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese records. John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 16411718 (1983), carries the history of the kingdom through a phase of disintegration. Dennis D. Cordell, Dar al-Kuti and the Last Years of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (1985), looks at state formation on the Muslim fringe of north-central Africa. Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 15001891 (1981), is one of the great classics of central African history. Thomas Q. Reefe, The Rainbow and the Kings: A History of the Luba Empire to 1891 (1981), significantly revises previous interpretations of the leading inland empire of central Africa.Charles Perrings, Black Mineworkers in Central Africa (1979), offers a radical history of the Katanga copper mines. Franoise Latour da Veiga-Pinto, Le Portugal et le Congo au XIXe sicle (1972), is an important case study of the diplomacy of the scramble for central Africa. Eric de Dampierre, Un Ancien Royaume bandia du Haut-Oubangui (1967), discusses state-building and society in the northern savanna. L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa: 18841914 (1979), is scholarship of the dispassionate school. Eugenia W. Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and Culture (1984), is a brilliantly innovative and deeply researched cultural history. Sidney Langford Hinde, The Fall of the Congo Arabs (1897, reprinted 1969), offers an eyewitness account of the colonial conquest of eastern Congo (Kinshasa) in the 1890s. Wm. Roger Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 18841919 (1963, reprinted 1979), provides a diplomatic history of the German enclave in central Africa. From the 19th century to the present Surveys include Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 18801985 (1988); Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, The Emerging States of French Equatorial Africa (1960), an encyclopaedic survey of terminal colonialism; and Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa: 19001945 (1971; originally published in French, 1964). Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grandes compagnies concessionnaires, 18981930 (1972), recounts the private enterprise dimension of colonialism. Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church (1975; originally published in German, 1971), studies the independent church of Congo (Kinshasa). Further studies of the central African countries under colonial rule and after independence may be found in the history bibliographies of the individual countries. David Birmingham The economy Agriculture, forestry, and fishing Traditional agriculture Farming societies practice a subsistence agriculture intended to ensure family nutrition. Its rhythm is linked to the rain cycle. Fields are cleared or reclaimed by cutting and burning the forest or the savanna during the dry season and are left fallow after one or more crops. Tools are rudimentary, and there is little, if any, use of manure, which a small stock-farming operationlimited to a few goats or sheep and some chickens (rarely a pig)cannot in any case supply. No other equipment is used for growing, processing, or transporting the produce. The tasks are distributed between men and women, but the women's participation is substantially greater than the men's. The wife carries nearly the whole burden of the family nutritional subsistence, though the husband participates a little more actively in the trading cultures. Yields are low owing to the general poverty of soils, the absence of fertilizer, and the poor quality of seeds. Heavily populated regions (e.g., parts of Congo [Kinshasa], Rwanda, and Burundi) use more intensive forms of agriculture. Plantains are the staple food crop in the equatorial forest region; yam and taro are of secondary importance. Since the 19th century, cassava has become more important. Fats are furnished by oil palm trees that often grow wild in the bush. In the savanna regions, in the north as well as in the south, cereal plants such as sorghum and millet dominated in the past, but they have been partially replaced by cassava and corn (maize). Peanuts (groundnuts) are also grown. In the north, sesame is traditionally included in crop rotation. In the highlands (eastern Congo [Kinshasa], Rwanda, Burundi), sorghum, traditional cereals, bananas (used to brew beer), kidney beans, sweet potatoes, and corn are grown. There is traditionally no cattle raising in most of central Africa, either because this technique was never known by its inhabitants or because of the widespread presence of the tsetse fly, carrier of trypanosomiasis, a disease that attacks both humans (sleeping sickness) and domestic animals (nagana), especially cattle and horses. Stock farming exists in the east and northeast, mainly in the highlands of eastern Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda, where the tsetse fly is not found. Bororo nomadic stockbreeders, originally from Cameroon, began migrating to the Central African Republic in the 1920s. Pastoralist groups also live in the eastern and northeastern part of this country, into which herds from The Sudan frequently move. Fishing, an important source of animal protein, is practiced in the interior rivers and lakes and supplies an important trade. There is a small amount of sea fishing in the cool coastal waters. Commercial agriculture Since the colonial period, agriculture has been part of a monetary economy. From that time, a part of the vegetable production has been intended for the urban markets. Cash crops were often introduced by the colonial authorities: cotton, urena fibres, tobacco, peanuts, robusta coffee in the low regions and arabica coffee in high-altitude regions, cacao, and hevea. During the colonial era large oil palm, sugarcane, coffee, cacao, and hevea plantations and smaller estates were established by European companies and settlers. Timber was cut in the coastal region forests (especially the limba tree in Congo (Kinshasa) and the okoume tree in Gabon) and in the internal forests of northern Congo (Brazzaville), southern Central African Republic, and the Lake Mai-Ndombe region in Congo (Kinshasa). Wood was the most important export for Gabon and Congo (Brazzaville) until the start of petroleum exploitation. Stock-farming ranches were established to supply the cities and, especially, the mining camps. Most of these estates were returned to nationals after 1960. Several governments have since founded (or helped to found) large agro-industrial companies, for example, in Congo (Brazzaville), which adopted a socialist political model with general consolidation of small producer holdings together with centralized planning. But some multinational companies have preserved a dominance in the related area of agribusiness. Unlike most of central Africa, the islands of the Gulf of Guinea continue to be dominated by the plantation system, where cacao plantations followed the 19th-century sugarcane plantations. The land Geology Central Africa is underlain by a basement complex of Precambrian rock, which is partially covered by a thin sedimentary layer. This complex consists of a varied lithology, including migmatites and other metamorphic rocks, granito-gneissic complexes, and partially metamorphosed sedimentary rocks (among which are limestones, sandstones, and conglomerates of glacial origin). Several orogenic phases occurred more than 600 million years ago. Though long subjected to weathering and erosion, the folds produced by these orogenies are still obvious in some reliefs: ridges lie parallel to the coast in western Congo (Brazzaville) and coastal Congo (Kinshasa); linear and curvilinear ridges of quartzitic sandstones are found in Rwanda and Burundi; and an arc-shaped range extends through the copper belt of southeastern Congo (Kinshasa). This Precambrian complex contains a wealth of mineral resources: gold and manganese are found in the very ancient parts (northeastern and southern Congo [Kinshasa], southeastern Gabon) and tin in Middle Precambrian strata (southeastern Congo [Kinshasa], Rwanda, Burundi), and in Late Precambrian strata (western Congo [Brazzaville], southeastern Congo [Kinshasa]) there is copper, often linked with lead and zinc or, as in southern Congo (Kinshasa), with cobalt and uranium. Iron ore abounds in central Africa's crust, but it is still relatively unexploited. During the Cretaceous Period (144 to 66.4 million years ago), kimberlitic pipes, a major source of diamonds, intruded through the basement rocks to the surface in central Congo (Kinshasa). In the west the basement sinks under a sedimentary coastal basin formed during the Cretaceous Periodi.e., after Africa and South America were separated. Narrow in Congo (Kinshasa), the basin widens in Gabon. Petroleum (most often tapped offshore), some phosphate, and potash are found there. Since the end of the Precambrian, the basement complex has undergone deformations of major amplitude, in addition to local upliftings and fractures. Raised and emerging at the periphery, the basement sags in the centre into a shallow basin (maximum depth about 5,000 to 6,500 feet [1,500 to 2,000 metres]), buried beneath sedimentsoften of continental origindeposited from the Late Precambrian to the Quaternary. The sediments also extend toward the south, between the coastal rim and the Kasai region in western Congo (Kinshasa). Sand deposits cover the surface of some plateaus in southern Congo, and other small sedimentary basins may be found in the Central African Republic (e.g., sandstone plateaus near Carnot in the west and between Ouadda and Mouka in the east, the latter containing alluvial diamonds). The far north of the Central African Republic is part of the interior-draining Chad sedimentary basin. The eastern part of central Africa is interrupted by the Western Rift Valley (a branch of the East African Rift System), which marks the progressive separation of the continental African plate in the west from the Somalian plate in the east. Transform faults disconnect the valley axis. Two of these dislocations are the centre of volcanic activity (old volcanism in the south, present Virunga volcanism north of Lake Kivu). The islands in the Gulf of Guinea are of volcanic origin, jutting out of the sea along an extension of the western Cameroon fault axis. Relief The landscapes of central Africa are most often wide plateau surfaces (often terraced planed surfaces), which are smooth in the central part and etched at the periphery. The interior basin of the Congo River, the lowest part of which (Malebo Pool) lies about 1,000 feet above sea level, is joined to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow neck traversing ridges parallel to the coast. The basin comprises some marshy surfaces in the region where the Congo, Ubangi (Oubangui), Likouala, and Sangha rivers converge and where Lakes Mai-Ndombe (formerly Lake Lopold II) and Tumba are found. Its major part, however, consists of drier surfaces (low plateaus or alluvial terraces). Higher plateaus extend through older sedimentary strata around the central part of the Congo basin. Those crossed by the Congo above Malebo Poolthe Batk Plateausreach an elevation of 2,600 to 3,000 feet north of Brazzaville and stretch southeastward to the Kwango Plateaus, which exceed 3,000 feet near the Angolan border. Beyond this sedimentary aureole the plateaus frequently show outcroppings of Precambrian basement rock. In the north a low divide (2,0002,300 feet) separates the Congo River and its tributaries from the Chad basin. The landscape beyond the divide descends by steps toward Lake Chad. In the west the rim of the Congo basin is well demarcated. The Chaillu Massif (3,0003,300 feet), in Gabon and Congo (Brazzaville), is a granitic elliptical buttress surrounded by a crown of ancient erosion surfaces. Southwest and south of the massif, from west to east, are ridges ranging from 2,600 to 3,000 feet, which are traversed through deep and narrow gorges by the Kouilou and Congo rivers; a shale-limestone depression; and a sandstone plateau. East of this complex the Congo River has eroded a broad basin, known as Malebo Pool, into the upper sedimentary strata before cutting rapids farther downstream. In the southeast, the plateaus often exceed 3,300 feet. Some parts, uplifted more than 5,000 feet (e.g., Kibara, Kundelungu), surround depressions (e.g., Lake Upemba, Lufira River plain). Small farms line the slopes in the highlands of Burundi, one of the most densely populated regions The most rugged terrain is seen on the eastern fringe of the Congo basin, where the Precambrian bedrock has been uplifted above the Western Rift Valley and is more than 8,000 feet high. A ravined slope abruptly drops to the floor of the rift valley. The level of Lake Albert (Mobutu) lies at 2,034 feet, that of Lake Edward at 2,995 feet, and that of Lake Tanganyika at 2,543 feet. In its southern part, the bottom of Lake Tanganyika is 2,165 feet below sea level, making the lake more than 4,700 feet deep. In Rwanda and Burundi, which lie east of the Western Rift Valley, the eastern edge of the valley mirrors that of the west: a vigorous slope on the fault side and an etched surface with a gentler slope dipping toward the east. North of Lake Kivu and of Rwanda, the Virunga volcanoes form an eastwest-trending range whose main peaks exceed 9,800 feet (14,557 feet [4,437 metres] for Mikeno, 14,787 feet [4,507 metres] for Karisimbi). The highest point in central Africa, Margherita Peak (16,795 feet [5,119 metres]), is located on an uplifted portion of the Precambrian basement on the eastern fringe of the Rift Valley. Its summit bears residual features of glaciation. The western sedimentary basin (a maritime plain with low hills) has a coastline broken up by estuaries (that of the Congo, downstream from Boma, Congo (Kinshasa), extends into a deep submarine canyon), lagoons, and rias. In Congo (Brazzaville) and southern Gabon offshore sandbars, stretched toward the north by the coastal current, alternate with small sea cliffs or rocky capes. The people Ethnic composition National borders have split the territory of many ethnic groups. Pygmies are scattered in the forests from Cameroon to the mountains surrounding Lake Kivu. The Fang of Gabon also occupy Equatorial Guinea and southern Cameroon. The Teke are spread throughout Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, and Congo (Kinshasa). The Kongo inhabit western Congo (Kinshasa), western Congo (Brazzaville), and Angola; the Chokwe (Tshokwe) and the Lunda occupy Congo (Kinshasa) and Angola. In each country some major groups enjoy a numerically dominant positionfor example, the Fang in Gabon and the Mboshi, Teke, and Kongo in Congo (Brazzaville). Burundi and Rwanda comprise a Hutu majority (agriculturists), a Tutsi minority (pastoralists), and some Twa (Pygmies). In Congo (Kinshasa) the major groups are the Kongo (southwest), Mongo (central basin), Luba (south-central), Zande and Mangbetu (northeast), and Ngbaka (northwest). In the Central African Republic, the Baya (Gbaya), in the west, are the most numerous, but the Banda, in the centre, occupy the largest territory. The islands of the Gulf of Guinea, owing to their history of slave plantations and, later, of plantations with a more or less enforced recruitment, have a mixed population originating from Angola as well as from western and central Africa. Linguistic composition Most languages spoken in central Africa belong to the Bantu group of the Niger-Congo language family. In northern central Africa, Adamawa-Eastern and Sudanic languages are also spoken. The area's rich linguistic diversity includes the use of vehicular languages (i.e., lingua francas) born of local languages, pidgin-creoles (in the islands of the Gulf of Guinea), and European languages, which are the official languages of the various countries (Portuguese in So Tom and Prncipe, French elsewhere). The vehicular languages often overlap the borders. Lingala, which is important in Congo (Kinshasa), is also spoken in Congo (Brazzaville), as are Kongo and Sango, which, in turn, is the main language in the Central African Republic. Swahili, the eastern Africa language, is the lingua franca in eastern Congo (Kinshasa) and among the merchants of Burundi and Rwanda. In the latter countries, Rundi (more properly, Kirundi) and Rwanda (Kinyarwanda) are (along with French) the official languages.