rs are also making modern Africans more primitive than they really are and are ignoring the development of major civilizations in Africa over the centuries, including some civilizations which have since disappeared. A civilization Europeans would recognize as a civilization began thousands of years ago in Egypt, but Iliffe notes how elements of civilization such as agriculture, iron-working, livestock, and language spread form the great Lakes region to nearly every corner of eastern and southern Africa in the first half of the first millennium B.C. (Iliffe, 1996, 34-36).
Much of the attitude Europeans have taken toward the peoples of Africa derive from racial differences and from the legacy of the colonial era. Europeans who colonized a people tended to depict and think of those people as biologically inferior, thus justifying the way the Europeans treated them. If they were naturally inferior, it was moral to take a paternal stance toward them even while exploiting them and the resources of their country. Such exploitation could be undertaken with the idea that these peoples were not sufficiently civilized to exploit natural resources themselves. The attitude would also become prevalent that the peoples of colonial areas actually prospered under European guidance, with the idea being that before the Europeans came, the native peoples were backward and unable to develop on their own. Thus, the Europeans were actually benefiting these people by civilizing them, the superior civilized man taking the less civilized under his wing and offering assistance.
However, this ignores as well much of the reality of what the people of Africa had achieved on their own long before the arrival of the European. As noted above, they developed such elements of civilization as agriculture, iron-working, livestock, and language. The early pattern was migratory, with populations exhausting the agricultural possibilities of a region and then m...