Black African & Native American Societies

The purpose of this research is to examine black African and Native American societies before European contacts in regard to their religions, political structure, and economics. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which pre-encounter societies flourished, and then to discuss distinctive features of these societies that illustrate their stability and institutional nature.

The fact that as of A.D. 1000 European civilization was less advanced and united than civilizations in Asia, Africa, or America has been well documented, as well as the fact that after that time Europe gradually emerged to dominate the world (Elson, 1992). However, the period of transformation that began roughly at the time of the Crusades was not necessarily the same as the bringing of superior civilization to non-European societies. Indeed, the societies that Europeans encountered in the Americas and Africa were reshaped along European lines in significant part because of European territorial and conquest ambitions. According to one account, "the indigenous populations of most colonized lands went under. Indians in America and aborigines in Australia had not sufficiently tamed and filled their continents to prevent newcomers from settling among them" (Oliver, 1966, p. 7). African societies survived the encounter more successfully because they were "too numerous and too much the masters of their environment to be overtaken" (p. 7).

If the pre-encounter societies of Africa

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associated with economic activity. Ghana was one imperial seat, and it had a feudal structure organized around mining and export. Ghana's empire, which lasted from AD 600 to 1600, drew "military strength from feudal levies and its financial power from the proceeds of the export trade in gold and other goods and of the import trade in salt, copper, and the manufactures of Egypt, North Africa and Europe" (Davidson, 1964, p. 15). The Swahili were well established on the southeastern coast and, like the Ethiopians to the north, had extensive Indian Ocean trade with Arabia, India, and China, exporting gold and ivory and importing textiles, porcelain, and other goods. Other African empires of about the same period were Mali, Kanem-Bornu, Songhay, and Hausa in the west and among the Katanga, Bantu, and Uganda in the east and south. Ghana's empire, as well s that of the Songhay, fell to a Moroccan invasion from the north in the 1600s, closely followed by the age of European exploration. Africa as a whole never recovered from these stresses, which made it vulnerable to long-term European exploitation. Native American social structure resembles that of black Africa chiefly in its multi-tribal configuration and in the sense of the sacred tha

Category: History - B