4.2 Africa South of the Sahara: Who Are Africans South of the Sahara?

 

Who Are Africans South of the Sahara?

The Cities They Refused to See

Every living human being has an African past.

That is not a slogan about solidarity, although it might encourage some. It is a statement about our species. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, and the story is older and geographically broader than the traditional textbook account suggests. Fossils discovered at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco have been dated to roughly 315,000 years ago, pushing the known history of our species far beyond the once-standard estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 years. Rather than appearing suddenly in one small corner of the continent, modern humans probably emerged through interactions among populations across Africa (Hublin et al., 2017).

This makes the Sahara a rather poor place to draw a line through human history. Today it is an enormous desert, but across longer stretches of time it has expanded, contracted, turned green, filled with lakes, and opened routes between populations. “Africa south of the Sahara” is a useful regional label. It is not an ancient wall separating one kind of humanity from another.

Africa was not a waiting room in which humanity sat until the important part of the story moved elsewhere. It was the workshop.

People hunted, gathered, raised livestock, domesticated plants, smelted metals, built cities, established kingdoms, developed systems of law, and moved goods across distances that would have exhausted a Roman courier. They argued about authority, worshipped, borrowed words from their neighbors, and complained about taxes. In other words, they had history.

That last point should be unnecessary. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of colonial scholarship was devoted to denying it.

Before Europe Arrived to “Discover” Anything

One of the most persistent myths about Africa is that cities arrived with Europeans. The ruins, manuscripts, trade routes, and surviving urban landscapes stubbornly refuse to cooperate with that story.

Consider Djenné, in present-day Mali. Settlement at Djenné-Jeno began around 250 BCE. The city became an important market in the inland Niger Delta, connecting farmers, fishers, herders, craftspeople, and merchants. Its position near waterways and seasonal floodplains made it part of a regional economy long before European ships became a significant presence along the West African coast. Djenné later became an important link in the trans-Saharan gold trade and a center of Islamic learning (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.-a).

Farther north, Timbuktu stood at the meeting point of desert caravans and the Niger River system. Gold and grain traveled north; salt, books, and manufactured goods traveled south. Scholars copied manuscripts on theology, law, astronomy, grammar, medicine, and mathematics. UNESCO describes the city at its height as possessing numerous Qur’anic schools and a scholarly population numbering in the thousands (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.-c).

This was not a European university transplanted into the sand. It was an African intellectual world organized through mosques, teachers, libraries, households, and scholarly networks. Learning does not become learning only when it acquires a Gothic bell tower.

Across West Africa, states such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Borno, Benin, and the Hausa city-states governed territory, collected taxes, supported armies, and competed for trade. Kano prospered near iron deposits and commercial routes. Gao commanded a strategic position on the Niger. Benin became famous for its urban organization, royal institutions, and extraordinary metalworking. Along the Indian Ocean, Swahili cities connected the African interior with Arabia, Persia, India, and eventually China.

These were not isolated dots of “civilization” surrounded by blankness. They were nodes in networks. Cities depended on farmers, herders, porters, boat operators, miners, artisans, and smaller market towns. The glittering object in the museum case was usually the final stop in a much longer geography of labor.

Then there is Great Zimbabwe.

Between approximately 1100 and 1450, African builders constructed an extensive complex of stone walls, enclosures, residences, and ceremonial spaces in what is now Zimbabwe. At its height, the city was connected to cattle production, gold mining, regional political power, and Indian Ocean commerce. Archaeologists have found goods indicating trade with distant places, including glass beads and imported ceramics. The surviving complex covers nearly 800 hectares (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.-b).

Early European visitors looked at the walls and decided that Africans could not have built them.

Perhaps, they proposed, the builders had been Phoenicians. Perhaps Egyptians. Perhaps agents of King Solomon. The reasoning was wonderfully circular. Great Zimbabwe was sophisticated. Africans were presumed incapable of sophistication. Therefore, Great Zimbabwe could not be African.

Archaeology eventually demolished this fantasy. The city was built by the ancestors of Shona-speaking peoples and belonged to a southern African tradition of settlement, political authority, cattle keeping, mining, and trade. The foreign-builder theories tell us almost nothing about Great Zimbabwe. They tell us a great deal about the people who invented them.

The colonial gaze did not merely fail to see African history. It often saw the evidence and reassigned it to someone else.

The Commerce in Human Beings

Africa’s connections with the wider world brought wealth and ideas. They also brought predators.

Several systems of enslavement operated in and around Africa over many centuries, including trades across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The Atlantic slave trade became especially destructive because of its enormous scale and its connection to plantation economies in the Americas.

The SlaveVoyages database estimates that approximately 12.5 million captive Africans were loaded onto Atlantic slave ships. About 10.7 million survived the ocean crossing and disembarked, primarily in the Americas. Those numbers do not include everyone killed during raids, forced marches, confinement near the coast, or warfare associated with the trade (SlaveVoyages, 2024).

A number such as 12.5 million is almost too large to comprehend. It begins to sound like bookkeeping. But the trade was experienced one person at a time.

A farmer disappeared from a field. A child disappeared from a village. A craftsperson, soldier, religious leader, or merchant was marched toward the coast. Families adjusted to the permanent absence of people who had held knowledge, worked land, settled disputes, and cared for children. Political systems were distorted by the availability of imported weapons and the profits of capturing human beings.

The effects were uneven. Some African rulers and merchants participated in the trade and profited from it. Others resisted, redirected commerce, fortified settlements, or moved communities away from exposed routes. Africans were not passive objects in this history, but neither does African participation excuse the international system that turned racialized enslavement into a vast commercial enterprise.

The Atlantic economy required labor. European merchants possessed ships, capital, weapons, and overseas markets. African captives were made to supply the bodies. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and wealth accumulated on one side of the ocean. Absence accumulated on the other.

That was one connection in a chain that would continue into formal colonialism.

The Map, the Mine, and the Railway

By the nineteenth century, European governments increasingly wanted more than coastal trading posts. They wanted territory, minerals, crops, labor, and political control.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, representatives of European powers negotiated rules for claiming African territory. Africans were not invited to negotiate the partition of Africa.

The borders that emerged are often described as arbitrary. Many certainly ignored political communities, trade regions, pastoral movements, and cultural landscapes. Some followed rivers, older boundaries, or geographic features. Yet even where a boundary had a recognizable logic, the governing purpose remained imperial convenience. The question was not, “How do people here understand their political world?” It was, “Which European government gets this part?”

Colonial governments bundled hundreds of communities into new territories while splitting others across different empires. The resulting colonies were expected to finance themselves and produce something valuable for the imperial economy. That requirement shaped cities, roads, railroads, farms, mines, and labor systems.

You can read the colonial economy from the railway timetable.

A line ran from a copper deposit toward a port. Another carried cocoa, cotton, coffee, or groundnuts from a producing region to the coast. Railroads were rarely designed to weave colonies into balanced national economies. They were designed to get something out.

The same logic shaped colonial cities. Ports such as Dakar, Douala, Mombasa, and Beira became gateways between colonial territories and overseas markets. Mining centers grew around copper in Zambia and the Congo, gold and diamonds in South Africa, and other mineral deposits across the continent.

Colonial cities also became instruments of racial control. Administrators separated European districts from African neighborhoods, directing infrastructure, sanitation, political authority, and property rights toward one side of the city.

Salisbury, now Harare, was built as the capital of white-ruled Rhodesia. Its broad streets, administrative buildings, and European residential areas presented colonial rule as orderly and permanent. Nearby African townships supplied labor while receiving fewer services and tighter restrictions. Mbare, established during the colonial period, became one of the city’s major African residential districts.

Johannesburg performed the same trick on a grander scale. Gold made the city rich. Black mine workers made the gold economy possible. Yet laws restricted where those workers could live, whether their families could join them, and how long they could remain in the city. Soweto developed from the racial geography of that labor system and later became a center of resistance to apartheid.

This was not poor urban planning. It was effective planning for an unjust purpose.

Independence Inherited the Floor Plan

After World War II, African independence movements accelerated. Ghana became independent in 1957. Seventeen African countries gained independence in 1960 alone. Some transitions occurred through negotiations; others followed prolonged wars against colonial governments.

Independence brought flags, anthems, constitutions, and tremendous hope. It did not bring a blank sheet of paper.

New governments inherited colonial borders, export-oriented railroads, unequal cities, administrative systems designed to control rather than represent, and economies dependent on a small number of commodities. The flag changed before the railway timetable, the property register, or the terms of trade did.

African leaders understood that the borders were deeply flawed. They also understood the danger of attempting to redraw the entire continent. Which historical kingdom should determine the boundary? Which period of migration? Which language? Which grazing route? What would happen to mixed cities and border regions?

In 1964, the Organization of African Unity pledged that member states would respect the borders existing at independence. This was not a declaration that colonial borders were wise or just. It was a practical judgment that reopening every boundary might produce endless territorial war (Organization of African Unity, 1964).

The inherited geography remained. Colonial capitals became national capitals. Export corridors became national infrastructure. Townships became permanent neighborhoods. Former labor reserves became crowded rural districts.

At the same time, Africans rapidly remade these spaces.

Markets spread beyond the sites designated by planners. Homes became workshops, restaurants, shops, churches, mosques, and salons. People built neighborhoods faster than governments could survey them. Residents created transportation systems when official buses failed to reach them. Urban economies grew through small businesses, repair work, vending, construction, domestic labor, and countless arrangements that formal statistics struggled to see.

Consider the Pink House Hair Salon in a Cape Town township. In the original textbook’s field note, the salon is a small, bright building amid the uneven infrastructure inherited from apartheid. Electricity may be unreliable. Heating may come from a paraffin stove. Yet inside is a business requiring skill, reputation, suppliers, customers, and knowledge of fashion. It is also a social space where news travels, relationships are maintained, and money circulates locally (Fouberg & Moseley, 2017).

It would be easy to photograph such a place and label it “poverty.” That would be accurate in the narrowest possible sense and false in nearly every other one.

The salon reveals enterprise, but we should not romanticize the obstacles. Improvisation is impressive. It is also work that people must perform because formal systems have failed them. Praising resilience can become a convenient way of avoiding the question of why so much resilience is required.

African urbanization is now proceeding at extraordinary speed. According to the United Nations, roughly one-third of the world’s cities that grew faster than 4 percent annually between 2015 and 2025 were in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the region is also unusual because its rural population continues to grow. Africa’s future will not simply be urban or rural. It will be produced through intensifying connections between villages, towns, metropolitan regions, migration networks, and remittance economies (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2025).

A Continent Speaking in Several Voices at Once

A language map makes Africa look deceptively well behaved. Each territory receives a color, each color receives a name, and the continent sits still long enough to fit into the legend.

People are less cooperative.

Africa contains an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 languages, roughly one-third of the world’s linguistic diversity (UNESCO, 2025). The uncertainty in that number is not carelessness. The boundary between a language and a dialect is partly linguistic, but it is also political and historical. Some speech communities have standardized writing systems, schools, media, and government support. Others exist across borders or within states that privilege a different official language.

The familiar language-family map also requires caution. Niger-Congo contains hundreds of languages and includes the large group commonly called Bantu languages. Afroasiatic languages extend across North Africa, the Horn, and parts of the Sahel. Austronesian languages reached Madagascar through migrations across the Indian Ocean. The proposed Nilo-Saharan grouping remains debated, while “Khoisan” is better understood as a convenient label for several distinct language families and isolates, not one tidy family (Hammarström et al., 2026).

The spread of Bantu languages across much of central, eastern, and southern Africa was not a single marching column. It unfolded over millennia through migration, farming, ironworking, intermarriage, trade, conflict, and cultural exchange. Language spread did not always require population replacement. People can adopt a useful or prestigious language without changing their ancestry.

Colonialism added another layer. English, French, Portuguese, and other European languages became languages of administration, law, higher education, and international commerce. They sometimes help speakers of different African languages communicate. They also preserve hierarchies established under colonial rule.

A student may speak one language at home, another in the market, a regional lingua franca with friends, and English or French at school. That is not confusion. It is competence.

The political question is which competence the state rewards. A child who arrives at school fluent in two local languages may be treated as deficient because neither is the language of the examination. UNESCO reports that fewer than one-fifth of students in Francophone Africa receive instruction in their mother tongue. Linguistic diversity is celebrated in speeches and often penalized in classrooms.

A language map, then, is a history of movement. It is also a map of power.

Religions That Refuse to Stay Inside the Legend

Religious maps present a similar problem. They ask each place to choose a color.

Large portions of sub-Saharan Africa identify as Christian or Muslim. Pew Research Center estimates that in 2020 about 62 percent of the region’s population was Christian and nearly 33 percent was Muslim. The region now contains more Christians than any other world region (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Those figures are useful, provided we do not mistake the category for the complete religious life of a person.

Islam has a long African history. It traveled through conquest in some places, but also through merchants, scholars, pilgrimage routes, intermarriage, and urban networks. Muslim states and scholarly centers were established in West Africa centuries before European colonization. Along the eastern coast, Islam became part of Swahili urban culture through sustained connections with the western Indian Ocean.

Christianity is also far older in Africa than colonial mission schools. Christian communities developed in Egypt and Ethiopia during the religion’s early centuries. Ethiopian Christianity acquired its own institutions, traditions, art, and political history long before many European kingdoms became Christian.

European colonialism did spread new forms of Christianity through mission churches, schools, and hospitals. Missionaries sometimes challenged colonial abuses, but missions were also entangled with colonial authority and cultural hierarchy. Africans did not simply accept imported Christianity in its European packaging. They translated it, argued with it, combined it with local traditions, and established independent churches.

Today, African-initiated churches and Pentecostal movements rank among the most dynamic religious institutions on the continent. A service may employ electronic keyboards, social media, local healing traditions, global theology, entrepreneurial advice, and political commentary, sometimes before lunch.

Indigenous religious practices also remain influential, even when census forms place their practitioners under Christianity or Islam. Beliefs involving ancestors, spirits, sacred landscapes, healing, misfortune, and moral obligations can coexist with mosque or church attendance.

Maps demand exclusive categories. Human beings frequently decline.

Ali Mazrui described Africa as possessing a “triple heritage” of Indigenous, Islamic, and Western influences. The phrase remains useful as long as we do not imagine three separate coats of paint. These traditions have interacted for centuries. The result is not a layered artifact waiting to be peeled apart. It is a living mixture.

The Tax Collector Enters the Village

Colonialism did more than redraw boundaries and build cities. It reached into household labor, farming decisions, gender relations, and the value assigned to land.

Colonial governments needed workers and revenue. They also wanted Africans to produce export crops and purchase imported goods. In many places, officials imposed head taxes or hut taxes payable in colonial currency.

That requirement began another chain.

A household needed cash. To obtain cash, someone might work in a mine, on a settler farm, or in a colonial city. Alternatively, the household could grow cocoa, coffee, cotton, or groundnuts for sale. Labor migration changed the division of work within rural communities. Women frequently assumed greater responsibility for food production and household survival when men migrated to mines or cities. Earnings returned as remittances, but absence carried its own costs.

In settler colonies such as Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Europeans took some of the most productive land. African farmers were moved into crowded reserves or restricted through laws governing land ownership and movement. South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act reserved most of the country for white ownership, a foundation later reinforced by apartheid.

These policies were not merely expressions of racial prejudice. They created labor.

If African families could sustain themselves comfortably on their own land, they would be less likely to accept dangerous mine work or poorly paid farm labor. Restricting land access helped produce the workforce demanded by colonial capitalism. The poverty of the reserve and the wealth of the mine were not separate conditions. One helped create the other.

African farmers still made choices. They changed crops, hid production, moved livestock, avoided official markets, migrated, cooperated with neighbors, and resisted labor demands. Colonial administrators regularly complained that Africans were irrational because they did not maximize cash-crop production. The farmers may have been maximizing something else, such as food security, family labor, or survival.

The administrator saw a failed economic subject. The farmer saw Tuesday.

Neocolonialism: Empire After the Flag

Political independence did not automatically produce economic independence.

Many newly independent governments attempted import-substitution industrialization. Instead of importing manufactured goods, they would build domestic industries. Governments created state-owned companies, protected emerging factories, expanded public employment, and invested in education and infrastructure.

Some projects succeeded. Others became inefficient, politically managed, or dependent on imported equipment and foreign loans. During the 1970s and 1980s, falling commodity prices, oil shocks, rising interest rates, drought, and mounting debt placed many African governments under enormous pressure.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank offered financing conditioned on structural adjustment. Governments were expected to reduce spending, privatize state enterprises, devalue currencies, liberalize trade, and emphasize exports. Supporters argued that such reforms could correct distorted prices, restrain debt, and restore growth. Even World Bank assessments recognized, however, that the debate over adjustment’s social consequences was severe and that growth without access to health care, education, and other services would do little for the poor (Husain, 1993).

For urban households, adjustment could mean layoffs, higher food prices, school fees, and reduced public services. For producers, currency devaluation and higher crop prices could create opportunities, but these gains were uneven and frequently overwhelmed by rising costs.

Critics called this neocolonialism: formal sovereignty combined with economic relationships that allowed outside institutions, corporations, and creditor governments to influence domestic policy.

The term should not become an all-purpose explanation that absolves African governments of corruption, repression, or disastrous choices. African leaders and political elites possess agency, including the agency to do harm.

The useful question is not whether every bad outcome was caused abroad. It is where decision-making power sits, who receives the benefits, and who absorbs the risks.

A government may be legally sovereign while depending on creditors for access to currency. A mine may be physically located in Zambia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo while investment decisions are made in London, Toronto, Beijing, or New York. A commodity may leave Africa with little processing and return as an expensive manufactured product.

The empire may have lowered its flag. The extraction route can remain remarkably familiar.

No Single Answer

Who, then, are Africans south of the Sahara?

They are not one people, one race, one language community, one religion, or one historical experience. They include descendants of farmers, merchants, herders, scholars, miners, rulers, enslaved people, resisters, migrants, and city builders. They live in megacities, market towns, pastoral regions, mining settlements, refugee camps, wealthy suburbs, old urban quarters, and villages tied to the world through phones and remittances.

They inherited borders they did not draw and cities they were once forbidden to occupy. They also inherited much older worlds that colonial accounts attempted to erase.

The most important lesson is not that Africa had civilizations before Europe arrived, although it did. It is that Africans never stopped making history. Not during the slave trade. Not under colonial rule. Not during structural adjustment. Not now.

Africa is not trapped in its inheritance.

It is arguing with it, building on it, escaping parts of it, and occasionally turning a small house bright pink simply to announce that life has not waited for the planner’s permission.

References

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Pew Research Center. (2025, June 9). Religion in sub-Saharan Africa. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/religion-in-sub-saharan-africa/

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UNESCO. (2025, February 27). UNESCO and the promotion of languages in Africa: Cultural diversity and multilingualism. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-and-promotion-languages-africa-cultural-diversity-and-multilingualism

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.-a). Old Towns of Djenné. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/116/

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.-b). Great Zimbabwe National Monument. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/364/

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