Africans colonized Africa for millennia before European arrival
Summary and headline written by AI from the source article. How we work
Bernard Lugan, a historian, argues that Africans colonized each other for thousands of years before European powers began colonizing the continent in the late 19th century.
Lugan contends that European colonization was both late, beginning primarily after the 1830s and expanding rapidly in the final decades of the 19th century, and brief, ending with decolonization movements in the 1960s. He contrasts this with the long history of internal African colonization that preceded it.
Lugan differentiates between earlier European coastal trading posts from the 18th century and true colonization, which he defines as beginning in the late 1800s. He points out that India, Pakistan, and Indonesia also gained independence relatively quickly, with India and Pakistan becoming independent in 1947 and Indonesia in 1949. He further explains that European colonization of Africa differed from colonization in places like the Americas and Australia because Europeans did not replace existing African populations.
In 1939, at the height of European colonial rule, only approximately 100,000 Europeans lived across nine million square kilometers of French colonial Africa, while over 55 million indigenous Africans resided there.
