Text|Star Sweep History said
Editor|Star RangeHistory said
Africa is the second largest continent in the world, covering an area of about 30.23 million square kilometers. In 1982, the continent's population was 499 million, accounting for about 10.9 per cent of the world's total population of 4,586 million. The historical African population has undergone extremely tortuous development due to the socio-economic conditions of different historical periods.
Population of Africa before the sixteenth century
In ancient times, the indigenous people living on the African continent mainly included the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, the pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Negro of West Africa. About seven or eight thousand years ago, the Caucasian race entered North and Northeast Africa from southwest Asia through the Suez and Bab el-Mandeb Straits.
The Mongols crossed the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Madagascar. Over the course of its long history, many different sub-races have been spawned due to the constant contact, mixing and integration of the above major races.
More than 6,000 years ago, animal husbandry and agriculture appeared in North and Northeast Africa, giving birth to ancient Egyptian civilization, which was the most populous region in Africa at that time, and together with southern Europe, southwest Asia, South Asia and East Asia, formed the only densely populated belt on the earth at that time. The vast area south of the Sahara is sparsely populated.
Later, with the gradual strengthening of interaction among the peoples of Africa and the continuous southward migration of the population, the area south of Suhara gradually developed and the population increased day by day.
In the long years that followed, Africa's population grew as productivity grew. However, in the more than a thousand years before the sixteenth century, the population development situation of the two regions bordered by the Sahara Desert was also very different due to the differences in the socio-political environment of the northern and southern regions.
North Africa is often in turmoil due to repeated attacks from powerful military and political forces in Eurasia. From the fourth century BC to the 14th century AD, it was conquered by the Roman Empire, the Arabs and the Crusaders, especially in the mid-14th century, when the plague spread to North Africa.
As a result, the entire North African region has suffered severe economic damage and lost a large number of people. Since the 11th century AD, the population of North Africa has been in continuous decline. According to UN estimates.
The ratio of North Africa's population to sub-Saharan Africa fell from 1:2 in 1000 AD to 1:3 in 1200, and then to 1:4 in the early fifteenth century. Among them, Egypt's population plummeted from more than 20 million in 1000 AD to about 4 million in 1500.
During the same period, many large and small kingdoms and empires sprang up in the vast area of sub-Saharan Africa. In the heart of these kingdoms or empires, populous and economically prosperous commercial towns developed.
Early Europeans believed that some cities were comparable in size and prosperity to medieval Milan and Florence.
There were many reasons for the rapid population growth of sub-Saharan Africa during this period, in addition to social stability, which had a lot to do with the widespread use of iron tools.
By the fifteenth century, the continent was still in the Stone Age, with the exception of the Pygmies living in the equatorial jungles and the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert.
The rest of the peoples successively completed the transition to the Iron Age. The use of iron tools greatly enhanced the ability of African peoples to use and transform nature. Most of the area changed from a primitive hunter-hunting socio-economic form to a socio-economic form dominated by agriculture and animal husbandry.
Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, large areas of wasteland have been reclaimed, the scope of agricultural and animal husbandry production activities has expanded rapidly, and the sources of material means of subsistence have become increasingly abundant, creating the necessary conditions for rapid population growth. According to United Nations estimates, by the eve of the sixteenth century, the entire African continent had reached about 60 million, accounting for about 14% of the world's total population at that time.
A period of rapid population growth
There were two main reasons for the rapid population growth in Africa during this period: first, around the sixteenth century, irrigated agriculture appeared in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, such as present-day Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
The capacity of land to support the population has been further improved. Second, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Africa introduced new varieties of food crops such as maize and cassava with strong adaptability and high yields from the New World, which significantly improved the quantity and quality of food for the African people. All this has stimulated the proliferation of the African population.
It is thought that the continuous advance of the Bantu across the Zambezi, Sabi and Limpopo rivers into southern Africa in the second half of the sixteenth century, as well as the great geographical expansion of the Igbo people in West Africa in the early seventeenth century, are thought to have been caused by population pressures.
It should be noted here that although Western colonists set foot on the African continent as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, in the first century or so, they were mainly obsessed with African gold and ivory, and the slave trade was still in a secondary position, so the number of slaves exported during this period was very small and had little impact on African population development.
During this period, North Africa was followed by plague epidemics and military conquests by the Turks, and the population was still declining. However, because the population of this region does not account for a large proportion of the total population of Africa, the population growth of Africa during this period is generally relatively fast.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, Africa's population had reached 100 million, accounting for about 18 per cent of the world's population, second only to Asia among continents. In this regard, foreign opinions are relatively unanimous.
A period of stagnant population growth
From the middle of the seventeenth century, population growth in other parts of the world began to accelerate, while Africa's history reached its peak in the slave trade. There are three main international opinions on the development of Africa's population during this period.
Although there are still differences in international views on Africa's population development during this period, they are basically the same, and it is recognized that the daily growth rate of Africans has been stagnant or declining during these 200 years.
The root cause of this result was the criminal slave trade and the resulting intensifying tribal wars. The slave trade in Africa began with the arrival of the first slaves in Lisbon in 1441 and lasted more than four hundred years between the actual cessation of the slave trade in Africa.
The entire black Africa, which covers about one third of the continent's land area and more than three-quarters of its population, has been drawn into this unprecedented catastrophe, particularly in West Africa. The slave traders were extremely cruel in their hunting for slaves, capturing young and middle-aged people wherever they went, and killing the rest, the old, young, sick and disabled.
At that time, many of Africa's weak tribes were extinct or endangered. At the same time, the slave trade greatly exacerbated conflicts between African tribes. Those powerful countries and tribes, relying on their military strength, constantly launched attacks against weak countries and tribes.
Relying on the plundering of slaves and other spoils of war to sustain their economic livelihood led to a perpetual war in the region, severely curbing population growth. How many people did Africa lose as a result of the slave trade? Estimates vary widely, from a low of 8 million to a high of 200 million.
According to most scholars, the number of live slaves exported from Africa to the Americas is between 15 million and 20 million. In fact, the number of slaves exported purely accounted for only a small fraction of the total population lost, and the number of people tortured to death during transportation and killed in the hunt was actually much higher. If you also consider that the slaves exported are almost all young and middle-aged.
The total number of indirect population losses due to a serious imbalance in the gender and age composition of the population is staggering. Du Bois, a well-known black scholar, believes that the total loss of the African population during the slave trade period is more than 100 million, which makes some sense.
The period of population growth resumes
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the slave trade had ceased as a historical stage in Africa, with the exception of a small number of slave trade along the East African coast. But as capitalism developed to the imperialist stage, Western countries began to carry out a full-scale invasion and partition of Africa.
The colonial conquest of Africa by the imperialist powers and the outbreak of the First World War had a negative impact on the development of the African population, but on the whole, the African population showed a trend of recovery during this period. However, population development has been uneven across regions: North and Southern Africa has seen rapid population growth, while other regions are recovering slowly or continuing to decline.
Because North Africa is separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it accepted the achievements of modern medical science early and achieved remarkable results in disease prevention and control.
Unaffected by the slave trade, population growth revived from the beginning of the nineteenth century after a long and sustained decline in the population.
The total population soared from 11 million in 1800 to 27 million in 1900, accounting for 20.3% of the total African population from 9.4% in 1750. Among them, Egypt's population growth rate is particularly impressive. Since the second half of the 19th century, perennial irrigation techniques have been introduced.
With the entry of high-quality staple cotton into world markets and the opening of the Suez Canal, Egypt's economy flourished like never before, with its population more than tripling in a century from about 3 million in 1800 to 10 million in 1900.
Central Africa, located between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade routes, was attacked by slave hunters from both the East and the West, and the slave trade lasted the longest.
In addition, the population of this area is relatively sparse; After such a long period of catastrophe, the vitality was exhausted, and until the beginning of this century, population growth remained stagnant, and the population of Zaire continued to decline.
East Africa is the only region that experienced a general decline in population during this period. The main reasons are: first, the slave trade ended at the latest, and did not stop completely until the seventies of the nineteenth century; Second, the brutal suppression of the East African people in their struggle against colonial rule by the imperialist powers.
For example, in response to the famous Maji Maji uprising launched by the people of Tanganyika in 1905, the German executioner von Trota, whose hands were stained with the blood of the Chinese Boxers, carried out a barbaric scorched earth policy, which reduced the entire southern part of German East Africa to ruins, killing an estimated 500,000 people; Thirdly, serious natural disasters.
During this period, East Africa was marked by frequent natural disasters, including three or four major natural disasters. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was an outbreak of rinderpest in the region, killing more than 90% of cattle, killing hundreds of thousands of herders; Then came a severe drought.
Coupled with the smallpox epidemic, the entire East African region was red, and Kenya and Tanganyika alone died more than 300,000 and 700,000 respectively, accounting for about one-tenth and one-sixth of the total population of the two countries at that time.
Over the course of two decades, Uganda alone has killed 200,000 people, about one-tenth of the country's population. As a result, populations in countries such as Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda are still generally declining. For example, the population of Kenya fell from about 4 million in 1902 to about 3 million in 1911.
epilogue
The nature of population growth in southern African countries differs from that in northern Africa, mainly due to mechanical growth. For example, the influx of people from East Africa into Malawi and Zambia has led to dramatic population increases in both countries, but it is still relatively low in terms of natural population growth rates. The situation is more prominent in South Africa. Since diamonds and gold were discovered here in the mid-sixties and mid-eighties of the nineteenth century,
Europeans flocked to the population in large numbers, and in the second half of the nineteenth century alone, the number of Europeans moving to South Africa increased by 500,000. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the colonial authorities recruited a group of road builders and plantation indentured workers from India into South Africa, most of whom later stayed for long periods of time.
bibliography
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(2) [Su] A. I. Gozulov: World Census, Commercial Press;
(3) [Su] T. M。。 Moiseva: An Overview of the Economic Geography of the Republic of South Africa, Henan People's Publishing House, 1976;