The virtual tour of Africa III

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 23:17:32 GMT

Chad
Chad would probably have seemed grimmer if I hadn't just been finding out about the Central African Republic. It still seemed pretty grim. Another country with an Islamic / Arabic north, a Christian south and a history of slave-trading from south to north. The desert section gives it the dubious title of the 'Dead Heart of Africa' though I'm not sure it's really any deader than Sudan.

Chad does at least have oil, and isn't under the Russian thumb, though there are French and US thumbs in the pie instead. I had heard of Lake Chad. I had not heard that Lake Chad had dried up enough that it's now less one lake than a bunch of smaller lakes and swampland.

It was interesting to discover there's a Roman fort on Lake Chad, built by an expeditionary force that crossed the Sahara, and also to find out a bit about the Chad predecessor state, the Kanem–Bornu Empire, which covered parts of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Libya and Chad. More about that when we look at Nigeria tomorrow, I hope.

Nigeria
Nigeria, though it has had a number of recent coups and also the nightmare of the Biafra war in its recent past, felt like a pleasant haven to visit after the Central African Republic and Chad.

It's got a southern/christian/coastal section, occupied by the Igbo and the and a northern/desert/islamic one occupied mostly by the Hausa people. The two bits and 3+ peoples were sort of welded together into first a colony and then a country by the British in the 20th century. Super high population, and fortunately, also a strong economy to support it. If I lived in Chad I think I'd want to move to Nigeria, even if it does have a corruption problem.

I'd like to know more about the Nok culture (1,500 BC to AD 200ish) makers of rather gorgeous terracotta figures and very early workers of iron. I'd also like to know a bit more about the African end of the transatlantic slave trade, which (from my quick research) seemed to start out from the Nigerian coast, with a lot of Igbo people being sold by the Oyo empire of the Yoruba people.

Also must look up more about the ancient Yoruba holy city of Ile-Ife, its king the Oòni, and its 401 deities. Apparently the Yoruba are a super-urban people.

Niger
Another enormous desert country that was for a while a French colony, focussed on trade routes across the Sahara. I had not realised just how much of Africa was French colonies! I found out that although this is an Islamic country, West African Islam is rather different to standard Arabic Sunni Islam. For example, men are traditionally veiled, women are not.

I wrote more about Niger but then I accidentally back-clicked and lost it all. Oh well. Think I wanted to know more about Askia the Great and the Songhai Empire.

Libya
A desert country with a really strong Islamic culture, even though the majority of the population are Berbers (a name derived from the same root as Barbarian, and Barbary pirates). They call themselves Amazigh, meaning free/noble man.

Amazigh have always lived in the deserts and the blue-clad Tuareg I saw in videos of Niger are part of this people. They have their own flavour of Islam that is strongly West African in flavour, (though some of them are Jewish). Suppressed by the Ottomans (who seem to be everywhere in Africa before about 1800).

Libya is yet another French ex-colony, and the French, apparently thought the Amazigh were more 'European' than the Arabs and favored them. When Gaddafi took control in 1969, he agreed with the French but considered this was a Bad Thing, and oppressed the Amazigh, banning their Tifenagh script and language and imposing forced Islamicisation and restricting women's rights which were traditionally much free-er under Amazigh traditions. They are/were great weavers, making complex rugs to encode histories with the Tifenagh.

Libya is now slowly recovering from the revolution of 2011 and the civil war but is still very closed and a high-security country. I learned that internal tourism is becoming a thing again, and that in Libya, petrol is cheaper than water and so the black market exports a lot of petrol.

comments

bunn

The virtual tour of Africa III