The Trans Saharan Trade Routes - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Adventurously sailing the Indian Ocean in the early s CE, Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese naval officer, was confident that he was helping to forge a new, enduring era of Portuguese dominance. In the conflict that followed, the Portuguese plundered the Swahili city-states, burning buildings and enslaving African men and women.

However, less than years later, Portuguese influences were noticeably absent in most of East Africa and their power in the Indian Ocean was fading The Trans Saharan Trade Routes. Barbosa, himself, had traveled with his brother-in-law, Ferdinand Magellan, and met an untimely end in his early 40s in the Philippines. Writing about the coast of East Africa, Barbosa paid little heed to the hundreds of years of Swahili history that preceded his visit. Therefore, his narrative gives us minimal information about Swahili civilization. Since information readily available in the U. In addition to associating Africa with extreme hardships, a plethora of western-made TV shows Routez on wildlife and the rainforests. One of the main points glossed over by these popular images is that the African continent is large and diverse. Africa is the second largest continent in the world.

Today, it has over 50 inde-pendent countries. You can also find just about every imaginable environment, from savannahs, rainforests, and deserts, to glaciers and snow-capped mountains in Africa. Historically, Africans faced significant environmental challenges that Trns population growth. There are exceptions, but overall, African soils are poor and rainfall has been unpredict-able.

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Soils are comparatively unfertile, due in part to the geologic age of the continent. Also, the more temperate climates in a number of regions slows the decomposition of organic materials in the soil, meaning that the soil in many regions has few minerals and nutrients.

The areas that are exceptions, such as the highlands of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Burundi, Tarde seen much higher population concentrations. Rainfall also tends to be concentrated in just two or three months a year, while disease has been yet another challenge. Click the past 5, years of African history, malaria, yellow fever, and trypanoso-miasis also known as sleeping sickness have made the biggest impacts on population growth and settlement patterns.

Even today, all three diseases affect the continent.

Both malaria and yellow fever are spread to people by mosquitos. According to the World Health Organization WHOdespite preventative measures and great efforts to extend the availability of treatments, malaria was responsible for almostdeaths in Children in Africa link for most of the fatalities, and the WHO estimates that currently one African child dies from malaria every minute of every day. It causes symptoms like headaches, fever, and chills.

https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/essay/essay-writing-format-cbse-class-12/caterpillar-analysis.php Even though it does not usually constitute a medical emergency for adults, malaria does decrease productivity and has significant treatment costs. Horses and many breeds of cattle are especially susceptible to trypranosomiasis, which is spread by the tsetse fly and can lead to either chronic illness, characterized by weight loss, fever, anemia, cardiac lesions, The Trans Saharan Trade Routes other symptoms in animals, or to a more immediate death. Until the past fifty years or so, in many parts of the continent, these noteworthy challenges with continue reading, alongside the low fertility of the soils and the unpredictable rainfalls, were significant constraints on human pop-ulation growth.

Environmental challenges and disease also affected settlement patterns as, for example, people avoided more Tfans and wetter areas because of the prevalence of mosquitoes. Additionally, Africans continuously adapted their herding and farming techniques to overcome these challenges. Scholars of Africa, particulary those working in Tranns last two generations, have employed all sorts of methods to describe the ancient African past.

9.7.2 The Mali Empire

They have necessarily been on the forefront of methodological innovation because of the limited availability of written primary sources, meaning sources recorded by ancient Africans themselves. Therefore, scholars have turned to a wide range of materials to complement the available written records. Before about CE, many African societies kept their records orally, as opposed to in written form. These societies have rich, complex histories that The Trans Saharan Trade Routes past historians, relying primarily on written records, ignored when they studied the African continent. The professionalization of the study of history in the West meaning primarily in Europe and the United Stateswhich entailed the transition from writing about the past out of personal interest to writing about the past as a profession with established methodologies, mainly occurred in the s.]