More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Roman sources refer to as the Afri. Africa, ‘the land of the Afri’, was originally applied in a strictly limited sense to the Roman province created after the conquest of Carthage in 146 BC.
Arab conquest of North Africa in the 7th century AD, the same coastal region became known, in Arabic, as ‘Ifriqiya’.
Yet it was the Atlantic slave trade, which between the 16th and the 19th centuries involved the forced migration of some 12 million Africans to the Americas, that forged an explicit link in European minds between racial inferiority, enslavement, and Africa. We will return to slavery and the slave trade in Chapter 4. The point to be noted here is that the modern idea of Africa emerged, in many ways, from the dehumanizing crucible of Atlantic slavery.
While such visual impressions are imprecise, the scientific evidence shows that there is actually as much genetic variation within African populations than there is between Africans and Europeans.
To begin with, Africans speak a dizzying variety of languages. Due to the subtle differences between languages and dialects, the exact number is debatable, but a figure in the region of 1,500 is generally agreed upon by linguists.
