Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa was not a paradise where all humans sat together around the campfire in their loincloths singing ‘Kumbaya’ in one huge – but obviously primitive – black kingdom covering the entire continent and littered with quaint looking mud huts, any more than all of Europe or Asia was one big happy family. Africa had and has ethnic, cultural, class and imperial rivalries that every scholar of the period acknowledges are the very divisions that colonisers and slave traders played on.
