Introduction

This chapter focuses on the various societies in sub-Saharan Africa, which experienced European influence in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. It discusses the responses to foreign intrusion in those areas.

European impact on sub-Saharan African tribal societies was dramatically disruptive. The trans-Atlantic slave trade exploited the divisions between tribes, whose conflicts ensured a steady supply of captives for the plantations of the New World. The colonization by Europeans of the Cape of Good Hope caused the disintegration of the native societies there.

None of the societies described in this chapter, which ends with the middle decade of the nineteenth century, had yet experienced the full challenge of Europe, which was the challenge to change and modernize in accordance with the European scientific and capitalistic experience. In the subsequent years of the nineteenth century, as will be seen in the later chapters, each of these traditional societies would again have to respond just as they had in the initial encounters described here. As in the first confrontation, the Europeans would set the agenda, literally dividing up the continent for their own purposes.