Historiographical Context. Western-influenced scholars often divide West African history into "precolonial," "colonial," and "postcolonial" periods. Others divide it into "traditional" and "modern" eras demarcated by the arrival of western Europeans,...

The "Bright Age." While Europe was going through the Dark Ages and Middle Ages and then entering its Renaissance, West Africa was in its "Bright Age." The thriving kingdom of Ghana, founded near the Senegal and Niger Rivers, reached its peak in the...

Studying Family Structure. The study of the family from an historically informed perspective is a challenging exercise. Indeed, concepts of the social unit known as the family have varied widely from time to time and place to place. Reconstructing...

Independent and Interdependent. The circumstances that affected the state of science, technology, and health before and during the period 500 to 1590 C.E. in West Africa include both independent and interdependent developments of technical and...

Contemporary Icons. Popularized by Africanists and African historians since the 1960s as a sequential triad of trade-based empires, ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhai have become icons of African history and culture. Although much of what has been written...

West African History. The recorded history of West Africa is largely devoted to powerful empires and the deeds of their rulers. Little of the information in these sources is directly related to the everyday lives and aspirations of the common men and...

Geographical Challenges. To maintain itself and benefit its constituency, a successful state system has to overcome challenges from its natural geography over a sustained period of time. An understanding of the character and strength of a state system...

Era of Australopithecus, the first...

Generalization about West Africa is made difficult by the size (roughly 3,000 miles west to east, and half that north to south) and diversity of the region, as well as by the problematic character of the terms available to describe it, and the...

West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries distributed over an area of approximately 5 million square...