Africa

The relations the Carolingians might have had with Africa mainly lied in those they had with the "Kings of the Africans' as mentioned by the monk of St. Gall, or an earlier time with northern African refugees when the Arabs invaded there. It's likely too that due to trade interactions between Morocco, Tunisia and sub-Saharan Africa, or between the Middle East and eastern Africa, data about those regions might have been reported during contacts between the Carolingian, the Arabic Spain, Persia, or the Byzantine Empire. No mention however is found of that in any of the Carolingian sources

Early Beginnings and General Frame

As the Sahara desert had become a green fertile domain between 10,500 and 5000 BC, the desert became dry again leading to peoples move from the Sahara to the upper-Egypt. People with a parietal civilization of rock shelters and huts, the symbolic representation of such huts turned into the Egyptian mastabahs and eventually the pyramids. The persistent rains meanwhile in Central and Eastern Africa lessened, leading to dry conditions in Eastern Africa. The Neolithic Revolution, in Africa, mostly began with cattle domestication, along hunter-gathering cultures as the first cases of domestication of plants occurred in the semi-arid, Sahel region about 5000 BC, with the sorghum and the African rice. A drier pace in the Sahara, about 4000 BC, eventually led peoples there to move to West Africa, triggering, about 3000 BC, a wave of independent agricultural revolutions in the region and in Ethiopia, with the domestication of plants, and the importation of already domesticated ones and cattle. As a more warrior-like societies -akin to the Beaker culture in Europe- developed, about 2300 B.C., in western North Africa, people from the Great Lakes Region moved into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, becoming there the proto-Canaanites, the far ancestors to Phoenecians. Ironworking got into Northern Africa and Sahara by the 1st millenium B.C. It got in western Africa possibly by 500 B.C., maybe brought there by the people exploring by boat from Carthage. Metalworking spread, maybe through trade routes. The Garamantes, the likely ancestors to the Tuareg are to be found from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D as their decline was likely due to they having exhausted the available water in the desert. The Bantu, on the other hand, spread from Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria moved East and southeast during the 2nd millenium B.C. likely due to the movement of people out of the Sahara for cause of dryness, displacing the earlier people there. Their move kept on until 1000 A.D. when they reached South Africa and Zimbabwe, passing first to the rainforests (about 2000 B.C.), then more South and East (about 0). The last step of them, fromto Zambia (during the 1st millenium down to 1000 A.D.), was likely due to agricultural techniques and plants imported from the southeastern Asia, through Madagascar into Zambia. The Koishan people were the former inhabitants of the part of Africa where the Bantu moved in. The Koishan are the famed click consonants peoples which today are concentrated near the Kalahari and some pockets in Tanzania. Ethiopia, as far as it is concerned, seems an original culture, with mostly plants adapted to the highlands of the country and an unrelated language

The Various Civilizations in Africa During the Carolingian Times

Pre-colonial Africa eventually came to be populated by maybe as many as 10,000 different states, from small family groups of hunter-gatherers to family clan groupings, heavily-structured clan groups like in the Horn of Africa or the Sahelian Kingdoms, and to large autonomous city-states such as the Swahili coastal trading towns and large empire like the Sahelian ones. To get some general glimpse of what civilizations were dwelling on the continent at the Carolingian times, it's a good idea to part it into several regions, matching some realities

• North Africa: it's that part of Africa North of the Sahara. The region first saw the Egyptian civilization, East (from about 3300 B.C. until about the Christian era) as the coasts and lands further West were the lands of the Berbers, who were colonized by successive powers like the Phenicians or the Romans. By the time of the Carolingian rule, all that part of Africa had been submitted to the Islamic conquerors, who, through successive waves, conquered Egypt, then the rest of North Africa on their route to Spain
• West Africa: the people there had migrated from dessicating Sahara into the Sahel and the tropical forests there. The great Sahara desert long remained a barrier, isolating the region. About 400 B.C., contact -including with Carthage- eventually had managed to be made with the Mediterranean world, as the Berbers of the Sahara were leading a trade of gold. Libya has been recently found to harbour numerous fortifierd farms and villages with castle-like structures dating back to between 1 to 500 A.D. The civilization of the Garamantes thus likely was far more advanced and historically important than previously thought. Which occurred despite the inhospitable weather of the Sahara. The view that that people was barbaric nomads and troublemakers came from Roman accounts as they owned too a written language and advanced technologies. The Garamantes likely pioneered oases and trans-Saharan routes. The major step in the region was the establishment of the large-scale trans-Saharan trade routes which linked, on a major scale that time, the Mediterranean and West Africa. This large scale trade was made possible due to two factors. First the importation there of the camels, those animals able to endure the lack of food or water over long durations of time. This occurred in the 3rd century and the Berbers used them. Second, the arrival of Islam in West Africa. It's that, with the conversion of the region in the 7th and 8th centuries, which had the trans-Saharan routes develop! Two routes ran accross the vast desert, with one from Morocco to the Niger Bend, the other from Tunisia to the the Lake Chad area, as Muslim merchants lead their caravanes along. Such roads were made possible by a succession of oases along, which were not found in other regions of the Sahara. A route which linked the Niger Bend to Egypt was eventually abandoned in the 10th century, as too dangerous. West Africa exported gold, cotton cloth, metal ornaments or leather goods and it imported copper, horses, salt, textiles and beads. Slaves were added to the trade later only, by the 10th century only. This opening of the region to the islamic trade, gave birth to centralized states, beginning with the Ghana Empire! It was founded in the 8th century by the Soninke, a people living at the crossroads of the trade, South of Mauritania, as they called their empire 'Wagadou' -'Ghana' meaning 'Warrior King', the title of the ruler. The empire swiftly expanded after 800 A.D. coming to dominate the whole western Sudan. The Ghana -which was able to field as much as 200,000 soldiers- soon however entered into conflict with Muslim tribes of the North, as the empire fell under the 'jihad' of the Moroccan, Berber Almoravids in 1052
• Nigeria, Gulf of Guinea, and Lake Chad: an additional chapter may be dedicated to some more people or powers which existed in this region. The Kanem-Bornu Empire was known to the Arabs since the 9th century A.D. It began northeast of Lake Chad as it was the southern end of a trans-Saharan route between Tripoli and Lake Chad. It was progressively islamized. The Yorubas, by 900 AD, established themselves like the dominant power in central and southwest Nigeria, Benin and Togo, as complex states already existed there. The Hausas moved West from Nubia and, between 500 and 700 A.D., they established, in northern and central Nigeria and eastern Niger a number of strong states. They were islamized in the 11th century. The Nok civilization is an ill-known civilization which existed in Nigeria between 1000 B.C and 1000 A.D. It disappeared likely due to an epidemics or to famine
• Ethiopia: Ethiopia, like said, was an independent and original culture. It was named 'Punt,' South of Nubia, by the Egyptians, as they would have reached there as soon as by 1,500 B.C. Their ships were leaving from June to September to benefit from the favorable, northwestern winds and were back during fall, when winds were blowing from the southwest. Egyptians were trading there incense trees, fragrant resin or wild game. Egyptian merchants were trading there and that the region might have been the early homeland of ancient Egyptians. A kingdom appeared in 800 B.C., having close relations with the Yemenite Sabaean kingdom. The region was related too to the story of Queen of Saba. That transitioned then to the Kingdom of Aksum by the 1st century B.C., one of the largest powers of that time as Christianity was introduced by 330 as the kingdom might have retained some form of control over the neighbouring Yemen. Monasticism -which gave the Ethiopian Christianity its definitive adhesion to the Byzantine Monophysite haeresy, akin to the Coptic religion- came to develop by the close of the 5th century as it became a power of sort. The Kingdom of Aksum came to its apogee about 525, controling a vast trade as far as India and Ceylan and in good and constant terms with the Byzantine Empire. 9 saints then came from Syria and Byzantium under king Gebre Meskel, the successor to famed king Kaleb. The end of the Aksumite kingdom is shrouded in mystery, maybe due to ecological problems, to an epidemics, or the shift of the trade roads, as the capital was moved from Axum to a still-unknown place
• An additional rubrics to Ethiopia may be added about Nubia. That region, South of Egypt, mostly was servient to that country and the trade route to tropical Africa, as after the end of the Egyptian world, it became an independent kingdom -the one of Kush, which was extant between 800 B.C. and the 4th century A.D. and which traded with Rome through the Nile river valley. They perpetuated there the worship of Osiris and Isis and being fond of pyramids, which one found in cemeteries. That Kushite kingdom declined above all due to that the trade routes halted to use the Nile valley as Rome's decline also accentuated that decadence of trade. The region eventually was conquered by the Noba people as it turned into small kingdoms, which were christianized from Egypt -about between the 4th and 6th centuries- as one of them, the Makuria Kingdom becoming dominant by the 7th century, being strong enough to avoid the Muslim conquest once the Arabs having taken Egypt. A treaty eventually warranted coexistence and trade during 600 years, as the merchants eventually brought Islam, which gradually supplanted Christianity. Of interest too is that the Rwenzori Mounts, in the current Republic of Congo, are often considered like being the 'Moon Mountains' which were evoked by Ptolemy like the Nile' source. The Virunga Mountains, as far as they are concerned, were the 'mountains of spirits' to ancient Egyptians
• the Bantu zone of expansion: like said before, the Bantus, by the Carolingian empire, were in the end of their last move southeast, as they were to end to move, by 1000 A.D., once arrived in southern Africa. That last moved started from Zambia, where they had found agricultural techniques and plants important from the southeastern Asia, through Madagascar. By 500 A.D., the Bantus were in the KwaZulu-Natal province, for example. Their organization remained mainly tribal and clanic as some groups -the ancestors of the Nguni- settled near the coast, others -the Sotho-Tswana- in the high plateau of the Highveld, as others still settled in the northeastern areas of today's South Africa. The Swahili people, which are located along the eastern coast of Africa, from Somalia to Mozambique, are too of a Bantu descent, as they entered important interactions with Muslim merchants beginning in the late 7th and early 8th century. They became a powerful culture by 1100 A.D. only. It has to be noted that Muslim merchants controled the sea trade routes of Eastern Africa by the 9th century, as the slave trade towards the Middle East and India began then. It's the ancient Egyptians and Phoenecians which had explored those coasts before and trade there as people of the Yemen were their successors