A central region of the African continent that has trade relations with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade.
In the most restricted geographical sense, Central or Equatorial Africa comprises the area drained by the Congo River system. In a broader definition, the southern border of the region may be drawn along the latitude of Victoria Falls on the Upper Zambezi, with the East African Rift System as the eastern border, and a northern limit may well be extended into the savanna zone beyond the Ubangi plateau. This takes into account both boundaries of precolonial states such as the Kingdom of the Kongo, ethnolinguistic blocks such as the Bemba, and southeastern dimensions of patterns of trade as well as European influence.
At present, Angola, the Central African Republic, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Zambia are regarded as Central African states with a total land area of 3.5 million square miles and an estimated combined population of 80 million.
The Bantu migrations of the fifth through tenth centuries C.E. had a profound effect on the region’s history, on the one hand mostly replacing the original Pigmy populations, and bringing about the spread of ironworking and advanced farming technology on the other hand. On the savanna fringes and plateau areas, mixing farming with cattle raising could act as a further catalyst for population growth. The major precolonial polities include Katanga, noted for the earliest distinct metalworking culture, the related Luba and Luanda kingdoms, and Kongo, as well as the states of the Ngbandi, Ndogo, Mbundu, and Lozi. Their expansion followed diverse patterns: a fusion of clans and smaller chiefdoms under a single leader is evidenced in sixteenth-century Luba, a dispersion of dynasties to found Bemba, Kazembe, and other states leaves a Luanda legacy paralleling that of Ife in West Africa, the institution of perpetual kingship allowed for loose combinations, while association with cults, such as the ngola (iron), could also bring about a consolidation of political, economic, and spiritual influence for others.
The kingdom of the BaKongo people was the basis of the largest empire, dating back to the fourteenth century with an earlier core around Malebo Pool, utilizing iron and copper sources as well as a favorable location on a well-navigable section of the Congo River. A southward shift and the transfer of the capital to Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador) was a combined effect of successful military campaigns, as against the Mbundu, driven by a population explosion and a shortage of food supplies, political alliances, as in the case of the Loango and Ngoyo polities, and drawing on influence by trade. This involved the import of food, salt, and textiles in exchange of copper, iron, and later ivory, beeswax, and an increasing number of slaves.
Even as the long-distance oceanic trade could be monopolized by a specific group of merchants, at least until the eighteenth century, east-west overland commerce, however, was conducted in a series of more localized transactions through middleman states and traders operating over a restricted area. It is from the 1850s that we have examples of a change in this pattern: Ovambo traders from southern Angola established connections with the Lama of present-day Zambia, Swahili merchants extended their operations on the Luanda empire’s frontiers, while the king of Nyamwezi is reputed to have sent out his trading caravans from Katanga to the ports of both oceans. The first documented west-east traversing of the region is that of the Angolan Pedro Baptista and A. José from 1802 to 1811, while late nineteenth-century European penetration was largely made possible after the explorations of David Livingstone and László Magyar.
Despite this late date for direct colonization, the opening of relations with Europe from 1482 resulted in important immediate influences, as the example of the Kongo illustrates: men were sent for training and the study of laws and customs in Europe, and Christianity gained a foothold with the baptism of the royal dynasty in 1491. Henrique, the son of King Afonso I, became the first black African bishop. A technology transfer also involved the arrival of craftsmen, a different type of education and literacy to facilitate direct communications with Europe, the recently invented German printing press, as well as metal-working and textile producing techniques. Horses, cattle, and pigs were brought from Europe, while in the latter sixteenth century maize, cassava, tobacco, and manioc were introduced from the Americas, providing higher calorie returns for the same labor invested in cultivating indigenous crops. Cocoa reached West Africa by way of São Tomé. At the same time, Europeans, also including Dutch, French, and British merchants, sought ivory, copper, silver, gold, pepper, and slaves—first exported to gold trading states of the Upper Guinea, then to the American plantation system.
Even though at first the rising volume favored Africans in terms of trade, both in the quantity and assortment of goods received, in the long run mechanisms of slave acquisition fueled wars and political instability, compounded by a drain of population. Kongo overlordship was also challenged in its control of the distribution systems and royal monopolies on the most lucrative branches of trade. The kingdom was further shaken in 1560s by a smallpox epidemic spread from visiting vessels. By the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1655, their operations already extended to Loango in the north and Luanda in the south, and the colony of Angola was founded in 1575. Trading posts and colonial settlements were highly Africanized, however, manifesting in the rise of the Creole dynasties of the Ambaquista, the increasing independence of the Pombeiros, initially Portuguese agents, as well as the adoption of African military, political, and commercial strategy.
With the active participation of indigenous and Euro-African middlemen, the region’s external trade in slaves reached its peaks in the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Central Africa was severely affected by it, contributing both to the approximately 12 million people shipped across the Atlantic between the late fifteenth and late nineteenth centuries, and the 10 million slaves exported through the trans-Saharan and Red Sea routes to the Muslim world over eleven centuries. Additional African destinations may also be mentioned, however, such as plantations of cloves on the Swahili coast, or islands of the Indian Ocean, while long-distance trade in ivory and other goods in itself mobilized a considerable number of people as porters and boatmen. On the African supply end, the long-distance slave trade preferred the participation of large-scale entities, such as a state or empire, and while it is not tenable to present the rise of precolonial African empires as a result of wars for slaves, organized participation by states contributed to efficiency while it also brought about important social and economic transformations in their structures.
The rise of informal European empires was another significant tendency. Between 1839 and 1842, the kings of both banks of the Gabon accepted a French protectorate, and after 1840, mission stations proliferated again. The importance of men on the spot continued into the period of formal colonial empire building. Leopold II of Belgium hired the American journalist Henry M. Stanley to enter into treaties with local rulers of the Congo basin on his behalf, and Cecil Rhodes championed the British scheme of a north-south axis of African territories through largely private enterprises, resulting in the creation of North and South Rhodesia. The Berlin Conference on the Congo convened by Otto von Bismarck in 1884–1885 proved to be a significant event in the partition of Africa by setting a widely followed precedent for claims and occupation. The era saw transformations not only in status, but also in trade patterns: at first, palm oil and rubber appeared as major export items along with copper, and they were followed by a new emphasis on forestry, the cultivation of coffee, tea, and cotton. The first half of the twentieth century saw a spectacular rise in the value of Central Africa’s external trade, up to 500 percent. This involved the discovery of new resources, such as diamonds in Angola in 1912, and economic development programs for the wartime mobilization of resources, even though raw materials continued to be pro cessed mostly outside the region. A new wave of European settlement and intervention was also discernible as a response to political changes at home, as illustrated by the 1926 military coup of Antonio Salazar in Portugal that forced a switch to cotton cultivation from foodstuffs in Central African colonies. During World War II, the Allies drew especially heavily on Congo’s mineral resources for arms manufacturing, and even the atomic bombs deployed against Japan contained uranium from Katanga Province. The United States subsequently became one of the main investors in the exploitation of new strategic minerals: gold, silver, diamond, cobalt, cadmium, thorium, tantalum, niobium, europium, uranium, and the recently valued coltan, which is essential for cell phone and airplane manufacturing and the military industry in general.
With the decline in demand, the main period of Central African decolonization in the early 1970s was also the end of a trend that favored producers of primary commodities. The erosion of prices could be complemented by the exploration of new resources such as oil, while other states might be ruined exactly because of their dependence on fuel imports. Exceptional mineral resources could also carry temptations of different sorts. At the end of the Mobutu era, 138 uranium bars disappeared from American-built nuclear reactors. The Congo’s civil war also provides an example of an incursion by foreign troops in order to take control of key resources.
Dilemmas of development and modernization remain unresolved into the twenty-first century. Ambitious programs overcommitted most states; urban emphases created uneven development, often extracting from overtaxed and regulated rural resources. Civil wars, ecological crises, and demographic problems continue to plague the region, including male migration to the detriment of women, children, and elderly populations, and the toll of epidemics such as AIDS. Ultimately, in the discourse on the plight of Africa, a dominant debate remains concerning whether this scenario is the result of external exploitation, dependency, or intervention associated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, or the result of African postindependence mismanagement and corruption among the elites.
Gábor Berczeli
See also: Atlantic Trade; Bantu Migrations; Cowries; European-African Trade; Exploration and Trade; Ivory; Portugal; Slavery; Triangle Trade.
Birmingham, David, and Phyllis Martin, eds. History of Central Africa. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1997.
Curtin, Philip D., Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina. African History from Earliest Times to Independence. New York: Longman, 1996.
Wheeler, Douglas, and Rene Pelissier. Angola. London: Pall Mall, 1971.