However, in the time before the Europeans arrived in Africa in the late 15th century, the civilizations of Africa had already accomplished many great things. We have a multitude of unbiased accounts about the success and importance of many African empires, kingdoms, and cities. The Aksumite empire was an important international trading center, and was a major stop on many trade routes along the coast of the Red Sea, and inland towards the Nile River and the Sahara Desert. The ancient kingdom of Ghana, at one time in its history, was the controller of the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade, and made sure that the world knew it. The court of the Ghanaian king was described as a luxurious place filled with luxurious people; even the dogs wore collars of gold and silver.
Benin art was produced mainly for the court of the Oba of Benin who was a divine ruler for whom the craftsmen produced a range of ceremonially significant objects. Aside from producing work to promote spiritual and religious devotion, Benin Art includes a range of animal heads, figurines, busts, plaques, and other artifacts. Typical Benin art materials include bronze, brass, clay, ivory, terracotta, and wood. During the reign of the Kingdom of Benin, the characteristics of the artwork changed from thin castings and careful treatment to thick, less defined castings and generalized features due to the important changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been crucial to Benin history because it was a period of Portuguese settlement and artistic grounding.
As well as many other religions/likewise, traditional religions belong to those, whom practicing and celebrating life-cycle rituals play an essential role throughout the one’s life. In Africa; for example, the most popular yet well-known rituals such as, birth, coming of age, marriage, and death in general concepts are reasonably extensive between each other. First, the native African civilizations and their pattern of performing life-cycle practices are frequently initiated as some type of contributions to the familial/ancestral spirits. These offered gifts are a combination of food such as pumpkins, honey, and yams, with different beverages; for example, water or something stronger left at the worship places “… taken out and poured over the ancestral, burial ground” (Sinaiko, xli). Therefore, birth as a first ritual plays an important part, and shortly after birth, it is crucial to name a newborn baby.
The art of drumming and dancing holds an extremely important role in the traditional cultures of Ghana, Africa. The fact that this music and dance is remembered and performed without ever being scribed holds testament to its important role in the Ghanaian culture. Even with the world molding into a place in which modern technology has reached almost everywhere, there are still people willing to appreciate and perform the traditions that have been passed down for many generations. Both drumming and dancing are combined and used for a very wide range of events. The content heavily relies on where in Ghana one is located.
Millions of Africans were shipped by force o America. The slave trade had many disastrous results in Africa societies. The slave trade became an important aspect of a dynamic and complex situation in Africa during the period from the 15th to 17th centuries. Slaves had been treated the same in the Ottoman Empire and Africa. Slaves in Africa and the Ottoman Empire were a part of society and had a chance to promote.
I am a Kamba, a Bantu ethnic group. Although a large part of Kamba culture has become westernized, and in my country the large towns and villages have greatly increased in number, the tradition pattern of family homesteads persists. Other forms of social and political structures such as clans, council of elders, and age-sets now appear to be primarily historical, and we no longer use them. The tribe’s role in Kenyan culture is slowly diminishing but it’s still one of the important facts of social life. In some parts of my country, I believe culture still exists and is taken seriously.
The empire’s manipulation of technology (iron and horses) and ecology (beneficial climatic shifts) emphasizes two of the possible means by which smaller polities may be integrated into the structure of a larger empire. At its height in the fourteenth century C.E. the Mali Empire covered an area greater than 24,000 square kilometers (9000 square miles), and it influenced, through trade connections, an even larger portion of West Africa for several centuries. Early West African States and the Caravan Trade Mali was not the first empire to occupy the large grasslands region of West Africa that straddled the Sahara, the semiarid edge of the desert known as the “Sahel” (literally the “shore” of the great ocean of sand, in Arabic) and the inland delta of the Niger River. According to oral traditions, the first state in that area was known as Ghana by the sixth century C.E.
Many even consider him a pioneer of Afrobeats music. Afrobeats music is known to be a combination of traditional Yoruba music, Jazz, highlife, funk and chanted vocals, fused with percussion and vocal styles, which was very popular in Africa in the 1970’s. Throughout Kuti family there was much leadership and success. His mother Funmilanyo was known as a feminist activist. While his father Oludotun Rasome Kuti was a protestant minister and a school principal.
There are more than 120 different languages and dialects and the nationality is Chadian. Chad was a country that was owned by the Muslim states before the Berlin Conference (French). Later on however, Chad was owned by a different country that was located in Europe. The country that gained power of Chad was France. France wanted to get more wealth and land so they decided that they wanted to gain land in Africa.
With all these factors, they only take place because of the enslavement of Africans. Africans were shipped from many regions of Africa but mostly from those areas along the coast. The Bantu, along the Guinea coast had largest homogenous culture followed by the Mande, thus the culture of African-Americans was influenced the most by the people of these regions. In the colonies the economic demand for slaves and the demographics of the slave population had an enormous effect on the development of Afro-American culture. Never did their exist one Afro-American culture, for each area had a different social, economic, and political reliance on slavery, which characterized a unique slave culture.