welcome to chapter 19 states and societies of sub-saharan Africa so the first time we talked about Africa it was really about the Bantu migrations and the Out of Africa theory well this was sort of continue that and expand on that a bit so as I said before the earliest African migrations came from the Bantu group and they had their migrations for a pretty long time and through this they did some things such as spreading agriculture and their herding practices pastoralism and through this they displaced or absorbed many hunting gathering and other fishing groups in Africa around 500 BCE they also included iron metallurgy and facilitated clearing more land for growth so with iron metallurgy and their agricultural techniques they really got some important crops and those are yams sorghum and millet and these three are really important crops that you should associate with Africa and then later on they also got bananas from Asia so the African political organization it was really a kin based society and what this really means is it was a stateless society so there weren't really kingdoms or empires although there were some but for the most part people governed through family and kinship groups for example there was a village council and that was religious the group of the male family heads in the village and then there was a chief of the village which was like the most prominent family head a group of villages often constituted a district and that's basically how villages grew there are also chieftain so over time population growth strain resources an increased conflict between neighboring tribes and so some African communities bound together and organized military forces and then within these military forces that powerful Chiefs overrule overrode the kinship networks and imposed Authority through these new chiefdoms so these were just like bigger villages so then we have the significance of the Islamic kingdoms and empires so as we talked about in the last video or actually it was a couple videos back the Islamic Kingdom really started to grow and through this one example of it was the use of camel so camels were really widely used in the Middle East and they were diffused over to Africa so the camels arrival was really good because they could get in the pace of communication across the Sahara and I also hub Islamic merchants who crossed the desert to establish relations and so one of the first kingdoms that relations were established was were as relations were established with was Ghana and Ghana was this kingdom that was this big commercial site in West Africa and it mainly provided gold which was its most important commodity ivory and slaves for traders from North Africa and these Ghana Kings many of them converted to Islam but they didn't force it on their inhabitants but ultimately this kingdom of Ghana suffered from nomadic raids and a weakening of Kingdom in the early 13th century then there was the second big civilization named the Mali Empire and it had this big capital city at Timbuktu the second important kingdom that many Islam traders encountered was the Mali Empire and it was founded by a Sundiata or the lion Prince and through this building in the Mali Empire the Mali Empire grew through trading it basically controlled intact almost all trade passing through West Africa so most of these kingdoms at the time were located in West Africa and through this they really linked these enormous caravans to North Africa which was more controlled by the Islamic merchants so there was this important Empire of Mali and in this there was also Sundiata as grand nephew who was Mansa Musa so immense and Musa was this really famous ruler he basically made this lavish pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1300s and he brought this huge Caravan so it was like loaded with gold and throughout every stop along the way to Mecca he was just dishing out vast amounts of gold in fact he dished out which gold that the price of gold decreased severely in every place where he traveled so upon return to Mali he was recommitted to the cause of Islam and built mosques and sent students to study with distinguished Islamic scholars in northern Africa and he also been new infrastructures such as Islamic schools to further spread the growth of Islam but ultimately Mali declined as well due to factions and military pressures from neighbors and nomads and that gave way to the Sangay Empire which replaced Mali by the late 15th century on the other half of the continent was the Indian Ocean trade and the Islamic states of East Africa and these are commonly called the Swahili States which is an Arabic term meaning coasters so these states really dominated the East African coast and they spoke Swahili which was like a syncretic Bantu language that had some Arabic words mixed into it and these people they traded with the Muslim merchants pretty heavily and it was really important by the 10th century and in these states of course there were Chiefs like the rest of Africa but there were also many ports that were developed and these became city-states governed by Kings and in the 11th and 12th centuries it really started to be the main center of trading one good example was Kiowa and they exported gold and a final big sort of like city ish on the Swahili coast would Zimbabwe so it was this powerful kingdom of East Africa and eventually the rulers decided to build this magnificent stone complex known as green Zimbabwe and this great zimbabwe was really sort of like this verse well it wasn't the first great city in africa but it was one of the fewer great cities in africa even though a lot of people don't even know if it exists today and these kings organized the flow of gold ivory and slaves so that was a big deal as well so islam was obviously a big deal in east africa and the ruling elite and wealthy merchants most frequently converted and this conversion prompted a close cooperation with the Muslim merchants who traded heavily in the area this conversion also opened the door to political alliances with new Muslim rulers an important person to know is even Battuta he was basically this Moroccan scholar and traveler he was born in Morocco and he first made his pilgrimage and once he made his pilgrimage he really just never left home he just travelled all around the world as far as China and Malacca in Southeast Asia and he really just tried to see how Islam was practiced in the rest of the world and see how other kingdoms treated it but he was this really learning man so many times in different regions like India and the Maldive islands he was appointed the judge or the kadhi of that area for a small time basically we he was like the Marco Polo but not of Italy but of the Arab world and he really gave us insight into other places around this time were like so Africans Society and cultural development as that before they lived in all sorts of hierarchies such as villages kingdoms and pyrrha city-states other villages were the most common and these they really practiced these communal practices so it was communities claimed the rights to land no private property unlike what the Europeans really felt about also there were sex and gender relations so even though Africa was patriarchal and that men dominated the women were still really important for example they took a lot of heavy roles and had influences as merchants and markets and for these women it was also good because Africa was this maitre lineal society that means a person's roots is traced through the mom unlike a patriarchal Pedro lineal society of the rest of the world so that was a plus for a woman there also there was the issue of slavery so most leaves were captives Wars debtors criminals and they worked as agricultural laborers or they were sold in slave markets so the thing we most don't seem to understand is that slavery occurred many hundreds of years before Europeans started plundering them and the 15 1600s they actually had their own slaves as prisoners awards and things like that so slavery was a big deal even before the Europeans came African religions and cultures so generally they believed in lesser gods and spirits so animism and they associated these with the natural features of the world they also believed in ancestor Souls like ancestor veneration much like China and they had many different types of rituals to sort of practice about throughout all this African religion was not theological but rather practical but it was not always great and it gave way to Christianity in Islam ultimately these Outsiders were successful in bringing in other religions such as Christianity and Islam so with these there were developments in North Africa with early Christianity so Christianity reached North Africa in the first century after Christ and it was in the Christian kingdom of Aksum and Ethiopia so Ethiopia was sort of the central hub for Christianity before Europeans actually came in themselves this is the fourth century and these Ethiopian Christians they did some pretty amazing stuff one of which was carving churches out of solid rock so it was like an actual underground church and they are translated the Bible there and this was really giving way to something called Coptic Christianity so Coptic you associate with Egypt or Ethiopia that areas Christianity it's not as big today because of Islam coming in but it was it's still a pretty big deal though also African Islam so this was basically the greatest religion in Africa appealed strongly to the ruling elite as had before and the merchants of sub-saharan Africa and these people they took it seriously so they built mosques schools and they really expanded and they really syncretized a bit to the African gender relations of putting women had a bit to give them more freedoms and for many is supplemented rather than replaced their traditional so it's really just a syncretism for these Africans so this has been chapter 19 states and societies of sub-saharan Africa and traditions encounters fourth edition thanks so much for watching and hope to see you in the next one