Kandace Presents . . . The Great Migrations

According to my DNA heritage results, I have ancestry from all regions of Africa (West, East, North, and South).

So the African migration topic sounds interesting.

Everything you said all she heard is Blah. blah, blah, here comes more Caucasian Supremacy .......   

I believe Kandace started down the "classy" route with the last sentence in her original post.  I wasn't rude, I was being honest and respectful. 

So, we can't have this conversation?  That's not classy at all and very unproductive. 

If you aren't aware of all of her sideways comments than you must be new here. 

Shoot, in the past, she can't even respond in a happy birthday thread without bringing race into it. 

Give me a break. 

Don’t pay the haters any mind, Kandace. You are one of the most researched posters on this message forum. The articles you post, whether about AA history or other issues, are always interesting.

While I may disagree with you at times, I have always respected your POV and that you don’t form an opinion without backing them up with resources. And I’ve learned that If the things you say make people upset, there’s a good chance it’s because it’s true.

I mean, there are many threads that I successfully avoid. I am positive that others can do the same. Positive.

I'm a dreamer.

In the aftermath of the infamous Berlin Conference, circa 1885, the major European powers plotted to divide the continent of Africa among themselves.   The division and bitterness sowed by centuries of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade reaped a harvest of division, and the squabbling African states fell one by one to the invading European armies (which were commanded by Europeans but staffed largely by African foot soldiers).  With the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, all of Africa fell to the invading Caucasian Colonizers.

Yet for the first few decades, the Europeans were quite nervous about their so-called inferiors' response to their oppression.   There was one particular colonial correspondence that revealed a pattern of behavior that may seem strange to contemporary readers, as it no doubt seemed strange to the colonial authorities who observed it.

On February 17, 1907, a brief note went out of the Dakar office of the Governor-General of French West Africa, addressed to subordinates. The governor had learned through French newspapers that:

According to a report on Northern Nigeria written by High Commissioner Sir W. Wallace, and published by the Colonial Office, thousands of Fulanis from the Middle Niger [central Mali] might be migrating from the French territory and heading towards the Nile valley … I would be grateful for any further information on this issue.

Tens of thousands of Muslim Africans were migrating away from the British and French colonies and fleeing towards the Nile Valley, the easternmost Sudan.   This mass migration would also continue in a significant form right into Saudi Arabia.  Today approximately 10 percent of the Saudi Arabian population is Afro-Arab, with a
significant percentage being descendants of those early 20th century emigrants.

Africa has long had a tradition of various peoples migrating over vast distances to flee unfavorable conditions.    Those unfavorable conditions varied greatly over the millennia.   They were environmentally based, often as the Sahara dried over the centuries.  They were political, as many people would flee wars, whether wars of invasion of wars of internal strife where the losing faction would flee to establish their own state beyond the reach of the victors.   They were often religious, with a great deal of migration being linked to the marginalization of Jews in Arabia and Egypt in the wake of the rise of Christianity and Islam, as well as staunch African pagans fleeing the rise of Christianity in the Nile Valley and the then slow but inexorable spread of Islam westward into the Great Sudan Regions Eastern Central, and Western Sudan).   

But one cannot discount the role of economics in encouraging migration.   The sheer vastness of the African content invites peoples to seek greener pastures in the most literal sense.  And the Sahara, contrary to popular myth, merely slowed rather than halted the spread of peoples in Africa.  African who followed the well worn paths could travel steadily in non desert areas, following oases, lakes, and rivers until they reached their chosen promised lands, so to speak.

Ina sense, Africa was America, before America was America.  It was an open frontier steadily rolling from east to west.





www.google.com/search?q=migration+from+collapsing+assyrian+empire&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi01-OWseL1AhWvmXIEHXHMCEIQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1357&bih=925&dpr=1#imgrc=Gb-u0LHQgrWFCM

Sorry you feel that way.  Extremism also alienates. 

I can't say I didn't try. 

Good day. 

backlash did occur, but it never wholly wiped gains that were achieved by being "moderate nice Negroes."  

You got the China part on the map right since its buying up Africa .......

Kandace, with all due respect, I *highly* doubt racial tension currently in American society has anything to do with what people believed 250 years ago. Or even 60 years ago.

Can we carry all these personal barbs to a different thread? I for one would prefer to allow Kandace to present the topical information at hand, irrespective of what you might think her motivations are and find the attacks childish.

One area that can frustrate and confuse persons researching African history is the shifting names of various regions.   Ancient Ghana is not modern Ghana.   Ancient Benin is not modern Benin.  Old Dahomey is the new Benin.   Ancient Ethiopia is modern Sudan and West Sudan.  Modern Ethiopia is Old Axum.  Modern Somalia is Ancient Punt.      


Heck, medieval Kongo Kingdom was located not just in modern Congo but also modern Gabon and modern northern Angola.

And we are all justifiably confused.    

You get the picture.  


For the purposes of this thread I will use the Classical definition of the Bilad-Es-Sudan: basically, Africa from the Nile Valley south of the second cataract, stretching across the Sahara and Sahel below Northern Africa, rolling past Lake Chad, and continuing until the Atlantic Coast.   From the southern Nile valley to the outermost regions bordering eastern region of Lake Chad is the eastern Sudan.  From the eastern region of lake Chad to the borders of the Niger river region (including tributaries) is the Central Sudan.   From the Niger River Region to the Atlantic is the Western Sudan.

The maps below vary by historical era, but they all convey the linkages of the Greater Sudan region, despite its vast size.








oi.uchicago.edu/museum-exhibits/history-ancient-nubiaOLD








en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_the_Sudan_region#/media/File:CentralEastAfrica1750.png


www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/The-early-kingdoms-and-empires-of-the-western-Sudan

The Equestrian Culture of Ancient Nubia played a major role in shaping the Equestrian Culture of the ancient Mediterranean.

Nubians and Ku****es were renowned horse masters and their famed Nubian Stallions, noted for their jet-black coats and ivory legs, were famous throughout the ancient world.  Nubians who worked with or handled horses were especially prized, and Nubians served as horse grooms, riders, trainers, breeders, and charioteers in many foreign kingdoms.   Several ancient Assyrian documents such as the Nineveh Horse Reports of 8th century B.C. mention the superiority of the “horses of Kush” and record receiving numbers in the thousands through trade throughout the Assyrian empire. One neo-Assyrian text cites a Ku****e horse expert and “chariot driver of the Prefect of the Land” holding a high office in the military.   Even as late as the 8th century A.D., John the Deacon, an Egyptian chronicler of early Christian Nubian Kingdoms, described the highly trained Nubian stallions' exceptional bravery on the battlefield. 

This Nubian horse culture would no doubt play a critical role in the Great Migrations.   The major Catalyst for the Great Migrations was the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the rise of Babylon.

After the expulsion of the Nubian 25th Dynasty Pharaohs from Egypt by the Assyrians, the new 26th Dynasty ended the ancient Egyptian practice of relying on Nubian mercenaries and instead recruited Carian (from southwestern Asia Minor, modern Turkey), Phoenician, and Greek mercenaries.   The 26th Dynasty Pharaoh Necho II used these mercenaries as part of a grand plan to reassert Egyptian control over the Levant, which was threatened by the newly emerging Babylonaisn Empire.  Necho undertook a Syrian campaign in 608 BC to assist the Assyrian armies that were under constant assault by the rising Babylonians.   When Josiah, king of Judah and an ally of the Neo-Babylonians, was slain in battle at Megiddo, Necho replaced Josiah’s chosen successor with his own nominee and imposed tribute on Judah. In 606 the Egyptians routed the Neo-Babylonians, but at the great Battle of Carchemish (a Syrian city on the middle Euphrates River) in 605 the Neo-Babylonian crown prince, Nebuchadrezzar, soundly defeated Necho’s troops and forced their withdrawal from Syria and Palestine. Egypt itself was threatened in 601, but Necho repelled the enemy and continued to promote anti-Babylonian coalitions in Syria and Palestine.

As could be expected, these waves of rebellion and intrigue triggered a constant flow of refugees from the former Assyrian Empire/New Babylonian Empire into the Nile valley.   The Jews fleeing the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple are the most prominent refugees, but they were far from the only people fleeing the Babylonians by seeking refuge in Egypt.   They were just the most ironic ones.  And in 539 BC, Egypt itself would fall to the rampaging Persian invaders.  

The Nile valley was becoming a very restive place.   Many peoples with loose links to Egypt populated the land.   The Assyrian empire had a policy of mass resettlement of conquered peoples far away from their homelands.   The Hebrews of the Northern Kingdom were victims of this, and their land was in turn settled by foreigners also conquered by the Assyrians.   When the Assyrian Empire fell to the Babylonians, many people, such as the Hebrews of the conquered kingdom of Judah, and no doubt some of the foreigners settled in the northern kingdom of Samaria, as well as other restive peoples, took advantage of the chaos, fled into the Nile valley, but, then a few decades later faced invasion from the Persians.

Some of these peoples had no doubt heard of more safe, prosperous lands far to the West, accessible if one knew how to follow paths through and/or around the vast Sahara.   The horses of Nubia, if purchased, or even the horsemen themselves, could provide guides and advance scouts for travelers.  In that era, horses and donkeys were still the preferred animal for travel through Sahara, (the camel not becoming really poplar until the Christian era) and it is quite likely that many of the refugees skirted the desert as much as possible, however much this no doubt added years to their journey.


Somewhere, to the West, the refugees knew there was another river valley civilization brimming with possibilities of peace and prosperity.    Getting there would be worth it.









journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/17167






www.researchgate.net/figure/Ghana-Wagadu-and-Kawkaw-Gao-zones-of-control-gold-producing-areas-interaction-networks_fig14_208574355