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Concept
African empires
Summary
African empires is an umbrella term used in African studies to refer to a number of pre-colonial African kingdoms in Africa with multinational structures incorporating various populations and polities into a single entity, usually through conquest.
Listed below are known African empires and their respective capital cities.
The Wabongo kingdom, with its capital in Bokanga, in the Lobaye region (South West Central African Republic)
Sahelian kingdoms
The Sahelian kingdoms were a series of medieval empires centred on the Sahel, the area of grasslands south of the Sahara.
The first major state to rise in this region was the Ghana Empire (Wagadu). The name Ghana, often used by historians, was the regnal title given to the ruler of the Wagadu empire. Centered in what is today Senegal and Mauritania, it was the first to benefit from the introduction of gold mining. Ghana's imperial era has been theorized to have initiated around 100 CE to 300 CE then come to dominate the region between about 750 and 1078. Smaller states in the region at this time included Takrur to the west, the Malinke kingdom of Mali to the south, and the Songhai Empire centred on Gao to the east.
When Ghana atrophied in the face of invasion from the Almoravids, a series of brief kingdoms followed taking up the mantle of regional power, notably that of the Sosso (Susu); after 1235, the Mali Empire rose to dominate the region completely filling the imperial vacuum left by the once powerful Ghana Empire. Located on the Niger River to the west of Ghana in what is today Niger and Mali, it reached its peak in the 1350s, but had lost control of a number of vassal states by 1400.
The most powerful of these states was the Songhai Empire, which expanded rapidly beginning with king Sonni Ali in the 1460s. By 1500, it had risen to stretch from Cameroon to the Maghreb, the largest state in African history. It too was quite short-lived and collapsed in 1591 as a result of Moroccan musketry.
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