A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races

A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien

The synopsis is capped at 5000 characters total, but the provided text is a single lengthy chapter — I'll produce a compact synopsis of the whole work's scope and argument as suggested by this opening section. Harry Johnston's *A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races* traces, from prehistory into the early twentieth century, the successive waves of outside peoples who settled, ruled, or shaped Africa, treating the continent's indigenous populations mainly as a backdrop against which foreign colonization unfolds. The opening chapter reconstructs Africa's prehistoric peopling: the arrival of early man from Syria and Arabia, the disputed presence of Neanderthal-type humans in North Africa, and the spread of the Galley-Hill type toward the Bushman/Strandlooper populations of the south. Johnston details the divergence of Bushman and true-Negro physical types, then subdivides the Negro into Congo pygmy, Forest, and Nilotic strains, whose mixture produced the "average" Bantu-speaking African. He surveys the Bantu language expansion, the Hamitic- and Semitic-influenced peoples (Fula, Hausa, Songhai, Mandingo, Tibu), and Egypt's outsized role in supplying domestic animals, crops, and technology to sub-Saharan Africa. Ancient alien contact is examined through the Hamitic and Semitic migrations from Arabia, the Malay/Indonesian colonization of Madagascar, and the enigmatic Zimbabwe ruins, which Johnston attributes to pre-Islamic Arab gold-seekers later overrun by Bantu invaders. The historical narrative proper begins with Phoenician and Carthaginian colonization of Mauretania, including Hanno's voyage and the legendary circumnavigation of Africa under Necho II, followed by Greek settlement at Cyrene and in Egypt, and Roman/Byzantine rule across North Africa and the Nile. The book then turns to the Arab and Islamic conquest from the seventh century onward: the career of Muhammad, the Arabization and Islamization of the Berbers, the Fatimid and later dynasties in Egypt and the Maghreb, the Almoravid and Almohad Berber empires, the Hilalian Arab invasions, and Muhammadan penetration into the Sudan, Nubia, Sennar, Somaliland, and the East African coast via Omani and Yemeni Arabs. Johnston emphasizes Islam's role in opening Africa to world history and spreading Arabic culture, architecture, and trade goods across the northern half of the continent. The remainder of the work follows European colonization beginning with Portugal: Prince Henry the Navigator's voyages down the West African coast, the rounding of the Cape by Diaz and da Gama, the establishment of trading forts and slave-trading stations, the Christianization and subsequent decline of the Kongo kingdom, the conquest and administration of Angola, missionary contact with Abyssinia, and the long, often troubled Portuguese presence in Mozambique and the Zambezi valley, including conflicts with Arabs, the Dutch, and eventually British interests culminating in the Delagoa Bay dispute and late-nineteenth-century boundary settlements. A subsequent section addresses Spain's more limited African enterprise: the conquest of the Canary Islands, presidios along the Barbary coast, the loss of most North African holdings to the Turks, the twentieth-century Spanish protectorate in Morocco and the Rio de Oro, and Spanish possessions in the Gulf of Guinea. Throughout, Johnston frames African history as a continuous overlay of external invasions—Hamitic, Semitic, Arab, and European—each leaving lasting genetic, linguistic, religious, agricultural, and political imprints on the continent, and the book's larger project (continued in later chapters covering France, the Dutch, Britain, and Germany) is to catalogue how each colonizing power contributed to Africa's modern racial and political map.

By Harry Johnston · First published 1899 · Genre: colonial history, historical, cultural history · 18 chapters · 170,018 words

First lines

THE theme of this book obviously deals rather with the invasion and settlement of Africa by foreign nations than with the movements of people indigenous in their present types to the African continent; nevertheless, it may be well to preface this sketch of the history of African colonization by a few remarks explaining the condition and inhabitants of the continent-so far as we can deduce them from indirect evidence-before it was subjected to invasion and conquest by races and peoples from Europe and Asia.

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colonialism · imperialism · African history · European expansion · 19th century · historical analysis · geography · empire · race relations · political history · cultural history · exploration

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