The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to describe Western Europe and North America.

Certainly, before colonization, some of the greatest and most powerful and wealthiest and most technologically and intellectually advanced empires in the world were in Africa, from Ghana, Mali and Songhai...We’re not taught about precolonial West Africa. We’re not even taught about Africa today!... And I don’t think we should focus on Europe because that is a demonstration to me of racism.

Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians.

The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all.

The African nations that won their independence from the European colonial powers are, for the most part, uneasy confederations of tribes that are traditional enemies. The primary loyalty of their citizens is not to the state, but to the tribe and its chiefs. The political objective of the dominant tribe is to capture the country’s economic power base, which is the government, and, once it has been seized, to hold on to it.

Africa was in fact a great deal less primitive than they imagined.… However, in three respects it struck the Victorians as benighted. Unlike North Africa, the faiths of sub-Saharan Africa were not monotheistic; except for its northern and southern extremities, it was riddled with malaria, yellow fever and other diseases lethal to Europeans (and their preferred livestock); and, perhaps most importantly, slaves were its most important export – indeed, supplying slaves to European and Arab traders along the coast became the continent’s biggest source of revenue. The peculiar path of global economic development led Africans into the business of capturing and selling one another.

The first four centuries of Afro-European trade in a very real sense represent the roots of African underdevelopment. Colonialism flourished rapidly from a European viewpoint, because several of its features were already rooted in Africa in the preceding period. One of the most decisive features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic, political, and cultural agents of the European colonialists. Those agents, or “s,” were already serving European interests in the pre-colonial period. The impact of trade with Europe had reduced many African rulers to the status of middlemen for European trade; it had raised ordinary Africans to that same middleman commercial role; and it had created a new trading group of mixed blood—the children of European or Arab fathers. Those types can all be referred to as “compradors,” and they played a key role in extending European activity from the coast into the hinterland, as soon as Europeans thought of taking over political power.

There were several spots within different colonies which were sufficiently far removed from towns and colonial administration that they neither grew cash crops nor supplied labor. In southern Sudan, for instance, there were populations who continued to live a life not dissimilar to that which they had followed in previous centuries. Yet, even for such traditional African societies the scope for development no longer existed. They were isolated by the hold which the colonialists had on the rest of the continent. They could not interact with other parts of Africa. They were subject to increasing encroachment by the money economy and were more and more to be regarded as historical relics. The classic example of this type of obstructed historical development is to be found in the U.S.A., where the indigenous population of Indians who survived slaughter by the whites were placed in reservations and condemned to stagnation. in North America are living museums to be visited by white tourists who purchase curios.

During the centuries of pre-colonial trade, some control over social, political, and economic life was retained in Africa, in spite of the disadvantageous commerce with Europeans. That little control over internal matters disappeared under colonialism. Colonialism went much further than trade. It meant a tendency towards direct appropriation by Europeans of the social institutions within Africa. Africans ceased to set indigenous cultural goals and standards, and lost full command of training young members of the society. Those were undoubtedly major steps backward.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously, unique features came into existence in virtually every locality with regard to all social details. In addition, the continent of Africa south of the great Sahara desert formed a broad community where resemblances were clearly discernible. For example, music and dance had key roles in “uncontaminated” African society. They were ever present at birth, initiation, marriage, death, as well as at times of recreation. Africa is the continent of drums and percussion. African peoples reached the pinnacle of achievement in that sphere.

Africa, time out of mind, had been in a state of slavery, therefore the inhabitants only changed one species of slavery for another. However, he was sorry to say, that, in changing from African to European slavery, they generally changed much for the worse, which certainly was a matter of reproach somewhere, and deserved serious consideration.

African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries.

It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers

African history, to this extent, has nothing to fear, for it can survive situations as long as humans, who are the preservatory instruments, survive. In fact, instead of them to express fear, Africans should accept that their history itself is a force that had the power to survive difficult times, and the fact that it survived every layer of inordinate machinations of the past means that it would survive the future no matter what happens in it.