Essay --

B00466902 Introduction to African History (AFST/HIST 283A) December 16th, 2013 1. (a) Africans and Europeans have relations that date all the way back to the origins of humans and human migrations. Scholars have hypothesized that Homo erectus found in Europe about 800,000 years ago originated and migrated from Africa Europeans and Africans also had religious relations; which is evident from the spread of Christianity, introduced by the Byzantines, throughout Africa specifically in North Africa, the Nile Valley, and the Horn of Africa. Aside from religious relations, Africans and Europeans also had economic and political relations as a result of European colonization and conquest of the African regions. Economic relations were a result of Europeans coming into Africa and taking natural resources to benefit from in the production of goods and trade. Another specific example of economic relations between Europeans and Africans is the practice of mercantilism, in which European nations were the mother countries and countries of Africa were the colonies. As the moth er country, Europeans, would take natural resources from the colony, African regions, to produce goods, which would then be sold back to the colony. This also attributed to the political relations between Africans and Europeans because the economic desires of the Europeans often led to them controlling the Africans to maximize profit and their own personal benefits; which is directly related to slavery, one of the biggest relations between Africans and Europeans. Slavery and the slave trade in turn created social relations because slaves were considered to be a class of their own. Another social relation that resulted from slavery was the creation a â€Å"new race† known as the... ...ural resources. Post independence Africans although not ruled by Europeans nations such as Britain, France, and the Dutch were still dependent on these nations for goods and other trading purposes. Culturally, post independence Africans and precolonial Africans were different because post independence Africans were greatly influenced by the mother countries that ruled them because their mother countries cultures were inflicted on them whether it was language, food, religion, or even clothing. Precolonial Africans and post independence Africans also differed politically in the aspect that precolonial African governments were more tribe like, while post independence Africans governments had western influence and some cases lead to dictatorships as seen in Liberia dictated by Samuel Doe, Zaire dictated by Mobutu Sese Seko, and Somalia dictated by Muhammad Siad Barre.