Europeans Enter Africa

European appetizer further whetted when Footloose Marco Polo, an Italian adventure, returned to Europe in 1295 and began telling tales of his nearly 20-year sojourn in China. Though he may in fact never have seen China (legends to the country, the hard evidence is sketchy), he must be regarded as an indirect discoverer of the new world, for his book, with its descriptions of rose-tinted pearls and golden pagodas, simulated European desires for a cheaper route to the treasures of the East.

These accumulating pressures eventually brought a breakthrough for European expansion.

Before the middle of the 15th century, European sailors refused to sail southward along the coast of West Africa because they could not beat their way home against the prevailing Northernly Winds and South flowing currents.

About 1450, Portuguese Mariners overcame those obstacles. Not only have they developed the caravel, a ship that could sail more closely to the winds, but they had discovered that they could return to Europe by sailing Northwestly from the African Coast towards the Azores, where the prevailing Westward breeze would carry them home.

The new world of sub-saharan Africa now came within the grasp of questioning Europeans.

The northern shore of africa, as part of the Mediterranean world, had been known to Europe since antiquity.

But because sea travel down the African Coast had been virtually impossible, Africa south of the forbidding Sahara desert barrier had remained remote and mysterious.

African gold, perhaps two-thirds of Europe's supply, crossed the Sahara on camelback, and shad-owy tales may have reached Europe about the flourishing West African kingdom of Mali in the Niger River valley, within its impressive Islamic university at Timbuktu.

But Europeans had no direct access to sub Sahara Africa until the Portuguese navigators began to creep down the West African Coast in the middle of the 15th century.

The Portuguese promptly set up trading posts along the African shore for the purchase of gold—and slaves. Arab flash merchants and Africans themselves had traded slaves for centuries before the Europeans arrived. The slaves routinely charged higher prices for captured some distant sources because they could not easily flee to their native villages or easily be rescued by their kin.

Slave brokers also deliberately separated prisoners from the same tribe and mixed them unlike people together to frustrate organized resistances. Thus from its earliest days, slavery by it's very nature disrupted African communities and inhabited the expression of regional African cultures and tribal identities.

The Portuguese adopted these Arab and African practices. They built up their own systematic traffic in slaves to work the sugar plantations that portugal, and later spain, established on the African Coastal Islands of Maderia, and Canaries, São Tomé, and Principe.

The enormous Portuguese appetite for slaves dwarfed the modest scale of the pre-European traffic.

Slave trading became a big business.

Some 40,000 Africans were carried away to the Atlantic Sugar Islands in the last half of the 15th century. Millions more were to be wrenched from their home continent after the discovery of the americas.

In the 15th century Portuguese adventures in Africa were to find the origins of the modern plantation system, based on large-scale commercial agriculture and wholesale exploitations of slave labor.

This kind of plantation economy would shape the destiny of much of the new world.

The seafaring Portuguese pushed still further southward in search of the water route to Asia.

Edging cautiously down the African Coast, Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the southernmost tip of the "Dark Continent" in 1488.

10 years later Vasco Da Gama finally reached India (hence the name "Indies," given by Europeans to all mysterious lands of the Orient) and returned home with a small but tantalizing cargo with jewels and spices.

Meanwhile, the kingdom of Spain became United and even pregnant with Destiny in the late 15th century. This new unity resulted in primarily from the marriage of two sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, and from the brutal expulsion of the "infidel" Muslim Moors from Spain after centuries of Christian-Islamic warfare. Glorifying their sudden strength, the Spaniards were eager to outstrip their Portuguese rivals in the race to tap the wealth of the indies. To the South and east, Portugal controlled the African coast and thus the gateway to the round Africa water route to India. Of necessity, therefore, Spain looked westward.