Unit 1 · Origins of the African Diaspora

African American Studies ● (core concept) — An interdisciplinary field that studies the histories, cultures, politics, and experiences of people of African descent, drawing on methods from history, literature, sociology, and other disciplines.

Black Campus movement ● (core concept) — The wave of student protests and strikes from 1965 to 1972 demanding Black Studies programs on college campuses, out of which the formal field of African American Studies grew.

San Francisco State College Black Studies department ● (core concept) — The first Black Studies department in the United States, established in 1968 after a student strike.

Niger River ● (core concept) — One of Africa's five major rivers named in the course, running through West Africa.

Congo River ● (core concept) — One of Africa's five major rivers named in the course, running through Central Africa.

Nile River ● (core concept) — One of Africa's five major rivers named in the course; Egypt and Nubia emerged along its banks around 3000 BCE.

Zambezi River ● (core concept) — One of Africa's five major rivers named in the course, running through Southern Africa.

Orange River ● (core concept) — One of Africa's five major rivers named in the course, running through Southern Africa.

Africa's climate zones ● (core concept) — Africa contains five distinct climate zones, and each zone's geography shaped the economies and ways of life of the societies living in it.

Surrounding seas and oceans of Africa ○ — Africa is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean, which connected its societies to trade networks.

Bantu expansion ● (core concept) — The spread of Bantu-speaking peoples across sub-Saharan Africa from about 1500 BCE to 500 CE, carrying ironworking and crop cultivation to new regions.

Bantu language family ● (core concept) — One of Africa's large language families, including languages such as Xhosa, Swahili, Kikongo, and Zulu.

Egypt and Nubia ● (core concept) — Complex societies that emerged along the Nile River around 3000 BCE; Nubia was the source of Egypt's gold and luxury trade goods, which created conflict between them.

25th Dynasty (Black Pharaohs) ● (core concept) — Nubian rulers who defeated Egypt around 750 BCE and established the twenty-fifth dynasty, ruling Egypt for a century.

Aksumite Empire ● (core concept) — An empire in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia that emerged around 100 BCE, grew through Red Sea trade, developed its own currency and Ge'ez script, and became the first African society to adopt Christianity under King Ezana.

King Ezana ● (core concept) — The Aksumite king under whose leadership Aksum adopted Christianity.

Ge'ez ● (core concept) — The script and language developed by the Aksumite Empire; it remains the main liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Nok society ● (core concept) — A society in present-day Nigeria, one of the earliest ironworking societies of West Africa, emerging around 500 BCE and best known for naturalistic terracotta sculptures of animals and people.

Kush (Cush) ○ — Another name for Nubia, the society south of Egypt along the Nile.

Meroë ○ — A Nubian city that developed its own system of writing.

Sudanic (Sahelian) empires ● (core concept) — The collective name for the West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, which rose and flourished from the seventh to the sixteenth century, each reaching its height as the previous one declined.

Ghana Empire ● (core concept) — The earliest of the Sudanic empires, flourishing from the seventh to the thirteenth century in what is now Mauritania and Mali.

Mali Empire ● (core concept) — The second of the Sudanic empires, flourishing from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and ruled in the fourteenth century by the wealthy Mansa Musa.

Songhai Empire ● (core concept) — The last and largest of the Sudanic empires, flourishing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before trade shifted from trans-Saharan to Atlantic routes.

Mansa Musa ● (core concept) — The fourteenth-century ruler of Mali whose 1324 hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, displayed the empire's wealth to the wider world and established Mali as a center for trade, learning, and cultural exchange.

Mansa ● (core concept) — The title for a ruler or king among Mande speakers.

Catalan Atlas ● (core concept) — A 1375 map by Abraham Cresques depicting Mansa Musa adorned with a gold crown and orb, showing Mali's wealth and influence as seen by a Spanish cartographer.

Trans-Saharan trade ● (core concept) — Commerce across the Sahara connecting North African traders to West Africa; it brought Islam, scholars, and administrators to the Sudanic empires.

Timbuktu ● (core concept) — A trading city in Mali where a book trade, university, and learning community flourished, drawing astronomers, mathematicians, architects, and jurists.

Griots ● (core concept) — Prestigious historians, storytellers, and musicians in West African societies who maintained and shared a community's history, traditions, and cultural practices; the tradition included both women and men.

Epic of Sundiata ● (core concept) — The Mande epic, passed down by griots, recounting the life of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire and an ancestor of Mansa Musa.

Religious syncretism ● (core concept) — The blending of introduced faiths such as Islam and Christianity with Indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmologies in West and West Central African societies.

Orishas ● (core concept) — Yoruba deities carried into diasporic religions; examples include Shango, Oya, and Ogun.

Shango ○ — The orisha of thunder, fire, and lightning, a deified ancestor and monarch of the Oyo kingdom.

Louisiana Voodoo ○ — An African diasporic religion in which West and West Central African practices such as ancestor veneration, divination, healing, and collective singing and dancing survived.

Great Zimbabwe ● (core concept) — A stone-built trading city of the Shona people in Southern Africa, flourishing from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, known for its Great Enclosure and conical tower.

Swahili Coast ● (core concept) — The East African coast where Bantu-speaking city-states adopted Islam and traded from the eleventh to the fifteenth century; the Portuguese arrived there in the sixteenth century.

Sawahil ● (core concept) — The Arabic term for the East African coastal region, meaning the coasts.

Kingdom of Kongo ● (core concept) — A West Central African kingdom whose Christian rulers blended Catholicism with African traditions; it was the largest single source region of enslaved people transported to the Americas.

Nzinga a Nkuwu (João I) ● (core concept) — The Kongo king who converted to Christianity in 1491, taking the Portuguese name João I.

Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I) ● (core concept) — A Kongo king who developed a distinct African form of Catholicism and wrote letters to the Portuguese king João III protesting the slave trade.

Day names ● (core concept) — Kongolese naming practices based on the day of a child's birth, which enslaved Africans carried with them to the Americas.

Queen Idia ● (core concept) — The first iyoba, or queen mother, of Benin in the late fifteenth century; an ivory mask of her became the symbol of the 1977 FESTAC festival.

Queen Njinga ● (core concept) — The ruler of Ndongo-Matamba in West Central Africa who waged roughly thirty years of guerrilla warfare against the Portuguese from her kilombo war camp.

Kilombo ○ — A Kimbundu word meaning war camp, as used for Queen Njinga's base of resistance.

FESTAC ○ — The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in 1977, whose symbol was an ivory mask of Queen Idia.

Cabo Verde and São Tomé ● (core concept) — Portuguese Atlantic-island colonies where sugar plantations run on enslaved African labor became the model for plantation slavery in the Americas.

Enslaved Africans in Europe before 1500 ● (core concept) — By 1500, about 50,000 enslaved Africans had been transported to the Atlantic islands and Europe through West African-Portuguese trade networks.