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History is filled with wrong turns and
almost were's, and the history of Africa and Europe in the
modern period--a history of suffering, greed, torture,
cruelty, racism, death, violence, hatred, and, in the midst
of this, a triumph of human spirit--could have been a
different history. For the history of Africa and Europe, the
history of slavery and the history of colonialism, both of
which we--Africans, African-Americans, African-Europeans,
Europeans, and European-Americans--are still paying for,
began with mutual respect and curiosity. The history begins,
as so much in the modern world, with the mercantile
expansion of European culture.
While Europeans had always known about
Africa, they hadn't known much. The desire to make money
suddenly made Africa interesting. The first real substantial
relationships Europeans forged with Africans were with the
Islamic civilizations and traders of North Africa. These two
groups had been in sporadic but undefined contact all
through the European Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century,
the major Islamic civilizations were beginning to decline in
power, but not in their impressiveness. The Europeans were
stunned by what they saw, especially in the Sudanese
empire.
While the modern history of Europe and
Africa is overwhelmingly one-sided, with Europeans forcibly
deporting Africans into European states or with Europeans
enforcing political, social, religious, and economic
practices on Africans during the colonial period and after,
the history actually begins with a two-sided dialogue.
Europeans were as much interested in African culture as they
expected the Africans to be interested in theirs. All the
contemporary evidence implies that they saw the Africans as
equal partners in civilization, government, and commerce.
The Africans, it seems, also believed this. During this
heady period at the start of the cultural exchange between
the two hemispheres, Africans regularly came to Europe to
study Western culture; in 1518, for example, Henry of the
Congo travelled to the Vatican and became the first bishop
of the Congo.
All this would change, however. The two
hemispheres were headed for a collision. The tragedy that
broke this initial historical pattern was slavery, and
slavery, in a great irony of history, was driven by the
discovery of a new hemisphere in the west.
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