Essays on Sahara

Within the Context of World History

Racism and misconceptions about the peoples of Africa have resulted in the neglect of Africa’s historical reality ever since the field of history began to emerge as a structured discipline during the eighteenth century (Reynolds, “So Many Africas, So Little Time: Doing Justice to Africa in the World History Survey”). Since Greek and Roman times and up until the European Renaissance there was mutual respect between Europeans and the subjects of black kingdoms they met (Clarke ‘Why African History?”). By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, most European historians, philosophers and political scientists had adopted a Eurocentric attitude ...

Introduction

West African region comprises of several states that are found in the western part of the African continent. These states occupy the vast Sahara Desert and is normally referred to as Sahel. West African has gone economic and political revolution since the twentieth century. After the colonial period, several cities in West Africa were converted into independent states.

The region comprises of the states in the Maghreb region, and they occupy a total of 6,140,000 square kilometers

Much of the region depends on Mediterranean politics, and this has made the region to be politically powerful The region witnesses the economic resource imbalance that has resulted in poverty index in the region. Thus, most of the people are economically ...

A fundamental problem facing new democracies is the hijacking of the political process by elites. Economic performance is affected by elite politics leading to underdevelopment and sometimes morphing into political violence. The transition from colonial regimes to democracy has been subverted by the harm that was done by the colonial subversion of traditional institutions in favor of artificial Western ones. This provided an opening for the rise of elites and the rule of ‘the big men’ (Owusu, 1992). What role do elites play in transition to democracy or its opposite? This paper seeks to provide an analysis on how ...

Colonialism is one of the most actual issues of the modern historical science. The formation of colonial regimes entailed profound changes in the economic situation of the African population and reflected in the nature and way of their management. The British and French colonial models were quite different, but I am not sure whether it will be correct to say that colonies were only raw appendages of the empires and got nothing in exchange. The process of colonization of Africa has become widespread in the second half of the XIX century, especially after 1885 and the beginning of the ...