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and the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, Africans were told that their societies were backward, their religious traditions sinful, their agricultural practices primitive, their systems of governance irrelevant, and their cultural norms barbaric.
    It is only relatively recently that the work of archaeologists and historians has slowly been replacing long-held Europeanpreconceptions about Africa as the “dark continent.” These scholars have discovered that the continent in the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans had sophisticated civilizations, substantial governance structures, and cultural artifacts to rival any in the Europe of that time. For example, the central African kingdom of Kongo, which spanned 130,000 square miles and contained over half a million people, survived for centuries until the Portuguese slave trade reduced it to a virtual vassal state. The Mali Empire during the fourteenth century was larger than western Europe and, according to some contemporaries, one of the richest states in the world. During the time of its successors, the Songhai of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the renowned University of Sankore at Timbuktu, one of the oldest seats of learning in the world, reached the heights of its achievements.
    The Ashanti dominated West Africa from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The kingdom of Benin spread south and west to the Niger Delta during the fifteenth century, while Dahomey (in modern-day Ghana and Benin) flourished from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The Zulu nation resisted the British and Boer expansion into southern Africa; Zanzibar traded spices with India and the Arab world; and the city of Great Zimbabwe was a center of commerce that archaeological evidence suggests may have done business with Arabia—and, if the discovery of pottery shards from Nanjing is any indication, possibly with China as well.
    To be sure, some of these states, like those of their eventual European conquerors, were imperialist, collected tributes, and engaged in slavery, across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Arabian Sea. However, contrary to the image of Africans perpetually at war with each other, there is no evidence that these civilizations were any more aggressive or perpetrated more atrocities than the colonialists who subdued them. Indeed, until the expansion of the slave trade in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, when as many as twenty-five million people were removed from Africa's shores (and new diseases wiped out both people and livestock), Africans had seen their wealth increase along with advances in technology, learning, and the arts. Some communities possessed huge herds of cattle and had mastered the ability to refine precious metals and mineral deposits. 5
    Given that advanced indigenous African civilizations were a reality, why were most African societies so vulnerable to European powers? One obvious factor was that African leadership and the slave traders developed an insatiable greed as the demand for slaves increased across the Atlantic. Another was the products of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of Western medicine that followed the debilitating effects of slavery. Ordinary Africans were awestruck at the power, knowledge, and skills displayed by the colonial administrators and missionaries; dazzled by the healing power of their medicines; and stunned by the speed of their transportation when horses, rickshaws, and, later, trains (“fire-spitting snakes”) and cars arrived. All of these new technologies overwhelmed the native peoples, whose technology was demonstrably less developed.
    Most impressive of all, however, was the power of the gun, which was presented to the African populations as the white man's magic and witchcraft—and a very strong witchcraft at that. For the colonial powers, everything depended on intimidating the natives through the display and use of force, because if the local peoples had been less impressed,