African History and Colonialism Exam Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering key historical figures, movements, policies, and concepts from 19th- and 20th-century African colonial and post-colonial history.

Zanzibar (19th century)

A 19th-century global trading center along the Indian Ocean known for trading spices, commodities such as global clothing, and enslaved people, where slavery persisted in various forms even after legal abolition.

Haitian Revolution

An anti-colonial slave revolt lasting from $1791$ to $1804$, led by figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, which achieved general emancipation in $1794$ and established the world's first Black republic in $1804$.

Scramble for Africa

The partition and colonization of Africa by European powers driven by the 'white man's burden,' the Industrial Revolution, the spread of Christianity, and the pursuit of new markets, raw materials, and capital extraction.

"Legitimate trade"

The 19th-century economic shift in West Africa following the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, where commerce transitioned toward commodities like Nigerian soap, Senegalese gum arabic and peanuts, and Congolese rubber, creating monocrop dependency.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther

The first African Anglican bishop of West Africa; he was emancipated from a Portuguese slave ship by the British Royal Navy, educated by the Church Missionary Society in Sierra Leone, and took the name of the man who converted him.

Indirect rule

A colonial governance strategy—exemplified by the British—that utilized and preserved pre-existing local elites, chiefs, and traditional courts to manage daily administration under imperial supervision.

Direct rule

A centralized colonial governance strategy—exemplified by the French in West Africa—that dismantled or bypassed traditional authorities through centralized administration, cultural assimilation, and strict legal hierarchies.

Évolué

A French term meaning 'evolved' or 'developed,' referring to a small class of assimilated Africans in French and Belgian colonies who adopted European culture, language, education, and religion, and sometimes had to pass an examination to vote and attain citizenship.

Henry Morton Stanley

A Welsh-American journalist and explorer who fought in the American Civil War, worked for the New York Herald, and signed a $5$-year contract with King Leopold II to lead expeditions in the Congo River basin.

Kalulu

An enslaved African youth brought to the United Kingdom by Henry Morton Stanley, taught English, forced on speaking tours across the UK and France, and who later died in a waterfall accident while working for Stanley in the Congo.

Leopold II

The King of Belgium who privately owned and exploited the Congo Free State from $1885$ to $1908$, extracting wealth in rubber, ivory, timber, palm oil, and diamonds through forced labor, military coercion, and widespread terror such as chopping off hands.

Independent Christian movements

African-initiated Christian denominations that emerged during the colonial era to resist Western missionary paternalism and Europeanized liturgy by emphasizing healing, practical empowerment, and prosperity.

Simon Kimbangu

A Congolese religious leader and son of a traditional healer who founded Kimbanguism—a movement combining Christianity and Congolese beliefs—and was revered by followers as a prophet sent by Jesus to save the Congo.

Négritude

A 1930s Paris-based literary and political movement founded by French-speaking African and Caribbean intellectuals to celebrate Black consciousness, reject forced French assimilation, and affirm a shared African heritage through art and poetry.

Léopold Senghor

The first President of Senegal and a principal theoretician of Négritude who championed Black consciousness and cultural pride while maintaining political ties to the French empire.

Jomo Kenyatta

A Kenyan anti-colonial activist, water meter reader, and president of the Kenya African Union ($1946$) who advocated gradualist politics, served as prime minister from $1963$ to $1964$, and was imprisoned as the alleged mastermind of the Mau Mau.

Mau Mau

A militant anti-colonial nationalist movement formed primarily among the Kikuyu of Kenya in the $1950\text{s}$ that used guerrilla tactics, night attacks, and oaths of allegiance to demand the departure of European settlers.

Dedan Kimathi

The leader of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army during the Mau Mau uprising who established the movement's formal military structure, administered thousands of war oaths, and was executed in $1957$.

Muthoni Kirima

The only woman to achieve a high military rank within the Mau Mau movement; she served as a forest fighter and spy, refused to cut her hair after leaving the forest, and declared Kenya as her only child.

Julius Nyerere

An anti-colonial activist and the first president of Tanzania, widely referred to by the Swahili honorific 'Mwalimu,' meaning 'Teacher.'

Ujamaa

A Swahili concept meaning 'family' or 'mutual cooperation' that defined the Tanzanian socialist ideology developed under Julius Nyerere.

Settler colonies

Colonial territories such as Kenya, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa where European settlers permanently established commercial farms, dispossessed indigenous peoples of their ancestral land, and imposed racialized governance.

Firestone Rubber

An American corporation operating in Liberia whose natural resource extraction exemplified corporate colonialism within a country ruled by African American settlers.

Kwame Nkrumah

The Ghanaian nationalist leader who served as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast from $1952$ to $1957$, organized general strikes, and funded major national modernization projects through cocoa farming revenue.

Patrice Lumumba

The leader of the Congolese National Movement and the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, who led the nation to independence from Belgium before his assassination in $1981$.

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)

Economic policy packages imposed in the late $1970\text{s}$ and $1980\text{s}$ by the IMF and World Bank on more than $40$ African nations, resulting in neo-colonial dependency and severe reductions in public spending on health and education.

Akosombo Dam

A Ghanaian hydroelectric dam built under the Volta River Project that formed the world's largest man-made lake, displaced $80{,}000$ people, and supplied $80\%$ of its power to heavy industry and neighboring nations while only $20\%$ went to Ghanaians.

VALCO

The Volta Aluminium Company Limited, an aluminum smelting company operating in Ghana that is powered by the electricity generated from the Akosombo Dam.

Hastings Banda

A Malawian politician who ruled Malawi from $1964$ to $1994$, establishing a $30$-year autocratic regime characterized by strict national dress codes.

Mobutu Sese Seko

A Congolese military officer and politician who served as the president of Zaire from $1971$ to $1997$ and implemented an anti-colonial cultural program termed 'Zaireanization.'

Mark Mathabane

The South African author of the autobiographical work Kaffir Boy.

1976 Soweto Massacre

A student-led protest in Soweto, South Africa, against the apartheid state's decree requiring Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Black schools, which was suppressed when police set attack dogs and opened gunfire on marching youth.

1994 Genocide in Rwanda

The mass extermination in Rwanda where approximately $800{,}000$ Tutsi were slaughtered by Hutu forces within $10$ days (including $10{,}000$ murdered by machetes in a single day), resulting in $1.3\text{ million}$ refugees fleeing into Zaire.

De Beers

A diamond extraction corporation operating in Botswana in which the government of Botswana owned only a $15\%$ equity share.

Cattle feedlot

An industrial commercial facility that treats cows strictly as mass-produced commodities for butchering, contrasting sharply with traditional African customs where cattle served as sacred assets used to seal alliances and marriages.

Hut tax

A British colonial residential tax implemented in Kenya to compel African populations out of subsistence agriculture and into the colonial wage-labor economy.

Kipande pass system

An identification pass system enforced by the British colonial administration in Kenya to control the physical movement and track the employment of African workers.

Jean Muteba Rahier

A mixed Congolese-Belgian individual whose life experience illustrated that racial categories and familial belonging are historically contingent products of colonial legal and social structures rather than simple biological facts.