African empires


African empires is an umbrella term used in African studies to refer to a number of pre-colonial African kingdoms in Africa with multinational structures incorporating various populations and polities into a single entity, usually through conquest.
Listed below are known African empires and their respective capital cities.

Sahelian kingdoms

The Sahelian kingdoms were a series of medieval empires centred on the Sahel, the area of grasslands south of the Sahara.
From the 15th century until the final Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century a number of empires were also established south of the Sahel, especially in West Africa.

West Africa

The West African empires of this period peaked in power in the late 18th century, paralleling the peak of the Atlantic slave trade. These empires implemented a culture of permanent warfare in order to generate the required numbers of captives required to satisfy the demand for slaves by the European colonies. With the gradual abolition of slavery in the European colonial empires during the 19th century, slave trade again became less lucrative and the West African empires entered a period of decline, and mostly collapsed by the end of the 19th century.
The Mutapa Empire or Empire of Great Zimbabwe was a medieval kingdom located between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers of Southern Africa in the modern states of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Remnants of the historical capital are found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

Ancient North African empires

Pre-Islamic empires of North Africa:
discusses the classification of Sub-Saharan African kingdoms, mostly of Central, South and East Africa, with some additional data on West African kingdoms distinguishing five types, by decreasing centralization of power:
  1. Despotic kingdoms: Kingdoms where the king controls the internal and external affairs directly. Examples are Ruanda, Nkore, Soga and Kongo in the 16th century
  2. Regal kingdoms: Kingdoms where the king controls the external affairs directly, and the internal affairs via a system of overseers. The king and his chiefs belong to the same clans or lineages.
  3. Incorporative kingdoms: Kingdoms where the king controls only the external affairs with no permanent administrative links between him and the chiefs of the provinces. The hereditary chiefdoms of the provinces were left undisturbed after conquest. Examples are the Bamileke, Lunda, Luba, Lozi.
  4. Aristocratic kingdoms: The only link between central authority and the provinces is payment of tribute. These kingdoms are morphologically intermediate between regal kingdoms and federations. This type is rather common in Africa, examples including the Kongo of the 17th century, the Cazembe, Luapula, Kuba, Ngonde, Mlanje, Ha, Zinza and Chagga states of the 18th century
  5. Federations: Kingdoms where the external affairs are regulated by a council of elders headed by the king, who is simply primus inter pares.