When Europeans first began to explore Africa, what did they find?

When Europeans first began to explore Africa, what did they find?

a. a great diversity of cultures

b. a single language shared by all Africans

Answer: a. a great diversity of cultures

Africa is one of the largest continents in the world with explorers seeing the first European explorers embrace a continent teeming with different cultures, languages and societies. This diversity was due to Africa’s huge size, geographical and eco-climactic complexity and long inhabitants’ occupation. The continent comprised millions of people belonging to different ethnic groups and all of them had their customs, social relations, and living standards. For instance, the explorers met with the highly developed states, the Mali and Songhai kingdoms with developed political structures, and active trade. They discovered that in East Africa there were coastal city-states affiliated with the Arabian and Persian traders, and in Southern Africa, the people that came across were hunter-gatherer and nomadic communities of Bantu-speaking pastoralist people. Of equal concern was the diversity in languages, and Africa had more than 2000 languages which were categorized; This cultural mix which was unraveled by Europeans disapproved of their beliefs about African societies hence proving the download. There, one encountered such a complex civilization with everything from the sculptural art of the Benin Kingdom to agriculture on the Swahili coast; all these turned on its head the European stereotype of the ‘dark continent’. Such an interaction with Africa’s diversity would have long-standing implications for the subsequent European-African interactions, colonialism’s rules, and even the later world perception of the black continent.