Africans, Dutch, & Portuguese

Europe’s desire for trade goods from the Far East drove men such as Bartolomeo Diaz and later Vasco da Gama around the horn of Africa in search of a trade route to the luxurious products from China and India; where upon supply depots needed to be established somewhere along the coast of the African continent: Portuguese built several along the eastern coast while the Dutch built at Cape Town. While the initial establishment of supply ports were built and manned by both the Dutch and Portuguese; both were soon to discover a truth discovered in the New World not many years past—Africans were not as industrious as their European counterparts much like the indigenous people of the Caribbean and coastal regions of the Americas and later deep into the interior. Africans began to resent the presence of the Dutch and Portuguese both were dealt with in kind, but were doomed as the push for land, minerals, and cattle drove the Europeans deeper into the veldt, highlands, and savannah of Southeast Africa.
The Portuguese under Vasco da Gama were the first to begin trading along the Indian Ocean rim—surprised to have found so many Muslim cities along the eastern coast of Africa da Gama was quick to develop an alliance with the city of Malindi against the Swahili city of Mombasa for access to a guide across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. The Portuguese were surprised at the lackadaisical attitude toward religion when revenues were in the offing. “…merchants in the western Indian Ocean seem to have been more interested in profits than prophets” (Gilbert, 221). With all the bluster and pride of the Portuguese their influence in Africa and trade in the Indian Ocean was nothing more than the bite of a common housefly. Without settlers to pioneer a h...

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...master was carried off with the key to the ammunition cases—the British troops ran out of ammunition—this is the reason break-a-way clasps are put on ammunition cases today—no locks). A resulting action from an encounter with the Zulus carried forth until present time.
African encounters with European nationals affected the Africans immensely—yet what affected the Africans had far-reaching effects on the Europeans as well. Case in point: ammunition boxes. Had Arabs and Europeans not made inroads into Africa and the lives of its people with technology, language, religion, and culture Africa would still be the “Dark Continent” and the rest of the world would be in the dark as well. After all, we would not have peanut butter.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Erik & Reynolds, Jonathan T., Africa in World History. Third Edition. Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, 2012.