Ancient Africa Africa is one of the earliest places of origin of mankind. Over a long historical period, Africa has followed roughly the same path as other parts of the world and has made great contributions to human development. In this process, development has been uneven across Africa. The lower Nile Valley is one of the earliest birthplaces of ancient civilizations in Africa and the world. As early as six or seven thousand years ago, the Egyptian people living here developed irrigated agriculture and established the first unified slave state in human history in 3188 BC. Other Mediterranean and Red Sea regions adjacent to Egypt, as well as the Niger and Senegal river basins in West Africa, were also relatively prosperous in ancient times. In 640 AD, Arabs from West Asia began to migrate to Africa and reached the Atlantic coast in 710 AD, thus spreading Arab culture and Islam throughout North Africa. At the same time, Christianity spread to the Red Sea region. North Africa and East Africa thus entered feudal society. Other regions in Africa have a relatively low level of development, but they also experienced a relatively rapid development period in the Middle Ages. The African people continued to promote the development of productive forces and the advancement of history. Later, the invasion of Western colonists interrupted this process and plunged Africa into a state of poverty. Africa's "backwardness" is entirely the result of colonial rule. Slave trade and imperialism’s carving up of Africa Around the 15th century, Western European countries, which were the first to embark on the path of capitalism, began to expand externally in order to gain wealth. Africa, which is adjacent to Europe, became the first target. The Portuguese first arrived on the West African coast in 1445, and colonists from Spain, the Netherlands, England, France, and other countries followed soon after. In the early days, the colonists mainly used various plundering methods to plunder gold, ivory, spices, etc. Soon, gold and silver mining and plantation agriculture emerged in the newly discovered Americas, which urgently needed a large number of laborers. So the colonists frantically plundered people in Africa and started the criminal slave trade. This bloody atrocity has brought huge disasters to the African people. Over the past 400 years, due to various direct and indirect losses, Africa has lost a total of more than 100 million people, and its productivity has been greatly damaged. During this process, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, France and other countries successively established a number of colonial strongholds in the coastal areas of Africa, but the scope was not large. Until 1876, the total colonies accounted for only 10.8% of the total area. In the 1870s, capitalism began to transition to the imperialist stage. European powers were feverishly competing to seize colonies in order to open up vast raw material production areas and sales markets, and their invasion and carving up of Africa quickly reached a climax. The most powerful Britain and France are at the forefront of this battle. France occupies the largest colony area, while the British colony has the largest population and is relatively the richest; the old colonial empires of Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Germany and Italy, which came up later, also got a share of the pie. By 1913, on the eve of World War I, only the last two nominally independent countries in Africa were left, namely Ethiopia and Liberia, and the colonies accounted for 96.1% of the total area of ??the continent.