29.1 Africa: a.d. 1401 to 1500  (Page 2/2)

In central Africa gold was plentiful and the king of the Congo maintained such opulence in his capital that visiting Portuguese were amazed and made haste to make an alliance, not a conquest. About 1441 they brought Christianity to western, central Africa, going even 200 miles up the Congo to convert the Congo king. Incidentally, they brought back gold. (Ref. 175 ) Living in the great bend of the Congo, in the plateau north of Stanley Pool, were the Teke people in a number of chiefdoms collectively known as Mongo. (Ref. 83 )

Farther east in the lake country between Tanzania and Zaire there appeared in this 15th century the Batutsi, a tall, warrior people, perhaps originally from Ethiopia. They invaded and subjugated the native Bahutu in Burundi. In Kenya, the nomadic Masai entered from the north, joining the Kikuyu already there and then some Luo entered from the west. The Kikuyu were Bantu-speakers and related groups established themselves in parts of the Transvaal and Natal as well as the lower Congo and Zambezi by about A.D. 1500. Kitari was an Hamitic kingdom north of Lake Victoria. (Ref. 175 , 83 )

In the meantime Muslim Swahili

Explorer Diogo Cao claimed Angola for Portugal in 1483 and the slave trade was opened up in earnest. In the next four centuries, some 3,000,000 slaves were sent to Brazil by the Portuguese. At the very tip of South Africa the people seen when the Europeans first explored the area were the Bushmen, who were hunters and gatherers, and the Hottentots (Khoikhoi), who herded sheep and cattle along the coastal regions. As noted previously, these were not Bantu-speaking people. (Ref. 175 )

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