Thread by @JanetteMk_250

The West has lied to the World that it only took them a few years for them to conquer Africa while actually it took them more than 4 centuries for them to stand a chance against well established African communities #LivingBetterStartsWith #BBInoContest

Until the last quarter of the 19th, African armies continued to defeat the best armies of Europe. European armies, despite superior weapons, could still suffer defeats up to the end of the 19th century. #Africa #HandsOffAceMagashule

A British force was wiped out by a Zulu army in 1879, an Italian army suffered a crushing defeat by Ethiopians in 1896. #Ethiopia #LivingBetterStartsWith #SouthAfrica

European colonization really started only when the European outgunned the African with automatic weapon. The Maxim gun was a real game changer without it Europeans had no hope #SouthAfrica #Nigeria #Tanzania

If Africa hadn't had complex societies and states at around the time of European expansion in the 1400s or even Islamic expansion much earlier Africa would have ended up like the Indigenous Americas, and Australian Aboriginees. #SouthAfrica #BBInoContest

This is a short list of military defeats suffered by European armies in Africa.
Rugaro
Elbejet
Viervoet
Fort Johnstone
Pembe Drift
Cunene
Nsamankow
Efutu,
Kitombo
Intombe Drift
Woyowayanko
Dabadugu
Soyo
Dogali
Isandhlwana
Adwa
The Franqui Expedition
Minonge Ravine
Dul Madoba
#Afr

The List continues Anoual
Togbao
Kouno
Mbandi Kasi
Mongwe
eCeceni
Mpofana
Asikuma
Bobikuma,

N.B: This list doesn't include The Ethiopian war whereby Italians were heavily defeated by the Ethiopian military #Ethiopia #AfricanHistoryClass #AfricanAmerican

What they don't tell you is that most Africans were defeated mainly due to Africans betraying one another and not due to Europeans military capabilities #SouthAfrica #Tanzania #Ghana

At first sight it may seem surprising that Europeans did not successfully penetrate Africa until the late nineteenth century, for Africa is after all Europe’s nearest neighbour, and the first continent with which Europe had established contact, #SouthAfrica

This helps us to understand why Europeans failed to penetrate Africa as successfully as they penetrated the Americas and Asia in this period. Africans successfully resisted them. #SouthAfrica #Kenya

But at this stage Europe did not enjoy the military preponderance she was to establish later. Just beyond the coastal belt of West Africa lay a sequence of powerful states, many of them with well-organized armies. #SouthAfrica #Kenya

There were important states in east and central Africa also, and a black military revolution in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century provided some African peoples with fresh powers of resistance there too. #Ghana #Nigeria #Zimbabwe

Europeans continued to be defeated by Africans, for example the Ashanti, the Zulu and the Abyssinians, until the late nineteenth century #SouthAfrica #Tanzania #Zimbabwe #Ethiopia

But Europeans had by now established a tremendous technological gap in firearms. Fast-repeating machine guns had been invented (the gatling in the late 1860s and the maxim soon after), and these enabled Europeans to conquer large African armies with small forces. #SouthAfrica

If Europeans had at last become a military match for Africans, they were also solving some of the medical problems of Africa. #SouthAfrica #Zimbabwe #Kenya

From the 1850s, quinine was being used as a prophylactic (that is a medicine taken to prevent the outbreak of disease rather than cure it after it had occurred) and efforts were being made to overcome the difficulties of the tsetse fly—John Mackenzie #Kenya