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1400
1400s
Europeans began to make long sea voyages in the 1400s. -
1400
1400s
Africans beyond the Sahara began trading with Europeans who had recently arrived on their coastlines. -
1500
1500s
Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans had built trading posts on the African coast. -
1500
1500s
African traders began selling enslaved people for guns and other European goods. -
1600s
Southern and Eastern Africa were also colonized as early as the 1600s. -
1800s
The slave trade was mostly outlawed in the early 1800s, but European interference in Africa continued. -
1800s
By the early 1800s, European powers began actively colonizing Africa. -
1900s
Africans regained power over their own lands. -
1900s
Several European powers controlled different parts of Africa in the early 1900s. -
1900
By 1900, European nations had divided most of Africa into colonies. -
Mid-1900s
African countries gained independence mainly during the mid-1900s. -
1910
In South Africa, independence came as early as 1910. -
1910
South Africa gained independence from Britain in 1910. -
1920s
In Kenya, the Kikuyu people started a political organization in the 1920s with the goal of independence from Britain. -
1930s
The only country that was never colonized was Ethiopia, though it was invaded by Italy in the 1930s. -
1940s
African independence movements gained momentum in the 1940s. -
1948
In 1948, they adopted apartheid, a former South African policy of strict separation of races. -
1950s and 1960s
Most of Africa gained independence in the 1950s and 1960s. -
1956
Only a few years after Sudan gained independence in 1956, southerners rebelled against northern life. -
1957
Ghana became independent in 1957. -
1960
Nigeria became independent in 1960. -
1960
Belgium abruptly granted independence to the Belgian Congo in 1960. -
1962
Nelson Mandela played a key role in ending apartheid. He was an ANC leader who was jailed in 1962. -
1963
After years of negotiation and finally violence between the British and Kenyan fighters, Kenya gained independence in 1963. -
1965
In 1965, army leader Joseph Mobutu seized power and changed the country's name to Zaire, after a traditional name for the Congo River. -
1967
By 1967, an oil-rich region controlled by the Igbo ethnic group attempted to leave Nigeria. -
1989 to 1994
Nelson Mandela continued to protest from prison. F.W de Klerk, South Africa's president from 1989 to 1994, realized that apartheid was destroying South Africa. -
1990
In 1990, F.W de Klerk released Mandela from prison and agreed to end apartheid. -
1994
South Africans had their first fully democratic election in 1994. -
1994
In 1994, South Africans of all races voted together and Mandela became president. -
1994
During a few months in 1994, Hutu military and militia groups killed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis. -
2000s
Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black farmers, were killed in the early 2000s. -
2005
Civil wars raged until 2005 and killed several million people. -
2010
In 2010, a movement for more democracy that came to be known as the Arab Spring began in Tunisia. -
2011
In 2011, South Sudan became independent. -
2011
Tunisia's dictator resigned in January of 2011 and a more democratic government was put in place. -
2011
Similarly, the king of Morocco responded to peaceful protests. He issued a new constitution that voters approved in 2011. -
2011
Qaddafi was killed in October of 2011, but the new government that formed did not have the support of all the rebel groups. -
2011
In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak led an often corrupt and tightly run dictatorship for 30 years. Arab Spring protests forced him to resign in 2011. -
2012
Egyptians elected an Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, in 2012. -
2013
But in 2013, the military imprisoned Morsi and banned his political party.