Course Syllabus
African History
Empires, kingdoms & continental sovereignty
Course Description
Empires, kingdoms & continental sovereignty
Units
12
Lessons
39
Recommended Length
8 weeks
Learning Outcomes
- •Students will be able to describe Aksum's political, religious, and economic significance as a major ancient trading power comparable to Rome, Persia, and China.
- •Students will analyze how colonial-era racial assumptions, and later, specific mid-20th-century political interests in Rhodesia, delayed acceptance of Great Zimbabwe's indigenous African origins.
- •Students will compare the Kingdom of Kongo's alliance-based strategy with the Asante Empire's independence-based strategy for encountering European colonial and commercial power.
- •Students will evaluate primary source evidence, including King Afonso I's letters, documenting African rulers' direct historical experience of early contact with European powers.
- •Students will be able to explain the 'effective occupation' principle established at the Berlin Conference and its role in accelerating European colonization of Africa.
- •Students will analyze how colonial-era border-drawing split existing ethnic and cultural groups while forcing historically separate or rival groups into single colonial states.
Auto-generated from unit objectives — an admin can refine these in the syllabus editor.
Prerequisite
None — open entry
Credit Hours
Self-paced / non-credit
Recommended Schedule
8 weeks · self-pacedA suggested pace. Move faster or slower as needed — your progress saves automatically.
Week
1
3 lessons · Four African states whose sophistication colonial history spent a century trying to explain away
3 lessons · How fourteen countries divided a continent in 104 days without a single African representative in the room
Week
2
3 lessons · Three empires, three governing philosophies, and one shared consequence: the deliberate withholding of the skills self-rule would require
3 lessons · Three responses to the Scramble for Africa: one victory, one act of unifying faith, and one atrocity historians now call a genocidal rehearsal for the twentieth century
Week
3
3 lessons · Ghana's model, Nigeria's fractures, and the referendum that let one country say no when everyone else said yes
3 lessons · When negotiation failed and colonized peoples fought their way to independence instead
Week
4
4 lessons · Three neighboring territories, three different roads out of white minority rule
3 lessons · How a rivalry between two faraway superpowers turned newly independent African nations into battlegrounds
Week
5
3 lessons · The colonial-era fracture this curriculum has tracked since Unit 3, finally breaking open into full civil war
4 lessons · How a colonial identity card became a death sentence, and what Rwanda built afterward to try to live together again
Week
6
3 lessons · When the Cold War's superpower patrons left, and clan militias, child soldiers, and diamond wealth filled the vacuum
4 lessons · A continental institution still finding its footing, a democratic intervention that worked, and a coup wave that is rejecting the very idea of outside intervention
Week
8
Review & Final Exam
Supplemental Materials
499
Books & primary/secondary sources
- • Up From Slavery (1901)
- • 'Algorithmic Amplification and Skin Tone,' Journal of Communication
- • 'Can Baby Bonds Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap?
Assessment
Unit Quizzes
53
Formative, one per unit
Final Exam Questions
17
Comprehensive, course-end
Optional Experiential Enhancements
Beyond the core curriculum — ways to make this course personal and place-based.
Heritage Trip
Plan a place-based visit to sites tied to this course with the Trips planner.
Family Chronicle
Build a personal family chronicle and tree as a capstone project.
Heritage Languages
Learn ancestral diaspora languages alongside the history.
Cultural Lens
Analyze films, music, and visual art as primary sources.
Interactive Labs
Explore interactive maps, music, and culinary roots labs.