Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 Many people called Africa the Dark Continent over the millennia, a reference both the color of the people who lived there, and the mysterious its jungles kept from outsiders.\u00a0 Africa has opened up to us in the last four centuries, shedding the mystery and stepping into the light of the modern worlds.\u00a0 What that will mean for the future is an interesting mystery that I hope to watch develop.<\/p>\n
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The Book of Civilizations<\/strong><\/p>\n Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Africa has a long and rich history as far back as we can trace human civilization at all.\u00a0 The grassy plains of Egypt and Nubia, on the banks of the Nile, were great centers of civilization after the Ice Age quite literally melted away, their pyramids a testament to the power that once flowed through their fingers.\u00a0 The jungles of central and southern Africa have long been home to humanity, and the local religions there are some of the oldest remaining religions we still remember as a race.<\/p>\n But as with all things, the power of Africa faded.\u00a0 The great Egyptian line of Pharaohs dating back to the beginning of civilization as we know it failed against the might Alexander the Great, and then ascendant Rome broke them again.\u00a0 When Christianity spread into the continent, the remaining great princes of Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful nations converted to Christianity.\u00a0 When Islam began to spread, they quickly conquered Christian Egypt and built a new city, Cairo, to act as a new capital.\u00a0 As the centuries passed, they slowly drove Christianity and the other local tribal religions out of the rest of northern Africa.\u00a0 But in central and southern Africa, where the jungles proved difficult for the desert-acclimated Arabs, Christianity and the tribal religions survived.<\/p>\n By the Nineteenth Century, the Arabs held sway over nearly all of the north, and their governments codified the destruction of any other religion.\u00a0 Muslim raiders traveled into the jungles to enslave the pagan Africans in such numbers that they depopulated entire regions.\u00a0 When the European nations stepped in and occupied Africa, one of their first steps was to end the slave trade.\u00a0 They also established an equality of religions, and Christian missionaries returned to the paths mapped by First Century Christianity.<\/p>\n The Twentieth Century, especially after the Second World War, saw the Europeans stepping back from full-scale occupations of Africa, and the Islamic Brotherhoods soon began working to drive Christianity and the local African religions out of existence again.\u00a0 The century-long Sudanese Civil war was the longest running of these conflicts, and the bloodiest civil war in all of Earth\u2019s history.\u00a0 Christianity became a unifying influence between the various African tribes of South Sudan, much like it became for the rest of central and southern Africa, a common interest the Africans could rally behind to stand against Arabic oppression.\u00a0 Proclaiming Christianity became not only a religious declaration, but also a political statement against the Muslim oppressors.<\/p>\n The Western World protested the atrocities into the Twenty-First Century, but generally did little more to stop the genocide as long as the Islamic governments kept things mostly under the covers.\u00a0 They did sometimes step in though.\u00a0 The Western militaries occupying the various oil-producing nations of the time are a testament to that policy, but even then they did not stop the wholesale bombing of Coptic Christian businesses and homes that finally drove most of them out of the Arabic World.<\/p>\n When the Second Great Depression hit, they pulled their armies back, and the Islamic Brotherhoods were free of even minimal interference from the West.\u00a0 The Arab governments throughout North Africa and the Middle East declared open warfare on anyone who wasn\u2019t Islamic once again.\u00a0 Tens of millions of people died.\u00a0 In the Far East, they ran into the meat grinder known as India.\u00a0 In the Middle East, they met an Israel with no America to hold them back.<\/p>\n In Africa, they ran into chaos.\u00a0 Many consider the war in Africa to be the hardest fought of the Islamic Jihad.\u00a0 Historically, Egypt and the other northern countries dominated by the Arabs were some of the richest in Africa, and they had some of the best-equipped armies in Africa, which they used to sow chaos throughout sub-Saharan Africa.\u00a0 Many African governments collapsed under the Arab attacks, including most of West and Central Africa.\u00a0 These fallen nations became no man\u2019s lands where individual tribes lived or died on their own, and outside forces were not tolerated.<\/p>\n Nigeria, South Africa, and Ethiopia proved the most stable of the African nations, and many of the nations around them survived only due to their support.\u00a0 They deployed small forces to hunt down the Arab raiders throughout Africa, without the need to take prisoners.\u00a0 They sent larger forces into the north, harassing the Arab states with hit and run attacks, and many of the Arab governments collapsed under the pressure.\u00a0 Sudan\u2019s century-long civil war finally came to an end when concentrated South African and Ethiopian attacks destroyed the Islamic central government.<\/p>\n Egypt proved to be the deadliest foe of the Africa Union, and their army and air force struck back killing countless soldiers and towns across Africa.\u00a0 They even deployed nuclear weapons, though most of them failed to detonate due to failures in the ignition systems that most historians attribute to shoddy maintenance.\u00a0 Every surviving African nation sent troops to invade Egypt, and that campaign proved to be the bloodiest of the war.\u00a0 Most of Africa\u2019s combined air force died in the days before the final assault, leading up to the bloodiest battle of the entire war.\u00a0 It started just outside the Great Pyramid near Giza, when a million-man African Union army tried to flank the Egyptian defenses.\u00a0 Egypt fired the last of its nuclear weapons, but none of them detonated.<\/p>\n The apparent miracle emboldened the African Union soldiers, and they charged the Egyptian flank.\u00a0 The Egyptian flank collapsed and their soldiers retreated.\u00a0 The Africans followed them, hoping to finish them off quickly, and the Egyptians reserves moved out of the city to stop them.\u00a0 Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed or wounded on both sides in the meat grinder that lasted all night and into the next day.\u00a0 Then to the amazement of everybody, the citizens of Cairo themselves stormed the presidential palace and brought an end to the most powerful Islamic Brotherhood government in Africa.<\/p>\n The war continued for many months, mopping up the surviving remnants of Islamic Brotherhood armies.\u00a0 And for years afterwards Islamic suicide bombers continued to plague Africa, but that was the day that the war for Africa was won.\u00a0 They began to rebuild, and to plan for the future they all could see coming.\u00a0 While the Arab Menace had been shattered, both in Africa and in the Middle East by Israel and India, the Russians and Chinese were flexing their muscles.\u00a0 The world was becoming smaller, and Africa would have to unite permanently, or they would be occupied again.\u00a0 So as they rebuilt, they began the slow work of uniting themselves in fact as well as treaty.\u00a0 It was neither simple nor easy.<\/p>\n In 2075, the Fifth<\/em> African Constitutional Convention braved another threatened wave of suicide bombers to announce the new constitution.\u00a0 The next year over a billion citizens voted in favor of the new constitution and the United States of Africa was born.\u00a0 Africa spent the next quarter century building a truly united economy, as well as their first spaceport outside Mombasa.\u00a0 They achieved space in 2095, orbit in 2097, and were operating their own space station in geosynchronous orbit over Africa by 2105.\u00a0 It was a small station, but it was African built, a matter of pride for all of Africa.\u00a0 They even established colonies on the Moon and Mars.<\/p>\n Then China performed the first hyperspace jump and Africa realized what the new<\/em> space race really was.\u00a0 For the first time in their memory, Africa could be the first to explore somewhere, but even after all of their efforts, they did not have the industrial base to support a true interstellar exploration program.\u00a0 What they did<\/em> have was natural resources that could last for centuries.\u00a0 Those same resources had made them the target of First World mining operations in previous centuries.\u00a0 In the Twenty Second century, Africa leveraged those resources, and their unique position on Earth, into being in<\/em> the First World.<\/p>\n Africa joined the Western Alliance as an equal member state, and plans to follow the Chinese into hyperspace quickly crystallized into action.\u00a0 And for Africa, joining the Alliance soon became one of the greatest economic boons in their history.\u00a0 For two centuries, mankind had envisioned a space elevator, a way to quickly move anything from surface to orbit without expensive rocket engines boosting small payloads at a time.\u00a0 The Second Great Depression had cut the efforts to build one off at the knees, but the Western Alliance had built an elevator in the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n Africa offered them something they did not have at the time; an industrial base of operations to build a permanent space elevator on the equator, with the population in place to support it.\u00a0 Nigeria had one of the largest economies in the world, an affluent middle class, and skilled laborers who could build anything.\u00a0 They also had world-class ocean-going freight capacity at Port Harcourt, making it an excellent choice for the permanent base of a space elevator.\u00a0 In 2110, Alliance technicians lowered the cable into Port Harcourt and the first permanent space elevator opened.\u00a0 By 2125, Port Harcourt boasted eight strands capable of sending freight into orbit simultaneously, and plans called for more.\u00a0 To this day, the Port Harcourt Orbital Elevator has more capacity than any other space elevator in all the Terran Worlds.<\/p>\n Africa took the elevator to space and the stars beyond, and soon began to colonize their own worlds, though tried to remain out of skirmishes with the Russians and Chinese.\u00a0 They chose to plant colonies on warmer worlds or land masses that the others avoided, giving them some security against poachers looking for an easy colony grab.\u00a0 The Arabs were the only other group who chose to build colonies where the temperatures approached 60 degrees Celsius on a regular basis, and they picked drier climates than the rainforests the Africans preferred.<\/p>\n Three African colony worlds had achieved First Worlds status when the Peloran made Contact.\u00a0 The technologies the Peloran brought proved as much a boon for the Africans as they did for the rest of the Western Alliance.\u00a0 The diseases that had stymied Western medicine for centuries ceased to be an issue, and Peloran genetic treatments extended African lifespans into the centuries.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Africans who stopped aging at all were far more rare than those who come from Europe.\u00a0 The fact that every African Ageless had markers that suggested a European ancestor was the single greatest clue we have yet discovered about that phenomenon.<\/p>\n Today, the African worlds continue to stay out of the way of major conflicts when possible.\u00a0 They do have fleets and armies powerful enough to defend their worlds against any normal foe, but have not yet committed their fleets and armies in defense of the Western Alliance, claiming mobilization issues.\u00a0 The Shang have not yet assaulted them, but if there is one thing we have learned, it is that no single place, no matter how well defended, is safe against a determined Shang assault.\u00a0 The question is whether or not the Shang will force the Africans into The War as they did the Americans and Europeans.\u00a0 The answer to that question will greatly determine the fate of the Western Alliance as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 Many people called Africa the Dark Continent over the millennia, a reference both the color of the people who lived there, and the mysterious its jungles kept from outsiders.\u00a0 Africa has opened up to us[…]↓ Read the rest of this 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