ABSTRACT

The role of Islam in Africa continues to be of great significance, and it is a role which is to a very large extent defined by past achievement. As Africa reaches the threshold of the third millennium, it seems right to conclude with some attempt to discern which strands in the African experience show most signs of continuing relevance to the present. All through history new crops were being added to those domesticated in Africa, and strategies of food production were changing, little by little, in consequence. More significant for Africa, however, was the community of African Americans who stayed in the land of their forced adoption and came to form one-seventh of the most powerful nation of the twentieth century. The partition of Africa placed each of some forty colonial territories squarely within the political ambit of a single European power, and under this new dispensation contact with the outside world continued to develop slowly.