East Africa, also known as Eastern Africa or the East of Africa, is a region at the eastern edge of the African continent, distinguished by its unique geographical, historical, and cultural landscape. Defined in varying scopes, the region is recognized in the United Nations Statistics Division scheme as encompassing 18 sovereign states and 4 territories. It includes the Horn of Africa to the North, African Great Lakes to the west, the coast of the Indian ocean to the east, and Southeastern Africa to the south.
The geography of East Africa is quite varied, with coastal regions leading up to cooler highlands where large population centers are often located. The climate generally is rather atypical of equatorial regions, being mostly arid or semi-arid, with more moisture as you go further south. The region is regularly affected by North Indian Ocean tropical cyclones near the Horn of Africa, and South-West Indian Ocean tropical cyclones in the south. The extreme climate variability makes the region vulnerable to drought and flood cycles, that in the 20th century has lead to food insecurity and climate migration.
Historically the region is thought to be the foundation of humanity, with some of the earliest evidence of human ancestors found in dry highland areas, such as the Rift valley. The populations in the region have been dominated by the Bantu expansion, a mass migration of ethnically Bantu peoples to the region between 2500 and 3000 years ago. During the pre-modern era, connections with sea routes to both Arab regions in the north, and India in the east often had cultural mixing on the coasts, leading to the development of the trade region of the Swahili coast, where the Swahili language developed with loan words from Arabic and other languages in the trade region. The Horn of Africa is home to Cushitic-speaking peoples. In some parts of East Africa, especially in South Sudan, the population largely consists of Nilotic populations.
In modern history, after European Exploration, first Portuguese and then later English and German colonies were formed in the region. Since post-colonial independence the region has grown to be a populous region, with a 2017 estimate of over 537.9 million inhabitants. Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia are some of the largest economies in the region. Many of the countries are still dominated by rural workforces employed in agriculture, but the economies of East Africa are currently growing much faster than other parts of Africa at 6% growth, with Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania outpacing many of the other countries.
Definitions In a narrow sense, particularly in English speaking contexts, East Africa refers to the area comprising Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, largely due to their shared history of British administration and later cooperation through East African regional institutions. Further extending East Africa's definition, the Horn of Africa—comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia—stands out as a distinct geopolitical entity within East Africa.Robert Stock, Africa South of the Sahara, Second Edition: A Geographical Interpretation, (The Guildford Press; 2004), p. 26
The East African Community, an economic and political bloc, currently includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania. Notably, the African Great Lakes region overlaps significantly with these countries. Adjacent to these mainland territories are island nations and territories such as the Comoros, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Mayotte, and the Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean.
Regions including portions of Mozambique and Madagascar, often aligned with Southern Africa, share significant historical and cultural connections with East Africa, particularly through the Indian Ocean's maritime networks. Sudan is also sometimes included due in part because it is a part of the eastern region in African Union (AU) and a member of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) free trade area.
History
Prehistory
According to both genetic and fossil evidence, it has been posited that archaic Homo sapiens evolved into anatomically modern humans in the Horn of Africa around 200,000 years ago and dispersed from there. The recognition of Homo sapiens idaltu and Omo Kibish as anatomically modern humans would justify the description of contemporary humans with the subspecies name Homo sapiens sapiens. Because of their early dating and unique physical characteristics idaltu and kibish represent the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans as suggested by the Out-of-Africa theory.
In 2017 finds of modern human remains, dating to ca 300,000 years ago in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, suggested that modern humans arose earlier and possibly in a larger area of Africa than previously thought.
East Africa is one of the earliest regions where Homo sapiens are believed to have lived. Evidence was found in 2018, dating to about 320,000 years ago, at the Kenyan site of Olorgesailie, of the early emergence of modern behaviors associated with Homo sapiens, including: long-distance trade networks (involving goods such as obsidian), the use of pigments, and the possible making of projectile points. It is observed by the authors of three 2018 studies on the site, that the evidence of these behaviors is approximately contemporary to the earliest known Homo sapiens fossil remains from Africa (such as at Jebel Irhoud and Florisbad), and they suggest that complex and modern behaviors had already begun in Africa around the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens.
In September 2019, scientists reported the computerized determination, based on 260 CT scans, of a virtual skull shape of the last common human ancestor to modern humans/H. sapiens, representative of the earliest Homo sapiens, and suggested that Homo sapiens arose between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in South and East Africa.
The migration route of the "Out of Africa" theory probably occurred in East Africa through the Bab-el-Mandeb. Today at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits, the Red Sea is about wide, but 50,000 years ago it was much narrower and sea levels were 70 meters lower. Though the straits were never completely closed, there may have been islands in between which could be reached using simple rafts.
Some of the earliest hominin skeletal remains have been found in the wider region, including fossils discovered in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia, as well as in the Koobi Fora in Kenya and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
The southern part of East Africa was occupied until recent times by Khoisan hunter-gatherers, whereas in the Ethiopian Highlands the donkey and such crop plants as teff allowed the beginning of agriculture around 7,000 BCE.Diamond, Jared; Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies; p. 103; Lowland barriers and diseases carried by the tsetse fly, however, prevented the donkey and agriculture from spreading southwards. Only in quite recent times has agriculture spread to the more humid regions south of the equator, through the spread of cattle, sheep and crops such as millet. Language distributions suggest that this most likely occurred from Sudan into the African Great Lakes region, since the Nilotic languages spoken by these pre-Bantu farmers have their closest relatives in the middle Nile basin.
Ancient history
Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Red Sea coast of Sudan are considered the most likely location of the land known to the Ancient Egyptians as Punt. The old kingdom's first mention dates to the 25th century BCE.Najovits, Simson (2004) Egypt, trunk of the tree, Volume 2, Algora Publishing, p. 258, . The ancient Puntites were a nation of people that had close relations with Pharaonic Egypt during the times of Pharaoh Sahure and Queen Hatshepsut.
The Kingdom of Aksum was a trading empire centered Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. It existed from approximately 100–940 CE, growing from the proto-Aksumite Iron Age period to achieve prominence by the 1st century CE. The kingdom is mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea as an important marketplace for ivory, which was exported throughout the ancient world. Aksum was at the time ruled by Zoskales, who also governed the port of Adulis.Periplus of the Erythreaean Sea , chs. 4, 5 The Aksumite rulers facilitated trade by minting their own Aksumite currency. The state also established its hegemony over the declining Kingdom of Kush.
Bantu expansion
Between 2500 and 3000 years ago, Bantu-speaking peoples began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland around southern Cameroon. This Bantu expansion introduced agriculture into much of the African Great Lakes region. During the following fifteen centuries, the Bantu slowly intensified farming and grazing over all suitable regions of East Africa, in the process making contact with Austronesian- and Arabic-speaking settlers on southern coastal areas. The latter also spread Islam to the coastal belt, but most Bantu remained African Traditional Religion adherents.
Over a period of many centuries, most hunting-foraging peoples were displaced and absorbed by incoming Bantu communities, as well as by later Nilotic communities. The Bantu expansion was a long series of physical migrations, a diffusion of language and knowledge out into and in from neighboring populations, and a creation of new societal groups involving inter-marriage among communities and small groups moving to communities and small groups moving to new areas.
After their movements from their original homeland in West Africa, Bantus also encountered in central east Africa peoples of Cushitic origin. As cattle terminology in use amongst the few modern Bantu pastoralist groups suggests, the Bantu migrants would acquire cattle from their new Cushitic neighbors. Linguistic evidence also indicates that Bantus most likely borrowed the custom of milking cattle directly from Cushitic peoples in the area.J. D. Fage, A History of Africa, Routledge, 2002, p.29
On the coastal section of the African Great Lakes region, another mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab and Persian traders, leading to the development of the mixed Arab, Persian and African Swahili City States. The Swahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the many Afro-Arab members of the Bantu Swahili people. With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Tanzania (particularly Zanzibar) and Kenya—a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast—the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loan-words as a consequence of these interactions.Daniel Don Nanjira, African Foreign Policy and Diplomacy: From Antiquity to the 21st Century, ABC-CLIO, 2010, p.114 Its important to note that Kiswahili grammar and structure are purely African and Bantu even if its vocabulary has non-African influence in the same way English remains a Germanic language regardless of its vocabulary being heavily influenced by Latin and French among other languages.