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After the great drought of the 1980s, the waters of the Nile River returned in abundance during the last decade of the 20th century; however, the peoples of the Nile Basin are reproducing at a greater rate than the waters of the Nile. The claims to this scarce resource are based on history and equity, which are fundamentally incompatible. Despite the creation of basin state organizations for discussion, conferences, and the intervention of the World Bank, the ten basin states, particularly Egypt, are determined to construct their own projects for Nile Control to feed their citizens in the new millennium.

This chapter describes the African slave trade to Asia across the Sahara Desert. The only criteria for the Muslim was that the slave be pagan, and since African traditional religions were unacceptable, sub-Saharan Africa became the most important source of slaves for the Muslim merchants who established elaborate commercial networks to transport them out of Africa across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea slave trade was ironically older than the trans-Saharan. The Greek mercantile presence in the Indian Ocean did not survive the dominance of Rome in the Mediterranean, but trade on the East African coast was continued as in the past by merchants from Arabia, Persia, India, and China who plied the waters of the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds of the Sabaean Lane. Slavery was an institution in most African societies, and its abolition came later than in the Americas. Keywords:African slave trade; Americas; Arabia; Asia; Greek; Indian Ocean; Muslim; Persia; Red Sea

The mean total length (LT), mass and age of ready to migrate female silver shortfin eels Anguilla australis from the Hopkins River estuary and the mouth of the Merri River in south-eastern Australia, were 83·2 ± 1·2 cm, 1051 ± 51 g, and 17·2 ± 1·79 years, respectively. The eye index (IE) of the silver shortfin eels was 50% of all the fatty acids in the lipid.

After traversing more than three millennia of the African past, it is time to pause and take stock, to look back in history as well as forward, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over the past half-century, scholars have scoured archaeological sites, colonial archives, published works, and oral traditions; utilized social science methodologies – anthropology, linguistics, and demography; and developed an appreciation of African art, music, and literature, to construct a new paradigm for understanding the continent's past. We hope that readers of this text will have recognized the themes in the last several thousand years of the African past that thread their way through the text into the twenty-first century. They are indeed the themes of this book, and they will most certainly reappear – in different forms, to be sure – in the twenty-first century. Environment continues to shape the lives of the African peoples. As seen in the previous chapters, population has long been tied to the interaction between humans and the unique African environment. In relation to its landmass, Africa has, historically, been under populated. Two thousand years ago, Africa south of the Sahara had only an estimated population one-fifth that of China or the Roman Empire. During the next 1,500 years, this ratio continued to decline so that by 1500, Africa contained less than an estimated 15 percent of the world's human beings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Africa accounted for only about 1 percent of the 2 billion people inhabiting the earth. The reasons for this low rate of growth remain unclear to this day. Was this creeping rate of reproduction caused by a harsh climate, disease, poor soils, conflict, and slavery? One can only reflect and suggest that the reasons lie in the complex interaction between humanity and nature in Africa.

After four hundred years during which Europe had displayed little or no interest in Africa beyond its coastline, suddenly – in the twenty years between 1878 and 1898 – the European states partitioned and conquered virtually the entire continent. To observers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this sudden conquest was a frantic, often unseemly, and largely unexpected scramble for territory in a continent about which the Europeans knew little and for which most cared nothing. Their sentiments were encapsulated in the famous remark by the English historian John H. Seeley that his generation had conquered half of the world “in a fit of absence of mind.” Today, however, with the advantage of hindsight historians have perceived several fundamental causes and events that combined to upset four hundred years of equilibrium between Africa and Europe and precipitate the European conquest of virtually the entire continent. The Industrial Revolution created demands for new raw materials from Africa, and made Africa an attractive potential market for European manufactured goods. Moreover, the new technologies produced by the Industrial Revolution provided the instruments that upset the long-standing balance of power between Africa and Europe. Imperialism was propelled as well by popular nationalism, which pressed European statesmen into pursuing expansionist policies in the name of imperial defense. Changing terms of trade required European merchants to seek political stability in Africa, where for centuries they had profited from the instability that had fostered the slave trade. European Christianity was also changing in the nineteenth century, as the new and powerful Evangelical movement inspired aggressive missionary activity, which in the past had been largely confined to the African coast, deeper into the continent.

East Central Africa South of the equatorial rainforest stretches a vast region of woodlands and savanna that includes parts of northern Angola and Zambia and the Shaba region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Central African savanna is bounded in the east by Lake Tanganyika, on the west by the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and in the south by the lower tributaries of the Zambezi River. The territory is interlaced with rivers and streams that feed the southern branches of the Congo and the upper reaches of the Zambezi. This immense, often inhospitable region is home to several of the most remarkable states in the history of Africa. The early history of the Central African savanna emerges with greater clarity after the immigration into the region by Bantu-speaking farmers from West Africa, their dispersal into small isolated communities, and the reintegration of these communities under new political institutions after 1400. Isolation was the inevitable result of the environmental challenges farmers confronted on the central savanna. The soils are generally poor in nutrients and not conducive to cereal agriculture. In the northern zone, which lies just south of the equator, the annual rainfall is dependable but steadily declines as one moves southeastward, and in the far south, years of drought are frequent. The valleys of the tributaries to the Congo and Zambezi are lush and heavily wooded, but the uplands between the rivers consist of lightly forested, sandy grasslands ill suited for agriculture. Thus the early farmers descended into the valleys, lakes, and floodplains where the soils were more fertile and water more dependable. Disease also limited the size and productivity of agricultural communities in Central Africa. Malaria and sleeping sickness remain two of the most prevalent endemic diseases, the widespread presence of the tsetse fly carrying sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) to domestic animals, known as nagana , prevented the raising of cattle and horses, depriving the inhabitants of meat, milk, and transport. The environment and disease conspired to inhibit the concentration of people into larger communities, leaving the farmers to disperse into small and scattered rural settlements.

Collins Robert O. The Ilemi Triangle. In: Annales d'Ethiopie. Volume 20, année 2004. pp. 5-12.

Maps Acronyms Preface 1. Sahara, Sahel, and Sudan Continuities Crossing the Sahara The Power of Belief The Bonds of Blood Boundaries and Frontiers Implacable Imperialism Notes 2. Chad: An African Conundrum France and the Republic of Chad The Tombalbaye Government Seeking Support Outside France Revolt in the B.E.T. Drought and the Insurgency FROLINAT A Nasty Little War Tombalbaye Fights Back The Return of the French French Conditions and Tombalbaye's Response Opposition in France The French Military in Chad The Libyan Card Notes 3. The Sudan and Tombalbaye: Muslims and Christians The Sudan and Chad Sadiq al-Mahdi and Chad FROLINAT Attacks The Sahelian Drought Turabi and Sadiq Numayri and Chad Notes 4. Libya and Tombalbaye: Muslim Arabs and Christian Africans Qaddafi's Game Geopolitic Visions The Chad-Libyan Boundary Dispute Revisited Cartographic and Other Territorial Aggression Hissene Habre The Aozou Strip Drought and Man in the Aozou Strip and the B.E.T. Security for Tombalbaye FROLINAT in Disarray L'Affaire Claustre Notes 5. The Struggle for Chad The United States and Tombalbaye Tombalbaye Assassinated The Conseil Suprieur Militaire du Tchad and Felix Malloum Presidents Giscard and Malloum Dissension Within the FAN Qaddafi and the Sudan The Return of the French Regional Geopolitics in a Changing World Egypt, Libya, Niger, and the OAU Habre Joins Malloum The Popular Armed Forces on the Offensive Notes 6. Libya Threatens Chad Habre and the Transitional Government of National Unity Political Disarray and Violence in Ndjamena Libyan Intervention and GUNT France Leaves, Libya Arrives Habre Is Isolated Libya Incorporates Chad The OAU and Chad The Reagan Response The OAU and Libya Notes 7. Habre Brings Order Habre Recovers Mitte

The plight of Sudan, where great numbers of people live and work under the chronic threats of famine, civil war and sickness, is a matter of humanitarian concern. Here, Sudanese scholars examine one aspect of these issues - the population displacement problem that affects one third of the nation.

During the first decade of the Anglo-Egyptian occupation of the Sudan, the newly formed Condominium Government had slowly established its rule in the Southern Sudan. A way to the south was first cleared through the sudd-choked channels of the Bahr al-Jabal and the Bahr al-Ghazāl Rivers, and administrators and troops soon followed to secure the control of the Upper Nile Valley for Britain and Egypt against the pretensions of other European powers. In 1898 Britain successfully rejected the claims of France to the Upper Nile, but it was not until 1906 that the British Government was able to eliminate the third competitor for control of the Southern Sudan—the Congo Free State. From 1902 to 1906 desultory negotiations were carried on between the British Foreign Office and the representatives of Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Congo Free State, enlivened only by provocative incidents precipitated by Leopold's agents in the Southern Sudan. Both parties had valid legal and moral claims to the Upper Nile which were supported by the arms of the Force Publique on the one hand and Egyptian and Sudanese troops on the other.