PLO Lumumba, the Kenyan lawyer and Pan-African orator, has told a version of Africa’s history that many Western textbooks still soften: that the continent survived not one but two long waves of external domination, an Arab wave and a European wave, and that both were dressed up afterwards in flattering language, abolition instead of exploitation, discovery instead of invasion. This is not rhetorical excess. It is a claim the documentary and scientific record backs almost point for point, and this article makes that case, citing sources any reader can verify independently.
The Arab slave trade and the Islamisation-Arabisation project
Lumumba is right that Africans were enslaved and absorbed under Arab rule on an enormous scale, and this is not a fringe reading of history. Historian Paul E. Lovejoy’s Transformations in Slavery, the standard academic reference on the subject, puts the number of people taken out of Africa across the trans-Saharan slave routes alone at roughly 7.4 million between the years 650 and 1900, with the Red Sea and East African coastal routes into Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and India adding well over a million more (Lovejoy, 2012). These are conservative academic figures, drawn from a scholar whose work remains the standard reference on the subject.
Lumumba is also right to call it an Islamisation and an Arabisation project, not a benign cultural exchange. Theologian and historian John Alembillah Azumah, in The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, documents that only seven years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, an Arab army invaded Egypt in 639 CE, and within two generations Arab hegemony had spread across the entire Maghrib to the Atlantic coast (Azumah, 2001). Drawing on primary Arabic and colonial-era sources, Azumah shows that the process combined military conquest, systematic enslavement, and religious conversion, precisely the pattern Lumumba describes (Azumah, 2001).
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European colonisation: the Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference
Lumumba’s second wave, a rotating cast of Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, French, German, and
English colonisers, is exactly what the historical record shows. Historian Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa, still the most comprehensive single narrative history of the period, documents how five European powers fought and negotiated their way to seizing African territory between 1876 and 1912 (Pakenham, 1991).
The proof that this was a coordinated carve-up, not an accident of history, is the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, called by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Pakenham’s account documents that the conference brought the major European powers together to settle competing claims over the Congo River basin and to agree a common framework for recognising European claims to African coastal territory, with not a single African ruler, state, or representative present or consulted (Pakenham, 1991). Before the conference, only about ten percent of the African continent was under direct European control; within roughly three decades, that figure had been driven up to about ninety percent (Pakenham, 1991). That is not exploration. That is conquest by paperwork.
“Discovering” an inhabited continent
Lumumba’s sharpest point may be his simplest: Africa was not discovered, it was inhabited, and calling it “discovered” was always a colonial sleight of hand. The record agrees with him. The Cape of Good Hope is conventionally described as having been “discovered” by the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, yet Encyclopaedia Britannica itself concedes that the cape had long been known to the indigenous Khoekhoe and San peoples before Dias ever arrived; he was simply the first European to see it (Britannica, 2026). Dias and his contemporaries used the language of “discovery” to describe coastlines, lakes, and rivers that African communities had already named, settled, and navigated for generations. Lumumba is not exaggerating for effect. He is naming the exact vocabulary colonial powers used to erase prior African presence from their own records.
Africa as the cradle of human civilisation
Lumumba’s boldest claim, that Africa is the cradle of humanity itself, is also the one with the least room for dispute. It is not rhetoric; it is mainstream science. The region north-west of Johannesburg, South Africa, is formally named the Cradle of Humankind and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in recognition of hominin fossils found there dating back three million years or more, including the Australopithecus africanus specimens known as “Mrs Ples” and “Little Foot.” Genetics closes the case beyond doubt. The landmark 1987 mitochondrial DNA study by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson, published in Nature, traced the maternal lineage of every living human being back to a common ancestral population in Africa, a finding subsequent genomic research has only reinforced (Cann, Stoneking, & Wilson, 1987). Lumumba is not indulging in continental pride when he calls Africa the cradle of human civilisation. He is stating the scientific consensus.
Conclusion
PLO Lumumba’s account of African history is not oratory dressed up as fact. It is fact delivered as oratory. The documented Arab slave trade and its accompanying Arabisation-Islamisation project (Lovejoy, 2012; Azumah, 2001), the European Scramble for Africa formalised without a single African voice in the room at Berlin (Pakenham, 1991), the colonial habit of calling inhabited land “discovered” (Britannica, 2026), and the scientific consensus that Africa is the cradle of humankind (Cann et al., 1987), each of these stands up independently to scrutiny.
Lumumba’s case for Africa is not a matter of sentiment. It is a matter of record.
References
Azumah, J. A. (2001). The legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A quest for inter-religious dialogue. Oneworld
Publications. https://archive.org/details/legacyofarabisla0000azum
Britannica. (2026). Berlin Conference. Encyclopaedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Berlin–West–Africa–Conference
Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M., & Wilson, A. C. (1987). Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature,
325(6099), 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/325031a0
Lovejoy, P. E. (2012). Transformations in slavery: A history of slavery in Africa (3rd ed.). Cambridge
University Press. https://archive.org/details/transformationsi0000love
Pakenham, T. (1991). The scramble for Africa: The white man’s conquest of the dark continent from
1876 to 1912. Random House. https://archive.org/details/scrambleforafric0000pake
