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Europeans began to make long sea voyages in the 1400s.
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Africans beyond the Sahara began trading with Europeans who had recently arrived on their coastlines.
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Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans had built trading posts on the African coast.
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African traders began selling enslaved people for guns and other European goods.
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Southern and Eastern Africa were also colonized as early as the 1600s.
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The slave trade was mostly outlawed in the early 1800s, but European interference in Africa continued.
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By the early 1800s, European powers began actively colonizing Africa.
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Africans regained power over their own lands.
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Several European powers controlled different parts of Africa in the early 1900s.
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By 1900, European nations had divided most of Africa into colonies.
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African countries gained independence mainly during the mid-1900s.
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In South Africa, independence came as early as 1910.
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South Africa gained independence from Britain in 1910.
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In Kenya, the Kikuyu people started a political organization in the 1920s with the goal of independence from Britain.
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The only country that was never colonized was Ethiopia, though it was invaded by Italy in the 1930s.
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African independence movements gained momentum in the 1940s.
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In 1948, they adopted apartheid, a former South African policy of strict separation of races.
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Most of Africa gained independence in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Only a few years after Sudan gained independence in 1956, southerners rebelled against northern life.
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Ghana became independent in 1957.
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Nigeria became independent in 1960.
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Belgium abruptly granted independence to the Belgian Congo in 1960.
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Nelson Mandela played a key role in ending apartheid. He was an ANC leader who was jailed in 1962.
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After years of negotiation and finally violence between the British and Kenyan fighters, Kenya gained independence in 1963.
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In 1965, army leader Joseph Mobutu seized power and changed the country's name to Zaire, after a traditional name for the Congo River.
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By 1967, an oil-rich region controlled by the Igbo ethnic group attempted to leave Nigeria.
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Nelson Mandela continued to protest from prison. F.W de Klerk, South Africa's president from 1989 to 1994, realized that apartheid was destroying South Africa.
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In 1990, F.W de Klerk released Mandela from prison and agreed to end apartheid.
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South Africans had their first fully democratic election in 1994.
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In 1994, South Africans of all races voted together and Mandela became president.
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During a few months in 1994, Hutu military and militia groups killed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis.
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Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black farmers, were killed in the early 2000s.
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Civil wars raged until 2005 and killed several million people.
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In 2010, a movement for more democracy that came to be known as the Arab Spring began in Tunisia.
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In 2011, South Sudan became independent.
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Tunisia's dictator resigned in January of 2011 and a more democratic government was put in place.
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Similarly, the king of Morocco responded to peaceful protests. He issued a new constitution that voters approved in 2011.
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Qaddafi was killed in October of 2011, but the new government that formed did not have the support of all the rebel groups.
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In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak led an often corrupt and tightly run dictatorship for 30 years. Arab Spring protests forced him to resign in 2011.
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Egyptians elected an Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, in 2012.
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But in 2013, the military imprisoned Morsi and banned his political party.