I have to confess that every time I address African history, I find it very difficult to escape the following conceptual dilemma: how do I go about dealing with the history of a fragmented continent within the framework of an external conceptual tradition and paradigm?
Discovery, Conquest, Colonization, Development, are general concepts but when they address African history they always entail a monocentric view of World history.

My purpose in this presentation is not to shift a core from Western Europe to the Bosporus Strait, but to simply reconstruct a sui generis evolutionary dynamic of the African continent before the Ottoman preponderance in the XVIth century.  To do so, I am compelled to acknowledge at least three major breakthroughs in World History that definitely shaped African historic destiny in the XVth century: