Answer 1
Answer: Slavery had existed for centuries in Africa. West Africans owned slaves themselves as well as participated in an overland slave trade, selling prisoners of wars and individuals convicted of heinous crimes. Slaves in West Africa lived under the same conditions as their owners and had rights to education, marriage, and their children. Slavery was not always a life-long condition and the children of slaves were free.
Answer 2
Answer: In general, Native American tribes shared many cultural traits: reverence for the environment, communal ownership of land, matrilineal organization, and a polytheistic religion. In contrast to European societies, these were typically more egalitarian and less stratified.
Answer 3
Answer: By the fifth century C.E. the empire of Ghana took shape, becoming wealthy and powerful as a result of the trans-Sahara trade in gold and salt. As West Africans, such as the Ghanians, traded with North Africans and Arabs, Arab ideas and the Islamic faith entered the region. The trans-Saharan trade continued to be important to Mali, which replaced Ghana as the region's political leader, and Islam became more important. The trade that made Ghana and Mali powerful led at first to the rise of the Songhai, but it ultimately contributed to that state's demise. Moroccan forces conquered Songhai in order to take control of the trade in gold and salt.
Answer 4
Answer: The five tribes comprising the League of the Iroquois formed a confederation based on kinship. They strengthened their political alliance in order to suppress intra-Iroquois feuds; their strategy succeeded. Their society stressed communal, rather than individual, survival.