Contender for african superpower:

Basic back-story: African nation adopts European technology from around the 1500s to 1600s, uses that newfound civilian and military technology to become a continental and eventual world power, even with colonies in other continents, wich african nations could possible do this??
 

U.S David

Banned
Egypt unites the Arab World after the Ottomans collaspe. I can see them going south into the heart of Africa. Or they become a British Domanion, and getting a League Mandate after WW1.
 
Honestly, could be anywhere. Madagascar is a possibility (only because geographically it seems to mirror England and Japan). I don't know much about early African history, but i believe there are plenty of places that could snowball.
 
The crusaders and mongols raid Damaskus, Baghdad, Cairo etc. Then many islamic scientics go to timbuktu, Marrakesch and Tunis. Then you have 3 possible candidates: Mali, Morroco and Tunisia.
 

Cryostorm

Monthly Donor
How about one of the crusades, maybe the fourth, attacks Egypt and massively weakens it. Then the Ethiopians/Nubians in the south invade and create a Coptic empire stretching from the Nile Delta to Somalia. The fact that it is Christian might keep the Europeans off its back and help facilitate more exchanging of ideas for it to modernize and hold off the Europeans. Let it survive until the 1900's and it will be in prime position to modernize with enough oil to support early domestic use but not enough to become reliant upon it. Maybe not superpower but definitely a hegemon in Africa and major world power.
 
Best solution. A worse Trimudids and Golden Horde invasion. Get the horde to go as far as Mecca. An advance like that would send the Muslim World reeling and the Catholic one panicking. Of course the hordes will have no way of getting any further stretched as far as they were.

This should keep the Middle East as unstable as possible to encourage migration to North and West Africa. This should keep things in Africa. Now the Hordes will of course threaten Europeans, so there will be attempts to break the Hordes power, while the Muslim exiles will also seek to recapture the holy land. Plus the loss of trade will mean that for Muslim nations as well as Christian, will have to seek a new rout to India. Around Africa and with a higher chance of discovering the Americas.

From there it's up to chance.
 

SunDeep

Banned
Going by the OP, I'd say Madagascar would be a strong contender. Perhaps united under the Sakalava Kingdom instead of the Merina Kingdom? With the Sakalava's long history of garnering their wealth through naval trade networks in the Indian Ocean, if they'd got on board with the European traders early on, during their first few voyages around the Cape to India, the Malagasy Sakalava Kingdom could have united the island far earlier than IOTL. They'd be ideally placed to dominate the trade routes between Europe and Asia, located slap-bang in the middle of the trade routes- essentially, they'd be taking over from the Ottomans as the primary trade intermediaries between Europe and Asia immediately after the discovery of the sea route around Africa breaks the Ottoman monopoly over the Silk Road, and they'd probably hold that position for around a century or so, until technology advances to the stage where the trade can become profitable enough for private European enterprises (the East India Companies) to take center stage- long enough to make it plausible for them to attain similar levels of wealth to the contemporary Ottomans by the start of the 17th century.

From there, if the Sakalava merchants have cottoned on and switched the focus of their naval trade missions from supplying the Arabs with slaves to the far more profitable business of supplying the Europeans with Indian spices and African gold early enough, they might even be able to out-compete a few of the European East India Companies, especially if they can maintain their early dominance of the East African gold trade by striking out across the Mozambique Channel and imposing their own rule over the territories south of the Zambezi before the Europeans do. It's also worth mentioning that the native Madagascans did originally come from Indonesia (South Borneo, to be precise), so if TTL's Madagascar did somehow manage to gain control over some of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago, they'd have a much better chance of maintaining control of those islands into the post-colonial era than the Dutch ever did.

And Madagascar's one of those few places in Africa where those mineral resources that you're going to need in order to establish an industrial complex are all there in abundance. Coal, steel, natural gas, oil (along with titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper and nickel, all of which will be extremely useful when it comes to producing more advanced alloys later on); on all counts, the reserves on the island of Madagascar alone exceed those of the British Isles prior to the Industrial Revolution. So, here you could potentially have a single African nation ITTL which could easily encompass Madagascar, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and most of Indonesia- perhaps even more, if they manage to expand further across Southern and Eastern Africa before the Scramble for Africa starts to build up steam. Realistically, such a nation, this 'Empire of Madagascar', would have a population on a par with that of OTL's USA, and a GDP (PPP) per capita similar to that of OTL's Turkey, giving it an economy larger than that of OTL's Japan- perhaps even reaching a par with that of OTL's India. If it had a similar military budget (% of GDP) to Turkey as well (which is marginally lower than the world average, might I add), this nation would also have the third highest military expenditure in our world; higher than that of Russia, and exceeded only by the USA and the PRC. Bearing all of these things in mind, would TTL's Madagascar be touted as one of the world's superpowers ITTL? Maybe...
 
Basic back-story: African nation adopts European technology from around the 1500s to 1600s, uses that newfound civilian and military technology to become a continental and eventual world power, even with colonies in other continents, wich african nations could possible do this??

A bit late, but 1700s Zanzibar seems to be a good contender (of course it's got an Omani ruling class at this point). Maybe Oman takes advantage of Dutch pressure on Portugal earlier and expels the Portuguese from Zanzibar in the mid-1650s, thus gaining control of the East African slave trade. Maybe the Omanis become more open to the idea of allowing locals to become elites, and so Indian and East African traders rapidly become 'Zanzibarized'. Then it could be possible to use Zanzibar's wealth as a means of securing the East Indian trade routes (maybe in connivance with the Dutch or the English), setting up far-flung trading posts for slaves and spice in India and Inner Africa.
 
How about the Kingdom of Kongo?

It was OTL fairly exploitative, despotic, and eventually gripped by civil wars, but given its early conversion to Christianity, it's large territorial holdings, and the mineral resources of Angola and the Congo River Basin, seems like it could have been a serious contender, though I wonder whether the jungle terrain and tropical disease would inhibit modernization, at least during the early modern period.
 
Institutions are what matter here. Political, economic, religious, martial, bureaucratic. High resource countries tended to be the conquered rather than the conquerors. The value of the resources flows to a few and the greater state gets left behind or becomes dependent upon resource funding rather than developing self sufficiency. Find an African state that has the capability of matching Western European institutions and that's your bet.
 

Deleted member 67076

Songhai, Ethiopia, Zanzibar and Madagascar are the likely candidates.
 
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