This history of Africa from the origins of mankind to the South African general election of 1994 refocuses African history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. The social, economic and political institutions of the African continent were designed to ensure survival and maximize numbers, but in the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations these institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. The history of the continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to the earliest human ancestors.