Historians believe these people were all either displaced or absorbed by the ancestors of the present inhabitants. The Sudanic empires also became centers of Islamic learning. Ghana was the earliest of the Sudan empires; it flourished in present-day eastern Mauritania from the fourth to the 13th century.
The Songhai Empire flourished there between the 14th and 16th centuries. The dense rainforest in the south created barriers to large-scale political organizations like those in the north. Five important states flourished in Ivory Coast in the pre-European era. Because of its location between Europe and the imagined treasures of the Far East , Africa became a destination for the European explorers of the 15th century.
Ivory Coast, like the rest of West Africa, was subject to these influences but the absence of sheltered harbors along its coastline prevented Europeans from establishing permanent trading posts.
The earliest recorded French voyage to West Africa was in French explorers , missionaries, trading companies, and soldiers gradually extended the area under French control inland from the lagoon region. Activity along the coast stimulated European interest in the interior, especially along Senegal and Niger rivers. The defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent annexation of the French province of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany caused the French government to abandon its colonial ambitions and withdraw its military garrisons from its West African trading posts, leaving them in the care of resident merchants.
The conference helped rationalize what became known as the European scramble for Africa. To support its claims of effective occupation, France again assumed direct control of its West African coastal trading posts and embarked on an accelerated program of exploration in the interior in Throughout the process of partition, the Africans were little concerned with the occasional European who came wandering by. In , France imposed a head tax for a public works program in the colony, provoking several revolts.
