The significance of the First World War in African history was its place in the chronology of European colonisation. There are four striking features of Africa's entanglement with the 1914-18 war. The first essentially European war fought amongst and profoundly affecting African populations had been the major war waged by Britain to subdue Boer republicanism, the Anglo-Boer War, or South African War. A second feature is that the first and last shots of a war which was won and lost in Europe were discharged on opposite sides of the African continent. Thirdly, for many regions and numerous inhabitants, the absorption into a global war was virtually imperceptible, and its impact on life barely felt. Larger tremor is the fourth and deepest inroad made by the European war, as respective imperial powers set about trying to extract the maximum manpower and material resources from their colonial dependencies.

The continent of Africa has an unusual combination of features and environments, including many extreme contrasts. By the late Precambrian, almost the whole Africa had become effectively a large stable craton and most of the central area was never invaded by the sea. However, Palaeozoic marine sediments occur in various parts of North Africa, bounded by a line from Ghana to the Sinai peninsula, and also in the Cape folded belt at the extreme southern end of the continent. At the end of the cycle of deposition of the Cape Supergroup, southern Africa was affected by an intense glaciation that ushered in the long period of sedimentation of the Karroo Supergroup. The Karroo Supergroup spans the period from later Carboniferous to early Jurassic, ignoring the usual break between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras. The Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age are concepts originally devised in southern Africa to describe the range of archaeological materials clearly younger than the Acheulian.