Writers 
Millet is said to have been domesticated in different parts of the world at different times. For Africa north of the equator, the Dar Tichit community is the most prominent. The pearl millet was domesticated there between 1500 - 5300 B.C. Seven different phases in the domestication process have been identified. They experimented with a number of desert grasses. In the first three phases, there were many seeds of grasses with a single grain of bulrush millet. In the fourth phase, two other grass seeds appeared and the bulrush millet rose to three percent of the total. By the sixth phase the bulrush millet had risen to sixty percent and in the seventh phase, it rose to eighty percent. As the Dar Tichit community experimented with different kinds of wild grasses, they discovered the bulrush millet as the best. Bulrush millet had been known in several other places including sites in Malawi, Rhodesia and among the Kotoko south of Chad. Among the sites and others located in other parts of the world, the Dar Tichit people command a pride of place.
Rice is another important crop domesticated in Africa. The brand is popularly known as African rice. Its original place of domestication was the middle Niger area or the inland delta of the Niger. Other areas of early appearance of Rice were The Gambia river valley and the highlands of the Republic of Guinea.
Today African rice has been recognised as indigenously domesticated. Teff, was the last of African cereal to be domesticated and was confined to Ethiopia. The Cushitic inhabitants who introduced wheat barley, domesticated teff before wheat and barley were introduced.
Domestication of food in Africa also included root crops; yam is the most prominent among the locally domesticated root crops. As usual, most writers believed that yam was introduced from Asia. Some other scholars believe that yam was a recent introduction into Africa. Today it is recognized that yam cultivation had been very ancient in the Eastern half of West Africa going back to 5000 - 4000 B.C. The presence of yam festivals, and the prohibition of the use of iron diggers to harvest yams in some parts of Africa, during yam festivals, indicate that yam predated the introduction of iron. This again emphasizes its antiquity in Africa.
Hausa Potato is also identified as one of the locally domesticated root crops, though its precise place of origin is not certain there is no doubt that it originated in Africa.
Other crops domesticated in Africa included African groundnut, pigeon pea and cow pea. Cow pea is domesticated in Nigeria. There are still other indigenous crops such as Okro, roselle, gourd, melon, castor and sesame though these never formed staple food as millet, rice and yam.
A number of tree crops such as kola, shea butter and oil palm were domesticated in Africa. The remains of a palm tree found at the site of Sheheinals in the Republic of Sudan dated about 3300 B.C. while another at Kitampo in Ghana dated to before 1400 B.C. All these sites were associated with cow pea and domestication of cattle. Today, palm oil has become an important ingredient in African diet and in many parts of Nigeria an export commodity. Among the tools used by the inhabitants of Kitampo were polished stone axes, grooved grinding stones and stone bracelets.
It is possible at this stage to summarize the pattern of events that led to the domestication of crops and animals in the Sahara and Africa north of the equator. It is now believed that certain crops and even cattle were domesticated in central Sahara before the process began in Egypt by 400 B.C. The dessication of the Sahara about 3000 B.C. compelled the inhabitants to concentrate more on the herding of cattle and goats. They continued to live near lakes and rivers and supplemented their diets with fish and other aquatic animals. As the lakes dried up, they concentrated on the cultivation of cereals.
Many of these farmers were Negroes. The inhabitants of Dar Tichit were Soninke while those of Kitampo, Diama, Kusakata and Nok were West African Negroes. Thus the dessication in the Sahara, pushed the Negro pastoralists and farmers into Western Sudan.
Besides, the Negroes were pushed away from the Sahara by attacks from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians together with their Berber allies after 1000 B.C. These were called the Garamanites. They used wheeled chariots to attack Negro settlements in the Hoggar mountains, Tibesti, Fezzan and along the Western route linking Western Sudan and North Africa through Mauritania. There are drawings showing these wheeled charioteers along the route from Mauritania to the Sahara. It has been suggested that the movement of the Dar Tichit villages up the escarpment by 1,000 B.C was not unconnected with the constant attacks by the Garamanites. The Dar Tichit villages lay along the trail of their attacks.
