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Prior to the Old Kingdom, in an era known as the Predynastic, Prehistoric or Protodynastic Period, Egypt was going through something of a transformation. The nation was divided into colonies, each with their own lords and rulers. The north and south of the country were also distinct in both practices and culture, with Hierakonpolis the capital of the south and Bes the capital of the north. Excavations over the last century have radically changed the way we view Egypt prior to the Old Kingdom, including the fact that the First Dynasty and the rise of Narmer was not an overnight process. Upper Egypt, the more affluent of the two states, had three main cities – Thinis, Nekhen and Naqada. One by one, these states conquered one another or merged, and…

For every period of greatness and monumental achievement in Ancient Egypt’s history, there is a stretch of time where governments crumbled, territories divided and the nation fell into a dark lull. As the royal hold on the country fell apart towards the end of the Old Kingdom, Egypt was plunged into an era of uncertainty that is referred to as the First Intermediate Period. To make matters worse, the power of the pharaoh was splintered when two rival dynasties began vying for power – the Tenth Dynasty (based in Herakleopolis, the principal city of Lower Egypt) and the 11th Dynasty (centralised in Thebes, Upper Egypt). This period of conflict and dissention lasted for 125 years, until the reign of Theban pharaoh Mentuhotep II. Ascending to the Upper Egypt throne in…

The Mali Empire is famous for being ruled by the richest man in history. But further back in its history, its founder, Sundiata Keita, is the subject of a legendary epic that could rival Britain’s iconic King Arthur for drama, magic and destiny. The Epic of Sundiata is a rich oral history sung by successive generations of griots, West Africa’s incredible musician-historians. It tells the tale of a handsome prince who is given a prophecy: if he marries an ugly woman, their son will grow up to be a mighty king. The prince does so, but the child that is born, Sundiata, is disabled, and the prince’s other wives plot to remove the boy from the line of succession in favour of their own sons. Cast out into exile, Sundiata…

01 GOLDEN CITY Timbuktu became a permanent settlement in the 10th century CE. Its purpose was a regional trade centre, where caravans met to exchange salt from the Sahara desert for gold, ivory, and slaves from what would become the Mali Empire. It was connected to trade routes via camel caravans and the Niger River. 02 SANKORÉ Because Timbuktu was a crossroads between Sub-Saharan African culture and Middle Eastern trade networks it became a centre of Islamic learning too. This is why Timbuktu was chosen as the site for Sankoré Madrasah, rather than Niani, which was too remote from the Middle East. 03 MOSQUE SCHOOL The Sankoré site is a religious complex including multiple mosques and centres of learning. It was an Islamic university where the focal point was faith.…

DISCOVER THE OTHER GREAT WALL Huge walls, which The Guinness Book of World Records describes as the world’s second largest man-made structure after the Great Wall of China, protected Benin City. The defensive fortifications included over 10,000 kilometres of earthen ramparts, some of which were over nine metres tall. As if that wasn’t enough, the walls were also encircled by a moat. CRUISE TO TIMBUKTU Benin City lay deep inside the jungle but it was not cut off from other places. The River Niger connected it to Timbuktu, the capital of the wealthy Mali Emprie, and other African kingdoms in the north. The river also flowed south to the Atlantic Ocean, which is how Europeans sailed to the city. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC One of the first cities to have a…

Barbary pirates were principally slave hunters and their aim was to kidnap people they could sell into the Ottoman slave trade. This gave them two targets: the coastline of Christian countries and unsuspecting ships. But as the 16th century wore on, coastal towns around the Mediterranean became less populated as villagers moved inland or highly fortified their homes to better defend themselves. This sent some pirates further afield, raiding Britain, Ireland and even Iceland. However, most privateers focused on raiding vessels at sea, where scarcity of victims was less of a problem as shipping continued to be big business. WHAT YOU’LL NEED… Easy targets While the corsairs preferred to target merchant ships with large crews and lots of booty on board, they were not above grabbing lone fishermen. Fighting for…

The US went to war with the Barbary States from 1801 to 1805 and then again in 1815 in an effort to curtail corsair attacks. The Battle of Derna was the decisive skirmish of the First Barbary War, led by Lieutenants William Eaton and Presley O’Bannon. Tasked with restoring a deposed pasha of Tripoli, Hamet Caramelli, in the belief that he would be more favourable to American ships, they trekked from Alexandria, Egypt, to Derna, in modern-day Libya. Though their success was undermined when the US signed a peace treaty that saw Caramelli removed again in return for hostages, the battle led to the line ‘To the shores of Tripoli’ being added to the Marine’s Hymn as well as the adoption of the Mameluke sword by the Corps. SETTING UP…

Slavery is, at its most elementary level, the involuntary coercion or detention of an individual to perform some function for the benefit of others. It has taken many names and has been shrouded in circumstance and suspect justification as well. While some may have offered the dubious argument that slavery actually has benefitted an enslaved people that otherwise were disadvantaged and unable to competently determine their own future, others have contended that the institution was a necessary tool for the good of society. Therefore, varied genres of slavery have emerged across the millennia. Slavery encompasses those who were simply seized and sold, those who were captured during wartime and made to serve the victors, and those whose families even considered it a privilege to give their children over to the…

In the 1980s, South Africa was a pariah state. Vilified in the global media and with protests a regular occurance outside many of its embassies, its government and people were the subject of trade embargoes from countries around the world, with the sale of everything from guns to well-known brands forbidden to the embattled nation. The reason was South Africa’s racist authoritarian policy of apartheid. Apartheid was enacted in 1948, at a time when other countries that had employed segregationist policies were beginning to rethink them in the wake of World War II. The USA, which had begun its process of desegregation in the 1950s, was one of South Africa’s keenest critics, despite having only fully ended its own racial separation policies in 1964. Under apartheid, the rights and privileges…

1. Robben Island 1962-1982 For 18 excruciating years, Mandela slept on a thin straw mat on the concrete floor of a bare cell measuring 2.1 by 2.4 meters (7 by 8 feet). After the Rivonia trial, where Mandela and nine ANC compatriots were found guilty of sabotage, the men were flown to Robben Island, a remote prison for political enemies and common criminals since the mid-16th century. For the first year, Mandela was woken at 5:30am, given a bucket of cold water to wash, fed a breakfast of corn mush and led into the courtyard, where he would spend all day — with breaks for two more bowls of mush and grisly meat — hammering stone into gravel. Conversation was forbidden, but Mandela was allowed to read law texts at…

To this day it remains unclear if the conflict should be called the ‘Eritrean-Ethiopian War’ or vice versa. Which country emerged victorious is still unclear. With press access tightly controlled before the UN finally forced a ceasefire and a peace treaty, it was difficult to ascertain the war’s definitive outcome beyond the hysterical propaganda spread by the belligerents. An even thornier issue is accurate figures for losses on both sides. The Eritreans never hesitated to publicise the immense casualties they inflicted on the Ethiopians during battles from 1998-1999. But the Ethiopian military also insisted Eritrean manpower was so depleted that their border defences almost collapsed. The UN reports that the war killed 80,000-100,000 and displaced 1 million people. But unverified claims from Ethiopian and Eritrean sources suggest actual losses were…

On the mid-eastern coast of the African continent, a peninsula juts out into the sea. The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden separate it from the Middle Eastern countries of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, while thousands of miles eastwards across the ocean lies India. Behind it to the west, the vast width of the African continent stretches towards the South Atlantic. Here, in a landscape of mountains and plains, where the weather can vary between monsoon rains and dry trade winds, where the lowland heat can hit 50C (122F) in places but the plateaus can offer sunny green climes, is the crucible in which humanity was formed. It’s thought that homo sapiens, modern humans, evolved in the Horn of Africa region between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. Some of…

In the Old Kingdom before it and the New Kingdom that followed, the pharaoh’s rule was absolute. Priests, nobles and even the queen herself could act, with consent, on the king’s behalf, but the for the most part, the pharaoh answered to no one but the gods. However, that definitive rule came under threat when the Old Kingdom crumbled and splintered into two separate realms. With two dynasties now vying for power, the normal authoritative structure of the kingdom was in ruins. Prior to the rise of the pharaohs, the entire country was divided into small administrative colonies known as nomes. Each nome had an appointed leader (nomarch), and it was these independent city states that the first pharaoh had to unite in order to establish Egypt as a single…

When Rome was nothing more than a village on the River Tiber and the Greek city-states ruled tiny tracts of land, the mighty Kingdom of Kush held sway over an empire that stretched from central Sudan to the Palestinian borderlands. Its rulers flourished for a millennium, outlasted the golden ages of Athens, Sparta and Macedonia, and witnessed both the growth and much of the decline of the Roman Empire. And yet here is a kingdom that to history has been perennially overshadowed by the ancient Egyptians, their famous neighbours to the north, even though, for a time, Egypt too fell under Kushite control. When the Kushites were finally expelled from Egypt at the hands of the Assyrians, their homeland dwindled to a place of peripheral influence and, says one leading…

If you wanted to describe someone as wealthy, you might say that they are as ‘rich as Crassus’ or call them ‘a Rockefeller’. However, while Ancient Roman businessman Marcus Licinius Crassus and American oil baron John D Rockefeller have became bywords for extravagant wealth, their respective fortunes were paltry compared to that of Mansa Musa, the 14th century emperor of Mali and the world’s richest-ever man. The Mali Empire (which in the West African Manding languages is known as Manden Kurufaba) was founded in the early 1200s and lasted into the late 1600s. It started in Niani, a town in the very east of modern-day Guinea, located on the banks of the River Niger. In the early part of the first millennium, the West African Ghanian Empire declined to the…

A Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies, Toyin Falola holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Key Events in African History: A Reference Guide. Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see,” wrote Portuguese ship captain Lourenço Pinto in 1691. He added, “The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.” Located in the depths of the jungle but connected…

It was German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who once claimed that the continent of Africa was “no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit”. This dismissal of the contribution of this entire region to the history of the globe is patently ridiculous, and yet for many the history of this continent is largely a blank space in time. In his Wolfson History Prize-nominated book, A Fistful Of Shells, Toby Green focuses on the history of West Africa in the same way that so many historians might have previously written about the history of Western Europe. His broad investigation into the economic and social changes that took place from the before the Atlantic slave trade to the age of revolution delves back in time…

INVASION OF GOZO JULY 1551 Turgut Reis attacked Malta and Gozo, temporarily seizing the latter for himself before leaving with most of its population. CORSICA JUNE 1501 Napoleon’s birthplace was often raided by Barbary slavers like Kemal Reis while his navigator nephew charted the isle’s coastline. ICELANDIC RAID 20 JUNE - 19 JULY 1627 A series of raids led by European renegados including Murat Reis abducted over 400 Icelanders to sell in Salé and Algiers. SACK OF BALTIMORE 20 JUNE 1631 Reis seized 107 men, women and children from a village in County Cork. Only two or three ever returned to Ireland.…

When Francisco de Rosa looked out on the New World from the deck of the Santa Maria de la Luz, the mariner was satisfied with a job well done. Setting out from Arguim, a tiny island off the coast of what is now Mauritania in West Africa, de Rosa had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and made it safely to Puerto Rico with a valuable cargo. Among the goods he carried to sell on the other side of the Atlantic were at least 54 African slaves. De Rosa’s voyage in 1520 was the second known to have been undertaken by a slave ship that sailed direct from Africa to the Americas; he may also have commanded the first slave crossing a year earlier, in which at least 60 slaves were transported.…

It is clear to many the impact that the slave trade had for Europe and the Americas, helping them to grow rich and to finance the Industrial Revolution. In Europe, a middle class began to emerge, enjoying greater leisure time, drinking tea and coffee with sugar, indulging in chocolate, exotic spices, fabrics and stories of travel and adventure in foreign lands. In the Caribbean and Americas, we know that Indigenous people experienced unspeakable decimation and disease, almost wiped out as lush landscapes were broken into plantation land upon which African slaves harvested sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice and many other crops that were quickly becoming essentials in Europe. But the story that is less well known, barely touched upon in comparison even to the lives of slaves once they made landfall…

The legend of the last emperor of Ethiopia is one shrouded in mystery and religious mysticism, that elevated him to a status greater than a mere man or ruler. Before he was named Haile Selassie, he was known as Tafari Makonnen. He was born in a hut on the outskirts of the country on 23 July 1892, in Ejersa Goro. Makonnen was the great-grandson of former ruler Sahle Selassie of Shewa. His father Ras (Prince) Makonnen was a senior adviser to Emperor Menelik II. Originally, Tafari Makonnen was not the next in line to succeed the Ethiopian throne. Menelik II’s heir was his grandson Lij Iyasu. In 1913, Menelik died, leaving the throne and the country in disarray. Seen as an outsider of the Ethiopian monoculture and national religious zeal,…

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” So said British prime minister Harold Macmillan in his famous ‘Winds of Change’ speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town in February 1960. It was actually the second time he’d made the speech, but here in apartheid South Africa it had much more impact on the watching world than it did when he originally voiced this opinion in Accra, Ghana over a month before. In Cape Town it was met with stony silence from the authoritarian white minority that governed the segregated nation. In Accra, however, it was an acknowledgement of a movement that had begun to electrify the African continent. From country to…

The passbook was one of the most hated signs of white rule in apartheid-era South Africa, with all black people required to carry and present the ID to authorities. The ANC decided to hold a mass demonstration against the pass on 31 March 1961, but a splinter group called the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) wanted to steal the ANC’s thunder. The PAC hastily organized its own non-violent anti-pass demonstration on 21 March, calling for supporters to leave their passbooks at home and march on police stations to be arrested en masse. The PAC was less influential than the ANC, but organisers went door-to-door on the morning of 21 March, conscripting people to join the cause. By midday, a crowd of roughly 5,000 demonstrators marched on the Sharpeville police station south…

Lasting from the 16th to 11th century BCE, the New Kingdom saw Ancient Egypt transformed. Its kings and queens both looked ahead at the promising future of the realm and back in the hope of emulating the monarchs of the past. The empire was expanded by the sword of warrior kings, while the realm itself was rebuilt from the ground up by a new economic prosperity. This was Ancient Egypt at its peak, as reflected in the resultant boom in arts and culture. The New Kingdom was preceded by another fracture known as the Second Intermediate Period. Towards the start of the 16th century BCE, a small warrior tribe known as the Hyksos had begun settling in the fertile land of the Delta (a group of rivers and tributaries that…

SALT MINES Rock salt was also a hugely profitable export, used in food preparation and preservation. Its value was at times literally worth its weight in gold. It was mined by slaves in salt flats throughout the Sahara desert, most notably at Taghaza. TIMBUKTU Timbuktu, although its name is now synonymous with a place in the middle of nowhere, was once a thriving hub of wealth and people in the Mali Empire. Its mud brick buildings were home to a plethora of shops, universities, mosques and opulent homes. TRADE ROUTES Trade was the key to Mali’s wealth. Merchants would pack up their camels with gold, salt and other items, then embark on long journeys across the Sahara desert to reach cities as far away as Tripoli and Cairo – on…

Barbary corsairs used a variety of ships to prey on enemy vessels sailing across the Mediterranean. One of the most popular was the galiot, a small galley boat that was primarily propelled by oars but also had a sail. It could be rowed with great speed, which allowed the pirates to get in and out quickly during raids as well as easily chase down the lumbering merchant vessels that were weighed down with cargo. The galiot’s small size also allowed the pirates to hide, swiftly breaking cover once lookouts located easy prey. However, they could only be used during the calm seas of summer as they sat quite low, making them susceptible to taking in water in rough seas. Although the galiots were the corsairs’ favourite ship, longer galleys with…

SLAVE CENTRES 1. ARGUIM One of the first European slave trading bases off the coast of Africa, established in 1445. 2. SAO TOME An island trading base that was a hub for slaves trafficked to the Americas from the Kingdom of Kongo. 3. ELMINA CASTLE Built in 1482, the slave-holding castle is now the oldest European building south of the Sahara. 4. CANARY ISLANDS The earliest European demand for African slaves arose from a need for workers in the island colonies of the east Atlantic. 5. HISPANIOLA The first known African slaves in the Americas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 after a circuitous passage via Europe. 6. SAN MIGUEL DE GUALDAPE Founded in 1526 by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, the 600 colonists of the first Spanish attempt to colonise the…

From earliest recorded history, the concept of slavery or involuntary servitude has existed, transcending cultural or ethical conditions and enabling those who have exploited human suffering to build immense wealth and exert control over subservient peoples. With the emergence of social classes, slavery developed in Sumeria and Mesopotamia, even being referenced in the Code of Hammurabi as an institution with its purpose and place in society. The development of slavery in civilisation stemmed from the need for labour, simply the performance of functions that contributed to the augmentation of wealth or the increase of status. Slaves were either captured during raids and transported to markets to be sold as commodities, taken prisoner during battles among rival kingdoms or empires and cast into bondage as the spoils of war, sold or…

In places where only some were taken, a gender imbalance was created. More men were kidnapped, leaving behind women, who were seen as less useful. They remained to keep the village running, and came under huge pressure to rebuild, care for and support their villages. But there were suddenly too many women and not enough men to marry, and so in some societies, men began to take multiple wives in a practice known as polygyny. Tensions and instability emerged with these new lifestyles, and this practice actually decreased the fertility of women, compounding population stagnation even further. It wasn’t only women whose roles were changing and developing as a result of the trade; a new class of ‘merchant princes’ found they could become rich. The children of chiefs and kings,…

One Zulu battle tactic was the use of a formation known as the impondo zankomo, or The Beast’s Horns, sometimes also referred to popularly as the Bull’s Horns formation. The structure looks a little like the head of a bull, and with cattle being so integral to Zulu culture you might guess it was symbolic more than practical – but there was much more to it. 1. CENTRAL FORCE The isifuba was the ‘chest’ of the beast and would charge at the enemy directly and with great ferocity, hoping to knock them off balance and get them on their heels. 2. FLANKING The izimpondo were the ‘horns’ of the manoeuvre and they flanked the enemy on both sides, rushing out from the middle and hoping to encircle them. 3. SUPPORT…

On 26 May 1948, roughly one million white South Africans went to the polls to cast ballots in parliamentary elections. Their decision was between the incumbent Union Party, which had thrust South Africans into a wildly unpopular World War II, and an upstart coalition of right-wing nationalists called the Reunited National Party (NP). Although no blacks and few mixed-race South Africans participated, the vote was a naked referendum on race. D F Malan, the NP leader, ran on a platform of institutionalized apartheid or ‘apart-hood’, an aggressive credo of racial segregation and white dominion. Jan Smuts, the sitting prime minister, fumbled over the ‘black question’, proposing a series of murky ideas involving racial integration. White Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch-speaking settlers who fought two bloody land wars with the British,…

“In what proved the most intense fighting in East Africa since WWII, the Ethiopians sought to drive away the entrenched Eritreans with Soviet-vintage tanks and artillery, but these efforts were blunted by determined resistance” The 1990s offered little respite for Africa, with bloodshed and disorder carving a destructive path from Freetown to Mogadishu. As the decade neared its end one of the continent’s youngest states was proving to be a difficult neighbour. Eritrea gained its independence in 1993 after 32 years of struggle against Ethiopia, which had itself almost collapsed following the overthrow of its Soviet-backed Marxist Derg regime in 1985 and the subsequent internal conflicts that followed. When Eritrea’s tough freedom fighters, clad in their iconic leather sandals, seized the colonial city of Asmara in 1991, a new state…