On 22 July 1994, a group of junior officers in the Gambian National Army, led by Yahya Jammeh, staged a disorganized and badly planned coup and somehow managed to end up in control of the nation of the Gambia. That is how the longest lasting democracy in West Africa came to an end; and even …
History consists of a lot of times and places when it would have been the opposite of awesome to exist in the prescribed role for women. Certainly ancient Greece checks this box, as, in the worlds of a museum website, “Greek women had virtually no political rights of any kind and were controlled by men …
There is something intriguing about Ethiopia. The only Jewish nation in Africa, mentioned in the Bible in the person of the legendary Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. It was Makeda’s son Menilek I who founded the Solomonic Dynasty that ruled Ethiopia, with an interruption of a few hundred years in the Middle Ages, until 1974. …
There was a slaughter. From 303 a series of edicts from the Roman government rescinded the rights of Christians in the Empire and demanded that everyone sacrifice to the gods. Those that didn’t conform were killed – although this was enforced to different levels in different places. Illyricum and Thrace, the Balkan areas of the …
The mightiest empire of antiquity, and arguably the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, was in decline in the third century AD. Not just in decline, but rapidly falling apart at the seams. Barbarians were invading, the peasants were revolting, the currency was debased, the plague surfaced, and Roman rulers were busy amusing themselves …
If a church is corrupt enough and gives little enough care to its adherents, at some point its followers will be tempted to follow something else. This was the case in tenth century Bulgaria, where the Orthodox Church provided a breathtakingly rich pageantry full of jewel encrusted costumes, but gave little care to the …
“At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in the clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell …
“Natives must be taught from an early age that equality with Europeans is not for them,” Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, author of the Bantu Education Act. In 1971, sociologist Dr Melville Edelstein, who devoted 18 years of his life to working in Soweto to improve conditions, wrote a book called “What Young Africans Think,” about the …
School children the world over returned from their Christmas break 1989/1990 with a new and difficult name to pronounce – Ceaușescu. The Romanian communist and his wife had been ousted and executed in the only violent revolution in the democratizing Eastern Bloc. A new political party had been organized to lead Romania in the …
“Hard times create great men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” G. Michael Hopf The golden age of Bosnia is generally accepted to center around one particular man – Ban Kulin. Certainly he didn’t come to power in easy and posh world-circumstances – when he …
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