From 1975 to 2002, Angola fought the last Cold War proxy conflict, a conflict that outlasted the ideological struggle funding the battles. On 10 August 2001, buried under the history of the massive shock of the 9/11 attacks just one month later the Angola Train Massacre was one of the most horrific atrocities committed in …
Russians always seem to have cutting jokes: Why is Cuba such a confused country?The Cuban capital is in Havana.The Cuban government is in Moscow.The Cuban population is in Miami.The Cuban medical system is in Venezuela.And the Cuban graveyard is in Angola. Angola, a medium-size country along the coast of southwestern Africa, was one of the last battlefields …
Cleopatra VII Philopater, mistress of Julius Caesar, wife of Marc Antony, Pharaoh of Egypt, killed herself on 12 August 30 BC. With her death the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt ended. Except, actually, it didn’t. Cleopatra was, genetically, Egyptian-in-name-only. The Ptolemaic Dynasty came to power in Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 …
The first of Portugal’s African colonies was also the first to gain independence. It was not, unfortunately, a smooth road to freedom. Most of the trade in Portuguese Guinea was controlled by a single group – Companhia Uniao Fabril – and their subsidiary companies. One of those subsidiaries, Casa Gouveia, controlled the docks. And Casa …
On 27 July 1948, Dorothea Bleek died. Dorothea had followed in her father’s footsteps, documenting the culture, language, and thousands-of-years-old rock art of Southern Africa. And although Dorothea continued to demur to her father’s expertise throughout her life, it was her books that brought the San to the attention of more academics. Her book, A …
The Gambia is an interesting place. It was a part of both the Mali and Songhai Empires. Ibn Battuta visited in the 1300s and had lovely things to say about the justice-minded people who lived there. It’s nearly completely surrounded by Senegal. And it is littered with stone circles resembling versions of Stonehenge. Not much …
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 …
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. …
“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 …
Apartheid in South Africa began its long, slow fall on 16 June 1976 when students in Soweto took to the street to protest being forced to study school subjects in Afrikaans. June 16 is now celebrated as Youth Day in South Africa, a day when the courage of students resulted in the horrible deaths …