African History: Did you mean...?

John Lee joins World History Encyclopedia to tell us all about his new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Kelly (WHE): Thank you so much for joining me! Let us start by talking about what the book is about...

The Mau Mau rebellion (1952-60), led by the Kikuyu people of Kenya, was a guerrilla war conducted against British colonial rule, motivated by anger at land confiscations and the threat to indigenous belief systems and cultural practices...

Did you know that salt was literally worth its weight in gold in ancient West Africa? This video is all about the lucrative trade of salt in West African history. Salt from the Sahara desert was one of the major trade goods of ancient...

On the salty Nathaniel Bacon and how his little rebellion in the early American colonies paved the way for the African Slave Trade.

A map indicating the major ancient and medieval states in sub-Saharan Africa. Areas and dates relate to a state at its peak. In addition, shaded areas are approximate indicators only. For the majority of the states, their precise borders...

African Slave Trade, map by KuroNekoNiyah, 2021. This map provides an overview of the slave trade out of Africa, c. 1500-1900, showing both transatlantic and ancillary global flows. It is based on Map I from Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave...

This marble sculpture from Rome, Italy dates to sometime between the 1st Century BCE and the 1st Century CE. It portrays a young male Aethiopian, or black African, acrobat balancing on a crocodile. (British Museum, London)

An African spy and his wife during the Boer War (1899-1902). Local Africans were used to gain military intelligence by both the Boers and the British during the conflict. Photograph by William Skeoch Cumming. Imperial War Museums, London.

An unidentified African-American man lynched from a tree. Photograph by National Photo Company, 1925. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

A July 1941 photograph showing a South African desert patrol in North Africa during the Western Desert Campaigns of the Second World War (1939-45). (Imperial War Museums)