African History: Did you mean...?

South African troops training looking for enemy mines during the Western Desert Campaigns (June 1940 to January 1943) in North Africa. (Imperial War Museums)

A handled flask depicting a crouching African. Roman period, probably made in Campania (in modern-day Italy) in the 1st century CE. (The British Museum, London).

This figure was made of a slipped and brown pigmented earthenware. It represents a male dancer, possibly an African or Indonesian. It was found in a Chinese tomb. Tang Dynasty, 8th century CE. (The British Museum, London).

This Roman oil lamp of unclear provenance was made in the 1st Century CE. It portrays an Aethiopian slave, with barbarians like Africans and Celts being popular motifs in Roman art. The lamp has also been suggested to have erotic connotations...

Escaped slave Gordon, also known as "Whipped Peter," formerly enslaved on a cotton plantation along the Atchafalaya River, showing his scarred back at a medical examination, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After the whipping, his wounds were salted...

German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika) was a colony of Imperial Germany from 1885 until 1918. The territory, much larger than Germany itself, covered what is today Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and part of Mozambique. As in many other European...

The Scramble for Africa describes the competition between European imperial powers to first control trade and then territory in Africa in the final two decades of the 19th century. The reasons these powers were interested in Africa included...

West Africa was one of the world's greatest producers of gold in the Middle Ages. Trade in the metal went back to antiquity but when the camel caravans of the Sahara linked North Africa to the savannah interior, the trade really took off...

European colonising powers sought to exploit Africa's resources from the 15th century onwards. Arab traders had been doing the same in North Africa and East Africa through the Middle Ages, but it was from the 17th century that European traders...

Belgian Congo was a colony of Belgium from 1908 until 1960. Prior to that, the region had been the Congo Free State (created in 1885), which was effectively a private enterprise of King Leopold II. Often referred to as Belgian Congo even...