African History: Did you mean...?

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...

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...

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).

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)

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...