Congo: Did you mean...?

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...

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...

The Fashoda Incident of 1898 occurred in Sudan and caused a diplomatic crisis between the British and French empires. A small French force claimed authority over the town of Fashoda...

A cartoon from a 1906 edition of Punch magazine highlighting the rapacious regime of Leopold II, King of the Belgians (here depicted as a snake), in the Congo Free State (Belgian Congo from 1908). Congo was ruthlessly...

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...

The search for the source of the Nile River was one of the last great geographical mysteries of 19th-century European exploration. Men like Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Stanley...

The Mahdist War (1881-99) in Sudan was led by the inspirational Muhammad Ahmad, an Islamic holy man who declared himself the Mahdi (the Messiah). The Mahdists wanted to overthrow Ottoman-Egyptian rule in Sudan...

The Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 saw General Kitchener lead an Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese army to victory over 50,000 Mahdists in Sudan. The death of General Gordon during the...

The siege of Khartoum from March 1884 to January 1885 was the most dramatic episode of the Mahdist War (1881-99) in Sudan when an army led by the inspirational Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed...