Africa

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers....

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time....

Already a major international bestseller, Zeinab Badawi’s sweeping and much-needed survey of African history traces the continent’s extraordinary legacy from prehistory to the present from the African perspective.

This classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization....

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships....

From a NAACP award-winning historian and Fulbright scholar, a history of education in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the historic ruling of Brown v. Board of Education.

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US....

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all.

Starting on September 11th, 2012, al-Qa'ida carried out a series of terrorist attacks on the U.S. Consulate and CIA Annex in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens....

In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society....

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"....

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity....

Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage—its longings, its obsessions, its deceits—making South African history a captivating political biography. Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn’t affect just the couple at its center, but an entire nation....

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe....

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up....

Col. Mike Hoare tells how his force of mercenaries, 5 Commando, put down a Comunist-backed rebel uprising in the Congo....

Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures....

Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent....

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies....

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a long-awaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war....

In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens....

Piloting a U.S. Army Special Operations Blackhawk, Durant was shot down and captured on October 3, 1993....

On the West coast of Africa there once, the Mali empire in its Golden Age was once bigger than the entirety of Western Europe put together, made possible by the efforts of one man Mansa Musa the Sultan of Mali....

In "Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State," Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop boldly calls for the unification of Black African nations.....

A little over 100 years ago, East Africa was terra incognita to most whites....

In The Battle for the Black Mind, Dr. Karida Brown explores the struggle to define and control the education of African Americans amid shifting societal attitudes and forms of systemic exclusion. From the perspective of freed slaves seeking empowerment and liberation through education, to the white elites aiming to shape the future of the workforce and consolidate power, The Battle for the Black Mind explores the formation of segregated education systems and the influence of philanthropic organizations, religious institutions, and Black educators themselves.

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants—if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants.

Striking where the enemy is weakest and melting away into the darkness before he can react. Never confronting a stronger force directly, but using audacity and surprise to confound and demoralize an opponent. Operations driven by good intelligence, area knowledge, mobility, speed, firepower, and detailed planning, and executed by a few specialists with indigenous warriors—this is unconventional warfare.

Welcome to Medusa's Musings — a razor-sharp manifesto from that snake-haired scapegoat of ancient mythology. Imprisoned within a simulated world where ancient deities operate on wireless networks and humans navigate a bio-digital labyrinth, Medusa breaks her silence to expose the greatest illusion of all: our modern reality. With venomous wit and unexpected vulnerability, our serpentine narrator deconstructs the grand deception of contemporary existence. She reveals her true origins as a sacred feminine power, deliberately fragmented, just as humanity now finds itself fractured by the ...

The Odu Ifa is a collection of 256 sacred verses of wisdom and prophecy from the Yoruba religion, which are used as a tool for divination. Each of the verses, or Odu, is filled with mystical and ethical teachings and serves as a foundation for understanding the universe. Performing an Odu Ifa divination is a complex process that requires a trained priest, known as a Babalawo for men or an Iyanifa for women. The process typically involves the priest invoking the spirit of Orunmila, the Orisha of wisdom and divination, using sacred palm nuts or a divination chain, called an Opele. The priest ...