East Africa History

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.

On August 4, 1972, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of over 80,000 Ugandan Asians from the country. A brave few stayed, but most left to Asia or Europe. Stripped of everything, my family chose to start over in Britain. Our story is just one of tens of thousands. I lived history. Though others may tell it differently, this is my experience. My family and I built ourselves from the ground up, standing strong against an endless wave of racism that sought to keep us in our place. To be able to simply walk down the street in peace once seemed impossible.

The Barefoot Woman is the story of the author’s mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother’s voice in a haunting work of art.

Some of the most iconic symbols of the Roman Empire that have survived into the modern world today are the arches that Romans erected to commemorate military victories and glorify individual emperors. The story of how arches came to be used throughout the Roman world in such a way is one that involves the evolution of the military and its leaders into the political forces that came to dominate the state. Those arches, along with the triumphs that came to be associated with many of them, were key parts in the process of exhibiting the might of both Rome.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o es estudiante en una prestigiosa escuela de Nairobi cuando la guerrilla Mau Mau reclama la independencia de Kenia. La etapa de más represión del gobierno británico coincide con su entrada al instituto, donde se siente protegido. Así, cuando Ngũgĩ visita su pueblo lo encuentra devastado y trasladado cerca de la vigilancia de las autoridades en un conjunto de pueblos a modo de campo de concentración.

En Sueños en tiempos de guerra, Ngũgĩ dibuja hábilmente una era pasada, capturando el paisaje, la gente y la cultura. Narrado desde los ojos de un niño y al mismo tiempo la inteligencia de una vida dedicada, entre otras cosas, al estudio y la defensa de las culturas minorizadas, el audiolibro evidencia la vicisitudes sociales y políticas de la vida colonial y la guerra.

On August 7, 1998, three years before President George W. Bush declared the War on Terror, the radical Islamist group al-Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where Prudence Bushnell was serving as U.S. ambassador. Terrorism, Betrayal, and Resilience is her account of what happened, how it happened, and its impact 20 years later. When the bombs went off in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania that day, Congress was in recess and the White House, along with the entire country, was focused on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Rufus L. Perry was an educator and Baptist minister from Brooklyn, New York. He was a member of the African Civilization Society and was a co-founder of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. The Cushite is a short work that investigates the history of ancient peoples.

Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen. Black Hawk Down drops you into a crowded marketplace in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia with the U.S. Special Forces - and puts you in the middle of the most intense firefight American soldiers have fought since the Vietnam War.

Abdul is just seven years old when his parents are killed before his eyes. As a brutal war sweeps Sudan, Abdul and his three-year-old brother are forced to flee. Their gruelling journey across the Sahara to a refugee camp in Chad is fraught with danger, and every day is a struggle against hunger and disease. Until one day Abdul is offered a chance to escape. A chance that could save him, but will force him to make the most heartbreaking decision of his life. Abdul's death-defying flight leaves deep scars.

On the night of September 11, 2012, the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, Libya, came under ferocious attack by a heavily armed group of Islamic terrorists. The prolonged firefight, and the attack hours later on a nearby CIA outpost, resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, the Information Officer, Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the 1950s, Grimzek and his son Michael began a quest to save the Serengeti from modernization by remaking an imperial game reserve into a gigantic zoo for the earth's last great mammals. Grzimek, well-known to German audiences through his long-running television program, A Place for Animals, used the film Seregenti Shall Not Die to convince ordinary Europeans that they could save nature. Yet their message sidestepped the uncomfortable legacies of German colonial exploitation in the region that had endangered animals and excluded local people.

Ride with the knights of the crusaders during the Middle Ages as you hear about all the battles of the 11th through the 15th centuries. The Crusades brings history alive as it chronicles the participants and their motives behind carrying the cross. Not only will you learn about the influential Christian leaders such as Richard the Lionheart, you'll also discover the strategies of the Muslim sultans, including the most respected in all of Islam, Saladin.

Madagascar provided the stunning backdrop for one of the strangest conflicts of the Second World War - when Britain went head to head against one of its closest allies. When British forces landed on the island in 1942, the enemy they faced wasn’t German, Japanese, or even Italian, this time the opposing forces were French.

Historical Sketches of the Ancient Negro (1920) by Edward and Josephine sought to correct the image of their African ancestors in the perception of Afro-Americans. The authors explore the ancient history of Cush, Ethiopia, Nubia and other African kingdoms, relying on Biblical text and other primary sources to retell the story of black Africans from an Afrocentric point of view, and providing an important early contribution to Ancient African history.

"Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization" by John G. Jackson is a seminal work that challenges traditional Eurocentric perspectives on the origins of civilization. Originally published in 1939, Jackson's book seeks to highlight the significant contributions of African civilizations, particularly Ethiopia, to the development of human culture and civilization.

This book deals with the lives and labours of men, and women, who transitioned the British imperial project in Africa from the era of capital imperialism to that of colonial administration. It is a story of the struggle between two major powers for dominance in West and Central Africa and the effort of the few to establish a style of administration to carry Africa into the future....

The Mahdist War took place at the end of the 19th century between Sudanese rebels and their Egyptian colonizers. A religious leader claiming to be the Islamic Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, raised an army and led a movement to guide not only Sudanese Muslims, but Muslims worldwide. He and the Mahdists envisioned a future in which they would live by the teachings of the Qur’an. However, larger global forces, especially those of global imperialism, would stand in their way. From the Mahdist grassroots movement to independence to reconquest, this is the story of the Mahdist War.

Reverend Richard A. Morrisey (born 1858) was an African-American biblical scholar, a Doctor of Divinity, and the pastor of a number of churches in the South and in Pennsylvania. In 1915, he published Bible History of the Negro, with the hope of inspiring a greater desire to read the Bible which he describes as giving "the Negro a place among the foremost races of the world, in wealth, in education, in honor and in religion, a history to which every member of the race may point with great pride and profound gratitude to Almighty God today”.

Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923) was an editor, historian, and prominent theologian of his time who founded The Christian Recorder, an early African American newspaper. In his 1895 book The Color of Solomon, he contends that King Solomon of the Bible did not belong to the white race.