In 1622, the Portuguese governor of Luanda offered Queen Nzinga of Ndongo a mat on the floor instead of a chair. She sat on her servant's back instead, and negotiated as an equal. The story of Africa's most famous act of diplomatic defiance.
In 1911 it took a joint British and German army to arrest one woman in the hills of south-western Uganda. Muhumuza, exiled queen of Rwanda and voice of the spirit Nyabingi, had built a court the empires could not ignore.
In 1900, a British governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool, the soul of the Asante nation. A 60-year-old queen mother answered with war — and the stool was never surrendered.
For 16 years, Samori Touré held off the French army with rifles his own blacksmiths built. This is the story of the Wassoulou Empire and its last stand.
On 22 January 1879, some 20,000 Zulu warriors overran a British camp at Isandlwana, killing over 1,300 troops in Britain's worst defeat by a native army. Spears beat rifles that day, and the empire never forgot it.
For a century, experts assumed the glass beads of Ile-Ife were imported from the Mediterranean. Then archaeologists dug at Igbo-Olokun and found the furnaces, the crucibles, and 13,000 beads made from local sand.
For a century, textbooks said Africans learned iron smelting from outsiders. The furnaces of Taruga, Nsukka, and Termit tell a different story: Africans were smelting iron on their own, more than 2,500 years ago.
Around 2400 BC, Egyptian vizier Ptahhotep wrote a book of maxims on how to live well. It predates Plato by 2,000 years, and scholars call it one of the oldest books in the world.
Around 1600 BC, an Egyptian surgeon wrote down 48 trauma cases with examinations, diagnoses, and honest prognoses. It holds the first written use of the word "brain" and is the oldest surgical text on Earth.
Around 1550 BC, Egyptian physicians filled a 20-metre scroll with more than 700 remedies, from dentistry to contraception. It is the most complete record of ancient Egyptian medicine, and it sat in Europe while textbooks credited medicine to Greece.
Nearly 4,700 years ago, an Egyptian named Imhotep designed the first pyramid and practiced medicine more than 2,000 years before Hippocrates was born. History class skipped him. Here is his story.
Timbuktu was one of the great university cities of the world, and its scholars mapped the stars while Europe insisted Africa had no written knowledge. The manuscripts prove otherwise.
