According to a medieval account, a ruler of Mali left one of the world’s wealthiest thrones to discover what lay beyond the Atlantic. His expedition disappeared, leaving behind a mystery shaped by history, legend, and a name that may never have been his.
In 1591 a Moroccan army dragged muskets and cannon across the world’s largest desert to destroy the Songhai Empire — the last and greatest of the medieval empires of the western Sudan.
Stephanos fled Ethiopia for America, but America never gave him the life he imagined. A review of Mengestu's novel on exile, friendship and how surviving a life differs from succeeding at it.
Over four funerals spanning decades, a white South African family unravels, haunted by an unkept promise to their Black housekeeper, exposing racial privilege and moral failure across apartheid and beyond.
A Zulu pastor travels to Johannesburg seeking his missing son, uncovering racial injustice, crime, and shattered families in apartheid-era South Africa—a powerful cry for reconciliation and hope.
Not dolls, curses, or shuffling zombies. Vodun is one of the world’s older living religions — a sophisticated West African faith that Hollywood turned into a horror prop.
In the 1640s a Mbundu queen, a Kongolese king, and the Dutch came within a breath of driving Portugal out of West-Central Africa. This is how they nearly won — and how the kingdom that first welcomed the caravel ended in fragments.
Twice — a century and a half apart — Russia reached for a foothold in Africa. Both attempts ended in storm, farce, and a single shelled fort. But they happened.
Angola is named after a royal title — the ngola of Ndongo. This is the story of that kingdom, and of the terrifying mercenary society the slave trade unleashed upon it.
How a sovereign king chose Christianity in 1491 — and how his son became the first African ruler to put the crime of the Atlantic slave trade into writing.
In 1781 the crew of the slave ship Zong threw 132 living people into the Atlantic, then filed an insurance claim. The court case that followed helped expose the brutal logic of the slave trade and became an important episode in Britain’s growing abolitionist movement.
For its first decades, the traffic through Elmina flowed in the direction history has forgotten — Europeans selling African captives to African buyers, in exchange for gold.
