Explore the societies, empires, and trade networks that flourished across Africa before colonial contact: from the wealth of Mali and Songhai, to the statecraft of Buganda and Zulu, to the enduring stone cities of Great Zimbabwe and Kush.
The story of Osiris — the murdered king who became judge of the dead — organised the entire Egyptian worldview, from the throne to the weighing of the heart. This is the myth that shaped Kemet.
From Vodun's healing shrines in Benin to the Mursi lip plate in Ethiopia, the all-night mbira ceremonies of the Shona to the kola nut diplomacy of the Igbo — African practices outsiders called primitive, barbaric, or bizarre were sophisticated systems of law, medicine, and meaning all along.
Across nearly 2,000 years, from Amanirenas of Kush, who forced Rome into a treaty in 21 or 20 BC, to Muhumusa of the Nyabingi movement, arrested in 1911, African queens led armies and negotiated with empires. Their records were later rewritten, shrunk, or erased.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In June 1730, ninety-six captives aboard the slave ship Little George broke their irons, seized the vessel, and sailed it back to Africa — with no one aboard who knew how.
