African War History

In nearly four decades as a journalist covering conflict from Rwanda to Kosovo to Palestine, Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has always carried a book of poetry. In Ukraine, she tweeted a poem a day, and people began to read, to share, to ask for more. Here, Lindsey collects her favourite poems from ancient times to modern, by writers from all around the world. Alongside each, she recalls a memory from her own work, whether interviewing the warlords of Bosnia, meeting child soldiers in Uganda or giving testimony in Rwanda.

During his years of reporting from the world's most savage and turbulent regions, Fergal Keane has witnessed the violence of the South African townships and the terror in Rwanda, the most extreme kinds of human behaviour, the horror of genocide, and the bravery of peacekeepers faced with overwhelming odds. As one of the BBC's leading correspondents, he recounts extraordinary encounters on the front lines.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, who was abducted from Africa on the last 'Black Cargo' ship to arrive in the United States. Of the millions of men, women and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

When people say the word slave, most think of unpaid, uneducated workers with little to no professional skills. However, this is not the case, and that word "slave" erases the genius of those who were in bondage. In the United States of America, African Americans were in bondage for centuries, and despite being in bondage and known as "slave", these men and women, as well as their descendants, contributed remarkably to the foundation and success of the country by doing the same jobs we "professionals" do today, from those in healthcare to designers and more except they didn't get paid. Your...

La importancia de agenciarse el petróleo, elemento vital para la movilización vehicular durante la II Guerra Mundial, hizo comprender a Hitler la necesidad insoslayable de obtenerla. Y en la lucha por su conquista, se abrió una zona de conflicto más: El frente africano. El punto de inflexión del frente africano durante la II Guerra Mundial.

Philip Gourevitch's unforgettable modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbours in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us a staggeringly vivid and intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness.