East Africa History

Shared Ancestry: A Genetic Roadmap for Peace in Ethiopia is a powerful exploration of our interconnectedness, unraveling the genetic threads that tie together the people of Ethiopia. This illuminating work uses the lens of genetics to challenge entrenched beliefs, debunk ethnic stereotypes, and advocate for a more unified national identity.

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.

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.

In the East African nation of Kenya, the most heated struggle for control of the land and political independence is today known as the Mau Mau uprising. Amongst former colonials and their allies who are familiar with the uprising, the term "Mau Mau" rouses profound fears. Among Black Nationalists and African-centered historians, the same term elicits a proud and emboldening badge of African honor. Yet, the Land and Freedom Struggle is largely unknown to a vast majority of black people. It is an honor for me to tell this story of these noble warriors. The words "Mau Mau" must forever be a ...

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.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children.

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.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over her lifetime her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood, and the death of children.

Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. Peter is the only person to have traced Obama's roots from the present back through more than twenty generations, thanks to the Luo tribe's remarkable oral tradition. Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this will be the story of an African dynasty going back over 400 years.

Abdi's world fell apart when he was only 15 and Somalia's vicious civil war hit Mogadishu. Unable to find his family and effectively an orphan, he fled with some 60 others, heading to Kenya. On the way, death squads hunted them and they daily faced violence, danger and starvation. After almost four months, they arrived in at refugee camps in Kenya - of the group he'd set out with, only five had survived.

Jesse Max Barber, born in Blackstock, South Carolina, to former slave parents, was a journalist, dentist, and civil rights leader. His literary career began in 1903 while attending Virginia Union University in Richmond. In this work, The Negro of the Earlier World, Barber contends that a race without traditions and without history is most likely to be a race without backbone and without self-respect.

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.

Este pequeño país del oeste africano se caracteriza por la confluencia de elementos opuestos: su territorio no llega al millón de kilómetros cuadrados, pero alberga una de las naciones más pobladas del continente.