When most people think about colonialism, they picture stolen gold, enslaved people, rubber plantations, diamonds, and vast territories carved up by European empires. Few realize that one of colonialism’s most disturbing legacies wasn’t buried beneath the ground; it was...
When European powers carved Africa into colonies in the late nineteenth century, they faced an immediate economic problem: the people they intended to exploit had no reason to work for them. Africans across the continent were largely self-sufficient, farming...
In September 1887, British officials invited king Jaja, the powerful ruler of Opobo in present-day Nigeria, to what appeared to be a diplomatic meeting aboard a British vessel. Instead of negotiations, he was arrested. Within days, the king who...
In colonial Kenya during the 1950s, the British government built a vast network of detention camps to imprison Africans accused of resisting colonial rule. Hidden within the hills of Nyeri was one of those sites, Aguthi Concentration Camp, a...
In the late nineteenth century, European powers rushed to take control of African territory in what historians later called the Scramble for Africa. Soldiers and guns would eventually play a major role in that conquest. But before armies arrived,...
The White Highlands of central Kenya were once the ancestral lands of communities such as the Kikuyu, Maasai, and Kalenjin. By the early 1900s, however, the British colonial government transformed this fertile region into the centerpiece of European settlement,...
On February 3, 1953, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe witnessed one of the bloodiest episodes of Portuguese colonial rule, the Batepá massacre. What began as tensions over forced labour quickly turned into a campaign of mass violence...
The Great Hanging at Old Moshi, also known as the Great Chagga Conspiracy, was a mass execution that took place on March 2, 1900, under German colonial rule in what is now northern Tanzania. Nineteen local leaders and noblemen...
On 22 July 1921, in the mountainous terrain of northeastern Morocco, the Spanish Empire suffered its most devastating military defeat in modern history, the Battle of Annual. Fought between the Spanish Army and the Riffian Berbers during the Rif...
Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, was a visionary monarch, legal strategist, and resistance leader who was executed on August 8, 1914, for opposing Germany’s plan to seize ancestral lands and forcibly displace his people to make way for a European-only...
