WRITER & HISTORIAN
It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and left it. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil... Continue Reading →
At first they were called ‘mocambo’: a word from the Mbundu of what is now Angola meaning ‘hideout’. They were communities of escaped slaves that began springing up in colonial Brazil in the 17th-century. Typically they might contain around fifty people, predominantly men. No less typically, the colonial powers – either the Dutch or the... Continue Reading →
The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a “wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations”. It offered “the only solution to great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails then all else fails.” Stirring words. Not those of some sentimental old Colonel Blimp back... Continue Reading →
When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been... Continue Reading →
The Anglo-Ashanti wars began with a debacle for the British. On 8 January 1824, word reached Cape Coast that the Ashanti were advancing. Sir Charles M’Carthy, newly appointed governor, divided up the forces at his disposal and hurried a few hundred men up country. They waded through waist-deep mud and slept exposed to torrential rain.... Continue Reading →
It was the morning of 22 December 1938 and the phone was ringing at the newly established museum in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The call was for Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young curator, then busy reconstructing a fossil dinosaur. Latimer had asked the local trawlermen to alert her to anything unusual in their... Continue Reading →
Tutankhamun was first autopsied in November 1925, three years after the sensational discovery of his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It proved impossible to remove him whole from his coffin. Resin-based unguents, in which the linen bandages wrapping his body had been steeped during mummification 3,000 years previously, now glued the mummy to... Continue Reading →
In 1688 a 19-year-old medical student from Berne named Johannes Hofer observed a condition that medicine had yet to define. Symptoms of this ‘melancholy delirium’ might include fever, disturbed sleep, palpitations, loss of appetite and anxiety – sometimes ultimately leading to death. Hofer noted the case of a fellow student from Berne, now living in... Continue Reading →
Founded in the early 17th century, the west African kingdom of Dahomey was a bellicose, expansionist state. It is said the king’s primary duty was to ‘make Dahomey always larger’; one 18th-century king, Agaju, boasted that – whereas his grandfather had conquered two countries, his father 18, and his brother, who took the throne before... Continue Reading →
By 216BC, Hannibal’s Carthaginian army in the Second Punic War had already won victories against the Romans at Trebia and Lake Trasimene. But then came Cannae. According to Polybius, the Senate, terrified by Hannibal’s successes, sent eight legions against him. It was an unprecedentedly large force: some 80,000 foot soldiers and 6,000 cavalry. It’s possible... Continue Reading →
The Songhay Empire wouldn’t be the first military power to set too much store in its cavalry. But by the time it fell to Morocco at the end of the sixteenth century it had little cause for complacency about anything. Founded in 1464 out of the ruins of the Malian Empire, Songhay was the largest... Continue Reading →
For the first English translation of his most influential work, The Description of Africa, he is John Leo. His baptismal name was Joannes Leone de Medici, although he preferred its Arabic form, Yuhannah al-Asad. His birth name was al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan. But he is best known as Leo Africanus. His date of... Continue Reading →
Five of the first six archbishops of Canterbury to be consecrated were not native to this country. None came from as far afield as the seventh: Theodore, born in 602, was a Greek-speaking monk from Tarsus – the modern Turkish city of Gözlü Kule – in what was then a Byzantine province. Educated in Antioch... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 