Showing titles in Africa

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to 400 to sell into slavery in Algiers. Among those taken was the Lutheran minister Reverend Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive and as a traveler across Europe (he journeyed alone from Algiers to Copenhagen in an attempt to raise funds to ransom the Icelandic captives who remained behind).

Step into a world where bold explorers and fierce warriors shaped a continent's destiny. This audiobook takes you on a breathtaking ride through Africa's past, revealing secrets of courage and conquest!

Ellis Park in Johannesburg, 24 June 1995. The Springboks versus The All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup final. Nelson Mandela steps onto the pitch wearing a Springboks shirt and, before a global audience of millions, a new country is born. This book tells the incredible story of Mandela's journey to that moment.

In 1941, with London burning in the Blitz, a group of hedonistic English nobles partied shamelessly in Kenya. Far removed from falling bombs, the wealthy elites of "Happy Valley" indulged in morphine, alcohol, and unrestricted sex, often with their friends' spouses. But the party turned sinister in the early hours of a January morning for Josslyn Hay, Lord Erroll, who had been enjoying the favors of the beautiful young wife of a middle-aged neighbor. Hay was found dead, a bullet in his brain.

Much is known about what Europeans did in Africa, yet very little is known about Africa's history before its colonization. In this surprising exploration, Max Siollun uncovers societies that were not part of a backward "Dark Continent," but which instead had rich lore to rival the ancient Greeks and Romans. This story of a dynamic and artistic people is a vital listen for those who want to discover a forgotten era of West Africa.

Idi Amin ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979, inflicting tremendous violence on the people of the country. How did Amin's regime survive for eight calamitous years? Drawing on recently uncovered archival material, Derek Peterson reconstructs the political logic of the era, focusing on the ordinary people—civil servants, curators and artists, businesspeople, patriots—who invested their energy and resources in making the government work.

Frank Sayi grew up in the 1970s in Mawabeni, a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's illegal regime. Reserves were places of repression and containment. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, police officers, and guerillas fighting for freedom. They were all violent men who terrorised the civilian population. Schools were closed, food supply chains and clothing were contaminated with poison, refugees fled the armies.

'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' – Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing...

Pacifique Irankunda’s childhood in Burundi was marked by a 13-year civil war - a grueling struggle that destroyed his home, upended his family, and devastated his country’s beautiful culture. As young boys, Paci and his brother slept in the woods on nights when the shooting and violence grew too intense; they hid in tall grass and watched as military units rolled in and leveled their village.

Robert Forczyk covers the development of armored warfare in North Africa from the earliest Anglo-Italian engagements in 1940 to the British victory over the German Afrikakorps in Operation Crusader in 1941. The war in the North African desert was pure mechanized warfare, and in many respects the most technologically advanced theatre of World War II. It was also the only theatre where for three years British and Commonwealth, and later United States, troops were in constant contact with Axis forces.

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.

More than 2,000 years ago one of the greatest military leaders in history almost destroyed Rome. Hannibal, a daring African general from the city of Carthage, led an army of warriors and battle elephants over the snowy Alps to invade the very heart of Rome's growing empire. But what kind of person would dare to face the most relentless imperial power of the ancient world? How could Hannibal, consistently outnumbered and always deep in enemy territory, win battle after battle until he held the very fate of Rome within his grasp?

Ancient Egypt was a highly developed civilization that lasted for thousands of years and left behind fascinating clues in the form of impressive structures and monuments. It was a culture balanced between the lush fertility of the Nile Valley and the barrenness of the surrounding vast deserts. The same balance holds true for our knowledge of the history of Egypt. In spite of the evidence we have, so much remains hidden and yet to be fully understood.

Apartheid, a state-sponsored policy of discrimination and segregation, was introduced and brutally enforced in South Africa for more than 40 years. It led to thousands of deaths, mass arrests, torture of prisoners, and to the suspension of the most basic human rights for the majority of Black South Africans. How did this come to be, and how did a modern state come to enact and enforce a series of laws deliberately designed to ensure poverty and lack of opportunity for the majority of its population?

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.

Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish "rag traders"; a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and African slaves - her ancestors were traded along the same Saharan routes as indigo, where a length of blue cotton could purchase human life.

1988 South Africa teeters on the edge of a state of emergency. Seventeen-year-old Bradley Steyn crosses Pretoria’s Strijdom Square and walks straight into a massacre. Barend Strydom, the notorious white supremacist ‘Wit Wolf’, is mowing down black bystanders relaxing in the square during their lunch break. Bradley cradles a dying man in his arms and, later, with reports of eight dead and sixteen seriously injured, he is brought face to face with the insanity of the nation.

On 16 March 1807, the British Parliament passed The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In the following year the Royal Navy's African Squadron was formed, its mission to stop and search ships at sea suspected of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Middle East. With typical thoroughness, the Royal Navy went further, and took the fight to the enemy, sailing boldly up uncharted rivers and creeks to attack the barracoons where the slaves were assembled ready for shipment.

In this classic tale of adventure, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, was captured by a band of nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. Thus begins an epic adventure of survival and a quest for freedom that takes him across the Sahara desert.