Flashback

ADF STAFF For a time, skirmishes between rival Nguni tribes in what is now South Africa were all bluster and no battle. Opposing fighters would stand 35 to 45 meters apart, each armed with an assegai, a 1.8-meter spear, and a tall…

ADF STAFF It was just before midnight at the end of a long election day in 2000, and Lamine Cissé, Senegal’s minister of the interior, had the unenviable task of telling the president he had lost.  In a historic phone call, Cissé, a…

ADF Staff Almost 500 years ago, a man named Yasuke drew crowds wherever he went in Japan. He was the first foreign-born man to become a samurai, Japan’s elite warrior caste. He also was the first, and only, black man most Japanese…

ADF STAFF Sayyida Salme’s life was a whirlwind. She was a sultan’s daughter from what is now Tanzania. Denied any formal education, she taught herself to read and write. She spoke four languages — Swahili, Arabic, Turkish and German.…

ADF STAFF The Sultanate of Damagaram was never one of Africa’s biggest empires. In what is now Niger, at its most expansive it was about 70,000 square kilometers — about the same size as modern-day Sierra Leone.  But as a commercial…

ADF STAFF The Kingdom of Axum, also known as Aksum, was the first to do many things in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was the first kingdom to mint its own coins. It created its own written language, called Ge’ez, which still is in use in…