Flashback

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…

ADF STAFF The storyteller historians of the Kingdom of Benin say that in about the year 1200, Evian, the kingdom’s aging administrator, tried to pass his title on to his son. But the administrator was not of royal blood, so the rule of…

ADF STAFF In 1978 during the war between Tanzania and Uganda, Tanzanian Brig. Gen. John Walden got on his army’s radio system to discuss the capabilities of the Cuban, Israeli, American and Mozambican Soldiers serving alongside his…