My African History Project, Updates

 

 I'll be following your progress.  I've always love africa. 

Thanx for the links mate! I'd for sure check them out in the near future.

Since I last posted here, I have been working on the last paper in the African history project, one covering the years 1965-2005.  I have found a picture of an OAU summit meeting that Haile Selassie hosted.  The picture was dated to 1963, but I believe it was actually taken in 1966, because that is the only year when both Kwame Nkrumah and Jean-Bedel Bokassa would have been in a lineup of heads of state.  It would look great near the beginning of the paper I'm working on now, but in order to use it, I need to identify all twelve figures in it.  So far I've been able to recognize or identify more than half of them; can you help me put names on the rest of the faces?  I'm sure Tobodai will recognize some.



Front Row (left to right):

1. Gr�goire Kayibanda? (Rwanda)
2. Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic)
3. Haile Selassie (Ethiopia)
4.  Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya)
5.  Unknown
6.  Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo-Kinshasa or Zaire)

Back row (left to right again):

1. Kwame Nkrumah? (Ghana)
2. Milton Obote (Uganda)
3. Julius Nyerere (Tanzania)
4. Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia)
5. Unknown
6. Unknown

Some of the heads of state I would expect to see are Hastings Banda of Malawi, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, William Tubman of Liberia, and Francois Tombalbaye of Chad.  If any of them are here, I don't recognize them.

The safari is now finished.  For at least a year and a half I have been sending out announcements concerning my project to write a complete history of Africa.  Well, the ninth and last paper in the series, "The Independence Years," has just gone up.  This one covers the last forty years, 1965 to 2005.

I thought that some of the other history papers I had written, like Chapter 16 of the Middle Eastern series, were long, but this one is my longest yet!  The original manuscript came out to 86 pages in WordPerfect, and it took two hours just to run the spell-check.  Finally, I had to divide it into two parts so that my search engine could index it.

My apologies in advance to you dial-up users.  This time I had to cover what was happening in fifty-three nations, compared with eighteen nations in the Middle East, thirty-six in Europe and eleven in Southeast Asia.  And most of Africa's nations don't have a recent history that is dull and peaceful, like Canada or Switzerland; the last forty years have been "interesting times," in the Chinese sense of the expression.  Let the record show that when I started building this website, I promised to deliver the story of "the rise and fall of just about everybody," and at least in the case of Africa, I succeeded!  I think I've earned a vacation for the rest of the year, yes?

Here are the URLS and the topics covered:

Part I

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af09a.html

Independence: Tying Up the Loose Ends
Civil War in the Ex-Portuguese Empire
Who Owns the Western Sahara?
One-Man Rule:  The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
North Africa Takes a Military Road
(includes special sections on Tunisia & Egypt, Algeria, Somalia & Sudan, Libya and Mauritania)

Nigeria:  The Great Underachiever
The Island at the End of the World

The Horn of Africa:  Horn of Famine
(includes special sections on Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia)

Part II

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af09b.html

Southern Africa:  The Fall of Apartheid
(includes special sections on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Southwest Africa/Namibia)

Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo:  Still the Dark Heart of Africa

America's Stepchild and Her Anarchic Neighbors
(includes special sections on Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone)

The Islamist Menace
Starting Over Again With the African Union
Modern African Demographics
The Challenges Facing Modern Africa

===================================

And here are the other papers in this series, in case you haven't seen them yet:

Chapter 1:  The Original Africans

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af01.html

Chapter 2:  Valley of the Pharaohs (Egypt before 654 B.C.)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/egypt.html

Chapter 3:  Carthage (814 to 264 B.C.)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/carthage.html

Chapter 4:  Africa in the Classical Era (654 B.C. to 641 A.D.)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af04.html

Chapter 5:  The Trading Kingdoms (641 to 1415 A.D.)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af05.html

Chapter 6:  The Forest Kingdoms (1415 to 1795)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af06.html

Chapter 7:  The Dark Continent Partitioned (1795 to 1914)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af07.html

Chapter 8:  "Wind of Change" (1914 to 1965)

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af08.html

Special Feature:  A List of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and the Kings of Ancient Nubia

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/pharaoh.html

Enjoy!