East Africa

The German First World War commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck has been described as the 20th century’s greatest guerrilla leader for his undefeated campaign in East Africa. Is the legend justified? Dan Whitaker considers the wider picture.

Postwar decolonisation in West Africa saw tensions rise between the fading imperial powers of France and Britain, according to papers recently unearthed by Kathryn Hadley.

While it is right to seek justice for those tortured and mistreated during the Kenyan Emergency of the 1950s, attempts to portray the conflict as a Manichean one are far too simplistic, argues Tim Stanley.

C.E. Hamshere shows how, a fortnight after the Armistice of 1918, the elusive German Commander in East Africa surrendered at Abercorn in what is now Zambia.

In October 1935 Mussolini’s Fascist Italian forces invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) at a crucial moment in the run-up to the Second World War. Daniel Whittall looks at the complex issues the invasion raised in Britain and the responses to it, especially from black Britons.

John Hanning Speke discovered the source of the Nile on August 3rd, 1858.

Clive Foss introduces the Kharijites, a radical sect from the first century of Islam based in southern Iraq and Iran, who adopted an extreme interpretation of the Koran, ruthless tactics and opposed hereditary political leadership. After causing centuries of problems to the caliphate, they survive in a quietist form in East Africa and Oman.

David Anderson, Huw Bennett and Daniel Branch believe that the Freedom of Information Act is being used to protect the perpetrators of a war crime that took place in Kenya fifty years ago.

David Anderson looks at the contentious issues raised as Kenya comes to terms with the colonial past.

The first-ever parliament of the Sudan was opened by the British governor-general, Sir Robert Howe, on January 1st, 1954.

Started in 1947, to grow peanuts in Tanganyika as a contribution to both the African and British economies, the Groundnuts Scheme was abandoned four years later on January 9th, 1951.

David Rooney describes the extraordinary exploits of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German soldier who kept the Allies tied down in Africa throughout the Great War.

The massacre of the army of Sudanese Dervishes on a plain near Omdurman on September 2nd, 1898, was an occasion that a new military technology by Britain in battle.