Africa

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a key moment in the smokescreen conflict of the Cold War played out in southern Africa. Gary Baines looks at the ways in which opposing sides are now remembering the event.

Jos Damen tells the stories of two unusual men who lived a century apart in the Dutch colony at Elmina in West Africa; a poet who became a tax inspector and a former slave who argued that slavery did not contradict ideas of Christian freedom.

Richard Hamilton on why the West has overstated the role of social media and understated the oral tradition in the Arab Spring.

Andrew Boxer demonstrates the ways in which external events affected the struggles of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Michael Scott-Baumann explains why Nasser is such an important figure in the Middle East in the twentieth century.

Little remains of the great North African empire that was Rome's most formidable enemy, because, as Richard Miles explains, only its complete annihilation could satisfy its younger rival.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

On the eve of the Second World War, the navies of Italy, France and Britain plotted for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Their actions resulted in the fracturing of the sea’s age-old unity, with consequences that persist to this day. Simon Ball explains how the ‘Middle Sea’ became the Middle East.

Tony Chafer examines the paradoxes and complexities that underlie belated recognition of the contribution of African soldiers to the liberation of France in 1944.