East Africa

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.

The Edwardian era is often seen as a peaceful interlude between the violence of Victorian expansion and the First World War. In reality, Edward’s reign bore witness to dozens of conflicts across the Empire.

On 5 April 1889 John Hore died aged only seven years old. His adventures in East Africa saw him immortalised by Victorian evangelicals as ‘the boy missionary’.

Madagascar was among the prizes of Europe’s ruthless African land grab. When a US diplomat made plans for his own colonial enterprise, he found that the French had other ideas.

A newly independent Tanganyika hoped to capture part of the lucrative European market for African tourism. But its rivalry with neighbouring Kenya proved an obstacle.

The revolt against President Omar al-Bashir is not the first in Sudan’s history, but it is the first since Africa’s former largest country split in two.     

At a discouraging time during the Second World War, writes Geoffrey Evans, British and Indian troops gained a spectacular victory over the Italian forces in East Africa.

For mixed motives, writes C.E. Hamshere, the construction of the British East African railway was begun in 1892,  to which the development of modern Kenya and Uganda is greatly indebted.

Charles Chevenix Trench describes how an adventurous Greek in British Service played a large part in the trade and politics of the Horn of Africa.

In the coastal regions of the modern colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika,  the Portuguese, first among Europeans, came into contact with the Arab-African civilization that flourished on the edges of the Indian Ocean.