African History
From the Archives: The Nile
In Empress of the Nile, Lynn Olson referred a number of times to a book that I enjoyed in the past: Toby Wilkinson’s The Nile:A Journey Downriver Through Egypt’s Past and Present. In fact, she led me to pull it off the shelf and dip in and out. I’m pleased to report that it’s…
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From the Archives: And Speaking of the Siege of Mafeking…
…as I believe we were just the other day, I was recently introduced to a vision of the siege that is very different from Lord Baden-Powell’s casually stiff upper lip. Sol T. Plaatje was a twenty-three-year-old African court interpreter for the Resident Magistrate when the Boers besieged Mafeking, and its African older sister, the adjacent…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past: Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?) The only bright…
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