Africa

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe....

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time....

Powerfully introduced by Angela Davis, this is the classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis by Walter Rodney, Guyanese intellectual and leading thinker and activist of the anticolonial revolution....

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships....

The Destruction of Black Civilization is revelatory and revolutionary because it offers a new approach to the research, teaching, and study of African history by shifting the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves....

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder....

Born in Blackness reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, anchoring of democracy in the West, and fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent....

This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time....

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up....

Africa is the continent where the first humans were born. They explored the vast land and produced the first tools. And although we migrated from that continent, we never completely abandoned it....

It is difficult to find another soldier's story to equal Captain Darrell Watt's in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced....

A sweeping history of the fortune seekers, adventurers, despots, and thieves who have ruthlessly endeavored to extract gold, diamonds, and other treasures from Africa and its people....

This book recounts the thrilling and uplifting tale of a man who defied the odds to lift himself and his country out of misery toward a more promising future....

This classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization....

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US....

Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage....

Anyone living in Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s would have had a father, husband, brother, or son called up in the defense of the war-torn, landlocked little country. This is the story of Andrew Balaam, a member of the Rhodesian Light Infantry and the Selous Scouts for 12 years....

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war....

In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States....

African mythology is intricate, complex, and the ideals behind some of their mythological beliefs were often intertwined with actual events....

Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage, and the Industry offers a definitive guide to the many rich dimensions of the bean and the beverage around the world....

A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy....

This audiobook tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers....

The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces....

Africa has played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture from its infancy. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood in Africa before they were in Europe....

Famed historian, university professor, and author of the groundbreaking "The Case for Colonialism" Bruce Gilley demonstrates that, contrary to modern presuppositions, German colonialism from its early roots to the mid-twentieth century served overall as a global force for good in the world, elevating the lives of its subjects and encouraging scientific development while allowing native cultures to flourish within its governance.

Sydney Kentridge carved out a reputation as South Africa's most prominent anti-apartheid advocate—his story is entwined with the country's emergence from racial injustice and oppression. He is the only lawyer to have acted for three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize—Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Chief Albert Lutuli. Already world-famous for his landmark cases, he then became England's premier advocate.

On August 4, 1972, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of over 80,000 Ugandan Asians from the country. A brave few stayed, but most left to Asia or Europe. Stripped of everything, my family chose to start over in Britain. Our story is just one of tens of thousands. I lived history. Though others may tell it differently, this is my experience. My family and I built ourselves from the ground up, standing strong against an endless wave of racism that sought to keep us in our place. To be able to simply walk down the street in peace once seemed impossible.

Dipuo grew up on the south side of a mine dump that segregated Johannesburg’s black townships from the white-only city. Some nights, she hiked to the top. To a South African teenager in the 1980s—even an anti-apartheid activist like Dipuo—the divide that separated her from the glittering lights on the other side appeared eternal. But in 1994, the world’s last explicit racial segregationist regime collapsed to make way for something unprecedented. With penetrating insight, The Inheritors tells the story of a country in the throes of a great reckoning. 

Why is Africa still perceived as a country when there are around 2,000 languages spoken on the continent alone? It's a Continent aims to counter the misconception that Africa is a country by breaking down this vast, beautiful and complex continent into regions and countries. Each of the 54 African countries has a unique history and culture and this audiobook highlights the key historical moments that have shaped each nation and contributed to its global position, as well as within the African continent.

The Barefoot Woman is the story of the author’s mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother’s voice in a haunting work of art.

Ten million people had been murdered. For 15 years, atrocities had been perpetrated by King Leopold II of Belgium and his Force Publique in the Congo Free State. By 1909, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could stand it no longer and felt the need to speak out and inform the general public of exactly what was going on. This new edition of his passionate plea for action includes contemporary newspaper reports and an introduction by Tim Dalgleish. His book is a classic in the annals of genocide and remains a shocking portrayal of humanity’s "heart of darkness".

As the world progressed through medieval times, great empires rose and fell across Europe and Africa. However, in the 15th century, trans-oceanic voyages were allowing imperialism to reach distant shores. This new form of control became rampant, and untamed capitalism put the slave trade at its core.

The first volume of Adel Ben-Harhara's three-volume memoir delves into the voyage of a boy who was separated from his mother as a toddler and essentially orphaned at the age of five when his father died. With his mother’s inability to provide support, the boy was often left on the streets. As a child, the boy received extensive religious teachings in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. As an adolescent Marxist in Ethiopia, he was imprisoned for taking part in a Communist party youth movement and barely avoided the death squad’s bullets before moving to his ancestors’ land: Yemen.

Jeremy Black takes the listener through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. He discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland and the Cold War.