Colonial history, checked against the sources.
Who wrote it down, what they left out, and who paid for the gap.
This site covers African history: how it came to be written the way it is, and what that does to the people reading it now. Precolonial kingdoms, the colonial period, people whose names never made it into any curriculum, and the long question of who gets to belong.
Every claim here can be traced back to a source. Where the record is thin, that gets said instead of smoothed over. The point is not to swap one confident story for another one.
What was there, what was made of it, who it happened to, and what is left of it now.
Four ways into the archive
01category
African Kingdoms
African kingdoms and empires before colonial rule. Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kush, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe, the states that were already there when the first European ships arrived.
02category
Colonial History
African colonial history, from the scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference to the borders drawn in a single afternoon and everything that followed.
03category
African Lives
People from African history whose names never made it into anyone’s curriculum. Rulers, scholars, soldiers, traders and resistance leaders.
04category
Identity and Belonging
Where the history goes once it is over. Origin, belonging and the questions that follow people who carry more than one place with them.
The history you were taught had an author.
GALLERY
New pieces go up across all four categories above, each one checked against named sources before it goes live. There is no fixed schedule and no filler between them.
Come back when one of the titles above pulls at something, or follow the shorter version of the same work on Instagram and Pinterest, @africanpeer.
