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By Gary Oswald. The London Illustrated News depicting "General Sir George Colley at the Battle of Majuba Mountain Just Before He Was Killed". Defeat portrayed as a heroic stand - something the establishment would to want to rectify. Public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the UK, was an imperialist. He oversaw the largest empire to ever exist and that empire expanded during his time in charge. In particular he made the c

By Gary Oswald. One of the New Villages created by the British in Malaysia, where civilians were forcibly relocated to disrupt the communist insurgency. This was publicly known in 1950s Britain - how many civilians were treated by soldiers and police was known & recorded by the government. Photograph in public domain, courtesy wikimedia commons. If you spend any time at all online looking for people talking about the British Empire (and honestly if you're reading this, you pr

By Gary Oswald. Secretly a AH film? The Woman King's bluray, courtesy Amazon. Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 Quentin Tarantino war film about allied agents operating in occupied France during 1944. Those agents are planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and, to spoil a 16-year-old film, they shockingly actually succeed. Hitler is killed by the French resistance in 1944 rather killing himself in 1945. That obviously has huge political and military implications. But the f

By Gary Oswald. You all know this guy. Tutankhamun's funerary mask on display in the museum in Cairo, picture courtesy wikimedia commons. So, as I think is probably clear by my contributions to this blog, I find Alternate History interesting. I find the idea of making changes to the past and seeing what results from that exciting and compelling. But I also find the much more obscure parlour game of Alternate Historiography equally interesting. With the latter, you do not chan

By Gary Oswald. A 1905 postcard from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Portuguese Mozambique... which was a lot more recent a creation that such images wanted to admit! (Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons) Portuguese Mozambique officially began in 1496 when Vasco de Gama arrived in Maputo Bay and didn't end until 1975. But in reality Mozambique is a big country and for most of that time, Portugal either had no men on the ground there at all or a tiny amount of tra

By Gary Oswald. The statue of Kimpa Vita, founder of Antonianism, in Angola. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The Kingdom of Kongo was one of the largest and most powerful pre-colonial states in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its capital was in modern Angola and it dominated the mouth of the Congo river from the 14th to 18th centuries. When, in 1482, Diogo Cão of Portugal first reached that river, he recognised Kongo as ‘the greatest African Kingdom’ of that time period and made i

By David Love. Samora Machel in 1985, during a state visit to the United States; image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Epilogue "He's dead." My sister stood in my doorway. It was the evening of the 20 th October, 1986. Earlier that day, around lunchtime, my mother had come to school and told us the news that Mozambiquan President Samora Machel’s plane was missing, reportedly crashed or shot down in South Africa. We’d left school early and gone home, sitting with my parents waiti

By Dr Charlton Cussans. A few years ago, I read a poem about South Africa which called the country “our free and happy land”. Well, I think I did. I could have sworn that I did, because the phrase stuck with me. I wish I could remember who wrote it, or what it was called, because I’ve not been able to find the damn thing since. Maybe it never existed, but I’m not going to claim the phrase is my own creation, it’s too evocative for that, and I’m not that good a writer. But I c

By Gary Oswald. A statue of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi in Mogadishu, picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The Adal Sultanate was a Muslim Somali Sultanate based around modern Somalia and the Ogaden or Somali region of modern-day Ethiopia. It is normally considered to have existed from 1415 to 1577, though there is an argument to be made that there was political continuity with both its predecessor and successor states. For the vast majority of that time, Adal was at war with t

By Colin Salt A Buccaneer in flight for the South African Air Force in the 1980s - when the jet was intended to deliver nuclear weapons. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. It is an ironic coincidence that two of the African countries with the most substantial nuclear weapons programs existed on different ends of the continent and could not have been farther apart in terms of effectiveness. Beginning with the success, it's well known among atomic scholars that apartheid S

By David Flin Basil D'Oliveira, who, according to Wisden, was: "The most important sportsman who ever lived." Some hyperbole, but he had a global impact beyond that of sport. Picture courtesy The Telegraph. As Pete Usher explained in his article series on the Olympics ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ), sport and politics have long been inextricably linked. Linking politics and sport is probably as old as sport itself. Or possibly politics. I guess it depends which came first.

By Alex Richards. A photograph of Guiseppe Verdi and not, as you might have first thought, of Alex Richards. So I'm told by Wikimedia Commons. When people think about opera, they usually think first of Italy. Those who are more aware of the genre will usually add the other great cultural centres of Europe – France, Germany, Russia, Austria, and Britain. Those with more interest in East Asia will probably talk of Chinese Opera – though to call Xiqu “opera” is somewhat misleadi

By Jeff Provine This article was originally posted on This Day in Alternate History and the original article can be found there . Please check that blog for more like this. Emperor Tewodros commits suicide - as depicted by the British media Tewodros II was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 until his death in 1868. His rule is often placed as the beginning of modern Ethiopia as he brought an end to the decentralized Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes) and restored centralised co

By Steve Payne and Jeff Provine This article was originally posted on Today in Alternate History ( twitter ) and the original article can be found there . Please check that blog for more like this. Achille Devéria's painting of Queen Nzinga The first Portuguese Sailors arrived in modern day Angola in 1483. They were there to establish alliances, trade and a path to Asia and one of the things they were most eager to trade was Slaves, having known for decades that the nations

By Lena Worwood On the Sea Lion Press Forums , we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the 55th contest was Black Horror . CW: abuse, assault, genocide, demons, PTSD, references to Byzantine church history Southern Kuliakia, Anno Mundi 7502 / 2001 Global Calendar Nobody was surprised that the inhabitants of Kipsaina were dead. It was worthy of a reference on the regional news,

By Gary Oswald I have written on and off about Africa during the 19th century on this blog for about three years in around 40 articles and over 150,000 words, and I have more articles like that to come. Most of those articles take the format of me describing an African people, their grim fate after being conquered by Europeans and some ways in which that could have gone differently. And they mostly take the presence of the European invaders as a fixed point of time, which the

By Gary Oswald Emir Abdelkader, as captured by Étienne Carjat, really should be much more prominent in this series than he is. In 1830 France invaded Algiers, which had long been a centre of Islamic piracy and where French merchants did significant business, after a diplomatic spat over unpaid loans and the Dey of Algiers hitting a French Ambassador. The French King, Charles X, and his conservative Prime Minister wished for a foreign policy victory to win over the French peop

By Gary Oswald Maasai warriors in German East Africa, c. 1906–1918 The Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania are a nomadic group of cattle herders in the Great Rift Valley. Traditionally, they fought primarily with throwing clubs, spears and shields and relied almost entirely on their cattle herds. They ate the meat, drank the milk daily, and even drank the blood on occasion. After emerging in force in the early 19th century and threatening Omani Mombasa in the 1850s, they were

By Gary Oswald Georg Ledebour In 1907, the German Empire in Africa consisted of four territories. German South West Africa, German East Africa, German Togoland and German Kamerun. In 1904, German South West Africa saw the beginning of the Herero and Nama genocide when a German official, Lothar von Trotha , ordered that every single man, woman and child of the Herero was to be exterminated. This order was enacted for six weeks, until the German parliament got the Emperor to r

By Gary Oswald Flag of the German East Africa Company In 1885 German gunships pulled into the Omani island of Zanzibar and demanded that the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, sell them his rights to some of his territory in mainland Tanzania. The Zanzibari control of East Africa tended to exist more in theory than practice, the cities on the Kenyan coast were constantly rebelling and Zanzibari Somalia was one house in Mogadishu where their agent would trade with the Som