France hit Islamist rebels in Mali with fresh air strikes and deployed armored cars on Tuesday, stepping up its intervention in the West African state as regional allies struggled to accelerate their plans to send in troops. Paris has poured hundreds of soldiers into Mali and carried out air raids since Friday in the northern half of the country, which was seized last year by an Islamist alliance combining ...

Barotse and Kololo: 19th century AD The African tribes living in the region between the Zambezi and Lake Tanganyika are first reached by outsiders in 1798. In that year a Portuguese trading party, pushing north from Tete on the Zambezi, reaches the capital of a chief near Lake Mweru. Half a century later this is the region which Livingstone explores, from his journey down the Zambezi in 1855 to his death ne ...

German colony: AD 1884-1914 The first German connection with Togo is the arrival of missionaries in 1847 to work among the largest tribal group in the region, the Ewe. German traders soon follow, establishing a base at Anécho on the coast. When Bismarck decides to put together an off-the-peg German empire in Africa, Togo is one of the three places which he selects on the west coast. His representative, Gust ...

Western Iberia: to AD 1179 The early history of Portugal is shared with the rest of the Iberian peninsula. The region is visited by Phoenicians and Carthaginians, settled by Celts, incorporated in the Roman empire (as Lusitania in 138 BC), settled again by Visigoths and conquered by Muslims. During the centuries of the Reconquest, the region has the status of a county. The count of Portugal, owing allegianc ...

Well placed for trade: from the 6th century BC Like Yemen to the southwest, the territory of Oman has always benefited from its fine trading position at the southern extremity of the Arabian peninsula. From here merchants, without needing to sail far from land, can make easy contact with Persia to the north, India to the east and Africa to the south. This stretch of coast, together with that of Muscat just ...

The Maravi Confederacy: 16th - 18th century AD The earliest known settled kingdom in the region of Lake Nyasa is that of the Maravi Confederacy. Established by Bantu-speaking peoples in about 1480, and continuing into the 18th century, the confederacy controls territory west from the great lake to the Luangwa River, south to the Zambezi and east to the coast. This tribal empire of the Maravi people loses co ...

Land of Freedom: from AD 1821 From the start the republic of Liberia is associated, as its name suggests, with the idea of freedom. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, has as its aim the settlement of freed slaves in colonies where they can become self-sufficient. With that purpose in mind agents from the society visit the west African coast south from Freetown, where the British have alread ...

Basutoland: AD 1868-1966 After being annexed by Britain in 1868 as Basutoland, Moshoeshoe's kingdom is transferred in 1871 to the administrative control of the Cape Colony. The Sotho tribes profoundly resent this development, about which they have not been consulted, and the 1870s are a time of increasing unrest in the region. This culminates in the Gun War of 1880, so called because it begins with an attem ...

Masai and Kikuyu: to the 19th century AD In the time before the arrival of outsiders and the beginning of recorded history, the Masai are the dominant tribe in the region now known as Kenya. They arrive as nomadic pastoralists from the north, probably in the mid-18th century. They are not Kenya's largest tribe (a distinction going to the Kikuyu, who live by agriculture), but the fierce reputation of the Mas ...