Tewodros II was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 until his death in 1868. He was born Kassa Hailegiorgis (English: "restitution" and "His [or the] power"). His rule is often placed as the beginning of modern Ethiopia, ending the decentralized...

Sir Samuel White Baker was a British explorer, officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer and abolitionist. He also held the titles of Pasha and Major-General in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. He served as the Governor-General of...

Paul Kruger was instrumental in negotiations with the British, which later led to the restoration of Transvaal as an independent state under British rule. In 1882, the 57 year old Paul Kruger was elected president of Transvaal. He l...

John Hanning Speke was an officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa and who is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile. In 1844 he was commissioned into the British army and p...

James Augustus Grant was a Scottish explorer of eastern equatorial Africa. In 1846 he joined the Indian army. He saw active service in the Sikh War (1848—49), served throughout the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and was wounded in the operations fo...

Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched th...

Major-General Charles George Gordon, CB, also known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British army, but he made hi...

Leopold Louis-Philippe Marie Victor of Saxe-Coburg, succeeded his father, Leopold I of Belgium, to the Belgian throne in 1865 as Leopold II, King of the Belgians and remained king until his death. Outside of Belgium, however, he is chiefly...

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley travelled to Zanzibar and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything, requiring no fewer than...

Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah was a religious leader of the Samaniyya order in Sudan who, on June 29, 1881, proclaimed himself as the Mahdi or messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith. From his announcement of the Mahdiyya in June 1881 until...

Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha was a German military commander widely condemned for his conduct of the Herero Wars in German South-West Africa, especially for the events that led to the near-extermination of the Herero. At the Battle of...

Cecil John Rhodes was a British imperialist and the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (since 1980 known as Zimbabwe), named after himself. He profited greatly from southern Africa's natural resources. Rhodes was born in Bishop's...

Ludwig Borchardt was a German Egyptologist who was born in Berlin. His main focus was Ancient Egyptian architecture. He began excavations in Amarna, where he discovered the workshop of the sculptor Djhutmose, amongst its contents was the bu...

George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon was an English aristocrat best known as the financier of the excavation of the Egyptian New Kingdom Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. The 5th Earl was a...

The Suez Canal, also known by the nickname "The Highway to India", is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows water...