Elon Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate, investor and inventor. He is currently the CEO & CTO of SpaceX and CEO & Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors. He is the founder of multiple companies, most notably Sp...

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who is the 44th President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office and the first president born outside the continental United States. Born in Honolulu, Hawa...

Over the past twenty years, Smith has written more than fifty books, including specialist academic titles, short story collections, and a number of immensely popular children's books. In 1998, McCall Smith's detective novel, The No. 1 Ladie...

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian author, journalist, government official and political organizer who was brutally executed by the Nigerian dictatorship in response to a very successful campaign to challenge that government, Shell Oil Co. and th...

Dame Jane Morris Goodall, is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family inter...

Dian Fossey was an American zoologist, primatologist, and anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work th...

Zenzile Miriam Makeba, nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, United Nations goodwill ambassador, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was a...

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy. His prolific output of...

Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Though originally an advocate of all-out guerrilla war, from 1974 on he and the PLO sometimes seemed to be seeking a negotiated resolution of the P...

Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an English broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for 60 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunc...

Patrice Emery Lumumba, African nationalist leader, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (June-September 1960). Forced out of office during a political crisis, he was assassinated a short time later. In January...

Robert Mugabe became Zimbabwe's first president after the establishment of majority rule and the official granting of independence from Britain in 1980. He still holds that position today. Mugabe was a hero in the struggle for majority rule...

Idi Amin Dada Oumee 'Butcher of Africa' seizes power in a coup in January 1971. Amin has become the subject of many bizarre rumours and myths. There are stories of cannibalism, of feeding the corpses of his victims to crocodiles, of keeping...

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was South Africa's first black chief executive, and the first elected in...

Umm Kulthum,Various spellings include Om Koultoum, Om Kalthoum, Oumme Kalsoum, and Umm Kolthoum. She was an Egyptian singer, songwriter, and actress. Born in Tamay ez-Zahayra village that belongs to El Senbellawein, she is known as the Plan...