& Her Flying Machines too
I don’t want to neglect this blog in 2011. Thus, I’ll be crossposting more stuff here to save anyone the trouble of going to subscribe to my DW. Happy New Year! I encountered Kimpa Vita last year in a few paragraphs while reading When We Ruled and those few paragraphs were enough for me to…
Long time no WordPress! Regardless I have been popping up elsewhere on the interwebs, mostly on Blogspot and Dreamwidth. About a month ago, I was invited to be a guest contributor at the amazing Beyond Victoriana, a blog dedicated to bringing “a multicultural perspective on steampunk” by the awesome Ay-leen the Peacemaker (she runs the…
Zheng He’s 7th expedition was his last and after years of moving back and forth between the East African coast and China, all contact seized. Some people may look at this and say that the Chinese turned their backs on Africa but if you look at the situation within China in that time, it sheds…
In 1414 a Chinese fleet heralded by the Muslim Grand Eunuch of the Three Treasures, Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) sailed into the western Indian Ocean for the fourth time since his journey to the East began in 1405. In previously, that is between 1405 and 1414, Zheng He and his ships had…
This whole post is nothing but a shameless plug (or a series of shameless plugs)! I was recently invited by the authors of That African Girl to participate in their African Childhood series celebrating growing up in an African home and the quirks that come with it. I wrote a post on the childhood monsters…
In my previous post I mentioned that I had read somewhere that two slaves given as gifts to the a Chinese Emperor by an Arab delegation were the first Africans to enter ancient China. This may have been wrong really because dark-skinned people were talked in China as early as the 4th century. They were…
Last year while I was researching for my dissertation, I came across a footnote that mentioned that the first Africans who reached ancient China (the particular period was not specified) were two slaves given as gifts to the Emperor by an envoy of Arab traders. I found myself wondering what happened to them, were the…
Osun is the Yoruba goddess of love, lust, fertility, fresh waters, women’s health, witches and wealth. Osun has been compared to and is sometimes thought of as the Yoruba representation or reincarnations of goddesses from other cultures such as Nekhbet, Sekhmet, the Chinese goddess Kuan Yin and Hindu goddess Laskhmi. Each year a large festival…
Below are some images Sugabelly put up on FB a while ago that I’m reposting here with her graceful permission. While writing about Nigerian historical dramas, I thought the point I was trying to make there would go down better if everyone saw actual images of African women from the precolonial days. Not everyone (Africans…
It is no secret that I am a huge fan of movies and series set in the fictional past. I’d rather watch historical dramas than those set in the modern times. I love all sorts of dramas set in different periods and I tend not to discriminate as I enjoy European historical movies alongside wuxia…