Britain and the Ashanti Empire fought five separate wars over nearly 80 years. Officially, these were framed around territorial disputes, treaty viola…

After Britain outlawed its own participation in the slave trade, it needed a newword for what came next. Something that sounded moral. Modern. Clean. …

Britain built Freetown to fight the slave trade. It ended up becoming one of the most important commercial and military portson the entire West Africa…

Kano had been one of the great trading cities of the trans-Saharan network forcenturies. Its woven textiles and leather goods traveled by camel carava…

For over a thousand years, camel caravans — sometimes stretching for miles,made up of thousands of camels — carried gold, salt, and goods across theSa…

This wasn’t eight separate colonies that happened to share a flag. It was one deliberately engineered federation, run out of a single office in …

Here’s a twist most people don’t expect: the currency Europeans used to buyenslaved people from West Africa wasn’t African at all. I…

In 1896, Britain declared a “protectorate” over the interior of Sierra Leone. Less than two years later, it told the people who already li…

For decades, the money in people’s pockets across British West Africa didn’t comefrom a central bank answerable to the people who used it….

West Africa didn’t need Europe to invent money for it. Long before a colonial coin ever touched West African soil, the region alreadyhad functio…