Litaba

He was African. He was Black. And he was one of the most powerful slave traders in all of recorded history.

His name was Hamad bin Muhammad al-Murjebi. But history knows him as Tippu Tip. Born around 1832 in Zanzibar off the coast of present day Tanzania. His family was of mixed African and Arab descent. His father was a trader. His grandfather was a trader. Commerce was in his blood from childhood.
He started with ivory. Then he went deeper.

At a young age he led a group of about 100 men into the interior of Central Africa seeking slaves and ivory. He came back wealthier. He went again with more men. Each expedition pushed deeper into the Congo basin. By the late 1860s he was leading expeditions of 4,000 men. He burned villages. He captured people. He forced them to march to the coast carrying ivory on their backs. Many died from exhaustion, disease and brutal treatment along the way. Those who survived were sold.

His guns made a distinctive tiptip sound during his raids in the Congo territory. That is where his name came from.

He built a trading empire that stretched from the Luba River in the south to the great westward bend of the Upper Congo River. He established his own kingdom in the eastern Congo basin where local communities paid him taxes in exchange for protection from rival groups. By 1895 he owned seven clove plantations in Zanzibar and 10,000 slaves working them.

He was so powerful that King Leopold II of Belgium appointed him governor of Stanley Falls district in the Congo in February 1887 to manage the territory on Belgium's behalf. He also guided and assisted European explorers including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley into the African interior. He helped the very people who were coming to colonise his continent while simultaneously enslaving his own people for profit.

In October 1893 Belgian forces defeated his army on the River Luama west of Lake Tanganyika. He lost all his holdings in the Congo including his oldest son Sef who di

English is the most widely used language in the world. It is spoken by over 1.4 billion people across the globe.

The English language spread around the world mainly because of the British Empire, and later grew even more because of the global influence of the United States.

Just as the name suggests, English originated in England. In fact, the people from England are called English, and the language they speak is also called English. However, the original inhabitants of the country we now call England did not speak English at all.

They spoke a Celtic language known as Brittonic. The original form of this language is now extinct, but it later developed into languages like Welsh, which is still spoken in Wales today.

🫡 Ok, so if the original inhabitants of what we now call England did not speak English, so where did the English language come from ?

Well, English originated from settlers who arrived in Britain, coming from Northern Germany and parts of Denmark, around 450 AD, roughly 1600 years ago.

The most notable of these settlers were,
▪️The Angles
▪️The Saxons
▪️The Jutes.
That’s where you get the term Anglo-Saxon. The Jutes are less talked about because they were the smallest of the three.

These groups spoke similar types of the same language, which came from an older language called Proto-Germanic.

When they first arrived in Britain, each group had its own slightly different dialect. Over time, as they settled and lived together, these dialects mixed and blended into one common language which had regional variations. By around 700–800 AD, that language had developed into what we now call Old English. It looked and sounded completely different from the English we speak today.

Old English gradually evolved into Modern English over a long time, mainly because of invasions, internal evolution and cultural mixing.

A major change happened in 1066 when England was conquered by French speaking people. From that point, many French words entered the Englis

First and second President of Rwanda-Pictured

Grégoire Kayibanda (in black suit) was the first elected President of Rwanda from 1962 .He pioneered and led Rwanda's struggle for independence from Belgium

On July 5, 1973, Grégoire Kayibanda was overthrown in a military coup led by his friend and then-Defense Minister, Juvénal Habyarimana.

Following the coup, Kayibanda and his wife were held in a secret location. It is widely reported that they were starved to death while in detention.

(Picrured Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana)