It is quite well known that the Orange Order is found outside the British Isles in areas with diaspora and colonial/ Commonwealth connections, such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Its presence on the African continent is less commonly appreciated. Orangeism had a long history in South Africa, developing in the early nineteenth century and … Read more
African history should be part of the core curriculum of the history syllabus in all our schools, all our third-level institutions. It should be an integral part of history as it is taught in Ireland, available to every student who wants to pursue it. That may seem an extravagant assertion, but in the era of … Read more
Among the different instruments of power wielded by empire-builders, maps might be considered as special forms of evidence in state formation: symbolic representations of expanding colonial influence. The mapping of Africa is synonymous with its conquest and domination. From the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first navigated the West African coast, cartographers imposed order upon … Read more
A conference to mark the start of the 6,000th anniversary year since the biblical creation will be held on 25, 26 and 27 October 1996 at Queen’s University’s new campus in Armagh. The 6,000th anniversary year of the creation will commence on 22 October 1996, according to Ussher, a seventeenth century Archbishop of Armagh. Working … Read more
I myself am not Irish, even though my name can be rendered Terence O. Ranger. (An American MA student, asked to assess my work on African history, argued that with a name like that I was inevitably sympathetic to African nationalism. Alas, my forebears are Kentish Jutes.) When I went to Africa in 1957 to … Read more