About

One story, every day

Africa is usually introduced to the world as a problem to be explained. This book introduces it as a story to be told — by the day, in the order the days come.

Every date on the calendar holds an African story. On one March morning in 1896, an Ethiopian army destroyed an Italian invasion force at Adwa and kept its freedom while a continent was being carved up around it. On a November morning in 1922, workmen in the Valley of the Kings brushed sand from a buried stone step and began the most famous archaeological discovery of the century. There are coronations and coups in these pages, queens and mathematicians, football matches that emptied streets and court judgments that changed what a country believed about itself. Taken one at a time, they are stories. Taken together, day after day for a year, they become something else: proof, in small daily doses, that this continent has always been making history — not waiting at the edge of somebody else's.

That is the idea behind This Day in Africa. The series began as a simple discipline: one true story from the continent's history, told in about a minute, every single day. No theme weeks. No agenda beyond the date itself. If it happened on this day, and it mattered, it earned its minute. This book is that discipline, gathered and expanded — 366 entries, one for every day of the year, February 29 included — each opened a little wider than a film allows, with room for the context a minute cannot hold.

The method

Every entry in this book began as an episode of the daily This Day in Africa series, and every episode began with a check against the historical record — encyclopedias, institutional histories and reputable reporting — before a word of it was filmed. Dates, names and places were verified at production, and before this book went to press a further sample of entries, drawn from every month of the year, was independently re-checked against published references.

Where historians disagree, or where the record is thin, the entry keeps the uncertainty inside the sentence rather than hiding it. A small number of entries mark observance days — days the world has set aside to remember — alongside the dated events; that, too, is part of how a continent's story is kept.

A handful of days in the year had no filmed episode: a short gap in the production calendar in March, and February 29, which the calendar only offers once every four years. Those entries were researched and written for this book, to the same standard as all the rest.

Any errors that remain are the publisher's own.

The author

Samuel D’Akropong is a Ghanaian writer and producer, and the creator of This Day in Africa — one true story from the continent's history, told for every day of the year. What began as a daily discipline of short films grew into this almanac and its companion website, part of a growing body of work devoted to African history, told plainly and told well.

Watch the films and read a new story every morning at thisdayinafrica.com.

This Day in Africa is published by Akanexus Studios.

The publisher

This Day in Africa — this site and the book — is published by Akanexus Studios. Every day's story also lives as a short film of about sixty seconds on YouTube.