Africa 24 Media Photography

Located a mere twenty miles off the coast of East Africa, the tropical Island of Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous part of mainland Republic of Tanzania. It comprises of an archipelago of many small islands, besides the two main ones, Pemba and Unguja, and was once a separate state with a long trading history within the Arab world. Known mostly for its sweet-smelling cloves and its historic center, Stone Town (a World Heritage Site), Zanzibar united with Tanganyika to from Tanzania in 1964 and still enjoys a high degree of autonomy within the union. As a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, the “Spice Islands” has its own government known as the revolutionary government of Zanzibar.

History largely remembers Jean Bedel Bokassa, cum Emperor Bokassa I not only for his flamboyance and career as a soldier but also for his excesses as an autocratic ruler of the Central African Republic form 1966-1979. Born in Bobangui in 1921, Bokassa was an orphan by the age of six, his mother having committed suicide a week after his father was murdered, leaving him to be brought up by missionaries.

The 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, one of Africa’s biggest disasters in history, was characterized by the cruelest act of nature, war and catapulted by the sheer negligence and avaricious nature of the human race. At first, cattle suffered as they grew thinner, thirstier and hungrier before they eventually died as worthless bags of skeletons. Then the crops; no longer able to withstand the searing heat, withered.

Naïve and likable, shrewd and ruthless, hulking and egotistic, intimidating and outrageous. These are just but the fewest of words which can be used to describe General Idi Amin Dada Oumee, commonly known as Idi Amin. His was the fairy tale of a dog seared by a lion as he vehemently took power in a coup from the man who he had served under, General Milton Obote, the then President of Uganda.

He struggled for more than half a century to illuminate his beloved country and free its people from the British colonial rule, a course for which he was vilified and also pushed him behind bars. Born at Ngenda in the Gatundu Division of Kiambu in Central Kenya, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta alias Taa ya Kenya, Swahili for the 'Light of Kenya' was the man who brought the light of independence to the East African nation.

The struggles Somalia faced in 1991 and 1992, were caused not only by natural phenomena but also by government and tribal conflicts. While the government and tribal chief’s fought over the ownership of Somalia, the citizens of Somalia were left to struggle for their own survival.