Gamal Abdel Nasser became involved at a very young age in the fight against British influence in Egypt. As a lieutenant-colonel, he founded in 1945 the Mouvement of Free Officers, in 1952 led a military coup d’état against King Farouk and proclaimed the Republic in 1953. Among the main actors of the conference of Bandoeng […]

Frantz Fanon was a physician and writer, a Martinican anti-colonialist fighter. In 1957, as a psychiatrist posted in Blida (Algeria), he is suspected of collaboration with the rebels and expelled. Exiled in Tunis, capital of the FLN in exile, he becomes one of the main spokespersons and editors of El Moujahid, the body of FLN […]

Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the First President of Côte d’Ivoire from 1960 to 1993. Nicknamed « the wise man », he is the « father » of the independence of the Côte d’Ivoire. Successively traditional chief, doctor, planter, trade union leader, Member of Parliament in France, Minister of French Governments, President of the Ivorian National Assembly, Mayor of Abidjan, First […]

Claudia Jones, born Vera Cumberbatch, is a journalist, feminist and Trinidadian communist. This civil rights activist is a descendant of Carribean slaves who first joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before joining the Young Communist League in 1936, the youth branch of the American Communist Party. Expelled from the United […]

Cheikh Anta Diop is a Senegalese anthropologist, Egyptologist and politician who owes his international renown partly to the theses he developed and argued throughout his life about the anteriority of black civilizations, the Negro origins of ancient Egypt and the rich history of pre-colonial Black Africa, particularly through its languages and cultural unity. In 1966, […]

Activist and revolutionary politician, Carmen Pereira is an active member of the PAIGC for the independence of Guinea-Bissau. Elected at the National People’s Congress of which she was vice-president from 1973 to 1984, she will become president in 1984. Carmen Pereira also became President of the Council of State (Acting President of the country) until […]

Betty McLeod Bethune is an American educator and activist for the defence of citizens’ rights. Born into a family of former slaves, she has, from her childhood, a taste for knowledge that pushed her to enrol in the local school, where she learns to read and write. This opens the doors to higher education, she […]

Battling Siki, whose real name is Louis Mbarick Amadou Fall, is one of the most famous boxers in the early 20th century. Born in Saint-Louis of Senegal in 1897, he arrives in France as a teenager and soon starts boxing and becoming excellent boxer. Enrolled as soldier in the French army, Battling Siki distinguishes himself […]

Born in a mixed union between a white American woman and a black Kenyan man, Barack Obama has distinguished himself with a brilliant academic career, from which he has become a lawyer. In 1996, he became Senator of Illinois at the age of 36, then Senator of the United States at age 43. In 2008, […]

She is the first woman to serve as Head of official statistics of an African country. After her graduate studies in mathematics and statistics, which were attested in 1975 by a diploma as statistician-economist delivered by ENSAE-Paris, her entire career is devoted to official statistics in Africa. In her country first and then to the […]