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Algerian emir and anticolonialist leader, was born on 6 September 1808 near Mascara in the west of Algeria. His full name was ʿAbd al-Qadir bin Muhieddine; he is known in the Arab east as ʿAbdel-Kader al-Jazaʾiri and in Algeria as al-Amir ʿAbd El-Kader.

His father, Muhieddine al-Hassani, was a Sufi shaykh who followed the Qadiriyya religious order and claimed to be a Hasani (sharif ) descendent of the Prophet with family ties with the Idrisi dynasty of Morocco. As a young boy, ʿAbdel-Kader trained in horsemanship, and from this he developed his love for horses, about which he wrote some beautiful poetry. He was also trained in religious sciences; he memorized the Qurʾan and read in theology and philology. He was also known as a poet who recited classical poetry and wrote his own poetry, mostly centering on war and chivalry.

In 1825 ʿAbdel Kader set out with ...

Self-titled “His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular,” Idi Amin also made a name for himself as one of modern Africa's most tyrannical and brutal rulers. A member of the Kakwa ethnic group, Idi Amin was born to Muslim parents near Koboko in northern Uganda when that part of Africa was under British control. After receiving a missionary school education, Amin joined the King's African Rifles (KAR), the African unit of the British Armed Forces, in 1946. He served in Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya while British authorities there suppressed an African uprising called the Mau Mau rebellion earning a reputation as a skilled and eager soldier But early in his career ...

military officer and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, was probably born in Koboko district near the Sudanese border in northwestern Uganda. Few facts about his parents, his birth date, or his upbringing can be confirmed. His mother, who was Lugbara and originally Christian, separated from his father—who was Kakwa, Muslim, and possibly a convert from Christianity—shortly after his birth and raised Amin in southern Uganda.

As a Muslim belonging to both the Kakwa and the Nubian ethnic communities, Amin received little formal education and had halting command of several languages, including Swahili and English. He practiced polygamy and married at least six women: Malyamu Kibedi and Kay Adroa (both Christians prior to marriage) in late 1966 and Nora (her full name cannot be confirmed), a Langi, in 1967. He divorced all three, according to a Radio Uganda announcement on 26 March 1974 He married Nalongo ...

Algerian anticolonial leader and politician, was born on 25 December 1916 in the town of Maghnia in western Algeria. His family was relatively affluent, and he was the youngest child of five boys and several girls.

Although Ben Bella’s father was a practicing Muslim, Ben Bella himself never managed to master Arabic. He attended primary schools in Maghnia and graduated in 1930. Ben Bella was a phenomenal football (soccer) player at school, and he seriously considered becoming a professional athlete. However, he ended up joining the French army and served in numerous campaigns during World War II. His bravery and skill made him a legend in his own unit, and he eventually reached the rank of Sergeant Major. At the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, he carried his wounded company commander 1500 yards to safety and then took charge of the company Charles De Gaulle his future ...

military officer, president, and emperor of the Central African Republic/Empire, was born on 22 February 1921 at Bobangui, Lobaye region, then in the French Equatorial African territory of the Middle Congo (now part of the Central African Republic) He was the son of headman Mindogon Mgboundoulou, who was murdered at the regional colonial headquarters in the Lobaye, and Marie Yokowo, who died a week after her husband. Bokassa belonged to the same Mbaka (Ngbaka) ethnic group as Central African Republic (CAR) leaders Barthélemy Boganda and David Dacko. His grandfather MʿBalanga took care of Bokassa until 1921, when he entered the Catholic missionary école Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc at MʿBaiki. Bokassa then attended Bangui’s École de St. Louis (1928–1929), which was run by Father Charles Grüner, and an école missionnaire at Brazzaville (1929–1939). Enlisting in the French army on 19 May 1939, Bokassa became a corporal (1940 ...

Algerian politician and anticolonial military leader, was born Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba in the Algerian town of Aïn Hesseinia, near Guelma, on 23 August 1932. Although Boumedienne was fluent in French through his primary school studies at a public school, he also chose to attend Islamic schools where the language of instruction was Arabic. Unlike some other future Algerian leaders who lacked a firm command of classical Arabic, Boumedienne thus could express himself in both French and Arabic as a result of his education.

The brutal crackdown of Algerian nationalists by European settlers and the French military on 8 May 1945 dramatically shaped Boumedienne s life Rather than accept eventually being forced to join the French military as a conscript he moved to Tunisia where he attended classes at the Zitouna University known for its advanced courses in Islamic law and theology After some time Boumedienne attended the ...

queen of Egypt, was the last ruler in the Ptolemaic dynasty, which held power in Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. The Egyptian ruler referred to as Cleopatra was Cleopatra VII, daughter of Ptolemy XII, one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian generals.

The identity of Cleopatra s mother is not known for certain She may have been the daughter of Ptolemy XII and his first wife Cleopatra V Cleopatra V disappears from the historical record sometime before 68 BCE however and it is unclear whether this disappearance occurred before or after Cleopatra s birth in 69 BCE It is possible that Cleopatra s mother may have been a concubine of Ptolemy XII who himself was the son of Ptolemy IX and a concubine The third option is that Cleopatra was the daughter of Ptolemy XII s second ...

military leader and twenty-first president of Liberia, was born 6 May 1950 to Krahn-Liberian parents in Tuzon, Grand Gedeh County. He was the first Liberian of ethnic heritage, as opposed to descendants of New World immigrants, to become president though his route to power was through a bloody military coup d’état staged in the early morning of 12 April 1980 resulting in the overthrow of the government of President William R. Tolbert Jr. (1971–1980). The coup ended more than a century of immigrant rule and opened Liberia to the prospect of inclusive governance.

Doe began his formal education in his hometown, moving on to Zwedru, the county’s capital where he enrolled in a Baptist junior high school, which he completed in 1967 Perhaps following in the footsteps of his father Private Matthew K Doe he enlisted into the Armed Forces of Liberia AFL two years later Assigned to duties ...

Egyptian Nobel Laureate, diplomat, international civil servant, and scholar who served as the director general (DG) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) between 1997 and 2009, was born in Cairo. His father was Mostafa ElBaradei, a lawyer and president of the Egyptian Bar Association, who campaigned for a free press and an independent legal system. ElBaradei studied law at the University of Cairo (1962), and completed his PhD in international law at the New York University School of Law (1974).

ElBaradei joined the Egyptian Diplomatic Service in 1964; his postings included the Egyptian Permanent Missions to the United Nations (UN) in New York and Geneva. Between 1974 and 1978 he served as a special assistant to the Egyptian foreign minister Working under another Egyptian diplomat who would later leave his mark on the UN Boutros Boutros Ghali he attended the Camp David ...

king of Egypt and the Sudan (r. April 1936–July 1952), was born in Cairo on 11 February 1920, the only son of King Fuʾad I and his second wife, Nazli Sabri, notably an Egyptian commoner. After a reputedly solitary and unhappy childhood inside the palace, Faruq briefly attended the Woolwich Royal Military Academy in England, at his father’s insistence. His education there was cut short when Fuʾad died abruptly in 1936 and Faruq rushed back to Egypt to accede to the throne (though he would rule for more than a year under the stewardship of a regency council). Faruq was the tenth and final member of the Ottoman-Albanian Mehmed Ali dynasty to rule in Egypt.

For the first several years of his reign Faruq a charismatic and good looking young king who unlike his father could address his subjects directly in Arabic garnered widespread support and affection among Egyptians ...

Sudanese military officer and politician, was born into the Aulian Dinka clan at Wangkulei, Jonglei State, southern Sudan (South Sudan as of 9 July 2011). His father, Mabior Atem, and mother, Gag Malual from Kongor, had seven children together, of whom Garang was the sixth. Garang’s parents died when he was ten years old. His uncle, who worked for the dairy unit of the government of Sudan, took him to Tonj, Lakes State, South Sudan, and enrolled him in school there. Garang attended Tonj Elementary School, Lakes State (1952–1955); Busere Intermediate School at Wau, Western Bahr Ghazal State (1956–1959); and Rumbek Secondary School, Lakes State (1960–1962). His education was disrupted by the First Sudanese Civil War, and he left the Sudan before finishing secondary school.

Garang went into exile to Tanzania, where he enrolled at Magambia Secondary School, sat for the Cambridge school certificate exams in 1962 and earned ...

emperor of Ethiopia, was born Tafari Makonnen; his father was Ras Makonnen, first cousin of Emperor Menilek II and governor of Harar in southeast Ethiopia. Educated by Jesuit missionaries and at secondary school in Addis Ababa, he was appointed governor of Harar at the age of 17. In September 1916 Menilek’s grandson and successor Yasu was ousted in a palace coup, and his daughter Zawditu installed as empress, with Tafari (whose role in the coup has remained obscure) as regent and heir to the throne with the title of ras, thus gaining the name by which he was to be known to the Rastarafians.

Over the next fourteen years, Tafari gradually built up his power through a capacity for skillful political maneuver that he never lost, steadily reducing the power of formerly quasi-independent regional governors. He was instrumental in securing Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations in 1923 ...

Carthaginian military leader and politician, was born in Carthage, in what in now Tunisia, the son of Hamilcar Barca, an important Carthaginian general. Although we know a great deal about his military career, few details of his personal life survive. Several stories about Hannibal’s youth are related in ancient sources, but these must be taken with a grain of salt. One, related by the historian Livy, has a young Hannibal asking his father to take him on campaign to Spain. Hamilcar agrees but insists that his son swear eternal hostility for Rome. In any case, it is true that Hamilcar took his nine- or ten-year-old son to Spain. After Hamilcar’s death in 229 or 228, the eighteen-year-old Hannibal served as an officer in the army commanded by his brother-in-law Hasdrubal.

Around 226 Hannibal married Imilce the daughter of the king of Castulo a town in south central Spain According to ...

was a member of the Free Officers, a group that succeeded in engineering a coup against the monarchist regime of Egypt in July 1952. Kamal al-Din Husayn was born in Kaylubiyya, Egypt, in 1921, and graduated from the Egyptian Military Academy in 1939. At the outbreak of World War II he enlisted in the Egyptian army and served in an artillery unit in the Western Desert. He took part in the War of 1948 in Palestine and upon his return to Egypt was appointed a teacher at the school of artillery and at the military staff college. In January 1949 he joined the Free Officers who were operating clandestinely within the Egyptian army together with ʿAbd al Latif al Baghdadi However he also maintained a strong relationship with the Muslim Brothers long serving as their liaison with the Free Officers His association with the Muslim Brothers ...

Sierra Leone’s third elected President and the first Muslim to become leader of the West African state, was born in Pendembu, Kailahun District, in eastern Sierra Leone, on 16 February 1932. His father, Abu Bakr Sidique Kabbah, was an ethnic Mandingo businessman who had migrated to the predominantly Mende and Kissi town from Kambia District, in northern Sierra Leone. His mother was from a prominent Mende ruling family, the Coomber family of the Mandu chiefdom, Kailahun District. The family later relocated to Freetown, allowing Kabbah, a member of a devout Muslim family, to attend the Catholic St. Edward’s Secondary School in Freetown. Cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance came naturally: Kabbah later married Patricia Tucker, a Catholic who was of the Sherbro/Mende ethnic group.

On completion of secondary school, Kabbah’s father sent him to the University of Wales, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1959 He joined ...

political leader and president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC; former Zaire), was born in the town of Likasi, located in the northern section of the southern Katanga region of the then Belgian Congo, on 27 November 1939. His father, Désiré Kabila Taratibu Obashikilwe, born in 1900, was a post office clerk from the town of Ankoro in northern Katanga and a member of a Luba-speaking clan. His mother, Jeannine Mafik Mwad Kanambui a Mubol, belonged to a Lunda community from southern Katanga. Taritibu was a remarkable figure in his own right, as he demanded his children speak French at his house and strongly supported his children’s education along Western lines. The family’s trading enterprises allowed the young Kabila to grow up in prosperous surroundings. Kabila’s father became a state-appointed chief in 1952 As Kabila attended primary and secondary school he followed his father s passion ...

In 1997 Laurent-Désiré Kabila received international attention when he led a seven-month rebellion in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that toppled longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Kabila’s rapid rise to power followed nearly three decades of opposition to the regime of Mobutu. Laurent Kabila was born into the Luba ethnic group in the mineral-rich province of Katanga in 1939. Little is known about his childhood. He attended university in France, where he studied political philosophy and became a Marxist, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he befriended Yoweri Museveni, the future president of Uganda. He returned to the Belgian Congo shortly before it achieved independence (as the Congo) in 1960. Upon his return, Kabila became a member of the North Katanga Assembly and a staunch supporter of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. After Lumumba’s murder in 1961 ...

Rwandan military leader and president, was born on 23 October 1957, in rural Tambwe, in the prefecture of Gitarama, Rwanda. His parents belonged to Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. His father, Deogratias Rutagambwa, was a farmer, while his mother, Asteria, was a cousin of Rwanda’s Queen Rosalie Gicanda, the wife of King Mutara III Rudahigwa. This connection to royalty afforded the family some protection from periodic violent political campaigns waged by Rwanda’s Hutu majority against the minority Tutsi elite. In November 1959, four months after the death of King Mutara, and at the beginning of the Hutu-led Rwandan revolution, Kagame’s father took the family into exile. Kagame, his four sisters, and his brother were among more than 100,000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsi, forced to flee.

Kagame grew up in destitution in a refugee camp in the Ankole district of Uganda the family later moved north to Toro He attended ...

Gabonese military leader and politician, was born in the northern Gabonese town of Bitam on 20 May 1939. Like many other men from the Sara ethnic community in southern Chad, Kamougue’s father was a soldier in the French colonial military that served in various colonies such as Gabon that belonged to the federation of French Equatorial Africa. Thus, Kamougue has always considered himself a resident of Chad rather than Gabon. He attended Qurʾanic schools in his father’s home province of Logone Oriental and then attended secondary school at the École Générale Leclerc in Brazzaville. Once he finished his military training, he was assigned to serve in the Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast, and Congo-Brazzaville. He then was selected to receive additional training at the legendary Saint Cyr officers’ school in France, where he graduated as a second lieutenant in 1964 As a southerner he supported the Parti ...

southern Sudanese political and military leader, was born at Akon village, Gogrial West County, Southern Sudan. Salva Kiir played a key role in both Sudan’s civil wars after independence. Kiir, a devout Catholic, was born into the Bahr el Ghazal group of the Dinka ethnic group, one of the biggest sections of the Dinka. His home area was home to a very large proportion of the men who joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M).

Kiir married Ayen Basili Mayardit and had seven children with her: Adut, Mayar, Sarah, Wol, Winni, Emmanuel, and Mia. Kiir was also married to a second wife who died in 1992; he had three children with her: Manute, Thiik, and Anok.

Kiir began his education at Akon Primary School during the mid-1950s and finished his schooling at Kuajok Secondary School. After completing secondary school in 1967 at the age of 17 Kiir left for ...