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Mary and Thomas Brittingham in Egypt, 1904.
Mary and Thomas Brittingham of Madison, Wisconsin were a jet-setting power couple before there were jets. Between 1897 and 1924, they visited at least 22 states and 32 countries including Egypt, Algeria, Portugal, Japan, Panama, Venezuela and Jamaica. Like any tourists, they photographed their travels extensively.
via: Brittingham Family Lantern Slide Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
read more: Chris Hartman, The Brittingham Family, UW-Madison Archives
(via wiscohisto)
Malik Ambar: Legacy of an Ethiopian Ruler in India
Among the tens of thousands of men, women, and children captured in Africa and sold into slavery in the Middle East and India was an Ethiopian of fierce determination: Malik Ambar. Born Chapu in 1548 in Harar, where the Ethiopian highlands meet the dessert stretching to the Red Sea, Ambar (as he was later called) was stripped of his family, his name, and forever taken from his homeland. Nevertheless, half a century later, and halfway around the world, he had transformed himself into a king-maker in India’s Deccan, leading the most powerful military force against Mughal rule.
The Ethiopian’s contributions to the making of the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean world are only just beginning to be more widely known, even as pioneering scholars from Jogindra Chowdhuri and Radhey Shyem to Richard Pankhurst and Richard Eaton have been helping to illuminate aspects of the Ethiopian Diaspora for decades. Malik Ambar — along with Bilalibn Rabah (Islam’s first muezzin) and Bava Ghor (a merchant and Sufi mystic) — serves as an exemplar of contributions by Ethiopians to the societies, economies, and cultures of the Arabian Peninsula, southern Iraq and Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond.
first photograph is just labeled “Africa,” second is titled “Tanganyika. Arusha. A yound(young?) Masai interested in the camera.” ca.1936.
Haile Selassie’s sons, with bonus cutie (a relative, but the precise relation was unknown to the photographer). 1923.
(Source: loc.gov)
Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s regent from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. ca. 1924.
Louis Armstrong in Egypt during a state-sponsered Goodwill tour of Africa and the Middle East, 1961
(via poundoflogic)
