So I thought to myself, ain't no decent place where regular folks can just explore famous Africans all in one spot. Saw some history pages but man, they either showed boring textbooks or tiny blurry headshots that looked like potatoes. Figured I'd make something proper myself.
Scrambling for Good Pictures
First thing was digging up real photos that ain't pixelated trash. Went straight to museum archives online late Tuesday night. Took me three hours just to find Nelson Mandela's prison ID photo that didn't look like sandpaper. Had to flip through like fifty pages for Wangari Maathai's tree-planting shots - why's everyone only posting the same Nobel prize stage picture?
Then I hit a wall with Thomas Sankara. Dude's pictures either had crazy watermarks or were so small you couldn't see his uniform details. Almost threw my coffee cup at 2am when I finally found clear military parade shots in some African university database.
Life Events Mess
Timelines were straight up chaotic. For Chinua Achebe's life, one site said he wrote Things Fall Apart at 26, another claimed 28. Dug up his actual interview from 1970 where he settled it himself. Haile Selassie's exile dates? Big fat disagreement between sources. Cross-checked three history books against BBC radio transcripts before I believed anything.
The worst part was translating stuff. Wanted to add Miriam Makeba's early life in Johannesburg and Google Translate butchered Zulu phrases so bad it sounded like she opened a noodle shop instead of a music club. Had to call my cousin's friend from Soweto to fix that dumpster fire.
Putting It All Together
Made this simple page where you click faces to see timelines. Coded it dead simple so even my grandma can use it:
- Top section: Big clear photos that actually load without freezing
- Middle bit: Color-coded life events with proper sources
- Bottom: Quick facts like "Kwame Nkrumah studied in Pennsylvania" that people never mention
Tested it on my neighbour's ancient tablet and almost cried when it worked perfectly. Took eight revisions to stop the pictures from overlapping on mobile though. That CSS fought me like a rabid hyena.
Now at least when kids search for Patrice Lumumba, they'll see crisp photos of him in that sharp hat, not just Wikipedia text blocks. Still bugs me I couldn't find that one photo of Ahmed Sékou Touré laughing though - maybe next week I'll dig through Parisian library collections again.
