Cultured Journeys

In the 1910 “Fight of the Century”, Jack Johnson defeated the man white America called its “Great White Hope”. After he lost the title in 1915, no African American fighter was allowed to challenge for the heavyweight crown for 22 years. In 2018, more than a century after a racially motivated conviction, he was pardoned.

For close to two centuries, Ragusa — today’s Dubrovnik — was one of the busiest slave ports on the Adriatic. Many of those sold belonged to the Bosnian Church, a faith neither Rome nor Constantinople recognised, and that refusal made them legal to enslave. On 27 January 1416, the Great Council banned the trade, calling it against all humanity. Britain would not outlaw its own slave trade until 1807.

Source: the Liber Viridis, State Archives in the Sponza Palace, Dubrovnik.

The 1978 draft constitution quietly removed the line naming Georgian as the state language. On 14 April, crowds on Rustaveli Avenue shouted deda ena — “mother language”, the title of the schoolbook most of them learned from. Eduard Shevardnadze came back from Moscow and read the restored article aloud. Since 1990, 14 April has been the Day of the Georgian Language.

Amanirenas held two titles, kandake and qore, which meant she ruled in her own right. She stood in a line of women who governed Kush with full authority. In 1910, at Meroë, archaeologists found a bronze head of the Emperor Augustus buried beneath a temple step, so that everyone who entered walked over the emperor’s face.

See it: British Museum, registration 1911,0901.1.

Thailand is the only nation in Southeast Asia never colonised by a European power. King Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn kept Siam independent by making it more useful to Britain and France as a buffer than as a conquest. In the 1930s, the government promoted Pad Thai as the national dish: Chinese noodles, South Asian tamarind, American chilli, and Thai palm sugar, fish sauce and lime.

Bowie grew up on Black American music and never pretended otherwise. In 1975 he brought an unknown Luther Vandross onto Young Americans; in 1983 he made Let’s Dance with Nile Rodgers. That same year, on camera, he asked MTV why so few Black artists were being played.

In 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland between them and abolished the state. Poles kept their nation alive through secret “flying universities”, language taught at home, Mickiewicz’s poetry and Chopin’s music, and rose in arms in 1830 and 1863. In 1918, the three empires collapsed and Poland walked back onto the map.

In the 1960s, Hollywood still portrayed East Asian characters as punchlines. Through Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee set a new standard: disciplined, powerful, impossible to disrespect. Enter the Dragon became a global phenomenon in 1973, the year he died at thirty-two.

On 9 August 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia with no natural resources, no real military, no reliable water and an income of around US$500 a person. Lee Kuan Yew’s government invested in education, housing and a corruption-free civil service. By 2020, Singapore’s GDP per capita was higher than that of the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.

On 15 October 1940, Franco’s regime executed President Lluís Companys at Montjuïc Castle. For most of the next thirty-six years, Catalan was driven from schools, courts and newspapers, and the Abbey of Montserrat sheltered it. The language returned to official life by 1979, and the habit of defiance never left.

At Mehrgarh, on the Kachi Plain, people spun some of the world’s earliest cotton and practised prehistoric dentistry, planting the seeds of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Baloch arrived much later, becoming stewards of a land already ancient. Today Baloch society also holds Arab-descended communities and the African-descended Sheedi.

Cùjū was played in Han Dynasty China from the 2nd century BCE. Rome had Harpastum, and Renaissance Florence had Calcio Fiorentino, codified and refereed. On 26 October 1863, the Football Association formed in London, and its rules reached places already playing their own way.

Guru Nanak founded Sikhism in 1469 on the belief that one divine truth lies beneath every religion. The ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed for defending Hindus’ right to practise their faith, and is remembered as the Shield of India. At the Golden Temple, over 100,000 people eat for free every day, side by side.

The Beatles’ debut album carried six covers, almost all first recorded by Black artists. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song, and in 1965 refused to perform on Shindig! unless Howlin’ Wolf appeared with them. Cream turned Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” into one of rock’s most famous performances.

Italian filmmakers made around 600 Westerns, shot in the Almería desert of southern Spain. Sergio Leone made Clint Eastwood a star, and Ennio Morricone gave the genre its sound. A Fistful of Dollars was a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and the thread runs on into Star Wars and The Mandalorian.

Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE as dictator for life, never emperor. Every Roman emperor after him took his name as a title, and it travelled on: Kaiser in the German lands, Tsar in Russia. Influence outlives the man; culture outlives the empire.

In 1492, the Alhambra Decree gave Spain’s Jews four months to convert or leave. Sultan Bayezid II ordered his governors to welcome and protect them. Salonica became known as the Mother of Israel, the first printing press in the empire was set up in 1493, and the Ladino language lived on in Turkish lands for over 450 years.

Quote as reported by the chronicler Rabbi Eliyahu Capsali of Crete.

“Curry” comes from the Tamil kari milagu, black pepper. The British used one word for rasam, kuzhambu, poriyal, kootu and sambar. The Tamils also gave the world Sangam poetry from around 300 BCE and one of the oldest classical languages still spoken today.

On Valentine’s Day 1970, David Mancuso threw an invitation-only party in his loft, a private space where people barred from dancing freely in public could move together. Disco went global. It was declared dead in 1979, yet within eighteen months Chic’s “Good Times” became “Rapper’s Delight” and launched hip hop.

Dhaka’s weavers made muslin so fine that whole bolts were said to pass through a finger ring. After the East India Company took Bengal in 1765, it chose coercion over competition: forced contracts and tariffs of up to 80% on Indian goods. Dhaka’s population fell from 200,000 to around 50,000.

The dish takes its name from the Jolof Empire, which ruled from around 1350 until 1549. In 19th-century Saint-Louis, oral tradition credits Penda Mbaye with creating thieboudienne when barley ran short and she used rice. UNESCO recognised it in 2021, and it spread across West Africa as jollof, benachin and riz au gras.

Liberated Africans and their descendants held the Jamaican mountains against the British. Unable to defeat them, Britain signed the Treaty of Cudjoe in 1739, granting land sovereignty and political autonomy. Nearly 300 years later, the treaty stands, and the Maroons of Accompong have never paid taxes on their treaty lands.

The Amazigh are a civilisation older than Rome. The Greeks called them barbaroi, but they have always called themselves Amazigh: the noble, or free, people.