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The famous recruitment poster has him pointing straight at us in full uniform,
finger in the foreground, handlebar mustache not far behind, and the words "Your Country Needs You."
He is Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener and one of the media stars of the First World War.
By then, Kitchener was already legendary as Kitchener of Khartoum.
He'd captured the city in 1898 after the murderous battle of Omdurman,
which had left 11,000 Sudanese soldiers dead.
After the battle, he presented to Queen Victoria a wooden drum from Central Africa.
And that drum is the object for this program.
I think it does signify the fusion between Black Africa, sub-Saharan Africa proper, and the Arab world.
It looks like the kind of drum you would see in Central Africa, and yet it's etched with Arabic script.
When you look at the origins, the markings, and the eventual destination of this item,
you see the whole struggle for the Nile Valley in the 19th century
and, by extension, the nature of the European conquest of Africa in the late 19th century.
A History of the World in 100 Objects.
Central African slit drum. Probably made in the 19th century.
This week's programs are about the world in the 19th century and the great shifts in the balance of imperial power,
which had enormous consequences for every continent and particularly for Africa.
But this program is also about internal struggle, in this case between Egypt and Sudan,
and within Sudan itself between the north and the south.