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This book opens with an account of the great explorers of the fifteenth century and looks at the imperial tradition which led Europeans to seek goldmines on both shores of Africa, to plant sugar and cotton on Africa's islands, and to carry away Africa's field-hands as slaves for the new colonies of the Americas. Although Portugal lost much of West Africa and South Africa to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, it retained important trading harbours in Central Africa. In the twentieth century these old colonial ports held off the challenge of British imperial advances and became the focus of immigrant colonies which eventually attracted nearly half a million white settlers. Relations between these settlers and their black hosts were complex and a mixture of exploitation and cooperation led to the emergence of 'coloured' communities similar to those of Cape Town. In the 1960s the 'African Revolution' reached the frontiers of both Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique and long wars of liberation broke out which eventually drove Portugal to abandon its political hold on Africa. A fascinating cultural and commercial legacy persisted, however, despite the virulence of anti-colonial nationalism. In 'Lusophone' Africa, where people spoke Portuguese, urban lifestyles remained quite different from those of 'Anglophone' Africa, linked to London, or 'Francophone' Africa, which preserved French colonial traditions.