KemetLeads
Zeinab Badawi
Thirty years interrogating presidents, then her own company spent on the history Africa had already written.
The rise
Born in Khartoum on 3 October 1959, daughter of a Sudanese newspaper editor and brought to north London at two, she read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and took a master's in Middle East history at SOAS. She reported for Yorkshire Television, co-presented Channel 4 News from 1988, then moved to the BBC.
What they did
On HARDtalk and Global Questions she questioned heads of state, Omar al-Bashir among them. Finding UNESCO's General History of Africa — written by African scholars, barely read — she filmed it in over thirty countries as a nine-part BBC World News series in 2017, made by her own company, Kush Communications. An African History of Africa followed in 2024; she has led SOAS since 2021.
The full picture
The series and the book are a popular survey, and academic historians say they smooth over contested readings of the past. She narrates the continent from London, a Sudanese-British journalist on British platforms, and the films came from her own production company with UNESCO and the BBC, not an African broadcaster.
Why it matters
She found the history African scholars had already written, sitting unread in a UN archive, and spent a career's standing and her own company on getting it onto screens and into print.
“The thought struck me that surely the General History of Africa is one of UNESCO's best-kept secrets!”