About Provenance Africa
@OnlyAfricaFacts has been posting facts, history and culture about Africa and people of African descent on X (formerly Twitter) since 2012. Over more than a decade, the account has built an archive of thousands of posts covering independence movements, colonial history, notable births and deaths, sports, music, and everyday life across the continent and its diaspora, material that rarely surfaces in mainstream feeds.
This site is an unofficial companion to that work. It's built directly from the account's own post history, organized so that individual facts and events can be found and shared on their own, rather than scrolling past in a timeline and disappearing. It also includes an On This Day section: a separately researched, date-by-date archive of verified historical events in African and diaspora history, cross-referenced against sources including Wikimedia Commons, South African History Online, the U.S. State Department's historical document archive, the UK National Archives' Cabinet Papers, British Pathé and AP Archive newsreel footage, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
Every fact on this site links back to its original source, whether that's the original X post or, for On This Day entries, the year and event it documents. Where photos and videos are included, they're either the original account's own posted media, or public-domain/Creative-Commons-licensed material from Wikimedia Commons, or embedded YouTube videos, each individually verified before being added.
The full-length "At a Glance" articles on this site go through an additional research pass beyond the original post: each one is cross-checked against at least two independent sources (prioritizing academic and archival references where they exist) before publication, and disputed facts or figures are stated as disputed rather than resolved in favor of either side.
Where this started
In 2012, the @OnlyAfricaFacts account began posting notes on African and diaspora history to X, one post at a time. Over the following decade it grew into an archive of thousands of moments: coronations, uprisings, court rulings, speeches, disasters.
The posts were grounded in real research from the start, but X's character limit left little room to show it. Early posts often stated a fact without space to cite where it came from. As the platform's character limit expanded over time, later posts increasingly included sources, video, and screenshots from news sites and magazines directly in the post.
Provenance Africa is the project of taking that decade of research and giving it the space it never had: going back through the archive, tracing each claim to what the primary and academic record actually says, checking it against multiple independent sources, and publishing the full picture. Where a claim doesn't hold up under closer scrutiny, or no adequate source can be found, the article says so rather than filling the gap with something weaker.
The original posts are still part of the record. Browse the archive on X
Who owns this site. Provenance Africa (provenanceafrica.com) is owned and operated by Princewill Ubani, based in the United Kingdom, and runs the @OnlyAfricaFacts X account, drawing on its archive as the starting point for this site's research (see Where this started above). It is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any government, political party, campaign group, NGO, or media company.
How it's funded. The site is entirely self-funded. It carries no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate links, and no paid placements of any kind. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it changes, and any sponsored or paid content will be labelled as such on the page it appears on.
What we do with your data. The daily email is run through Buttondown. We don't sell or share subscriber lists. See the privacy policy.
Editorial independence. No source, publisher, institution, or individual has any right of review over what appears here before publication, and none has been offered.
If you spot an error, have a correction, or want to get in touch for any other reason, see the contact page.