How we source and verify facts

Provenance Africa is the researched archive built from @OnlyAfricaFacts, an X account that started posting facts about Africa and the African diaspora in 2012 (see About: Where this started). This site is the archive of that decade-plus of posts, gradually being rewritten as full, sourced articles. This page explains how that process works, so you can judge the reliability of what you read here for yourself.

Where the facts come from

Every article's topic originates from the @OnlyAfricaFacts archive; see About: Where this started for how that archive became this site.

Every post on the original account started from something real: a news story, a historical event, a public figure's life. The original posts often didn't cite sources, because X posts rarely do. The full articles on this site do.

Each article is checked against multiple independent sources before publication. We draw on:

• Academic and historical references: encyclopedic sources, peer-reviewed research, university-published material
• Primary historical records where they exist, including declassified U.S. State Department documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series
• Established journalism (Reuters, the AP, Euronews, and similar outlets for more recent events)

How we find and verify sources

We start from general reference material, then follow its citations back to the original scholarship: the academic monographs, university press books, and peer-reviewed journal articles that historians have actually written on a subject. We confirm each source is real and substantively covers the topic, not just adjacent to it, then cite that source directly rather than the reference material that pointed to it.

If a subject has no qualifying book or paper behind it, we leave that section empty rather than cite something weak just to fill it. Where we found one, it appears in a "Books & Further Reading" section on the article itself.

When historians disagree

Some events in African history don't have a single agreed-upon account. The Congo Free State's death toll, for instance, is cited anywhere from 1.2 million to 10 million depending on the historian and their methodology. When that happens, we say so directly in the article, name the range, and attribute it to the historians who hold each position, rather than picking one number and presenting it as settled fact.

Review process

Every article on this site is reviewed by our editorial panel before publication. If you think something here is wrong, incomplete, or missing context, tell us. See the corrections log for how we handle that.

What this site is not

We're not trying to be the source for "10 facts you didn't know about Africa" clickbait. If a fact can't be sourced properly, or its context can't be verified, it stays on the account's original archive page marked as an unverified post, rather than getting dressed up as a researched article it isn't.