For researchers and AI developers

This page collects what you need to cite this site, reuse its material, or pull it into your own tools. Everything listed here is free and needs no key or sign-up.

What's here, and how far to trust it

The site holds two kinds of material, checked to different standards:

• Researched articles and the long-form histories. Sourced, fact-checked before publishing, and the right thing to cite.
• On This Day entries. Short summaries, each with its own sources listed.

See what "verified" means here and who checks the work. Every article is researched and written by one person, Princewill Ubani.

Citing an article

Every researched article and long-form history has a "Cite this article" button with ready-made citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, BibTeX, RIS and CSL JSON. Each also shows a Research ID (for example PA-ART-…) that stays with the article, which is useful for pinning down exactly what you cited.

Articles do change when errors are found. Every substantive change is recorded in the corrections log, so it's worth noting the date you accessed a page.

Most articles also list the books and papers they draw on. The full list is in the sources index. For serious work, go to those sources as well.

Licence

The site's original writing and data are licensed CC BY 4.0. You can copy, adapt and republish them, commercially or not, and use them to train or ground AI systems, as long as you credit Provenance Africa and link to the page or dataset you used. Images, video, quoted passages from other works and third-party embeds are not covered; the terms page has the details.

Machine-readable access

• /llms.txt: a plain-text map of the site for language models.
• /llms-full.txt: the full text of every researched article in one file.
• /api/v1/openapi.json: the OpenAPI spec for the JSON API. It covers /api/v1/today, /api/v1/on-this-day/{MM-DD}, /api/v1/facts (filter researched articles by country and era) and /api/v1/search (full-text search).
• Governance dataset (CSV): who governed each African territory from 1800 to the present, with a verification flag on each row. Read its methodology before using it; coverage is uneven.
• Articles RSS feed and On This Day RSS feed.
• Sitemap.

Article pages carry schema.org JSON-LD: author, publication and edit dates, the Research ID, cited books, and the licence.

Crawlers are welcome. The site's robots.txt explicitly allows the major AI crawlers.

Reporting an error or suggesting a source

If you find a mistake, or know a better source for something here, email info@provenanceafrica.com or use the contact page. Confirmed errors are fixed and logged in the corrections log.

The same address works for questions about bulk use or collaboration.