Who Is Archduke Ferdinand and Why Would the World go to War Over His Death?

It is a fascinating story, the story about the Archduke whose death led the whole world to war, or so we are told. Our parents told us many stories when we were growing up - stories about the exploits of the tortoise and the fox in a world where animals spoke. But they never told us about stories of war, especially a war that involved the whole world. I first heard about the war in school. Perhaps because my parents never went to school, they never had the chance to hear about this war that engulfed the whole world. Is it possible that a war can be called a world war when many people in the world never even heard about it? At school I was taught that the war was fought mostly in Europe and that it began because an important person called an Archduke was killed. How the process moved from the death of this single person to include the death of many others was not clear to me. And why was it important for us, sitting in a village in Cameroon in the 1980s to know about a war that was largely fought in Europe from 1914 to 1918? They said that was part of what we needed to learn if we were to be smarter than our parents. We needed to learn about wars that were fought in Europe by people we did not know. Even now, living in the United States, I hear news reports claiming that the war changed the 20th century. However, in the village where I grew up in Cameroon, that war made no impact. The Archduke whose death led to the death of many others is still unknown there. In the village, people still wonder why the world would go to war because of the death of one person. And why would it be called a world war when the people of my village did not fight in it?