Heritage & Culture

One of the oldest Islamic cities in the world, founded in the tenth century and at its height in the fourteenth, inside a city of twenty million.

The capital of Egypt at its height, split across a river: temples for the living on the east bank, tombs for the dead on the west.

The World Heritage property at Aswan is ten places, not two temples. Five were cut apart and moved before the reservoir reached them, and five never left.

Twelve official languages, a country that talks openly about its own history, and a set of courtesies that are easy to learn and matter more than usual.

South Africa's diaspora story runs in two directions at once: people removed from their own neighborhoods, and a solidarity movement that circled the world.

A cuisine built from Cape Malay cooking, Indian indenture, Portuguese trade routes and the fire everybody in the country gathers around.

A quarantine station, a leper colony, a wartime garrison and finally a political prison, inscribed by UNESCO for what its last chapter came to mean.

The caves northwest of Johannesburg where the fossil record of our own origins is densest, inscribed by UNESCO as the Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa.

A kingdom on the Limpopo that traded gold for Chinese porcelain, ruled for four centuries, and was then written out of the country's own history.

Built in 1593 to take the Indian Ocean trade routes, and fought over for three centuries. What stands at Mombasa now, and how to visit it.

A Swahili city of the tenth to seventeenth centuries, abandoned and swallowed by forest. Inscribed only in 2024, and still barely visited.

UNESCO calls the coastal castles the starting point of the African diaspora. What a journey of return to Ghana involves, and what it asks.