Heritage & Culture

Jollof, banku, waakye and kelewele. The staples worth knowing, how street food actually works, and what to ask for if you avoid chili.

The largest of Ghana’s coastal castles, a World Heritage Site and a working museum. What stands there now, and how to visit it properly.

Begun in 1482, St. George’s d’Elmina is one of the oldest European buildings outside Europe. What survives there, and how to visit it.

The last bath before the coast. Assin Manso was a great inland slave market, and is now a place of return, of reburial and of quiet.

Greetings are not optional in Kenya, and the coast has its own rules. What to say, what to wear, and when not to take the photograph.

The oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, lived in for over seven hundred years. What to see, how to get there and how to visit.

Kenya is not West Africa, and its diaspora story is an Indian Ocean one. What return travel here actually means, and what it does not.

Ugali, sukuma wiki, nyama choma and the Swahili coast. What Kenyans actually eat, and how the coast became a different cuisine.

A Cairo tour operator introduces Egypt: its geography, the beliefs that raised the pyramids, and the country visitors meet today.

The Afar Depression in northeastern Ethiopia holds one of the deepest records of human origins anywhere, alongside a working salt trade, an acid hydrothermal field and a persistent lava lake.

Archaeological sites, rock shelters, Swahili coastal towns and a language spoken by 200 million people: a guide to the heritage landscapes of Tanzania, and how to travel among them responsibly.

The crater is one part of an 809,440-hectare World Heritage property that also holds Olduvai Gorge, the Laetoli footprints, Maasai pastoral communities and an unresolved argument about who conservation is for.