Heritage & Culture

A Hausa kingdom of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nine kilometers across, now walls and wells in the scrub of Sokoto State, in the north west.

An earth wall with a fourteen kilometer radius, around a market and a palace that are still working, in a north west where the threat of kidnap is high.

A town lived on top of an isolated rock hill for centuries, and its palace, its court and its belfry are still up there today.

A hilltop kingdom with terraced fields and the remains of an iron industry: one of only two World Heritage properties in Nigeria, on the Cameroon border.

A century ago every Yoruba town had a sacred grove. This is the largest one left, and UNESCO calls it probably the last in Yoruba culture.

The first Creole society formed on these islands, at a port built for the slave trade. The music that came out of it is a music about leaving.

Cape Verde has exactly one UNESCO-inscribed tradition, and it is a form of music about leaving. That turns out not to be a coincidence at all.

Cachupa is the national dish and it is built from what the islands could actually grow. It takes a long time on purpose.

Some experts call this the greatest center of plant biodiversity in the archipelago. It is also where the water is, which is the same story.

The first European colonial town in the tropics, a platform for the Atlantic slave trade, and where the first Creole society formed. All one place.

Cape Verde calls it the camp of slow death. It held prisoners from four countries of the Portuguese empire for more than thirty years.

People live on the floor of an active volcano with an eight kilometer caldera. In 2014 it erupted, and they are still there.