Journal

Eleven churches cut down into living rock, and the most significant heritage site in Ethiopia, in a region where conflict has restricted movement since 2023.

Jollof rice is the dish everyone argues about, and the argument is the point. Nigerian cooking is regional before it is national.

We publish no month-by-month table. On Nigeria the question that decides a trip is not when you go but which states you can go to.

A Yoruba divination system is still practiced in the Americas and the Caribbean. That is the thread. There is also a warning you need first.

Nigeria has eight UNESCO-inscribed traditions. One of them is a divination system that the African diaspora carried across the Atlantic and still uses.

Three of Nigeria's inscribed traditions are gatherings you could in principle attend: the Sango Festival in Oyo, Argungu in Kebbi and the Kano Durbar.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.