Articles

Twenty African countries covered for travelers returning to the continent: what the journey asks, which sites hold the history, and what each has built for it.

99 heritage guides across 20 African countries, with what UNESCO World Heritage inscription means and what it does not tell a visitor.

Ghana and Senegal are where roots tourism is most developed. What each one offers, how the two differ, and what to read before booking either journey.

The answer is not a month. It is a coast, because the monsoon that makes one side of an island safe to swim makes the other side dangerous.

Seychelles is on the Indian Ocean slave route, not the Atlantic one, and it has a mountain school built for the children of liberated Africans.

Seychelles had no indigenous population, so everything here was carried in. Its Creole culture is what the people brought and what survived.

Moutya is a dance that enslaved Africans performed at night in the forest, out of earshot of the plantation house. UNESCO inscribed it in 2021.

Seychellois food is a Creole kitchen built on an ocean and a plantation economy, and its clearest expression is a fish market in Victoria.

Four coral islands around a lagoon, so hard to reach that they were never spoiled. Some 152,000 giant tortoises live there, the world's largest population.

A school built in 1876 for the children of liberated Africans, high on a mountain on Mahé, and a stop on the Indian Ocean slave route.

The first island of the group ever sighted, in 1609, and one whose heritage case rests on Creole tradition as much as on its wildlife.

A palm forest on Praslin kept almost in its original state, and home to the coco de mer, which produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom.