Articles

Egypt sits at the join of Africa and the Arab world, and the Nubian south carries a displacement story that the monuments above it are famous for.

A conservative, hospitable and very sociable country where dress, photography and the word for tipping are the three things visitors most often get wrong.

A lunar calendar, a Coptic one, a pharaonic spring festival everybody still keeps, and a sunrise that reaches the back of a temple twice a year.

Bean breakfasts, a national dish assembled from three starches at once, and a food culture built on feeding a lot of people well and cheaply.

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.

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 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.

The Cape and the rest of South Africa have opposite rainy seasons, which is the single most useful thing to know before choosing when to go.

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.

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.

A carnival on the second of January, an arts festival that takes over a whole town, and public holidays that are commemorations before they are days off.

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