Articles

Kenya has two rainy seasons, two dry ones and a coast that ignores the highlands. A month by month reading of when to go and why.

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.

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.

Maulidi at Lamu has been held since the nineteenth century. What Kenya celebrates, when it falls, and how to attend without being a problem.

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

The oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, lived in for over seven hundred years. What to see, and the advisory that surrounds it.

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. It is also a region the US, UK and Canadian governments currently advise against.

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.

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.

Great Zimbabwe, Lalibela, Timbuktu, Aksum. The sites are not obscure. What is worth knowing is how hard some scholarship worked to explain them away.

There is no such thing as African food. There are Ethiopian, Senegalese, Cape Malay and Swahili coast cuisines, and the difference is the point.