Heritage & Culture

A walled city said to be the fourth holiest in Islam, with 82 mosques inside it. It is also the one site in this cluster you can reach.

The capital of a kingdom that traded with Rome and Persia as an equal, marked by giant stelae. Tigray is closed and its flights are suspended.

Eleven churches cut down into living rock, and the most significant heritage site in Ethiopia. It is also in a region closed to all travel.

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.

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

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

A Hausa kingdom of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nine kilometers across, now walls and wells in the scrub. Sokoto is all but essential travel.

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. The FCDO advises against all travel to the state it stands in.

An earth wall with a fourteen kilometer radius, around a market and a palace that are still working. Kano is all but essential travel.

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.

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