Heritage & Culture

A granite range in the far northeast, sacred for centuries, twice stormed by colonial troops, and still drawing pilgrims to its ancestor shrine.

Ten forest sites along 200km of the Kenyan coast, holding the remains of Mijikenda villages. Sacred ground first, and a visitor site only rarely.

Dry stone walls up to four and a half meters high, laid without mortar in the sixteenth century, in the hills northwest of Migori.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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