Heritage & Culture

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Heritage travel is not sightseeing with a heavier subject. It asks something of the traveler that ordinary travel does not, and it is worth knowing what, before you go.

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