Journal

The answer is not a month. It is a coast, because the monsoon that makes one side of an island safe to swim makes the other side dangerous.

Seychelles is on the Indian Ocean slave route, not the Atlantic one, and it has a mountain school built for the children of liberated Africans.

Seychelles had no indigenous population, so everything here was carried in. Its Creole culture is what the people brought and what survived.

Moutya is a dance that enslaved Africans performed at night in the forest, out of earshot of the plantation house. UNESCO inscribed it in 2021.

Seychellois food is a Creole kitchen built on an ocean and a plantation economy, and its clearest expression is a fish market in Victoria.

Four coral islands around a lagoon, so hard to reach that they were never spoiled. Some 152,000 giant tortoises live there, the world's largest population.

A school built in 1876 for the children of liberated Africans, high on a mountain on Mahé, and a stop on the Indian Ocean slave route.

The first island of the group ever sighted, in 1609, and one whose heritage case rests on Creole tradition as much as on its wildlife.

A palm forest on Praslin kept almost in its original state, and home to the coco de mer, which produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom.

On Ethiopia the honest answer to when you should go begins with where you are still allowed to, and then with two precisely dated festivals.

Ethiopia never became a diaspora through the Atlantic trade, and the reconnection it offers is a different one. There is also a warning to read.

Ethiopia keeps its own calendar, its own clock and its own alphabet, and it is the only African country never formally colonized.