Journal

Ethiopia has seven festivals and traditions on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, more than any other country in this series, with fixed dates.

Ethiopian eating is communal, seasoned by a fasting calendar most visitors never hear about, and built on a grain grown almost nowhere else.

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.

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.

Stone terraces worked continuously for 21 generations, and carved wooden figures that UNESCO says record a tradition close to disappearing.

Where Lucy was reconstructed from 52 fragments in 1974, and one of the most important paleontological landscapes anywhere on earth.

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.

We publish no month-by-month table. On Nigeria the question that decides a trip is not when you go but which states you can go to.

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.

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

Three of Nigeria's inscribed traditions are gatherings you could in principle attend. Two of them are in states the FCDO restricts.

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