Culture & Heritage

A recording only survives as long as something can still play it back. Staff interviewed for a 2024 study of South Africa’s National Film, Video and Sound Archives named outdated …

They live among lions, raise their children on cattle blood and milk, and have held the same ground for centuries under the most dramatic sky on earth. The Maasai people …

The door is not the first thing you see when you arrive at a Swahili stone house. The door is the first thing you are meant to see. In Lamu, …

Before dawn on 10 January, the sound of drums reaches the beach at Ouidah from several directions at once. By the time the light comes up, the town has been …

Europe was not the beginning of civilisation. It was not even close. While European scholars spent centuries constructing a narrative in which human progress flowed from Greece to Rome to …

At 21:00 the night before, the Maoma royal drums begin. Their sound crosses the floodplain in the dark, carrying for up to fifteen kilometres across the Zambezi’s risen waters. It …

There is nothing quite like the Umhlanga Reed Dance anywhere on the African continent. Not in scale, not in longevity, and not in the quality of what it asks visitors …

The Niger River bends through the Sahel like an artery. Along its banks, cities once rose in mud brick and scholarship. Caravans crossed salt plains carrying gold measured in tonnes. …

Rwanda has submitted a bid to list Imigongo and Umuganura on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage register. Imigongo is a centuries-old geometric art form painted with cow dung, while Umuganura is …

African fabrics do more than just cover bodies. They carry stories, values, history, resilience, and identity. In communities where oral history weaves meaning into cloth, each fabric becomes a visible …