For centuries, the Baganda have made cloth by beating the inner bark of the mutuba tree. The tree survives and regrows its bark. UNESCO recognises this as one of the world's oldest textile crafts.
At a signal, thousands of fishermen leap into the Matan Fada river in north-west Nigeria, armed only with hand nets and calabashes. The Argungu festival is one of West Africa's most extraordinary spectacles.
High on a sandstone plateau in the Algerian Sahara, thousands of paintings and engravings show giraffes, hippos, cattle herders and dancers. They are a record of a time when the desert was full of life.
Each year, the island town of Lamu fills with pilgrims, singers and spectators to celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. This week, the Maulidi festival returns.
From the markets of Dakar to the wrestling arenas and the sabar drum circles, Wolof is the language most Senegalese share. Here is its history, how it works and a few words to start with.
A soil scientist who walked the farms of Guinea-Bissau, Amílcar Cabral led one of Africa's most successful liberation movements and wrote some of its deepest thinking on culture and freedom.
A tiny, fiery chilli, a Swahili name and centuries of trade between Africa, the Americas and Portugal. The story of peri-peri is the story of how a flavour becomes global.
Slowed-down house beats, chanted township slang and an attitude all its own. Kwaito was the soundtrack of young Black South Africans in the first years after apartheid.
Bold colours, named patterns and a history that runs from Java to the Netherlands to the markets of West Africa. Wax print is everywhere, and its story is more surprising than most people think.
Sand underfoot, a lake as big as a sea, and a stage under the stars. Since 2004, the Lake of Stars festival has brought Malawian and international artists together on the beaches of Lake Malawi.
Long before the modern country took its name, a Soninke kingdom called Wagadu controlled the gold trade of the western Sahel. Arab writers called it Ghana. Here is what we know, and what remains legend.
Born from the trade talk of the Congo River, spread by soldiers and missionaries, and carried across Africa by rumba, Lingala is one of the continent's great lingua francas.
