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Stories
Real history, myths checked against the record, and the food behind the places.
The place cards say where. These pages say what happened, what people get wrong, and what is on the table. They follow the same rule: every claim has a source, and each story ends with what is still not known.
History
Real events and people, told with what the sources say and where historians disagree.
- History · 2 min readAksum: the great power you were never taughtSeventeen centuries ago a kingdom in the Horn of Africa minted its own coins, wrote in its own script and sat on the trade route between Rome and India.Eritrea · Ethiopia
- History · 1 min readKilwa: gold, coral and a city on an islandA city off the coast of today's Tanzania grew rich on the gold trade and was called one of the most beautiful in the world.Tanzania
- History · 1 min readKush: the African kingdom that ruled EgyptIn the eighth century BCE, rulers from what is now Sudan became pharaohs of Egypt.Sudan
- History · 3 min readMansa Musa and the gold nobody could countA king from Mali set out for Mecca in 1324 and drew the attention of the Muslim world. How much of the story is record, and how much is legend?Mali
- History · 2 min readThe country with a river in its nameWhy English says The Gambia, what the river has to do with it, and what a map cannot tell us.Gambia
- History · 1 min readWas all of Africa colonised? Ethiopia and the battle of AdwaBy 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were outside European control. Ethiopia won its place on the battlefield, in 1896.Ethiopia
Myths
A common idea about Africa, checked against the record.
- Myths · 1 min readAfrica is a continent, not a countryFifty-four countries, and the biggest has about 1,900 times more people than the smallest.
- Myths · 2 min readAfrica is much bigger than the map saysOn the world map most of us grew up with, Africa looks about the size of Greenland. It is fourteen times larger.DR Congo
- Myths · 1 min readDid one conference in Berlin carve up Africa?A meeting of fourteen states, with no African representative, set rules for the scramble. It did not draw the map.DR Congo
- Myths · 1 min readDo Africans speak "African"?There is no language called African. Glottolog lists more than 2,000 of them, in 43 families.Nigeria
- Myths · 1 min readDo most Africans live in villages?About 45 in every 100 Africans lived in a town or city in 2023, and in 23 of the 54 countries most people did.
- Myths · 1 min readHow rich is Africa?There is no single answer: income per person in 2023 ran from $250 in Burundi to $18,131 in Seychelles.
- Myths · 1 min readWas Africa's history only ever spoken?The oral tradition is real and rich. But writing has a long history on the continent too, from the Ge'ez script of Aksum to the manuscripts of Timbuktu.Ethiopia · Eritrea · Mali
Food
Dishes and the people, places and arguments behind them.
- Food · 1 min readCassava: the American crop that feeds AfricaMost people who eat garri or fufu today are eating a plant that came from Brazil in the 16th century.Nigeria
- Food · 2 min readInjera: the bread that is also the plateA sour, spongy flatbread made from a grain that began in Ethiopia, and the centre of the meal in Ethiopia and Eritrea.Ethiopia · Eritrea
- Food · 2 min readJollof rice: a dish, a map and a friendly warRice cooked in tomato and spices, claimed by half of West Africa. Where does it really come from?Senegal · Gambia · Ghana · Nigeria