For its first decades, the traffic through Elmina flowed in the direction history has forgotten — Europeans selling African captives to African buyers, in exchange for gold.
In June 1730, ninety-six captives aboard the slave ship Little George broke their irons, seized the vessel, and sailed it back to Africa — with no one aboard who knew how.
For a century, Portuguese navigators produced the most precise coastal survey in the world and named the shoreline after whatever could be carried onto a ship. The map they drew had no inside, and the shape of that map is still visible in the continent's ports, railways and reputation.
Between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Arabic writers produced the most accurate account of Africa that anyone outside it had ever managed. It was accurate because it was an inventory, and the habit of reading the continent as an inventory has never quite been broken.
For seven centuries Greek and Roman writers could not find where the great river began. What they wrote in place of an answer hardened into a way of describing Africa, and that way of thinking outlasted the writers who created it.
Bigo bya Mugenyi, Uganda: a complete guide to East Africa's largest earthworks complex. History, the Chwezi Empire, the debate over what the ditches were really for, and how to visit.
Gondar, Ethiopia: a complete guide to the 17th-century castle city of Fasiladas. History, Emperor Fasilides, the Gondarine architectural style, Debre Berhan Selassie, Timkat at Fasilides' Bath, and the best time to visit.
Thimlich Ohinga, Kenya: a complete guide to the largest dry-stone enclosure complex in the Lake Victoria Basin. History, the Bantu and Luo builders, the three-phase walling technique, UNESCO status, and the best time to visit.
When the remains could not be identified, families were given earth from the crash site to bury. Six years later, Ethiopian architects built a memorial on that same ground, in the oldest architectural language the country has.
In the Waterberg, the oldest art was painted with pigments drawn from the ground. Thousands of years later, a school on the same land was raised from the soil dug out of its own foundation trenches.
A geometric art form made by Rwandan women nearly vanished in 1994. Women revived it. Now it has been built at full scale, into a center for young women, by a workforce that was 40 percent women.
