Explore Africa's rich cultural heritage: traditional ceremonies, festivals, indigenous practices, ethnic groups, diaspora identity, and the living traditions that define African peoples.
When misfortune befalls the Fang, they turn to their ancestors. For them, death must not be allowed to cut the line between a family and its dead, and the living cannot prosper unless that line stays open.
To answer the question we have posed in this African Cosmologies series, when misfortune calls for the Kikuyu, it is neither the anger of a god nor the grudge of an ancestor.
Three groups, related languages, shared religious traditions, and competing origin narratives. Their intertwined histories reveal how social distinctions were racialised and turned into instruments of political exclusion and violence.
Where the Kikuyu saw a stain and the Shona a broken bond, the Luba of Congo saw power itself: disorder is raw force running hot and free, and order is force that has been cooled, cultured, and bound.
Where the Dogon looked to the cosmos and the Kongo to no one at all, the Shona answer to human suffering points somewhere none of them do: to a relationship, and usually to the dead.
An Algerian chickpea flan, said to have been invented by Spanish soldiers under siege in Oran, beat every other street food in Africa in TasteAtlas's 2026 ratings. North African snacks filled the top ten.
In 2024, about 2.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa lived in the United States, more than triple the number in 2000. In their kitchens, a grain dish recorded in 13th-century North African cookbooks sits beside a curry-filled loaf invented in 1940s Durban.
Around 1800 BC, an Egyptian scribe copied a maxim saying the finest speech could be found among women grinding grain. Nearly 3,800 years later, Kikuyu elders in Nyeri used one line about a log and a crocodile to warn a bride without forbidding her.
The fate of the people of Kitara is said to have been determined by a god that set out to test his sons. One was crowned a king, the second was named a herder and another, a farmer.
In the early fifteenth century, hair served as a carrier of messages in most West African societies, and one Dutch explorer in Benin noted sixteen different hairstyles, each marking a combination of gender and status.
