The Digital Encyclopedia of Africa

Ababda

Afro-Asiatic

Camel herders of Egypt's Eastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, the northernmost of the Beja peoples, who guided caravans to the emerald mines and the Nubian gold roads, and who lost their language to Arabic while keeping everything else.

Ababua (Boa)

Niger-Congo

Forest farmers of the Uele basin whose war masks — flat, white-and-black, with enormous projecting ears — are among the most immediately recognisable objects in Congolese art, and whose country lay directly under the Free State's rubber regime.

Abagogwe

Niger-Congo

The cattle-keeping communities of Rwanda's north-western volcanoes — highland Tutsi herders of the Gishwati and Virunga slopes who were among the first killed in 1994 and who have never been counted separately since.

Abagusii (Gusii/Kisii)

Niger-Congo

The densely-settled highland farmers of southwestern Kenya — soapstone carvers of Tabaka, keepers of the egesa harvest dances and the ritual healer-diviners (abanyamoriogi), whose clan-fortress hills held off Maasai and Kipsigis raiders for centuries.

Abakonde

Niger-Congo

The lineages of Rwanda's north-west who held land by ubukonde, the right of the first family to clear the forest, a tenure that predated the monarchy, resisted it, and was abolished twice before finally being written out in 2005.

Acholi

Nilo-Saharan

The Luo chiefdoms of the Uganda–South Sudan borderland — poets of the royal drum and the larakaraka courtship dance, whose mato oput reconciliation rite taught the world a justice that mends rather than merely punishes.

Afar

Afro-Asiatic

The salt-caravan nomads of the Danakil — one of the hottest places on earth — whose camel trains, sultanates and clan law have mastered a landscape of volcanoes and salt lakes that few others can even cross.

Agaléens

French-lexified creole

The people of two coconut islands a thousand kilometres north of Mauritius — a few hundred islanders whose community was built on copra, who have no airport of their own until recently and no say in the runway now being built on their land.

Mythology

Creation stories, deities, cosmologies and ancestor traditions

Oral Literature

Epics, folktales, hero legends and proverbs

Architecture

Vernacular building, palaces, sacred sites and settlements

Artifacts

Masks, sculpture, regalia, weapons and textiles

Kingdoms & History

Interactive map of 20 great empires, plus migrations and trade networks

Languages

Language families, scripts and living speech

National Heroes

The figures each country claims: liberation, sport, music, science and activism