Indigenous Community Profiles (575)
Each profile follows the Atlas knowledge structure: identity, culture, oral literature, mythology, architecture, artifacts, timeline and sources. Filter by name, country or cultural region.
Showing 575 of 575 communities
Ababda
Egypt · Sudan
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.
Read full profile →Ababua (Boa)
Democratic Republic of the 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.
Read full profile →Abagogwe
Rwanda · Democratic Republic of the 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.
Read full profile →Abagusii (Gusii/Kisii)
Kenya
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.
Read full profile →Abakonde
Rwanda
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.
Read full profile →Acholi
Uganda · South Sudan
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.
Read full profile →Afar
Ethiopia · Eritrea · Djibouti
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.
Read full profile →Agaléens
Mauritius
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.
Read full profile →Agni (Anyi)
Côte d'Ivoire · Ghana
The Akan kingdoms of eastern Côte d'Ivoire — Indénié, Sanwi and Moronou, founded by migrants from Asante, keepers of gold regalia and stools, and rulers of one kingdom that has twice petitioned to secede.
Read full profile →Aït Atta
Morocco
Amazigh transhumants of the eastern High Atlas and the Saghro, governed by an annually rotating chieftaincy that no lineage could hold twice in succession, and the last Moroccans to surrender to the French, at Bougafer in 1933.
Read full profile →Ait Lahsen
Western Sahara · Morocco
A Tekna-linked tribe of the Saguia el-Hamra — camel herders and caravan people of the northern Sahara whose sections ended up on opposite sides of the Western Sahara conflict, and whose territory holds the world's largest phosphate deposit.
Read full profile →Aja
Benin · Togo
The parent people of the Fon and the Ewe — inhabitants of Tado, the town from which both dynasties trace their origin, keepers of the Vodun tradition at its source, and farmers of the Mono river valley between two countries.
Read full profile →Aka (BaAka)
Central African Republic · Republic of the Congo
The forest hunters of the Sangha basin — whose yodelled polyphony, sung by everyone at once in overlapping parts, is inscribed by UNESCO, and whose elephant-hunting and net-hunting knowledge is disappearing with the forest.
Read full profile →Akan (Asante & Fante)
Ghana · Côte d'Ivoire
Matrilineal peoples of the Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire forest belt whose Asante Empire, Golden Stool, kente cloth and adinkra symbol system created one of Africa's most sophisticated courtly civilizations.
Read full profile →Akele (Kele)
Gabon
Dispersed forest communities of the middle Ogooué whose scattered settlement across half of Gabon reflects a nineteenth century spent moving ahead of the Fang expansion and behind the trade in ivory and rubber.
Read full profile →Aku of the Gambia
The Gambia · Sierra Leone
Descendants of liberated Africans resettled from Freetown at Bathurst in the 1820s, who built the colony's churches and mosques, supplied its lawyers and clerks for a century, and split into a Christian Aku and an Aku Marabout Muslim community that share a name and little else.
Read full profile →Alaba (Halaba)
Ethiopia
Muslim enset and pepper farmers of the Rift lakes escarpment, known across Ethiopia for the painted geometry of their houses and for supplying much of the country's berbere chilli.
Read full profile →Ali (Ali-Gbaya)
Central African Republic
A small Gbaya-group community of the Ombella-M'Poko and Lobaye, farmers and hunters on the savannah-forest margin north of Bangui, whose language is one of a cluster the wider Gbaya identity has been absorbing for a century.
Read full profile →Alur
Uganda · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Luo-speaking rainmakers of the Albert Nile escarpment, whose chiefs were sought out by their non-Luo neighbours to rule over them — a pattern of voluntary incorporation that gave political anthropology one of its foundational case studies.
Read full profile →Amazigh (Berber)
Morocco · Algeria · Libya · Tunisia · Mali · Niger · Mauritania
The indigenous peoples of North Africa — 'Imazighen', the free people — whose Tifinagh script, mountain and desert civilizations, and millennia of continuous culture long predate the Arab arrival, stretching from the Canary Islands to the Siwa oasis.
Read full profile →Ambundu (Mbundu)
Angola
The people of the Kwanza valley and Luanda's hinterland — the Ndongo kingdom whose ruler's title, ngola, gave Angola its name, whose Queen Njinga fought Portugal for four decades, and whose language carries the vocabulary that crossed to Brazil.
Read full profile →Americo-Liberians
Liberia
Freed African Americans and Caribbean settlers who founded Liberia in 1822, built a republic on the American model, and ruled the indigenous majority as a five per cent minority for 133 years until a sergeant shot the president in his bed.
Read full profile →Amhara
Ethiopia
Highland civilization of the Ethiopian plateau — heirs of Aksum's Ge'ez literacy, builders of Lalibela's rock churches and Gondar's castles, whose Orthodox Christian culture and Amharic language shaped the Ethiopian state for seven centuries.
Read full profile →Ana (Ifè) of Togo
Togo · Benin
The Yoruba of the Atakpamé hills — a western outpost of the Ifè world, separated from the Nigerian heartland by two borders, who kept the orisha, the language and the claim of descent from Ilé-Ifè itself.
Read full profile →Anaang (Annang)
Nigeria
People of the Cross River hinterland whose ekpo and ekpe societies governed before any state did, whose raffia weaving and wood carving are among the finest in Nigeria, and whose oratory gave the region its reputation for the most elaborate proverbs in West Africa.
Read full profile →Andalusians of Tunisia
Tunisia
Descendants of the Moriscos expelled from Spain in 1609, who arrived in their tens of thousands, founded a dozen towns on the Medjerda valley, brought the chechia hat and the malouf music, and built a village with a minaret carved with the Star of David and a clock.
Read full profile →Angolares
São Tomé and Príncipe
The fishing people of São Tomé's southern shore — descendants, by their own account, of a sixteenth-century shipwreck or of escaped plantation workers, who kept a distinct creole, a king and the island's most skilled canoe fishery.
Read full profile →Anjouanais of Mayotte
Mayotte · Comoros
The migrants from seventy kilometres away — Comorians from Anjouan who cross to Mayotte in small boats for work, schooling and hospitals, who build much of what stands there, and who are deported in their tens of thousands each year.
Read full profile →Annobonese (Ambô)
Equatorial Guinea
The people of an island six hundred kilometres from their own country — a Portuguese creole community on a volcanic speck in the Atlantic, with their own language, their own whale-hunting past and a long record of governing themselves because nobody else bothered.
Read full profile →Antaimoro
Madagascar
The people of the sacred manuscripts — a south-eastern coastal group descended in part from Muslim settlers, keepers of the sorabe books written in Malagasy in Arabic script, and makers of the paper those books are written on.
Read full profile →Antandroy
Madagascar
The people of the thorns — cattle herders of Madagascar's spiny desert, whose carved aloalo grave posts stand above tombs grander than any house, and who migrate across the island for work while their dead stay put.
Read full profile →Anuak
South Sudan · Ethiopia
The river farmers of the Baro and Pibor — a Luo people whose kings and headmen hold power through a system of noble emblems rather than force, and who were massacred at Gambella in 2003 as oil and farmland interests moved into their country.
Read full profile →Arab community of Somaliland
Somaliland
The Yemeni merchants of Berbera and Hargeisa — families who crossed the Gulf of Aden to trade in hides, livestock and cloth, financed the livestock export economy, and hold a position of commercial weight without clan standing.
Read full profile →Argobba
Ethiopia
Muslim traders and weavers of fortified escarpment villages between the Christian highlands and the Afar desert, whose towns were the caravan waypoints of medieval Ifat and Shewa, and whose language is now spoken by a few thousand people.
Read full profile →Arosien
Western Sahara · Mauritania
A Sahrawi tribe of religious rather than warrior standing, holding the shrine of Sidi Ahmed al-Aroussi in the desert north, whose members were traditionally exempt from raiding because their blessing was worth more than their weapons.
Read full profile →Awi (Agaw of Gojjam)
Ethiopia
Agaw farmers of western Gojjam, the substrate population of the Ethiopian highlands whose language preceded Amharic there, and in whose territory the Blue Nile rises from the springs at Gish Abay.
Read full profile →Awlad Ali
Egypt · Libya
The Bedouin of Egypt's western desert — a confederation that moved east from Cyrenaica, whose honour code and oral poetry were made famous by an anthropologist's book, and whose coast is now being built over with resorts.
Read full profile →Awlad Suleiman
Libya · Chad · Niger
The Arab confederation of the Fezzan — camel nomads driven south from Sirte by the Ottomans in the 1840s, who established themselves around Lake Chad and in southern Libya, and whose cross-border networks have made them central to the smuggling economies and conflicts of the central Sahara.
Read full profile →Awrtable
Puntland · Somalia · Ethiopia
A Darod clan spread across the Somali regions — herders and merchants of Mudug and the Ethiopian borderlands whose name means the camel-loaders, and whose trading networks reach from Galkayo to the Gulf.
Read full profile →Azande
South Sudan · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Central African Republic
The 'great eaters of the forest edge' — a conquering Avongara-led nation spanning three borders, whose oracle-governed courts, throwing knives and Ture trickster cycles made them the classic study of an African philosophy of causation.
Read full profile →Baamba (Bwamba)
Uganda · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Forest farmers of the Semliki valley at the Rwenzori's northern foot, Central Sudanic in language among Bantu neighbours, who fought alongside the Bakonzo in the Rwenzururu movement for a kingdom of their own and got one, briefly and contentiously, in 2014.
Read full profile →Babongo
Gabon
Gabon's forest people — hunter-gatherers of the interior who are credited across the country with originating Bwiti, the iboga religion that has since spread to their Bantu neighbours and to the world, while remaining the most marginalised community in the country.
Read full profile →Badiu
Cabo Verde
The people of Santiago's interior — descendants of the enslaved and of those who escaped into the mountains, keepers of the batuku drum-and-thigh rhythm, the tabanka processions and the deepest form of Cabo Verdean Creole.
Read full profile →Bafumbira
Uganda
Kinyarwanda-speaking farmers of Uganda's volcanic south-western corner, cultivating terraced slopes under the Virunga cones at the country's highest densities, and holding a Ugandan citizenship that regional politics has repeatedly called into question.
Read full profile →Baga
Guinea
The mangrove rice farmers of the Guinean coast — carvers of the Nimba, the great shoulder mask of motherhood that Picasso's generation collected, and whose sacred objects were burned by their own government in the 1950s.
Read full profile →Baganda
Uganda
The kingdom people of the northern Lake Victoria shore — Buganda's Kabaka monarchy, 52 totemic clans, barkcloth craft and royal drum orchestras built one of Africa's most sophisticated precolonial states, and gave Uganda its name.
Read full profile →Bagirmi (Barma)
Chad
The people of a sultanate that ruled the Chari between Bornu and Wadai for four centuries, raided its neighbours for slaves and was raided in turn, and whose capital Massenya was destroyed twice within a decade in the 1890s.
Read full profile →Bagisu (Bamasaba)
Uganda
The people of Mount Elgon — arabica coffee farmers whose imbalu circumcision festival every even year turns whole districts into a stage, and whose descent from the ancestor Masaba binds a nation to a mountain.
Read full profile →Bagungu
Uganda
Fishers of Lake Albert's eastern shore in Buliisa, keepers of a network of sacred natural sites revived through a formal community protocol, and the people directly on top of Uganda's oil fields and the pipeline route out of them.
Read full profile →Bagwere
Uganda
Millet and cotton farmers of Pallisa and Budaka in eastern Uganda, a community whose clans trace arrivals from four directions, whose language sits at a junction of Bantu groupings that linguists still argue about, and whose recent history is a case study in what district creation does to a people.
Read full profile →Bainunka
The Gambia · Senegal · Guinea-Bissau
The people who were there first — the original inhabitants of much of the Casamance and Gambia river country, absorbed over centuries by Mandinka and Jola neighbours, and now among the most endangered communities in West Africa.
Read full profile →Bajuni
Somalia · Kenya
The island fishers of the Somali-Kenyan border — a Swahili people of the Bajuni archipelago whose sailing dhows and coral villages were emptied by Somalia's war, and whose asylum claims abroad turned their dialect into forensic evidence.
Read full profile →Baka
Cameroon · Gabon · Central African Republic · Republic of the Congo
Forest hunter-gatherers of the western Congo basin — whose yelli and water-drumming polyphonies are among the world's most admired music, whose Jengi forest spirit governs the hunt, and whose land rights are among Africa's most contested.
Read full profile →Bakgalagadi
Botswana · South Africa · Namibia
The first Sotho-Tswana speakers in the Kalahari — pushed into the desert by later arrivals, made clients of the Tswana states, and now caught between their own land claims and the eviction of the San from the Central Kalahari reserve they share.
Read full profile →Bakiga of Rwanda
Rwanda · Uganda
The mountain farmers of Rwanda's north — terrace builders of the Virunga foothills whose regional identity survived the abolition of ethnicity, and whose distinctiveness from the southern heartland shaped the politics that produced the genocide.
Read full profile →Bakonzo
Uganda · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of the Mountains of the Moon — farmers of the Rwenzori's steep slopes whose god lives on the snow peaks, who fought a sixty-year campaign for their own kingdom, and whose glaciers are disappearing within a generation.
Read full profile →Bakossi
Cameroon
Farmers of the Bakossi mountains and the Muanenguba crater lakes in south-western Cameroon, whose forest holds more plant species than any comparable area in tropical Africa, and whose twin lakes are a shrine.
Read full profile →Bakuena
Lesotho · South Africa · Botswana
The crocodile people — the senior Basotho lineage from which Moshoeshoe I came, whose totem gave the kingdom its royal house, and whose clan name is carried by chiefdoms across three countries.
Read full profile →Bakweri
Cameroon
The people of Mount Cameroon — farmers on the slopes of Africa's most active volcano, whose ancestral land became German plantations and then a state corporation, and whose century-long claim to it has never been settled.
Read full profile →Balanda Bviri
South Sudan
Farmers and carvers of the woodlands south-west of Wau, one of the Fertit communities that the nineteenth-century slave raids assembled out of survivors, with a Ubangian language, a Zande-influenced court tradition and a history written largely by the people who preyed on them.
Read full profile →Balanta
Guinea-Bissau · Senegal
Guinea-Bissau's largest people and its most stubbornly ungoverned — mangrove rice farmers who refused kings, chiefs and colonial administration alike, who filled the ranks of the liberation war, and who feed the country.
Read full profile →Bambara (Bamana)
Mali · Burkina Faso · Senegal
Mali's largest people — farmers of the upper Niger whose Segou kingdom, chi wara antelope crests and the six graded komo initiation societies made Bamanankan the nation's lingua franca and their art a canon of world sculpture.
Read full profile →Bamileke
Cameroon
The dynamic chiefdom civilization of Cameroon's western Grassfields — beaded elephant masks, towering bamboo palaces, sacred forests and a famed entrepreneurial spirit rooted in tontine savings circles and ancestral skulls kept close to home.
Read full profile →Bamoun (Bamum)
Cameroon
The kingdom that wrote itself — Sultan Njoya invented an original script, drew maps and chronicles, founded schools and a new religion, and built Foumban's palace into one of Africa's great courts, still reigning in its twentieth generation.
Read full profile →Banda
Central African Republic
The savanna people of the Central African Republic's east — driven west by nineteenth-century slave raiders from the Nile, makers of the towering linga horns and the ngakola initiation, and the largest group in a country whose politics they helped shape.
Read full profile →Banen
Cameroon
Farmers of the Mbam valley in Cameroon's Littoral and Centre, whose territory the colonial state emptied in the 1950s for the Nachtigal and Mbam reserves, and who were among the communities most heavily involved in the UPC insurgency.
Read full profile →Banyamulenge
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Kinyarwanda-speaking cattle herders of the high plateau above Uvira, whose Congolese citizenship has been granted, withdrawn and granted again, and whose contested belonging has been at the centre of three decades of war in the eastern Congo.
Read full profile →Banyankole
Uganda
The cattle nation of Uganda's southwest — whose Ankole longhorn cattle with their vast lyre-shaped horns are among the world's most striking breeds, and whose Bahima herders and Bairu cultivators built the kingdom of Nkore.
Read full profile →Banyaruguru and Bahima of Burundi
Burundi
The cattle-keeping strata of the Burundian hills — Banyaruguru of the northern highlands and Bahima of the eastern plains, whose herds carried both wealth and ritual weight, and whose distinctions colonial administration froze into something harder than they had been.
Read full profile →Banyarwanda
Rwanda · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Uganda
The people of Rwanda — one language, one religion, one culture across Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, whose royal court produced the intricate imigongo art and the towering intore dance, and whose 1994 genocide and its aftermath reshaped the continent's conscience.
Read full profile →Banyole
Uganda
Farmers of the Butaleja rice flats east of Mbale, whose divination and healing traditions were recorded in unusual depth in the twentieth century, and whose wetlands have become Uganda's rice bowl at the cost of the swamp itself.
Read full profile →Banyoro (Bunyoro-Kitara)
Uganda
Heirs of Kitara — the empire of the Bacwezi legends whose Babiito kings ruled from Hoima, whose royal fire never died from crowning to crowning, and whose king Kabalega fought the British empire for a decade from the swamps.
Read full profile →Baoulé
Côte d'Ivoire
The people of Queen Abla Pokou's sacrifice — an Akan nation that crossed the Comoé into the Ivorian heartland, whose spirit-spouse figures, goli masks and gold-weight heritage made them central to Côte d'Ivoire's history and art.
Read full profile →Baphuthi
Lesotho · South Africa
The Nguni people inside the Sotho kingdom — a community of the southern Lesotho mountains speaking a language of their own, whose chief Moorosi fought a colonial siege to the death in 1879, and whose language is now spoken by a few thousand elders.
Read full profile →Bara
Madagascar
The cattle people of Madagascar's southern plateau — herders for whom stealing zebu was a required proof of manhood before marriage, and whose dead are carried up sandstone cliffs into caves that nobody can reach.
Read full profile →Bari
South Sudan
Farmers and cattle keepers of the Nile at Juba, whose rain chiefs governed by ritual rather than force, whose land the Egyptian, Turkish and British administrations each chose as their base, and on which South Sudan's capital now stands.
Read full profile →Bariba (Baatombu)
Benin · Nigeria
The horsemen of Borgu — whose Wasangari nobility rode against every empire that approached, whose Nikki and Parakou courts still hold the Gaani festival, and whose kingdom Islam, Songhai and the Sokoto Caliphate all failed to conquer.
Read full profile →Barundi
Burundi
The nation of the Kirundi-speaking hills — a single language, a single monarchy and a single ritual drum tradition shared by Hutu, Tutsi and Twa alike, and the country whose royal drummers are inscribed on UNESCO's heritage lists.
Read full profile →Bashi (Shi)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Farmers and cattle keepers of the hills above Lake Kivu, organised in a set of kingdoms whose mwami still command real deference, on some of the most densely populated and most fought-over ground in Africa.
Read full profile →Basoga
Uganda
The people between the lake and the Nile — Busoga's federation of chiefdoms under the Kyabazinga, whose bigwala gourd-trumpet royal music is UNESCO-safeguarded, and whose land at the Nile's source shaped Uganda's history.
Read full profile →Basongora
Uganda · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Long-horned cattle herders of the Rwenzori plains, whose grazing became Queen Elizabeth National Park, who were pushed into Congo and came back in 2006 to find no room, and who keep the Ankole-type Sanga herds that are now a conservation concern in their own right.
Read full profile →Basotho
Lesotho · South Africa
The mountain nation forged by Moshoeshoe I at Thaba Bosiu — refuge-builders of the Maloti highlands whose blankets, conical hats and horsemen made a kingdom in the sky that outlasted every siege.
Read full profile →Basotho Mineworkers
Lesotho · South Africa
Generations of Lesotho men who went down South African gold mines on eleven-month contracts, sang the difela poems of the journey, sent home the wages that were the country's largest source of income, and were retrenched in their tens of thousands when the gold ran thin.
Read full profile →Basotho of Eswatini
Eswatini · South Africa
Sotho-speaking communities in the north-western highveld of Eswatini, absorbed into a Swazi kingdom whose national identity is emphatically Nguni, and whose language has no place in its schools.
Read full profile →Bassa
Liberia
The coastal people of central Liberia — farmers and fishers of the Buchanan hinterland who devised their own alphabet in the diaspora, whose Poro and Sande societies govern initiation, and who were among the first to meet the American settlers in 1822.
Read full profile →Bassari
Senegal · Guinea
The people of the south-eastern hills — one of West Africa's least assimilated communities, whose age-grade initiations and masked wrestling matches take place in a landscape UNESCO listed precisely because the way of life is still being lived.
Read full profile →Basubiya
Botswana · Namibia · Zambia
River people of the Chobe and Zambezi floodplain whose kingdom once held the whole four-country corner, who were pushed aside by the Lozi and then the Kololo, and whose land was fenced off for a national park in 1960.
Read full profile →Batammariba (Tamberma)
Togo · Benin
The people who build houses like fortresses — makers of the takienta, a two-storey earthen tower-house with granary turrets and a rooftop terrace, whose whole cosmology is expressed in the building and whose valley is a World Heritage site.
Read full profile →Bataung
Lesotho · South Africa
The people of the lion — a Sotho clan whose chief Moletsane raided across the highveld through the Lifaqane and then submitted to Moshoeshoe, and whose descendants hold chieftaincies in Lesotho and the Free State.
Read full profile →Bathepu (Xhosa-speakers of Lesotho)
Lesotho · South Africa
The Nguni communities of Lesotho's southern districts — Thembu and Xhosa-descended families who settled the Quthing and Qacha's Nek borderlands, kept their language inside a Sesotho kingdom, and are counted as Basotho by everyone including themselves.
Read full profile →Batlokoa
Lesotho · South Africa
The people of the wild cat — the Basotho clan led during the Lifaqane by MaNthatisi, a woman regent whose name terrified the highveld, and who is remembered as one of southern Africa's most formidable commanders.
Read full profile →Batoro
Uganda
The people of the Toro kingdom below the Rwenzori, whose realm broke away from Bunyoro in the 1830s, was abolished in 1967 and restored in 1993 with a three-year-old on the throne, and whose court speech includes a parallel royal vocabulary that must be used of the king and never of anyone else.
Read full profile →Batswapong
Botswana
The people of the eastern hills — communities of the Tswapong range whose sacred gorges hold rain shrines consulted across Botswana, and who were subject peoples under the Bangwato before independence gave them their own voice.
Read full profile →Batwa of Burundi
Burundi
Burundi's first inhabitants and its most excluded — former forest hunters turned potters, whose clay is in every household and whose children are still the least likely in the country to finish school.
Read full profile →Batwa of Rwanda
Rwanda
Rwanda's first inhabitants — forest hunters turned potters, excluded before the genocide, killed in it in proportions comparable to the Tutsi, and excluded again by a post-genocide policy that has abolished ethnic categories without abolishing their effects.
Read full profile →Bayei
Botswana · Namibia
The people who brought the mokoro — Okavango Delta fishers and hippo hunters who arrived from the Zambezi in the eighteenth century with the dugout canoe and the fish trap, and who now pole tourists through the channels they mapped.
Read full profile →Beafada
Guinea-Bissau
One of the oldest recorded peoples of the Guinea coast, named in Portuguese accounts from the 1500s, whose kingdom controlled the Geba river trade, and who were converted, absorbed and reduced until fewer than thirty thousand remain.
Read full profile →Beja
Sudan · Eritrea · Egypt
The camel lords of the Red Sea Hills — Africa's ancient 'Blemmyes', sword-bearing clans of the Hadendowa, Bisharin and Ababda whose crossed-swords dances, coffee ceremonies and desert codes have held the corridor between Nile and sea for four thousand years.
Read full profile →Bemba
Zambia · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The crocodile-clan kingdom of Zambia's northern plateau — whose paramount Chitimukulu still reigns, whose chisungu girls' initiation is a masterwork of ritual pedagogy, and whose miners' migrations made Bemba the lingua franca of the Copperbelt.
Read full profile →Bembe (Babembe)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Farmers and hunters of the Itombwe forests above Lake Tanganyika, carvers of the small ancestor figures that Western collectors call Bembe, and the community from which the Simba rebellion of 1964 drew much of its strength.
Read full profile →Bemdzabuko
Eswatini
The true Swazi — the Dlamini and the clans that travelled with them from the north, whose arrival made the kingdom, and whose descent is the standard against which every other Swazi clan is still classified.
Read full profile →Bena
Tanzania
Highland farmers of the Njombe plateau whose nineteenth-century state under Mkwawa's neighbours was reshaped by Ngoni invasion, whose men were conscripted into the Maji Maji war and its suppression, and whose cool uplands now grow much of Tanzania's timber and tea.
Read full profile →Benadiri (Reer Hamar)
Somalia
The old urban families of Mogadishu, Merca and Brava — merchants and weavers of Persian, Arab, Indian and Swahili descent whose coral-stone quarters are the oldest continuously inhabited parts of the Somali coast, and who were looted and driven out in 1991 because they had no clan militia.
Read full profile →Benahoaritas (Awara)
Canary Islands
The Amazigh of La Palma — twelve small chiefdoms inside a collapsed volcanic crater, whose spiral rock carvings are the finest in the archipelago and who held out until 1493, when their last leader was taken by a promise of parley.
Read full profile →Benga
Gabon · Equatorial Guinea
Coastal fishers and traders of Corisco Bay and the Gabonese estuary, the first people on this coast to acquire a written language from American missionaries, and now among the smallest communities in either country they inhabit.
Read full profile →Benga of Corisco
Equatorial Guinea · Gabon
A small maritime people of the Corisco Bay islands who traded between the Gabon estuary and the sea for three centuries, gave their language to the region's first missionary printing, and now number a few thousand on islands claimed by two countries.
Read full profile →Berom
Nigeria
The plateau farmers of Jos — tin-country people of the Nzem festival and the mado initiation, whose terraced highland farms and stone-walled compounds held the cool heart of Nigeria's Middle Belt.
Read full profile →Berta
Ethiopia · Sudan
Muslim gold-washers and sorghum farmers of the Ethiopia-Sudan borderland whose sheikhdoms were tributary to Sennar and then to Ethiopia, and whose waza trumpet ensembles are inscribed by UNESCO.
Read full profile →Beta Israel
Ethiopia
The Jews of Ethiopia — who kept a Torah-observant faith in Ge'ez without the Talmud for centuries in the Semien mountains, whose monks and Kessoch led a community through isolation and persecution, and who were airlifted to Israel in the 1980s and 90s.
Read full profile →Bété
Côte d'Ivoire
The forest people of Côte d'Ivoire's centre-west — farmers of the cocoa belt whose gbégbé dance and whose leaders have been at the centre of the country's politics, and whose region was the front line of two civil wars.
Read full profile →Beti (Ewondo & Bulu)
Cameroon
The people of Cameroon's southern plateau and its capital — Ewondo, Bulu and Eton communities whose mvet epics, bikutsi rhythm and cocoa farms shaped the nation's centre, politics and popular music.
Read full profile →Betsileo
Madagascar
The rice-terrace engineers of Madagascar's southern highlands — whose hillsides are carved into staircases of paddy, whose famadihana reburials are the island's most elaborate, and whose Fianarantsoa country is the heart of Malagasy scholarship.
Read full profile →Betsimisaraka
Madagascar
Madagascar's second largest people, of the rainforest east coast, whose name means the many who do not separate, assembled into a confederation around 1710 by the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy noblewoman.
Read full profile →Bidhan (Moors)
Mauritania · Western Sahara · Mali
The Hassaniya-speaking Moors of the western Sahara — divided historically between hassan warrior lineages and zawiya scholarly ones, holders of desert libraries with thousands of manuscripts, and the group that has dominated Mauritanian politics since independence.
Read full profile →Bijagó
Guinea-Bissau
The island people of the Bijagós archipelago — a matriarchal-leaning society where women choose husbands and own houses, where men are initiated as 'cows' in the vaca bruto masquerade, and where a UNESCO biosphere of eighty-eight islands holds a world apart.
Read full profile →Bilen
Eritrea
The people of Keren — an Agaw-speaking island in a Semitic and Cushitic sea, half Muslim and half Christian, whose language is the last Agaw survival in Eritrea and whose women's hair and jewellery are the country's most photographed.
Read full profile →Bimbaches
Canary Islands
The Amazigh people of El Hierro — the smallest and westernmost pre-conquest island society, keepers of the Garoé, a laurel tree that condensed the island's only fresh water out of the mist.
Read full profile →Bira (Babira)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Farmers of the Ituri rainforest's southern edge, long-standing partners of the Mbuti hunter-gatherers in an exchange relationship of meat for cassava that anthropology has studied for a century, and neighbours to the okapi's only home.
Read full profile →Bisa
Zambia
Traders and hunters of the Bangweulu swamps and the Luangwa valley who carried ivory to the Indian Ocean before any European did, and whose valley became South Luangwa National Park.
Read full profile →Bisharin
Sudan · Egypt
Beja camel nomads of the Red Sea hills and the Nubian desert, whose language has no close relatives, whose hair Roman and British soldiers both wrote about, and whose range the Aswan reservoir and the Egypt-Sudan border between them cut in half.
Read full profile →Bisio (Bujeba)
Equatorial Guinea · Gabon · Cameroon
A small forest people of the Río Muni interior — squeezed between the Fang who arrived from the north-east and the Ndowe on the coast, holding a language spoken by a few thousand and a body of forest knowledge that goes with it.
Read full profile →Bitonga
Mozambique
Fishers, sailors and coconut growers of the Inhambane peninsula, whose dhows still work the bay under sail, and whose timbila-adjacent musical world produced some of Mozambique's most exported sound.
Read full profile →Boa-vistenses
Cabo Verde
The people of a desert island of dunes and shipwrecks, once Cabo Verde's salt capital and the archipelago's link to the Americas, depopulated by drought and emigration, and now rebuilt around all-inclusive resorts on beaches where turtles nest.
Read full profile →Bobo
Burkina Faso · Mali
The farmers and smiths of the Bobo-Dioulasso region — makers of leaf masks and towering butterfly masks that come out at the first rains, and holders of a village religion centred on Dwo, whose masks are the god's own body.
Read full profile →Bofi
Central African Republic
Farmers and forest people of the Lobaye in the south-western Central African Republic, whose villages sit alongside BaAka camps in one of the most studied hunter-gatherer and farmer relationships in Africa, and whose forest is now a diamond and logging frontier.
Read full profile →Bomitaba
Republic of the Congo
Fishers and net hunters of the Likouala swamp forest in the Congo's far north, in the flooded basin that holds one of the world's great peatlands and the persistent report of an animal nobody has produced.
Read full profile →Bongili
Republic of the Congo
Forest villagers of the Sangha basin in the Congo's north-west, long-standing partners of the BaAka, and the community living inside the Sangha Trinational forest that three countries protect together.
Read full profile →Boni (Aweer)
Kenya
Hunter-gatherers and honey-collectors of the Boni forest behind the Lamu coast, whose forest became a military operation zone against al-Shabaab, leaving a few thousand people caught between an insurgency, a counter-insurgency and a hunting ban.
Read full profile →Borana
Ethiopia · Kenya
Guardians of the gadaa — the Oromo generation-grade democracy in its most intact form, whose Gumi Gayo assembly revises the law every eight years, and whose singing wells lift water from the earth by human chain in the Ethiopian-Kenyan borderlands.
Read full profile →Bozo
Mali
The masters of the Niger — fishers of the inland delta whose rights to the river's waters predate every state that has claimed them, who build the pirogues everyone else uses, and whose joking alliance with the Dogon is a working institution rather than a curiosity.
Read full profile →Bravenses
Cabo Verde
The people of the smallest inhabited island, who left on American whaling ships from the 1820s, founded the oldest African-origin community in the United States by voluntary migration, and built an island that has always had more of its sons in New England than at home.
Read full profile →Bubi
Equatorial Guinea
The people of Bioko — the island's original inhabitants, farmers of the volcanic slopes who fought Spanish annexation for decades, and who have been a minority in their own home since the mainland took the country's politics.
Read full profile →Buduma (Yedina)
Chad · Niger · Nigeria · Cameroon
Island people of Lake Chad, herders of the amphibious kuri cattle and builders of papyrus boats, whose lake shrank by nine-tenths within a generation and whose islands became the base of an insurgency.
Read full profile →Builsa (Bulsa)
Ghana
Farmers of Sandema in Ghana's Upper East who defeated the Zabarima slave raiders in the 1890s, and who re-enact that defeat every December in the Feok festival — the only West African festival built entirely around the memory of resisting enslavement.
Read full profile →Bulu
Cameroon
Beti-Fang forest people of Cameroon's south, cocoa growers whose language the American Presbyterian mission made the written vehicle of the whole region, and the community from which the country's first president came.
Read full profile →Burji
Ethiopia · Kenya
Terrace farmers of the highlands south of Lake Chamo who became the traders of northern Kenya, running the shops of Marsabit and Moyale, and whose two communities — Ethiopian farmers and Kenyan merchants — have been in continuous exchange for a century.
Read full profile →Bwa (Bwaba)
Burkina Faso · Mali
Farmers of the Black Volta country whose towering plank masks, painted in black, white and red geometry, are among the most recognisable objects in West African art, and whose villages rose against the French in 1915 in the largest revolt of the colonial period.
Read full profile →Cabo Verdean diaspora
Cabo Verde
The larger half of the nation — more Cabo Verdeans live abroad than at home, in New England whaling towns, Lisbon suburbs and Rotterdam docks, and the remittances they send have kept the islands alive through two centuries of drought.
Read full profile →Cabo Verdeans of São Tomé
São Tomé and Príncipe · Cabo Verde
Islanders sent from a famine to a plantation — tens of thousands recruited from drought-stricken Cabo Verde to the cocoa estates, whose descendants form a distinct community that neither fully returned nor fully belonged.
Read full profile →Canarii of Gran Canaria
Canary Islands
The aboriginal people of Gran Canaria, who held out against Castile for five years behind painted caves and grain fortresses, whose two rival kingdoms met in a stone-walled council, and whose name the whole archipelago now carries.
Read full profile →Chã das Caldeiras community
Cabo Verde
The village inside a live volcano — a few hundred people farming vine and coffee on black lava at 1,700 metres, twice buried by eruption and twice rebuilt, with a founding French ancestor whose surname most of them still carry.
Read full profile →Chaamba
Algeria
The camel Arabs of the northern Sahara — nomads of the Grand Erg whose méhariste companies the French recruited to police the desert, and whose position at Ghardaïa alongside the Mozabites has periodically turned violent.
Read full profile →Chagga
Tanzania
The banana-grove people of Kilimanjaro whose ancient irrigation channels, coffee cooperatives and terraced kihamba gardens turned Africa's highest mountain into one of its most prosperous and densely settled landscapes.
Read full profile →Chagossians
Mauritius
The people removed from their islands — Ilois families deported from the Chagos Archipelago between 1968 and 1973 to make room for a military base, who have spent half a century in Mauritius and Britain litigating for the right to go home.
Read full profile →Chewa
Malawi · Zambia · Mozambique
The Maravi heirs who gave Malawi its name — a matrilineal farming civilization whose Nyau secret society dances the Gule Wamkulu, 'the Great Dance', where masked spirits of the dead, beasts and moral caricatures instruct the living.
Read full profile →Chleuh (Ishelhiyen)
Morocco
The Amazigh of the Souss and the western High Atlas — argan growers, collective-granary builders and the most successful commercial migrants in Morocco, whose village assemblies and written poetry tradition are among the oldest continuous institutions in the country.
Read full profile →Chokwe
Angola · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Zambia
The master carvers and hunters of the Angolan plateau — whose Chihongo and Pwo masks, sand-drawn sona mathematics and the epic of Chibinda Ilunga made a once-small hunting people the great art-civilization of three borders.
Read full profile →Chopi (Vachopi)
Mozambique
The orchestra-builders of Inhambane — whose timbila xylophone ensembles play composed, multi-movement symphonies with sung social commentary, a tradition UNESCO proclaimed a masterpiece of humanity's oral heritage.
Read full profile →Chuwabo
Mozambique
The people of the Zambezi delta's northern edge — matrilineal coconut and rice farmers of Quelimane whose country was carved into prazo estates by Portuguese-African warlords and then into the world's largest coconut plantation.
Read full profile →Communities of the Mugamba
Burundi
The people of Burundi's cold southern crest, tea growers on the Congo-Nile divide, whose region has supplied both the army officers and the rebellions of a country where the north-south division has mattered as much as any other.
Read full profile →Comorians and Mahorais of Réunion
Réunion · Comoros · Mayotte
The island's Muslim minority from the archipelago to the north — Comorian and Mahorais families who came for work and schooling, built mosques in a Catholic department, and occupy an uneasy position between French citizenship and foreign origin.
Read full profile →Comorians of Zanzibar
Zanzibar · Comoros · Tanzania
The islanders from the south — Comorian families who settled Zanzibar as scholars, clerks and traders under the sultanate, held a position between Arab and mainlander, and were caught badly by the revolution that abolished both.
Read full profile →Copts
Egypt
Egypt's indigenous Christians — the largest Christian community in the Middle East, whose liturgy preserves the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, who invented monasticism, and whose calendar still counts the years from Diocletian's persecution.
Read full profile →Daasanach
Ethiopia · Kenya
Herders and flood-retreat farmers of the Omo delta at the head of Lake Turkana, who take in outsiders as full members through a formal adoption system, and whose entire agricultural cycle depended on a river flood that a dam upstream has now regulated away.
Read full profile →Dagomba (Dagbamba)
Ghana
The drum-history kingdom of northern Ghana — Dagbon, founded by the red hunter Tohazie's line, where lunsi drummers recite seven centuries of kings, and the Damba festival turns Tamale and Yendi into courts of praise.
Read full profile →Damara (ǂNūkhoen)
Namibia
Namibia's oldest unresolved question — a Bantu-featured people speaking a Khoekhoe click language, whose origins remain genuinely unexplained, who were enslaved by their neighbours and then confined to a homeland of stone by the apartheid administration.
Read full profile →Dan (Yacouba)
Côte d'Ivoire · Liberia · Guinea
The forest people of the Ivorian west — carvers of the serene, polished masks that Modigliani's generation studied, keepers of the leopard society, the stilt-dancers who tower over festivals, and a culture where every mask is a spirit with a name and a temper.
Read full profile →Datooga (Barabaig)
Tanzania
Nilotic cattle herders of the Rift country around Mount Hanang and Lake Eyasi, whose brass and iron work supplies their Hadza neighbours, whose women wear scarified faces and beaded hide dresses, and who lost their best grazing to a Canadian-funded wheat scheme.
Read full profile →Dawro
Ethiopia
Omotic farmers between the Omo and the Gojeb whose ancestors built a defensive wall system running for hundreds of kilometres across the hills — one of the largest pre-modern fortifications in Africa and almost unknown outside Ethiopia.
Read full profile →Dendi
Benin · Niger · Nigeria
The Songhay of the far south — descendants of the Songhay empire's survivors who withdrew downriver after Tondibi, and who became the Muslim merchants of northern Benin's Niger valley towns.
Read full profile →Dhulbahante
Puntland · Somaliland · Somalia
The Darod clan of the Nugaal and Sool — the core of the Dervish state that fought Britain for twenty years, and the community whose territory has been the flashpoint between Somaliland and Puntland for three decades.
Read full profile →Didinga
South Sudan
Herders and terrace farmers of the Didinga hills above Chukudum, close kin of the Murle whose ancestors parted from them centuries ago, whose rainmakers still open the season and whose hills gave the SPLA one of its safest bases.
Read full profile →Digil
Somalia
Farmers of the land between the Shabelle and the Jubba, speakers of Maay rather than the Somali of the north, whose settled agriculture and mixed origins placed them outside the pastoral genealogies that Somali politics is organised around.
Read full profile →Dinka (Jieng)
South Sudan
The cattle-keeping people of the White Nile floodplain — South Sudan's largest nation, whose color-poems for oxen, towering height, cattle-camp youth culture and priest-chiefs of the fishing-spear built a civilization around the herd.
Read full profile →Dioula
Côte d'Ivoire · Burkina Faso · Mali
The traders whose language became a lingua franca — Mande merchants who carried Islam and commerce along the kola routes for six centuries, built the mud mosques of the northern savanna, and whose name in Côte d'Ivoire came to mean northerner and, for a time, foreigner.
Read full profile →Dishiishe
Puntland · Somalia
A Harti Darod clan of the north-eastern coast, holding the fishing settlements and frankincense country between the Majeerteen heartland and the Gulf of Aden, and the community most directly caught between piracy, foreign trawlers and the sea itself.
Read full profile →Djerbians
Tunisia
The island community of southern Tunisia — Ibadi Amazigh, Sunni Arab and one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, sharing an island of underground mosques, fortified oil presses and a synagogue that has drawn pilgrims for over a thousand years.
Read full profile →Dogon
Mali · Burkina Faso
Cliff-dwelling farmers of Mali's Bandiagara Escarpment whose intricate cosmology, mask society and granary-studded villages have made them one of the most studied — and most storied — cultures in Africa.
Read full profile →Dorze
Ethiopia
Weavers and bamboo-builders of the Gamo highlands — whose towering elephant-shaped houses stand for decades and can be picked up and moved when termites bite, and whose shemma cotton weaving clothes much of Ethiopia.
Read full profile →Duala
Cameroon
The estuary traders who gave Cameroon its port and its name — middlemen kings of the Wouri whose Ngondo water-festival honours the Jengu spirits, and whose 1884 treaty and 1914 martyrdom shaped a nation's history.
Read full profile →Ebira (Igbirra)
Nigeria
Weavers and farmers of the Okene highlands west of the confluence, makers of the hand-woven cloth that clothes half of Nigeria's ceremonies, and holders of the ekuechi masquerade in which the dead return once a year to speak in their own voices.
Read full profile →Edo (Benin Kingdom)
Nigeria
The people of Benin City, whose Oba-centered civilization produced the world-renowned Benin Bronzes, a moated city that astonished early European visitors, and a living monarchy whose court ritual continues after seven centuries.
Read full profile →Efik
Nigeria · Cameroon
The traders of Old Calabar — a Cross River people whose Ekpe leopard society governed the port, whose nsibidi ideographs crossed the Atlantic into Cuba, and whose kings' letters are among West Africa's earliest surviving African-written records.
Read full profile →El Molo
Kenya
Fishers and crocodile hunters on the south-eastern shore of Lake Turkana, long described as Kenya's smallest community, whose Cushitic language died within living memory and whose descendants are now rebuilding an identity around the lake that has both fed them and made them ill.
Read full profile →Emafikamuva
Eswatini
Those who arrived after — the clans that joined the Swazi kingdom late, including refugees from the Zulu wars and Sotho and Tsonga groups, absorbed as full members but with the newest and weakest claims to land.
Read full profile →Emakhandzambili
Eswatini
Those found ahead — the clans already living in the Swazi country when the Dlamini arrived, absorbed into the kingdom on terms that gave them ritual precedence over the land and a permanently ambiguous political standing.
Read full profile →Equatoguinean Exiles
Equatorial Guinea · Cameroon
The third of the country that fled — Equatoguineans who left during the Macías years, when schools closed, the word intellectual became an accusation and the president declared himself the country's only miracle, and whose descendants live in Spain, Gabon and Cameroon.
Read full profile →Esan (Ishan)
Nigeria
People of thirty-five small kingdoms on the plateau north-east of Benin City, whose Onojie rulers each hold an independent throne, and whose name is said to come from the Bini word for those who fled.
Read full profile →Eshira (Gisir)
Gabon
Farmers of Gabon's Ngounié and Nyanga valleys whose women's mwiri and bwiti-derived societies are unusually strong, and whose country holds the Fernan Vaz lagoon and the forest where Albert Schweitzer built his hospital.
Read full profile →Ewe
Ghana · Togo · Benin
The people of the Volta estuary and coastal lagoons whose polyrhythmic drumming, kente weaving and Vodu religion shaped three nations — bound by the memory of a shared escape from the tyrant king of Notsé.
Read full profile →Fang
Gabon · Equatorial Guinea · Cameroon
The forest people of the mvet epic and byeri ancestor reliquaries — whose migrations across the equatorial rainforest, guardian sculptures that transfixed Picasso's generation, and harp-zither bards made them Central Africa's great epic civilization.
Read full profile →Fellahin of the Delta
Egypt
The cultivators of the Nile Delta — the people who have farmed the same green triangle for five thousand years, whose village life shaped Egyptian literature and cinema, and whose land is now being eaten by concrete and salt.
Read full profile →Fernandinos
Equatorial Guinea
The creole elite of Fernando Pó — descendants of freed slaves landed by British anti-slavery patrols, Sierra Leonean Krio settlers and West African traders, who spoke English in a Spanish colony and owned the cocoa farms before losing everything after independence.
Read full profile →Figuig oasis communities
Morocco
Seven walled ksour of an Amazigh oasis on Morocco's eastern edge, watered by a hand-cut irrigation network divided to the minute, and cut off from the palm groves that a closed border left on the Algerian side.
Read full profile →Fipa
Tanzania
Farmers and ironworkers of the plateau between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, whose mound-and-compost cultivation system fed a dense population without fallow, and whose tall induction furnaces produced steel that European metallurgists studied in astonishment in the 1970s.
Read full profile →Fon
Benin · Togo
Founders of the Kingdom of Dahomey — the disciplined royal state of Abomey with its women warriors, appliqué chronicles and bas-relief palaces — and the heartland people of Vodun, the religion that crossed the Atlantic and reshaped the Americas.
Read full profile →Forros
São Tomé and Príncipe
The freed — descendants of the enslaved liberated on São Tomé before abolition, who refused to return to the plantations, kept their own Creole and their own dance-drama, and became the island's landholding majority.
Read full profile →Frafra (Gurunsi of Bolgatanga)
Ghana · Burkina Faso
Farmers of the Upper East around Bolgatanga whose women paint the walls of their compounds in bold geometric patterns, whose baskets are exported worldwide, and whose region supplied the labour that built colonial Ghana's south.
Read full profile →Franco-Mauritians
Mauritius
The descendants of the island's French planters — a very small minority who kept their language, their estates and a disproportionate share of the sugar and tourism economy through British rule, independence and beyond.
Read full profile →Franco-Seychellois
Seychelles
The planter families of the granite islands — descendants of the first French settlers of 1770, who held the coconut and cinnamon estates, gave the islands most of their surnames and place names, and lost their land in the nationalisations after 1977.
Read full profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
Nigeria · Niger · Mali · Senegal · Guinea · Cameroon · Burkina Faso · Mauritania
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Read full profile →Fur
Sudan
The people who gave Darfur its name — 'the home of the Fur' — whose Keira sultanate ruled a Saharan-Sahelian empire from Jebel Marra for three centuries, and whose homeland became the site of the 21st century's first genocide.
Read full profile →Ga (Ga-Dangme)
Ghana
The founders of Accra — fisherfolk and traders of the Gulf shore whose Homowo festival 'hoots at hunger', whose twin celebrations honor double blessings, and whose fantasy coffins carry the dead to sea in aeroplanes, fish and cocoa pods.
Read full profile →Gabbra
Kenya · Ethiopia
Camel nomads of the Chalbi desert and the Ethiopian borderlands, who keep one of the last working generation-grade calendars in Africa, move their houses on camelback five or six times a year, and read a lunar calendar so exact that anthropologists have used it to date events.
Read full profile →Gabooye
Somaliland · Somalia · Djibouti
The occupational communities of the Somali world — smiths, leatherworkers, hunters and barbers whose skills every household needs and whose members have been barred from intermarriage with the noble clans for centuries, and who now organise against that exclusion.
Read full profile →Gadabuursi (Samaroon)
Somaliland · Djibouti · Ethiopia
The Dir clan of the north-west borderlands — farmers as much as herders around Borama, hosts of the 1993 conference that gave Somaliland its constitution, and inventors of an indigenous Somali script that briefly rivalled the Latin alphabet.
Read full profile →Gamo
Ethiopia
Highland farmers and weavers of the ridges above Lake Abaya, organised into dozens of small self-governing dere with assemblies rather than kings, and the source of most of the woven cotton Ethiopians wear.
Read full profile →Ganwa
Burundi
Burundi's princely stratum — the sons and grandsons of kings who governed the chiefdoms, stood outside the Hutu and Tutsi categories entirely, and produced both the prince who won independence and the men who lost the monarchy.
Read full profile →Gbaya
Central African Republic · Cameroon · Republic of the Congo
The savanna-forest farmers of the CAR's west — whose Karnu prophet led the great Kongo-Wara rebellion against French rule, and whose hunting societies, initiation dances and sanza thumb-pianos hold the country's largest people together.
Read full profile →Gedeo
Ethiopia
Agroforesters of the escarpment above Lake Abaya whose enset-and-coffee gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, and whose hillsides carry the largest concentration of carved standing stelae in Africa.
Read full profile →Ghadamsi
Libya
The people of the pearl of the desert — an oasis town at the Libya-Algeria-Tunisia meeting point whose covered streets, painted white interiors and rooftop world reserved for women made it one of the most remarkable settlements in the Sahara, now largely emptied into a modern town beside it.
Read full profile →Gharyan and Nafusa cave communities
Libya
Amazigh communities of the Jebel Nafusa escarpment south of Tripoli who lived in courtyard houses dug down into the rock, whose language was banned outright under Gaddafi, and whose towns were among the first to rise in 2011.
Read full profile →Gnawa
Morocco · Algeria
The descendants of enslaved West Africans in Morocco — a brotherhood rather than a tribe, whose all-night lila ceremonies heal through possession, whose guembri and iron qraqeb built a music now played from Essaouira to the world's festivals, and who are named for the country they were taken from.
Read full profile →Gogo (Wagogo)
Tanzania
The cattle-and-millet people of Tanzania's dry central plateau — masters of survival on the caravan road to the coast, whose msunyunho ritual, ng'oma dance-competitions and celebrated polyphonic singing made Ugogo a crossroads of sound and endurance.
Read full profile →Gomeros (Silbo whistlers)
Canary Islands
The people of La Gomera — terrace farmers of a ravine-cut island who inherited a whistled language from the Guanches, carried it into Spanish, nearly lost it to the telephone, and now teach it to every child in the island's schools.
Read full profile →Gonja
Ghana
The cavalry kingdom of northern Ghana — founded by Mande horsemen from Mali in the sixteenth century, ruled by a paramount who rotates among divisional gates, and holder of the Damba festival and one of West Africa's important Arabic chronicles.
Read full profile →Gourmantché
Burkina Faso · Niger · Togo · Benin
The people of the eastern savanna — farmers and hunters of a kingdom that survived alongside the Mossi for six centuries, whose diviners are consulted across the region, and whose country has become the epicentre of the Sahel's insurgency.
Read full profile →Grebo
Liberia · Côte d'Ivoire
The people of Liberia's south-eastern corner — early converts and early rebels, who produced the country's first indigenous Episcopal bishop and also its most serious nineteenth-century risings against settler rule.
Read full profile →Griqua
South Africa · Namibia
The people who made states out of the frontier — Khoekhoe, San, enslaved and settler descendants who took a name for themselves, founded republics with constitutions and coinage at Griquatown and Kokstad, lost them to diamonds and annexation, and are still seeking recognition as an indigenous people.
Read full profile →Guanches
Canary Islands
The Amazigh people of the Canary Islands — cave-dwelling shepherds who reached the Atlantic archipelago from North Africa around two thousand years ago, resisted Castilian conquest for a century, and left their language in place names, their whistling in La Gomera and their DNA in the modern islanders.
Read full profile →Gumuz
Ethiopia · Sudan
Nilo-Saharan shifting cultivators of the hot Blue Nile lowlands between the Ethiopian escarpment and the Sudanese border, historically raided for slaves by highlanders and lowlanders alike, and now living on the land the Renaissance Dam's reservoir has flooded.
Read full profile →Gurage
Ethiopia
The enterprising enset-farmers of Ethiopia's central-south — whose intensive gardens and the yajoka qicha customary constitution ordered a stateless society, whose migrant traders built a proverbial reputation for hard work, and whose kitfo and cuisine spread nationwide.
Read full profile →Guro (Kweni)
Côte d'Ivoire
The carvers of central Côte d'Ivoire — a people of the forest-savanna edge whose masks, with their long faces, high foreheads and painted horns, are among the most collected in West African art, and whose Zaouli dance has become a national emblem.
Read full profile →Gurunsi (Kasena-Nankani and Nuna)
Burkina Faso · Ghana
The painted-house builders of the Volta basin — farmers whose women decorate every wall with geometric patterns in earth pigment, and whose Tiébélé compound is among the most photographed pieces of architecture in Africa.
Read full profile →Ha (Waha)
Tanzania
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Kigoma highlands above Lake Tanganyika, close kin of the Rundi and Rwanda in language and once organised in six kingdoms of their own, whose country has absorbed refugees from Burundi and Congo continuously for sixty years.
Read full profile →Haalpulaar of the Senegal River
Mauritania · Senegal
The black Mauritanians of the river valley — Pulaar-speaking farmers and herders whose expulsion in 1989 sent tens of thousands across the river, and whose citizenship in the country of their birth is still contested.
Read full profile →Hadendoa
Sudan · Eritrea
The Beja of the Red Sea hills — camel herders whose hair the British called fuzzy-wuzzy and whose ancestors broke a British infantry square at Tamai, and whose language descends from the speech of the ancient Blemmyes.
Read full profile →Hadiya
Ethiopia
Cushitic-speaking farmers of the Ethiopian south whose name once belonged to a medieval Muslim sultanate that fought the Christian empire for three centuries, and whose modern territory is one of the most densely populated rural areas in Africa.
Read full profile →Hadjarai
Chad
The people of the rocks — a cluster of distinct groups in Chad's Guéra massif who took refuge among granite inselbergs from slave raiders, share the margai spirit cult rather than a common language, and became a name only because outsiders needed one.
Read full profile →Hadza (Hadzabe)
Tanzania
One of the world's last hunter-gatherer peoples — click-speaking foragers of Lake Eyasi whose language has no established relatives, whose honey-guiding partnership with a wild bird is famous, and whose land is the front line of indigenous rights in Tanzania.
Read full profile →Hamar (Hamer)
Ethiopia
The cattle-and-sorghum people of Ethiopia's lower Omo — whose bull-jumping ukuli bula makes a boy a man, whose women's ochre-and-butter ringlets and iron torcs are famous, and whose age-grades and evangadi night-dances order a proud pastoral world.
Read full profile →Hambukushu
Botswana · Namibia · Angola
The rainmakers of the Okavango panhandle — farmers and fishers whose chiefs were sought across the region for their control of rain, and whose baskets, coiled from palm and dyed with bark, are among southern Africa's most collected craft.
Read full profile →Harari
Ethiopia
The people of the walled city of Harar — Islam's fourth holy city, a UNESCO world heritage of 82 mosques within five gates, whose merchants traded the Horn, whose women's dress is famous, and whose hyenas are fed by hand at the walls each night.
Read full profile →Haratin
Mauritania · Morocco · Algeria
The Black population of the Saharan oases and Moorish society — descendants of enslaved people who worked the date gardens and the water tunnels, the largest single group in Mauritania, and the community at the centre of the world's longest-running struggle against chattel slavery.
Read full profile →Hausa
Nigeria · Niger
West Africa's greatest urban trading civilization — the walled city-states of Kano, Katsina and Zaria, a lingua franca spoken by over 80 million, centuries of Islamic scholarship, and the spectacular horsemanship of the Durbar.
Read full profile →Havu
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Fishers, farmers and cattle keepers of Idjwi island and the Kivu shore, whose island kingdom is the largest in Lake Kivu, and whose community holds the highest recorded prevalence of albinism in Africa.
Read full profile →Hawiye
Somalia
The clan family of the Somali centre — pastoralists and traders of the Shabelle and the Mogadishu hinterland, whose lineages built the capital's commerce, led the movement that toppled Siad Barre, and then fought each other through the ruins of the city.
Read full profile →Haya
Tanzania
The banana-grove kingdoms of Lake Victoria's western shore — Bahaya iron-masters who smelted carbon steel two millennia ago, whose Kagera courts kept epic praise-poetry, and whose coffee-and-banana kibanja gardens are among Africa's oldest continuous farms.
Read full profile →Hedareb (Beni Amer)
Eritrea · Sudan
Camel and cattle herders of the Eritrean-Sudanese lowlands, speakers of Beja Tigre and Arabic in varying combination, formed from a nineteenth-century confederation of Beja and Tigre-speaking groups under the Diglal, and among the most consistently displaced peoples of the Horn.
Read full profile →Hehe
Tanzania
The southern highlanders who beat a German army — whose chief Mkwawa forged a nation from scattered chiefdoms, destroyed a colonial column at Lugalo, and whose skull's return from Germany became a landmark of restitution.
Read full profile →Hema (Bahema)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Cattle keepers of the Ituri plateau, related in language and herding tradition to the Hima of Uganda, whose colonial preferment and land titles made them prosperous and then made them targets in the Ituri wars.
Read full profile →Hemba
Democratic Republic of the Congo
People of the right bank of the Lualaba in northern Katanga whose ancestor figures — serene, closed-eyed, precisely carved portraits of named forebears — are among the most admired sculptures in African art, and were unattributed to them until the 1970s.
Read full profile →Herero (Ovaherero)
Namibia · Botswana
The cattle-herders of central Namibia — whose women's Victorian-derived otjikaiva dresses and horn-shaped headdresses are worn in proud defiance, whose sacred ancestral fire (okuruwo) never dies, and who survived the 20th century's first genocide.
Read full profile →Himba
Namibia · Angola
Pastoralists of the Kunene — famed for the otjize ochre-and-butter that colors skin and braids red, a dual-descent kinship system counted through both mother and father, and the sacred ancestral fire that must never die.
Read full profile →Hlengwe
Zimbabwe · Mozambique · South Africa
The people of the south-eastern lowveld — Tsonga-speaking farmers and hunters of the dry Save and Limpopo country, moved off their land twice for a national park and a sugar estate, and split across three borders.
Read full profile →Holli (Ohori)
Benin · Nigeria
The forest Yoruba who stayed apart — a community of the Benin-Nigeria borderland known for resisting both the Dahomey kingdom and French rule, and for a scarification tradition so distinctive it functioned as a passport.
Read full profile →Ibibio & Efik
Nigeria
The Cross River peoples of Nigeria's southeast — masters of the Ekpe leopard society and its nsibidi ideographic script, of the fattening-room bride, and of the raffia-and-wood masks that crossed the Atlantic to become Cuba's Abakuá.
Read full profile →Idoma
Nigeria
The Benue valley people of the white-faced Ichahoho masks and the Alekwu ancestral cult — farmers and hunters whose Och'Idoma unites a once-stateless nation, and whose Ogrinya warrior dance still stamps the Middle Belt's festivals.
Read full profile →Igala
Nigeria
People of the Niger-Benue confluence whose Attah kingdom at Idah fought Benin and the Royal Niger Company, whose bronze and brass work belongs to the Lower Niger tradition, and whose princess Inikpi is remembered as having been buried alive for her country.
Read full profile →Igbo
Nigeria
One of Africa's great republican civilizations — over 35 million people of southeastern Nigeria whose village democracies, masquerade societies, Nri priest-kingship and the astonishing 9th-century bronzes of Igbo-Ukwu testify to deep indigenous sophistication.
Read full profile →Ijaw (Izon)
Nigeria
The people of the Niger Delta's ten thousand creeks — canoe-house traders, masters of the water-spirit masquerades whose headdresses skim the surface like living fish, and the conscience of the Delta's oil age.
Read full profile →Ik (Teuso)
Uganda
A few thousand mountain farmers on the Morungole escarpment above Kidepo, made famous by an ethnography that described them as a people whose morality had collapsed under starvation — a portrait they and later researchers have spent fifty years disputing.
Read full profile →Ila
Zambia
The cattle people of the Kafue flats — herders of a seasonal floodplain who follow the water with their animals, whose men once wore towering horn-shaped hairstyles, and whose grazing grounds are now a dam-regulated wetland shared with lechwe antelope.
Read full profile →Ilchamus
Kenya
Maa-speaking irrigators and fishers of the Lake Baringo shore, who built canal systems in a semi-desert, ate fish when their pastoral cousins would not, and won a landmark Kenyan court ruling in 2006 establishing their right to a constituency of their own.
Read full profile →Imbo plain communities
Burundi · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of the lakeshore strip — fishers, palm-oil growers and traders on the hot plain between the Burundian hills and Lake Tanganyika, whose Swahili-speaking port quarter made Bujumbura a different place from the country behind it.
Read full profile →Imraguen
Mauritania
The fishers who work with dolphins — a small community on Mauritania's Banc d'Arguin who wade into the Atlantic beating the water to call wild dolphins that drive mullet into their nets, a partnership found almost nowhere else on earth.
Read full profile →Indians of Djibouti
Djibouti
Gujarati and Sindhi trading families who followed the French port and the Ethiopian railway, financed the import trade for a century, and remain a small commercial community in a city built entirely on moving other people's cargo.
Read full profile →Indians of Zanzibar
Zanzibar · Tanzania
The financiers of the clove and ivory economy — Gujarati, Kutchi and Bohra merchant families who bankrolled the Omani sultanate, built the stone town's finest houses, and largely left within a decade of the 1964 revolution.
Read full profile →Indo-Mauritians
Mauritius
The majority of the island — descendants of nearly half a million indentured workers who landed at the Aapravasi Ghat after 1834, kept Bhojpuri alive in the cane belt, built the temples of Grand Bassin, and turned a labour system into political and economic power.
Read full profile →Indo-Seychellois and Sino-Seychellois
Seychelles
The trading families of Victoria — Gujarati, Tamil and Chinese merchants who arrived under British rule, built the shops that supplied the estates, endowed the islands' Hindu temple and mosque, and have long married into the Creole majority.
Read full profile →Iraqw
Tanzania
A Cushitic island in a Bantu sea — the terraced-farming people of Mbulu whose sunken tembe houses hide in the hillside, whose Cushitic language links them to the Horn a thousand kilometres away, and whose masay purification rites bind the community.
Read full profile →Isaaq
Somaliland · Somalia
The largest clan family of the north-west — livestock exporters and traders of Hargeisa, Burao and Berbera, targets of the state bombardment of their cities in 1988, and the political core of the Somaliland republic declared in 1991.
Read full profile →Isaaq of Djibouti
Djibouti · Somaliland
A Somali clan family whose merchants helped build Djibouti City and whose kin dominate Somaliland next door, holding commercial weight in a republic whose politics were built around a balance between Issa and Afar that leaves them outside it.
Read full profile →Issa (Ciise)
Djibouti · Ethiopia · Somaliland
The Somali clan of Djibouti — pastoralists of the arid triangle where three countries meet, whose Xeer Ciise customary constitution has been recited and applied for centuries, and who form the political core of the Djiboutian state.
Read full profile →Iteso (Teso)
Uganda · Kenya
The largest Ateker (Karamojong-cluster) farming people — of eastern Uganda and western Kenya, who turned from cattle-nomadism to the hoe, kept the akiriket council-circles and the ajosi harvest dances, and became a granary of the Lake Kyoga basin.
Read full profile →Itsekiri
Nigeria
Traders and fishers of the Benin river's creeks whose Olu's kingdom of Warri dealt with Portugal from the 1480s, sent a prince to be educated in Lisbon, and produced Nana Olomu, the last great middleman the Royal Navy went to war against.
Read full profile →Ja'aliyin
Sudan
The riverain Arabs of the Nile bend above Khartoum — farmers and traders claiming descent from the Prophet's uncle, heirs to the Christian Nubian kingdoms whose land they occupy, and one of the two groups that have supplied most of independent Sudan's rulers.
Read full profile →Japadhola (Adhola)
Uganda
A Luo island in a Bantu sea: Nilotic-speaking farmers around Tororo who broke from the southward Luo migration, settled in forest for protection, and kept their language surrounded on all sides by peoples who speak nothing like it.
Read full profile →Jbala
Morocco
The mountain people of Morocco's north-west — Arabic-speaking with an Amazigh substrate, growers of the country's cannabis and of its finest figs, keepers of the ayta jabaliya sung poetry and of the blue-washed town of Chefchaouen.
Read full profile →Jeberti
Eritrea
Tigrinya-speaking Muslims of the Eritrean highlands, traders and craftsmen in a Christian agricultural society, whose long campaign to be recognised as an ethnic group rather than a religious minority was rejected by the Eritrean state.
Read full profile →Jerid oasis communities
Tunisia
The date growers of Tozeur and Nefta — oasis farmers who built a three-storey agriculture of palms, fruit trees and vegetables over a thousand hand-dug springs, divided the water by the minute, and faced the Sahara from towns built of patterned brick.
Read full profile →Jola (Diola)
Senegal · The Gambia · Guinea-Bissau
The rice-farming people of the Casamance and Lower Gambia — decentralised and fiercely independent, keepers of the awasena religion of the shrine-spirits (boekin), the great king-priest of Oussouye, and the wrestling and mask traditions of the estuary forests.
Read full profile →Jukun (Wapan)
Nigeria
Heirs of Kwararafa — the confederacy that raided Kano and Bornu — whose Aku Uka is a divine king traditionally hidden from public view, and whose Puje festival and akuma masquerades keep a Benue kingdom's memory alive.
Read full profile →Jur Chol (Luo of Bahr el Ghazal)
South Sudan
Luo-speaking farmers and ironworkers of Bahr el Ghazal, whose smiths supplied the spears and hoes of the Dinka among whom they live, whose name in Dinka means simply strangers, and whose language links them to communities as far away as Kenya.
Read full profile →Kababish
Sudan
Camel nomads of the Kordofan desert whose confederation was assembled in the nineteenth century out of unrelated lineages, held together by a single family the British then made into a paramountcy, and whose range the droughts of the 1980s emptied.
Read full profile →Kabye
Togo · Benin
The terrace farmers of Togo's northern mountains — iron-working people who turned steep rock into fields, whose evala wrestling initiations turn a whole region out every July, and who have supplied Togo's army and its rulers for sixty years.
Read full profile →Kabyle (Iqbayliyen)
Algeria
The mountain Amazigh of northern Algeria — whose village assemblies wrote their own constitutions, whose silver-and-coral jewellery and pottery are famous, and whose Amazigh Spring forced a state to recognise a language it had denied.
Read full profile →Kaf (Afro-Réunionnais)
Réunion
The descendants of the enslaved on Réunion — Malagasy and East African in origin, makers of maloya, the drum music their masters banned and the French state banned again until 1981, now inscribed by UNESCO and sung at every political rally on the island.
Read full profile →Kafficho (Kaffa)
Ethiopia
The people of the Kingdom of Kaffa, whose forests are where Coffea arabica grows wild and from which the word coffee most likely comes, whose kings held out against the Ethiopian empire until 1897, and whose montane forest is a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Read full profile →Kaguru
Tanzania
Matrilineal farmers of the Itumba mountains in Kilosa, whose ritual life and moral reasoning were recorded across four decades by an anthropologist who kept returning, producing one of the fullest portraits of a single African community in the literature.
Read full profile →Kakwa
Uganda · South Sudan · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Eastern Nilotic farmers of the tri-border country where Uganda, South Sudan and the DR Congo meet, dispersed across three states, associated in outside memory with Idi Amin and in their own with a rain-chief tradition and with Yumbe's long road back from insurgency.
Read full profile →Kalanga
Zimbabwe · Botswana
The builders' descendants — a people whose ancestors raised the stone walls of Khami and Great Zimbabwe's successor states, whose Mwali shrine at Njelele is still consulted for rain by two countries, and whose language is taught in neither.
Read full profile →Kalenjin
Kenya · Uganda
The 'runners of the Rift' — a highland-Nilotic family of Nandi, Kipsigis, Tugen, Marakwet and more, whose age-set republics, koitalel prophets and the Kerio escarpment's terraced fields produced age-old cattle culture and the world's greatest distance runners.
Read full profile →Kaliko
South Sudan · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Central Sudanic farmers of the Congo-Nile watershed at the South Sudan-DR Congo border, close kin of the Lugbara and Avukaya, whose small population has been displaced by every war in either country for seventy years.
Read full profile →Kamba (Akamba)
Kenya
The trading nation of Kenya's eastern drylands — caravan masters who linked the coast to the interior long before the railway, world-renowned woodcarvers of Wamunyu, drummers of the gravity-defying kilumi and mbeni dances, and dryland farmers of stoic genius.
Read full profile →Kambaata
Ethiopia
Enset farmers on the slopes of Mount Hambaricho in southern Ethiopia, living at some of the highest rural densities on the continent, whose land shortage has made them a national case study and whose women's rights campaigns have been among Ethiopia's most effective.
Read full profile →Kanembu
Chad · Niger · Nigeria
The founding people of the Kanem empire — Lake Chad farmers and herders whose eleventh-century state was the first in the region to adopt Islam, whose mai ruled for a thousand years, and whose descendants still farm the lake's retreating shore.
Read full profile →Kanuri
Nigeria · Niger · Chad · Cameroon
The imperial people of the Lake Chad basin — heirs of Kanem-Bornu, a Muslim state that lasted a thousand years, whose sultans corresponded with Istanbul and whose scholars, saddled cavalry and desert trade routes linked the Sahara to the savanna.
Read full profile →Kaonde
Zambia · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of Zambia's north-west — Luba-descended farmers and hunters whose territory holds the copper of Solwezi and Kansanshi, and whose chiefs still perform the Ntongo and Juba ceremonies over ground now valued for what is under it.
Read full profile →Kapsiki (Higi)
Cameroon · Nigeria
Farmers and smiths of the Mandara mountains' volcanic plugs, whose blacksmith caste holds funerary, medical and divinatory monopoly, and whose landscape of basalt spires is Cameroon's most photographed.
Read full profile →Karamojong
Uganda
The cattle-herding warriors of Uganda's northeastern plains — an Ateker people whose generation-set system, sacred akiriket sacrifices, manyatta kraals and deep cattle-cosmology held a proudly pastoral world against a century of pressure to settle.
Read full profile →Kare (Kari)
Central African Republic · Cameroon
Savannah farmers of the Ouham and the Cameroonian border whose villages lay on the route of the nineteenth-century slave raids from Wadai and Bagirmi, and whose region became the French concession companies' cotton and rubber ground.
Read full profile →Karoninka
The Gambia · Senegal
A small rice-growing people of the lower river islands, related to the Jola but distinct in speech, whose language is spoken by a few thousand and whose bolong creeks and mangrove paddies are among the oldest wet-rice landscapes in West Africa.
Read full profile →Kassena (Gurunsi)
Burkina Faso · Ghana
The painted-house builders of the Burkina–Ghana border — whose women cover the fortress-walls of Tiébélé in bold black, white and ochre geometry, and whose stateless earth-shrine villages held off the horsemen of the savanna kingdoms.
Read full profile →Kavango peoples
Namibia · Angola
The five river nations of Namibia's north-east — Kwangali, Mbunza, Shambyu, Gciriku and Mbukushu — farmers and fishers of a green strip along the Okavango, and the country's woodcarvers.
Read full profile →Kenga of Fitri
Chad
People of Lake Fitri in central Chad, a shallow inland lake with no outlet whose flood governs a whole economy, and the community from whom the sultanate of Yao takes its ruling line.
Read full profile →Kerkenniens
Tunisia
Islanders of a flat limestone archipelago off Sfax who fish with palm-frond fences built into the seabed, a technique older than any record of it, now UNESCO-listed and threatened by a sea that is rising over an island barely above it.
Read full profile →Khassonké
Mali · Senegal
The people between two worlds — a Mande-Fula fusion of western Mali whose Kayes homeland was France's first colonial capital in the Sudan, the terminus of the Dakar-Niger railway, and the source of a large share of France's West African migration.
Read full profile →Kibushi-speakers of Mayotte
Mayotte
Mayotte's Malagasy-speaking villages — descendants of Sakalava and other Malagasy settlers and refugees, who kept a Madagascar language on a Comorian island, and whose trumba possession ceremonies bring the royal ancestors of a country they left across the sea.
Read full profile →Kikuyu (Agĩkũyũ)
Kenya
Kenya's largest nation — farmers of the Mount Kenya highlands whose origin covenant at Mũkũrwe wa Nyagathanga, nine founding clan-mothers, age-set democracy and central role in the Mau Mau liberation struggle shaped modern Kenya.
Read full profile →Kim
Chad
Fishers and potters of the Chari's middle reaches around Bousso, whose women's pottery supplies markets across southern Chad and whose villages sit on a river that has been the region's road for a thousand years.
Read full profile →Kissi
Guinea · Sierra Leone · Liberia
The rice farmers of the three-border forest — a people split across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia whose ancestral stone figures are dug from their own fields, and whose region was where the 2014 Ebola epidemic began.
Read full profile →Kongo (Bakongo)
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Angola · Republic of the Congo · Gabon
Builders of the Kingdom of Kongo — a centralized Atlantic-African state with six centuries of recorded history, its own Christianity, minkisi power objects and a cosmology of the crossroads that profoundly shaped African-American religion and art.
Read full profile →Konkomba
Ghana · Togo
Yam farmers of the Oti plain on the Ghana-Togo border, a people without chiefs who were administered under other peoples' chiefs for a century, and whose demand for their own paramountcy produced Ghana's deadliest post-independence conflict.
Read full profile →Kono
Sierra Leone · Guinea
The people who live on the diamonds — farmers of Sierra Leone's eastern highlands whose district produced some of the largest stones ever found, and who have almost nothing to show for a century of extraction.
Read full profile →Konso
Ethiopia
The stone-terrace builders of Ethiopia's southern rift — whose 400-year-old walled hill-towns, generation-grading and the waka grave-markers of heroes make the Konso Cultural Landscape a UNESCO monument to a stateless agrarian civilisation.
Read full profile →Kota
Gabon · Republic of the Congo
The reliquary-makers of eastern Gabon — forest people whose copper-sheathed guardian figures sat atop baskets of ancestral bone, and whose abstract faces were among the objects that redirected European art in 1907.
Read full profile →Kotoko
Cameroon · Chad · Nigeria
City builders of the Chari and Logone floodplain, heirs to the Sao whose walled towns and terracotta heads are among the Chad basin's oldest urban record, and rulers of small sultanates that predate Bornu.
Read full profile →Kpelle (Guerzé)
Liberia · Guinea
Liberia's largest people — rice farmers of the forest interior whose Poro and Sande societies school every generation, whose 'moot' house-palavers became a model of restorative justice, and whose talking drums carry the forest's news.
Read full profile →Krio
Sierra Leone
The settler community of Freetown — descendants of freed slaves from Nova Scotia, London, Jamaica and captured slave ships, who built a Victorian city on the African coast, spread a language now spoken by most Sierra Leoneans, and were the region's teachers and clerks for a century.
Read full profile →Kroumirs (Khroumirie)
Tunisia · Algeria
The forest people of Tunisia's north-west — cork oak communities of the Kroumirie mountains whose cross-border raiding gave France its pretext for taking Tunisia in 1881, and whose damp green landscape is the opposite of everything the country is usually pictured as.
Read full profile →Kru
Liberia · Côte d'Ivoire
The seafarers of the Atlantic coast — canoe crews so skilled in surf that European ships hired them for two centuries, who refused to be enslaved and were feared for it, and whose men worked the whole coast from Freetown to the Congo.
Read full profile →Kuba
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The kingdom of the nyim in the Kasai forest — a confederation famed for the world's most elaborate raffia textiles (the 'Kasai velvets'), the Bushoong royal masks, wooden ndop king-portraits and a court that dazzled every visitor with art.
Read full profile →Kunama
Eritrea · Ethiopia
The oldest inhabitants of the Gash-Setit — a Nilo-Saharan-speaking, matrilineal farming people surrounded by Semitic and Cushitic neighbours, who resisted every state that reached them and who have been displaced by the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war.
Read full profile →Kuranko
Sierra Leone · Guinea
A Mande people of the northern hills whose chiefdoms sit on the Guinea border, whose hunters' associations and finaba praise-singers hold authority no chief can override, and whose oral tradition was recorded across four decades by a single anthropologist.
Read full profile →Kuria
Kenya · Tanzania
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Kenya-Tanzania border above the Mara, organised in clans and age-sets whose ritual cycles run across an international boundary, and known across East Africa both for the cattle raiding that has shaped their modern history and for the campaigns run from within the community against girls' cutting.
Read full profile →Kuyu
Republic of the Congo
The people of the Kouyou river — northern Congolese farmers and fishers whose kébé-kébé dance sends a carved head spinning above a whirling raffia column, and whose region has supplied the country's leadership for four decades.
Read full profile →La Diguois
Seychelles
The people of the third island — a granite outcrop of five square kilometres where ox carts outnumbered cars until the 1990s, whose beach is on half the postcards printed in the Indian Ocean, and whose community has watched tourism buy the island out from under it.
Read full profile →Lala
Zambia
The people of the Muchinga foothills — Bemba-related farmers of central Zambia whose country produced Alice Lenshina's Lumpa Church, the mass religious movement that Kenneth Kaunda's new government crushed in the year of independence.
Read full profile →Lamba
Zambia · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Matrilineal farmers and smiths of the Copperbelt, on whose land the mines were sunk and the towns built, and who watched a copper economy grow around them without becoming part of it.
Read full profile →Lari
Republic of the Congo
Kongo-speaking farmers of the Pool region behind Brazzaville, whose Matsouanist movement made a martyr of a clerk who died in a French prison, and whose region has been the ground of every Congolese civil conflict since 1959.
Read full profile →Lebou
Senegal
The fishing people of Cape Verde peninsula — the original inhabitants of the ground Dakar stands on, who declared their own republic in 1790, and whose ndeup healing ceremonies still draw the city's residents to the shore.
Read full profile →Leelkase
Puntland · Somalia
A Darod clan of the north-east — herders and traders of the Nugaal and the Bari coast whose sultanate sat between the larger Majeerteen and Dhulbahante blocs, and who have played the broker in Puntland's clan arithmetic ever since.
Read full profile →Lega (Rega)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Forest people of the Maniema and Kivu interior whose bwami association graded its members through a lifetime of initiations, each stage marked by ivory and wooden sculptures that became among the most sought-after and most looted objects in African art.
Read full profile →Lendu (Bale)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Central Sudanic farmers of the Ituri plateau west of Lake Albert, whose relationship with their Hema neighbours — reworked into a rigid hierarchy by Belgian administration — became the axis of a conflict that killed tens of thousands and produced the International Criminal Court's first convictions.
Read full profile →Libyan Jews
Libya
A community of more than two thousand years — present in Cyrenaica since Ptolemaic times, numbering forty thousand in 1948, and reduced to nothing by 1970, the only North African Jewish community to disappear entirely.
Read full profile →Limba
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone's oldest inhabitants by their own account and most others' — farmers and palm-wine tappers of the northern hills who kept no centralised state, produced the country's first president, and hold a storytelling tradition recorded in one of the classic works of African oral literature.
Read full profile →Lobi
Burkina Faso · Côte d'Ivoire · Ghana
The fiercely independent farmers of the Black Volta — builders of fortress-houses (soukala), carvers of the bateba shrine figures that stand for the thila spirits, and a people who never accepted a chief, a king or a colonial officer without a fight.
Read full profile →Lokele
Democratic Republic of the Congo
River traders and fishers of the Congo above and below Kisangani, whose long canoes ran the trade of the upper river, and whose drum language John Carrington studied so closely that he could hold conversations in it.
Read full profile →Lomwe
Malawi · Mozambique
Malawi's second-largest people — matrilineal cultivators who crossed from Mozambique in their tens of thousands to escape Portuguese forced labour, worked the tea estates of Mulanje, and were long dismissed as anguru until they organised.
Read full profile →Lozi (Barotse)
Zambia
The flood-plain kingdom of the upper Zambezi — whose Litunga leads the Kuomboka, the world's most majestic climate migration, moving his court by royal barge from flooded lowland to highland each year as drums command the river.
Read full profile →Luba
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The savanna empire of the Congo's heart — whose sacred kings traced descent from the hunter Kalala Ilunga, whose lukasa memory boards encode history in beads, and whose ideal of refined, remembered power shaped a whole region's political culture.
Read full profile →Lugbara
Uganda · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The West Nile people of the Uganda–Congo border — Sudanic-speaking farmers whose lineage elders wield the power of the ancestral 'ghost invocation', and whose classic ethnography made their moral world famous in anthropology.
Read full profile →Luguru
Tanzania
Matrilineal mountain farmers of the Uluguru range above Morogoro, whose refusal of a colonial terracing scheme in 1955 helped launch Tanganyikan nationalism, and whose forests supply most of Dar es Salaam's water.
Read full profile →Luhya (Abaluyia)
Kenya
Western Kenya's federation of seventeen-plus sub-nations — Bukusu, Maragoli, Wanga and kin — united by related Bantu dialects, the UNESCO-listed isukuti drum-dance, spectacular bullfighting festivals, and the Wanga kingdom, precolonial Kenya's most centralized monarchy.
Read full profile →Lulua (Bena Lulua)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
People of the Lulua river in Kasai, carvers of figures covered in raised scarification so fine that collectors mistook it for lace, and whose nineteenth-century hemp-smoking reform movement tried to abolish war, and whose 1959 conflict with Luba neighbours foreshadowed the Congo's independence crisis.
Read full profile →Lunda
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Zambia · Angola
The empire of the Mwant Yav — heirs of Ruwej and Chibinda Ilunga's marriage whose 'perpetual kinship' statecraft ruled a three-nation web of tributaries, and whose Mutomboko festival still crowns the eastern kingdom's year.
Read full profile →Luo (Joluo)
Kenya · Tanzania
The lake nation of Nyanza — river-lake Nilotes who walked the Nile's length over five centuries, masters of fishing and oratory, whose nyatiti poetry, benga guitar and intellectual tradition (from Argwings Kodhek to Obama's father) mark East African public life.
Read full profile →Luvale (Lwena)
Zambia · Angola · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of the upper Zambezi headwaters — matrilineal cultivators and fishers whose makishi masqueraders emerge from the boys' initiation camps, a tradition inscribed by UNESCO and shared across three countries.
Read full profile →Ma'di
Uganda · South Sudan
Central Sudanic farmers of the Nile's west bank at Nimule and Adjumani, whose chiefdoms sit exactly on the Uganda-South Sudan border, whose land now holds one of the largest refugee settlements on earth, and whose rain chiefs still open the hunting season.
Read full profile →Maasai
Kenya · Tanzania
Semi-nomadic Nilotic pastoralists of the Kenya–Tanzania borderlands, whose age-set society, cattle-centered economy and striking red shúkà have made them among the most recognized peoples in Africa.
Read full profile →Maba
Chad · Sudan
The people of Wadai — founders of a sultanate that ran the Darb al-Arba'in caravan trade to Egypt, resisted French conquest until 1912, and whose capital Abéché was once the largest city between Khartoum and Kano.
Read full profile →Madhiban of Puntland
Puntland · Somalia
A hereditary occupational caste of leatherworkers and hunters, excluded from the clan genealogies that determine everything in Somali society, barred from intermarriage, and left without the armed protection that clan membership provides.
Read full profile →Mafa
Cameroon · Nigeria
The terrace builders of the Mandara mountains — one of the montagnard peoples who refused Islam and the Fulani jihad, who turned bare rock into some of Africa's most intensive agriculture, and whose villages became a front line against Boko Haram.
Read full profile →Mahorais
Mayotte
The people of Mayotte — Shimaore-speaking Muslims who voted repeatedly to stay French while the rest of the Comoros left, and who now live in a French department that is simultaneously the poorest in France and a magnet for migration from the islands next door.
Read full profile →Mahorais of Réunion
Réunion · Mayotte
Migrants from Mayotte to Réunion, moving between two French departments in the same ocean, and finding that a shared nationality does not prevent them being received as foreigners in a society that is itself entirely built from migration.
Read full profile →Mainlanders of Zanzibar
Zanzibar · Tanzania · Mozambique
The descendants of the enslaved and of the plantation workers — Yao, Nyasa, Makonde and Manyema brought to Zanzibar for the clove estates, whose labour built the island's wealth and whose numbers decided the 1964 revolution.
Read full profile →Majang (Majangir)
Ethiopia
Forest cultivators and beekeepers of south-western Ethiopia, living in scattered households rather than villages, whose forest has been progressively taken for coffee and tea investment and whose 2016 protests were met with force.
Read full profile →Majeerteen
Puntland · Somalia
The Darod clan of the Horn's tip — frankincense traders and sultans of the Cape Guardafui coast, whose nineteenth-century sultanates dealt directly with Italy and Britain, and who founded the Puntland administration in 1998.
Read full profile →Majoreros
Canary Islands
The people of Fuerteventura — goatherds of a dry, wind-scoured island whose name for themselves comes from the Guanche Maxorata, who make the archipelago's most celebrated cheese, and whose windmills ground the grain of the whole Canaries.
Read full profile →Majos of Lanzarote
Canary Islands
The aboriginal people of Lanzarote, first of the islands to be raided and first to be conquered, whose name survives in the goatskin shoes they wore, and whose descendants farmed a landscape that was then buried by six years of eruptions.
Read full profile →Maka (Makaa)
Cameroon
Forest farmers of Cameroon's east around Abong-Mbang, whose villages line the road to the Central African Republic, and whose forest is the country's largest timber concession zone and the home of the Baka.
Read full profile →Makhoakhoa
Lesotho · South Africa
One of the older Sotho groupings of the northern lowlands, whose chiefs were among the first to gather under Moshoeshoe at Thaba Bosiu, and whose name appears in every account of how Lesotho was assembled out of the wreckage of the Lifaqane.
Read full profile →Makoa of Mayotte
Mayotte · Comoros
Descendants of Makua people carried from northern Mozambique into the Comoros as slaves, freed by French decree in 1846, and still identifiable by name, by drum and by where in a village their families live.
Read full profile →Makonde
Mozambique · Tanzania
The plateau people of the Ruvuma — matrilineal farmers whose mapiko masquerades dance the ancestors at dusk, whose ebony 'tree of life' carving founded a modern art movement, and whose highlands sheltered Mozambique's liberation war.
Read full profile →Makua (Emakhuwa)
Mozambique · Tanzania
Mozambique's largest nation — the matrilineal millions of the northern plateaus whose white-masked muali initiations, Mount Namuli origin songs and centuries of Indian Ocean trade wove the deep interior to the Swahili coast.
Read full profile →Malbars
Réunion
Réunion's Tamil community — descendants of indentured workers brought from south India after abolition, whose firewalking at the island's temples and whose cari massalé are now common Réunionnais property.
Read full profile →Mambwe
Zambia · Tanzania
Ridge-mound cultivators of the plateau between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Rukwa, whose grass-mound farming built fertility out of poor soil, and whose country the First World War's last campaign crossed on its way to the final surrender.
Read full profile →Mamprusi
Ghana · Burkina Faso
The senior of the Mole-Dagbani kingdoms of northern Ghana, whose Nayiri at Nalerigu claims descent from the founder from whom the Dagomba and Mossi kings also trace, and whose succession dispute has kept Bawku under curfew for two decades.
Read full profile →Mandinka
The Gambia · Senegal · Guinea · Guinea-Bissau · Mali
The westernmost great branch of the Mandé world — heirs of the Mali Empire whose griots, kora harpists and farming villages carried Sunjata's legacy to the Atlantic, from the Gambia River to the Guinea highlands.
Read full profile →Mandjia
Central African Republic
Farmers of the central savanna who rose against French cotton and rubber requisitions in the Kongo-Wara war of 1928, one of the largest anti-colonial revolts in French Africa, which France concealed and then took four years to crush.
Read full profile →Mang'anja
Malawi
The people of the Shire valley, cotton growers and iron smelters whose Lundu and Kaphwiti chieftaincies predate the Maravi expansion, whose land Livingstone crossed, and whose valley is now the most flood-prone and drought-struck ground in Malawi.
Read full profile →Mangbetu
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The northeastern Congo kingdom famed for elongated heads (lipombo), the harp with a carved human head, refined court art and the polygynous palaces that awed 19th-century travellers — an aristocracy of artists in the Uele forest.
Read full profile →Manjaco
Guinea-Bissau · Senegal · The Gambia
The weavers and migrants of Guinea-Bissau's north-west — cloth producers whose strip-woven panels were currency along the coast, kingdoms at Bassarel and Caió, and a community that has sent its young to Dakar, Lisbon and Paris for a century and built its villages on what they sent back.
Read full profile →Marba
Chad
Sorghum farmers and cattle keepers of the Tandjilé and Mayo-Kebbi in southern Chad, whose land rites are conducted by hereditary earth priests and whose region is the country's cotton belt.
Read full profile →Marehan
Somalia · Ethiopia · Kenya
Darod herders of the Jubba valley and Gedo, the clan of Siad Barre whose two decades in power made them the most exposed of all Somali clans when the state fell in 1991.
Read full profile →Marka-Dafing
Burkina Faso · Mali
Muslim traders and farmers of the Black Volta bend, a Mande people among Gur neighbours, whose Islamic scholarship and long-distance commerce made Safané and Boromo nodes of the West African trade network.
Read full profile →Marrons of Réunion
Réunion
Enslaved people who escaped into the volcanic interior and built communities in cirques no colonial force could reach, whose Malagasy names now label half the island's map, and whose leaders were hunted by paid detachments until slavery ended in 1848.
Read full profile →Masalit
Sudan · Chad
The sultanate people of West Darfur — farmers of the Chad borderland whose kingdom defeated a French force in 1910, and whose towns were the site of mass killings in 2003 and again, on a larger scale, in 2023.
Read full profile →Massa (Masa)
Cameroon · Chad
Fishers and cattle keepers of the Logone's banks, whose guru-walla fattening seclusion is the most extreme in Africa and whose floodplain fishery is among the continent's most productive.
Read full profile →Matmata and the Ksour Amazigh
Tunisia
The troglodyte and hilltop communities of southern Tunisia — Amazigh families who dug their houses down into the earth against heat and raiders, and who stored their grain in honeycomb ksour whose vaulted cells still stand at Chenini, Douiret and Ksar Ouled Soltane.
Read full profile →Mauritian Creoles
Mauritius
The descendants of the enslaved — the people whose ancestors were brought from Madagascar, Mozambique and West Africa, who made sega on the beach at night, who climbed Le Morne rather than be recaptured, and who remain the group least served by the island's prosperity.
Read full profile →Mbala
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Farmers and carvers of the Kwilu between the Kwango and the Kasai, once tributary to the Kongo kingdom, whose maternity figures and headrests are staples of Central African art collections, and whose province produced the Kwilu rebellion of 1963.
Read full profile →Mbeere
Kenya
Dryland farmers and honey-gatherers of the lower Tana basin below Mount Kenya, whose land the Seven Forks dams flooded, whose miraa and mango now feed Nairobi, and whose age-grade system remains among the most intact in central Kenya.
Read full profile →Mbeti
Republic of the Congo · Gabon
Farmers and hunters of the Congo's north-western plateaux around Owando and the Gabonese border, carvers of small standing figures with rounded heads, and neighbours to the forest that holds the world's largest surviving western lowland gorilla population.
Read full profile →Mbochi
Republic of the Congo
The river people of the Congo's north — Alima and Likouala fishers and traders whose canoe networks reached deep into the basin, and whose political prominence since 1979 has shaped the country's north-south divide.
Read full profile →Mbororo of the Central African Republic
Central African Republic · Cameroon · Chad
The cattle nomads of the savanna — Fulani herders who moved into the Central African Republic in the twentieth century, whose herds were the country's largest export, and who were driven out or killed in tens of thousands after 2013.
Read full profile →Mbum
Central African Republic · Cameroon · Chad
Farmers and ironworkers of the Adamawa plateau's eastern edge, whose chiefdoms were broken by the nineteenth-century Fulani jihad and whose territory spans three countries at the point where the Chari and the Sanaga rise.
Read full profile →Mbuti
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of the Ituri forest — among the world's oldest continuous cultures, whose molimo songs converse with the forest itself, whose net-hunts are choreographies of trust, and whose polyphonies are counted among humanity's musical summits.
Read full profile →Mende
Sierra Leone · Liberia
The rice-farming people of Sierra Leone's forested south whose Sande and Poro societies school every generation, whose Sowei mask is the only known African mask danced by women, and whose chiefs and orators shaped the modern state.
Read full profile →Merina
Madagascar
The highland kingdom-builders of Madagascar — an Austronesian-African people whose rice terraces, royal hill-cities and famadihana ancestor ceremonies unified the great island under Queen Ranavalona's dynasty from Antananarivo.
Read full profile →Meru (Ameru)
Kenya
The people of the misted eastern slopes of Mount Kenya — whose Njuri Ncheke council of elders governs with revered authority, whose Mugwe prophet-priests led a remembered exodus 'across the red waters', and whose miraa (khat) and highland farms feed a whole region.
Read full profile →Métropolitains of Mayotte
Mayotte
French mainlanders posted to the youngest and poorest department in the republic, mostly teachers, nurses, police and administrators, drawing a salary bonus to be there and turning over every few years.
Read full profile →Middle Atlas Amazigh (Zayane and Beni Mguild)
Morocco
The transhumant herders of Morocco's cedar highlands — Tamazight speakers whose cavalry held French columns for two decades, whose ahidus dance fills the mountain nights, and whose seasonal movement between summer pasture and winter valley is now largely over.
Read full profile →Mijikenda
Kenya · Tanzania
The 'Nine Homesteads' of the Kenyan coast — Giriama, Digo, Duruma and kin — whose sacred kaya forests hold the ancestral villages and vigango memorial posts, and whose long entanglement with Swahili towns wove coast and hinterland together.
Read full profile →Mikea
Madagascar
The forest people of the south-west — families who live by foraging in the dry spiny forest, drawing water from tubers rather than wells, and whose existence has been argued over by anthropologists for fifty years while their forest is cut for maize.
Read full profile →Minianka (Mamara Senufo)
Mali · Burkina Faso
Senufo-speaking farmers of southern Mali around Koutiala, whose balafon and drum ensembles are among the most complex in West Africa, and whose country became Mali's cotton belt and the setting for a much-discussed book about healing through rhythm.
Read full profile →Mitsogo (Tsogo)
Gabon
Forest people of the Chaillu massif in central Gabon from whom the Bwiti religion spread across the country, keepers of its liturgy, its harp and its temples, and carvers of the white-faced okukwe and mask forms that circulate under other peoples' names.
Read full profile →Mongo
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The great forest people of the Congo basin's heart — a vast family of Nkundo, Ekonda, Ntomba and others whose Lianja epic is one of Africa's longest oral works, and whose equatorial villages line the rivers of the cuvette.
Read full profile →Moroccan Jews
Morocco
The largest Jewish community the Arab world ever held — a quarter of a million people in 1948, present since Roman times, sustained in mellahs and Atlas villages, and reduced to a couple of thousand while their music, food and saints' festivals remain part of Moroccan life.
Read full profile →Moru
South Sudan
Central Sudanic farmers of Mundri and Amadi in Western Equatoria, whose mission schools produced a disproportionate share of South Sudan's teachers and nurses, and whose Moru-language hymnody is among the region's most developed.
Read full profile →Mossi
Burkina Faso · Ghana · Côte d'Ivoire
The kingdom-builders of the Volta basin, whose Mogho Naba still holds court in Ouagadougou every Friday — a 500-year unbroken monarchy of horsemen, farmers and mask societies on the West African savanna.
Read full profile →Mozabites (At Mzab)
Algeria
The Ibadi Muslims of the M'zab valley — a community that fled orthodoxy into the desert a thousand years ago and built five fortified hill cities with a religious council still governing daily life, a palm oasis engineered to catch flood water, and an architecture that Le Corbusier came to study.
Read full profile →Mundang
Chad · Cameroon
Farmers of the Mayo-Kebbi whose sacred kingship at Léré required the ruler to be hidden from ordinary sight, and whose country holds a lake with one of Africa's last populations of West African manatee.
Read full profile →Mundari
South Sudan
Cattle keepers of the Nile's east bank above Juba whose enormous white Ankole-Watusi herds, ash-covered and horned, have made them one of the most photographed communities in Africa, and whose camps are a working system of dung, smoke and constant defence.
Read full profile →Murle
South Sudan · Ethiopia
The cattle people of the Pibor — an age-set society of eastern South Sudan whose young men's age regiments, cattle raiding and the abduction of children have made them both a byword in the country's conflicts and among its most misrepresented communities.
Read full profile →Mursi
Ethiopia
Cattle-herders of the lower Omo — famed worldwide for the women's clay lip-plates, the men's ceremonial donga stick-fighting, and a fiercely independent life now under pressure from dams and plantations.
Read full profile →Muslim Mauritians
Mauritius
Around a sixth of the island, descended from indentured labourers of the Ganges plain and from Gujarati merchants who arrived free, holding a constitutionally recognised place in parliament and a distinct institutional world within an Indo-Mauritian majority they are not part of.
Read full profile →Myènè
Gabon
The coastal traders of Gabon — Mpongwe, Orungu and Nkomi peoples of the estuary and the lagoons who brokered the Atlantic trade for three centuries, whose land became Libreville, and whose mukudji white masks are among Africa's most recognised sculptures.
Read full profile →Nafusa Amazigh
Libya
The Ibadi Amazigh of Libya's western mountains — cave-house builders and olive growers whose language was banned under Gaddafi, who took up arms in 2011 and pushed to Tripoli, and who have since fought to have Tamazight written into the constitution.
Read full profile →Nalu
Guinea-Bissau · Guinea
The coastal people of the Cacine and Compone rivers — mangrove rice farmers whose banda mask, a long horizontal composite of crocodile, antelope and serpent, is among the most extraordinary sculptures in West Africa.
Read full profile →Nama (Khoekhoe)
Namibia · South Africa
The southernmost Khoekhoe herders — heirs of the ancient Cape pastoralists, keepers of the click-rich Khoekhoegowab tongue, the Nama stap dance and the /gais praise-poetry, who fought and endured the same colonial wars that struck their Herero neighbours.
Read full profile →Nande (Yira)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Farmers and traders of the Rwenzori's western slopes and the Beni-Butembo corridor, who built one of Africa's most successful indigenous commercial networks out of a war zone, and whose territory has been the epicentre of the ADF massacres and of the 2018 Ebola outbreak.
Read full profile →Nara
Eritrea
One of Eritrea's nine recognised peoples and among its smallest, farmers of the western lowlands whose Nilo-Saharan language has no close relative in the country, and whose land sat directly on the front line of the war with Ethiopia.
Read full profile →Ndau
Mozambique · Zimbabwe
The people of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe borderlands — Shona-speaking communities who were conquered by the Gaza Nguni, whose spirit mediums are feared across two countries for the potency of ndau possession, and who supplied the fighters of Mozambique's civil war on both sides.
Read full profile →Ndebele
Zimbabwe · South Africa
Two proud branches of one Nguni root: Mzilikazi's amaNdebele kingdom at Bulawayo — the Zulu-descended state that ruled western Zimbabwe — and the Southern Ndebele of South Africa, whose electric geometric house-painting and beadwork became a global visual language.
Read full profile →Ndowe
Equatorial Guinea · Gabon
The beach people of the Río Muni coast — a cluster of fishing and trading communities who met the first European ships, brokered the coastal trade before the Fang came down from the interior, and whose name for themselves simply means the people of the shore.
Read full profile →Nganguela
Angola · Zambia
The peoples of Angola's eastern woodlands — a cluster of communities named collectively by outsiders, whose hunting and beekeeping country became UNITA's base, and whose land is among the most heavily mined on earth.
Read full profile →Ngbaka
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Central African Republic
Farmers of the Ubangi hinterland whose gaza initiation took boys into the forest for months, whose harp-zithers and slit drums furnished a distinctive music, and whose villages sit across a border that Central African conflict repeatedly pushes people over.
Read full profile →Ngbandi
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Central African Republic
River people of the Ubangi whose speech is the base of Lingala's northern cousin Sango, the national language of the Central African Republic, and whose community produced Mobutu Sese Seko and was rewarded and then ruined by that fact.
Read full profile →Ngindo
Tanzania
Beekeepers and shifting cultivators of the Selous wilderness, matrilineal, dispersed by design across the largest protected area in Africa, and the community whose killing of a German officer in 1905 is where the Maji Maji war is usually said to have begun.
Read full profile →Ngombe
Democratic Republic of the Congo
River and forest people of the Mongala and middle Congo, whose great slit drums carried messages across the forest at speeds the telegraph could not match, and whose men the Free State recruited into the force that policed the rubber regime.
Read full profile →Ngoni
Malawi · Zambia · Tanzania · Mozambique
The northern branch of the Zulu diaspora — regiments that marched two thousand kilometres out of the Mfecane, absorbed the peoples they conquered, and planted Nguni kingship, praise poetry and the ingoma dance across four countries.
Read full profile →Nkoya
Zambia
People of Zambia's Kafue headwaters whose royal drums are older than the kingdoms that later claimed them, whose Kazanga ceremony was revived in 1988 as an argument about history, and who have spent a century contesting their subordination to the Lozi.
Read full profile →Nsenga
Zambia · Mozambique
Matrilineal farmers of Zambia's Luangwa valley escarpment, whose chief Kalindawalo's country lay on the nineteenth-century slaving road, and whose vimbuza-related healing dances and Nyau connections tie them to both the Chewa and the lakeshore worlds.
Read full profile →Ntomba
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Fishers and forest farmers of Lake Mai-Ndombe and the Tumba swamps, whose lake was renamed for the black water it holds, and whose region became the site of the world's largest forest-carbon project and of the 1990s Congo's most notorious rubber-era memory.
Read full profile →Nuba
Sudan
The many peoples of Sudan's Nuba Mountains — dozens of hill-communities famed for ceremonial wrestling and stick-fighting, dazzling body-art, terraced granite farms, and a fierce resilience through decades of war in the country's borderland heart.
Read full profile →Nubians
Sudan · Egypt
The people of the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum — heirs of Kush, Meroë and Christian Nubia, whose pharaoh-conquering kingdoms, pyramid fields and living languages make theirs one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth.
Read full profile →Nuer (Naath)
South Sudan · Ethiopia
The pastoral prophets of the Sudd — a fiercely egalitarian Nilotic nation of cattle-keepers whose age-sets, leopard-skin peacemakers and earth-prophets like Ngundeng made them the classic study of order without rulers.
Read full profile →Nupe
Nigeria
The river people of the Niger-Kaduna confluence — brass-smiths, glass-makers and boat-builders whose Bida emirate turned a pre-Islamic kingdom into a craft metropolis, and whose gugu and ndakogboya masquerades still walk the Middle Belt.
Read full profile →Nyakyusa (Ngonde)
Tanzania · Malawi
The banana-and-cattle people of the fertile northern Lake Malawi rift — famed for their unique age-villages where age-mates built and lived together, their sacred chiefs and 'breath of men' philosophy, and the volcanic gardens of the Rungwe highlands.
Read full profile →Nyamwezi
Tanzania
The 'people of the moon' — Tanzania's great caravan nation whose porters carried the ivory trade from Lake Tanganyika to the sea, whose chief Mirambo built an empire in a decade, and whose bugobogobo dance societies still contest the harvest.
Read full profile →Nyaneka-Nkhumbi
Angola
The cattle people of Angola's south-west — Huíla plateau herders whose women build their hair into ochre-and-butter nontombi ropes, whose age grades still govern the herds, and whose land has been taken repeatedly for commercial farms.
Read full profile →Nyangatom
Ethiopia · South Sudan
Karimojong-cluster herders of the Omo's west bank and the Kibish, the smallest and most heavily raided of the Lower Omo peoples, whose scarification records killings and whose territory the Ethiopian state has been villagising since 2011.
Read full profile →Nyaturu (Rimi)
Tanzania
Cattle keepers and sorghum farmers of the Singida plateau, builders of the flat-roofed tembe homestead that once defined central Tanzania's architecture, and the people whose district gave Tanzania both its groundnut boom and its most notorious witch-killing statistics.
Read full profile →Nyiha and Lambya
Malawi · Tanzania · Zambia
The iron-smelting people of the northern highlands — farmers of the Songwe river country whose furnaces supplied hoes across three modern countries, and whose highland is now Malawi's coffee and Tanzania's maize frontier.
Read full profile →Nyungwe
Mozambique · Zambia · Zimbabwe
The people of Tete — Zambezi valley farmers and traders at the old Portuguese river port, heirs to the chikunda slave-soldier tradition, and now the community sitting on top of one of the world's largest coking coal deposits.
Read full profile →Nzakara
Central African Republic · Democratic Republic of the Congo
A small kingdom of the Ubangi savanna whose court harpists composed a repertoire of astonishing complexity, sung in a language now spoken by very few, and recorded in the 1960s by an ethnomusicologist who realised she was hearing the last of it.
Read full profile →Nzebi
Gabon · Republic of the Congo
The people of Gabon's southern plateaux — ironworkers and hunters whose mvet-like epics and mungala judicial poison ordeals structured a society without chiefs, and whose region holds the manganese that pays for the country.
Read full profile →Nzema
Ghana · Côte d'Ivoire
The people of Ghana's south-western corner — Akan-speaking coastal farmers and fishers who gave the continent Kwame Nkrumah, whose Kundum festival lasts weeks, and whose stilt village of Nzulezo stands on a lagoon.
Read full profile →Obamba (Mbaamba)
Gabon
People of the Haut-Ogooué plateaux around Franceville, makers of the brass-and-copper reliquary guardians that Picasso's generation seized on, and inhabitants of the province whose manganese and uranium built modern Gabon.
Read full profile →Ogaden
Ethiopia · Somalia · Kenya
The largest Darod clan, camel herders of the plateau between the Shabelle and the Ethiopian highlands, whose territory gave two states a war in 1977 and whose name is now attached to a region, an insurgency and a long argument about what the Somali region of Ethiopia should be called.
Read full profile →Ogiek
Kenya · Tanzania
The honey-hunters of the Mau — forest-dwelling beekeepers whose clans own named tracts of highland woodland by inherited right, and whose landmark African Court victory in 2017 affirmed indigenous land rights across the continent.
Read full profile →Ogoni
Nigeria
Farmers and fishers of a small, dense territory in the Niger Delta whose campaign against Shell and the Nigerian state cost Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others their lives in 1995, and whose land the UN found would take thirty years to clean.
Read full profile →Orma
Kenya
Oromo-speaking cattle herders of the Tana basin, descendants of the Oromo expansion that once reached the Indian Ocean, Muslim for two centuries, and now squeezed between a regulated river, a delta under development and neighbours who farm the same ground.
Read full profile →Oromo
Ethiopia · Kenya
The largest ethnic nation in the Horn of Africa, whose Gadaa system — an indigenous democracy of generational classes with elected leaders and term limits — is recognized by UNESCO as a masterpiece of human governance.
Read full profile →Otuho (Lotuko)
South Sudan
Farmers and herders of the Imatong mountains and the Torit plain, builders of dense stone-walled hill villages, whose rainmakers held the only authority anyone recognised, and in whose town the Sudanese civil wars began in 1955.
Read full profile →Oulad Delim
Western Sahara · Mauritania
The Arab warrior tribe of the Río de Oro — Maqil Bedouin in descent who held the southern Western Sahara and the Dakhla coast, dominated their neighbours militarily for two centuries, and split sharply between Moroccan and Polisario allegiance after 1975.
Read full profile →Ouled Naïl
Algeria
The steppe confederation of the Saharan Atlas — herders of the high plains whose name became attached, through colonial spectacle and photography, to a tradition of dancers whose gold-laden performance was both a livelihood and a misrepresented one.
Read full profile →Ouled Tidrarin
Western Sahara · Mauritania
A zawiya tribe of the western Sahara — a lineage of scholars and traders rather than warriors, who taught, arbitrated and kept the manuscripts while the hassan tribes fought, and who are now scattered between the territory, the camps and Mauritania.
Read full profile →Outer Islanders (Zil Elwannyen Sesel)
Seychelles
The people of the coral islands — copra workers and fishers scattered across a million square kilometres of ocean on Aldabra, Farquhar and the Amirantes, most of whose settlements have been closed and whose descendants now live on Mahé.
Read full profile →Ovambo (Aawambo)
Namibia · Angola
The nation of the oshana floodlands — Namibia's largest people, whose millet-and-marula kingdoms between seasonal channels bred the efundula bride-festivals, the sacred fire of kingship, and the backbone of the liberation struggle.
Read full profile →Ovimbundu
Angola
Angola's largest people — the Bailundo and Bié highland kingdoms whose ovimbali caravans carried the interior's wax, ivory and rubber to the Atlantic for two centuries, and whose plateau became the heart of a long civil war.
Read full profile →Papel
Guinea-Bissau
The people of Bissau's own island — farmers and palm-oil producers whose kingdoms held the ground the capital now stands on, whose iran shrines govern land and illness, and whose funerals are among West Africa's most elaborate.
Read full profile →Pare (Asu)
Tanzania
Iron smelters and irrigators of the Pare mountains between Kilimanjaro and the coast, whose furnaces supplied the region's hoes and spears, whose rain shrines held skulls of chiefs, and who took to mission schooling early enough to shape Tanganyikan politics out of all proportion to their numbers.
Read full profile →Pedi (Bapedi)
South Africa
The Northern Sotho nation of the Leolo mountains — whose Marota kingdom under Sekhukhune fought both Boer and Briton to a standstill, and whose kiba pipe-and-drum orchestras and koma initiation schools still shape Limpopo.
Read full profile →Pende
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The mask-carvers of the Kwilu and Kasai — whose mbuya village masks satirise every human type, whose chiefly minganji ancestors dance in raffia, and whose 1931 revolt against the rubber and tax regime shook the Belgian Congo.
Read full profile →Pokomo
Kenya
River farmers of the Tana, the only Kenyan community whose whole economy was built on a flood, growing rice, bananas and mangoes on silt the river laid down each year, and now living downstream of dams that stopped the flood coming.
Read full profile →Pokot
Kenya · Uganda
The people of two worlds — hill farmers with astonishing irrigation furrows and plains pastoralists with vast herds, joined by one language, the sapana initiation, and the great cattle-culture of the Kerio and Suam valleys.
Read full profile →Praslinois and La Diguois
Seychelles
The people of the second and third islands — boatbuilders, coco de mer guardians and ox-cart farmers of Praslin and La Digue, whose accents mark them out in Victoria and whose islands hold the palm forest General Gordon took for Eden.
Read full profile →Principense
São Tomé and Príncipe
The people of the smaller island — seven thousand of them under Príncipe's volcanic towers, keepers of a critically endangered creole, of the auto de floripes pageant, and of a biosphere reserve that covers their whole territory.
Read full profile →Punu
Gabon · Republic of the Congo
Carvers of the white-faced okuyi masks that dance on stilts above the Ngounié — serene kaolin faces with scaled foreheads and shell coiffures, among the most recognisable images of Central African art.
Read full profile →Qemant
Ethiopia
Agaw farmers of the hills north-west of Gondar who kept a religion of their own — neither Christian nor Jewish nor Muslim but with elements recognisable in all three — into the twentieth century, and whose contested demand for self-administration has since 2015 been one of the most violent disputes in Amhara.
Read full profile →Rabelados
Cabo Verde
The rebels of Santiago's northern hills — Catholics who refused the 1940s reform of the Church, withdrew to the countryside for decades, and whose descendants now paint their refusal onto canvas that sells in Lisbon.
Read full profile →Rahanweyn (Digil and Mirifle)
Somalia
The farming Somalis of the rivers — sorghum and maize growers of Bay and Bakool who speak Maay rather than the standard language, who ran an inclusive clan system that absorbed outsiders, and who bore the worst of the famines of 1992 and 2011.
Read full profile →Rangi (Langi)
Tanzania
Farmers and traders of Kondoa in central Tanzania, Muslim in a largely Christian interior, custodians of the Kondoa rock art — thousands of years of painting on shelter walls, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006 and older than any state on the continent's east.
Read full profile →Rashaida
Eritrea · Sudan
The last arrivals — Bedouin who crossed the Red Sea from Arabia in the 1840s, kept their Arabian dialect and their tents on the African shore, and whose women's veils and silverwork are among the most elaborate anywhere.
Read full profile →Reguibat
Western Sahara · Mauritania · Algeria
The great camel confederation of the western Sahara — warriors and herders who dominated the desert between the Atlantic and the Adrar, resisted French and Spanish penetration into the 1930s, and form the backbone of the Sahrawi independence movement.
Read full profile →Rehoboth Basters
Namibia
A community that named itself with a slur — descendants of Cape Dutch settlers and Khoikhoi women who trekked north in 1868, wrote their own constitution, governed themselves for a century, and lost the case for their land in Namibia's Supreme Court.
Read full profile →Rendille
Kenya
Camel nomads of the Kaisut desert — a Cushitic people whose herds cross a landscape almost without water, whose naabo assemblies govern by consensus, and whose women's mpore headdress and doko necklaces are worn as a marriage's public record.
Read full profile →Rifians (Irifiyen)
Morocco
The Amazigh of Morocco's northern mountains — a people who defeated a Spanish army at Anwal in 1921, declared a republic, were bombed with chemical weapons, and whose region has remained the most politically restive in the kingdom ever since.
Read full profile →Rodriguans
Mauritius
The people of the far island — forty thousand Creole-speaking fishers and farmers 560 kilometres east of Mauritius, with their own accordion-driven sega tambour, their own autonomy since 2002, and an octopus fishery they close by agreement each year to let it recover.
Read full profile →Ronga
Mozambique · South Africa
People of Maputo bay and its hinterland, whose Tsonga-related language the city grew on top of, whose ancestors' territory was Delagoa Bay's ivory and slaving frontier, and whose marrabenta music is Mozambique's national urban sound.
Read full profile →Rwandan Returnees
Rwanda · Uganda
The generation born in exile — Tutsi refugees driven out from 1959 who grew up in Ugandan, Burundian and Congolese camps, built the army that stopped the genocide, came home in 1994 to a country most had never seen, and now govern it.
Read full profile →Sabiny (Sebei)
Uganda
Kalenjin-speaking cattle keepers and barley farmers on Mount Elgon's northern slopes, the only Kalenjin people in Uganda, and the community whose women built the alternative-rite movement that Uganda's anti-cutting law was written around.
Read full profile →Sahel coastal Tunisians
Tunisia
The olive coast — the towns of Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia, whose ribat fortresses guarded the Ifriqiyan shore, whose olive groves stretch to the horizon, and which supplied independent Tunisia with its first two presidents.
Read full profile →Saho
Eritrea · Ethiopia
The people of the escarpment — Cushitic herders and farmers who move between the Eritrean highlands and the Red Sea coastal plain with the seasons, and whose customary law code was written down and is still cited in court.
Read full profile →Sahrawis of the Tindouf Camps
Western Sahara · Algeria
A society built in the hardest desert in Algeria and inhabited for fifty years, where camps are named after towns their residents have never seen, women run most of the institutions, and a third generation has now been born stateless.
Read full profile →Saidi (Upper Egyptians)
Egypt
The people of the southern Nile valley — farmers of a narrow green strip between deserts, keepers of tahtib stick art and mizmar music, of clan-based honour and feud, and of the deepest continuity with the Egypt of the pharaohs.
Read full profile →Sakalava
Madagascar
The kingdom-builders of Madagascar's west coast — whose Menabe and Boina empires once dominated half the island, whose royal relics (dady) are honoured in the fitampoha bathing ceremony, and whose tromba spirit-possession lets dead kings speak.
Read full profile →Salampasu
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Angola
Forest and savannah people of the Kasai-Angola border whose warrior societies graded their members by heads taken, whose copper-sheathed and raffia-bearded masks are among the most fearsome objects in African art, and who held off the Lunda empire for two centuries.
Read full profile →Salineiros of Sal and Boa Vista
Cabo Verde
The salt people of the flat islands — workers who cut salt from a volcanic crater and from lagoon pans for the Brazilian and West African trade, on two islands so dry that water had to be shipped in.
Read full profile →Samburu
Kenya
The 'butterfly people' of northern Kenya — Maa-speaking cattle pastoralists whose moran warriors wear ochre and beads with famous flamboyance, whose age-sets govern without chiefs, and whose singing-and-jumping dances rival any on the continent.
Read full profile →Samo
Burkina Faso
Farmers of north-western Burkina Faso who fought the Mossi and the French alike, whose village autonomy was near-absolute, and who joined the 1915 revolt that the Volta-Bani country mounted against conscription.
Read full profile →Sampadjudu
Cabo Verde
The people of the Barlavento windward islands — São Vicente, Santo Antão, São Nicolau and Sal — whose Creole is lighter, whose port city produced morna and coladeira, and who gave the world Cesária Évora.
Read full profile →San (Bushmen)
Botswana · Namibia · South Africa
The first peoples of southern Africa — carriers of some of humanity's oldest lineages and its oldest continuous art tradition, whose click languages, trance-dance healing and encyclopedic desert knowledge stretch back tens of thousands of years.
Read full profile →Sara
Chad
The largest people of southern Chad — Nilo-Saharan farmers of the Chari basin whose yondo initiation-school, cotton fields and long resistance to northern slave-raiding made them the demographic and political heart of the country's south.
Read full profile →Sara-Kaba
Central African Republic · Chad
The people of the Chad-Central African borderland — a Sara group whose women wore the lip plates that colonial photographers made into a symbol of Africa, a practice they adopted, by their own account, to make themselves unsellable.
Read full profile →Sena
Mozambique · Malawi · Zimbabwe
The people of the lower Zambezi — cultivators of the flood plain who lived under the prazo estates of Portuguese-African warlords, supplied the labour for the Zambezi bridge and the sugar estates, and now farm between a dam upstream and cyclones from the sea.
Read full profile →Sengwer
Kenya
Forest hunter-gatherers and beekeepers of the Cherangany Hills, evicted from the Embobut forest repeatedly and violently in the name of conservation, and the subject of one of the most closely documented indigenous land-rights cases in Africa.
Read full profile →Senufo
Côte d'Ivoire · Mali · Burkina Faso
Master farmers and carvers of the middle Volta savanna whose Poro initiation cycle takes twenty-one years, whose champion-cultivator staffs and firespitter masks rank among Africa's great sculpture, and whose balafon orchestras earned UNESCO honors.
Read full profile →Serahule (Soninke of the Gambia)
The Gambia · Senegal · Mali · Mauritania
The Gambia's traders and diamond dealers — Soninke people descended from the founders of ancient Ghana, who kept a merchant network from the upper river to Sierra Leone's mines and Europe's cities, and who are the country's most conspicuously commercial community.
Read full profile →Serer
Senegal · The Gambia
Guardians of Senegal's oldest religious tradition — the people of Sine and Saloum whose pangool ancestor-saints, sacred baobabs, wrestling arenas and poet-presidents (Senghor was Serer) kept an unbroken covenant with land and sea.
Read full profile →Serviçais
São Tomé and Príncipe
Contract labourers shipped to the cocoa estates from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde after slavery was abolished, on contracts almost nobody was permitted to complete, in a system a British chocolate company was eventually sued for calling free.
Read full profile →Seychellois Creoles
Seychelles
The people of the granite islands — formed from enslaved East Africans, French planters and later Indian and Chinese traders into a single Kreol-speaking nation, with moutya drumming, a national Creole institute and a language that is one of only three official ones.
Read full profile →Shaigiya
Sudan
Riverain people of the Nile's fourth cataract country, cavalry lords who fought the Ottoman-Egyptian invasion in 1820 and then served it, and whose date palms and waterwheels the Merowe dam drowned.
Read full profile →Shambaa (Sambaa)
Tanzania
Farmers of the Usambara mountains whose nineteenth-century kingdom under Kimweri ye Nyumbai reached the coast, whose forests hold some of the densest endemism in Africa, and whose historian gave African studies one of its classic accounts of how a state is remembered.
Read full profile →Shangane of Eswatini
Eswatini · Mozambique · South Africa
The Tsonga-speaking communities of the eastern lowveld — families of the Lubombo borderlands who move between three countries for work and family, and whose language has no official standing in the kingdom they live in.
Read full profile →Sharifs of the Comoros
Comoros
Lineages claiming descent from the Prophet through the Hadrami sayyids, who supplied the archipelago's sultans and its judges, whose scholarship linked the islands to Yemen and Zanzibar, and whose standing survived the abolition of the sultanates by a century.
Read full profile →Shawiya (Ichawiyen)
Algeria
The Amazigh of the Aurès — mountain farmers and herders whose fortified granaries crown the ridges, whose women fought in the war of independence in numbers, and who claim the Kahina, the queen who led the last great resistance to the Arab conquest.
Read full profile →Sheekhaal
Somalia · Ethiopia · Kenya
A Somali community defined by religious descent rather than by the standard clan genealogy, tracing itself to a thirteenth-century saint, historically providing the judges, teachers and mediators of the Somali interior, and holding a status that placed it outside the ordinary logic of feud.
Read full profile →Sherbro (Bullom)
Sierra Leone
The coastal people of Sierra Leone's islands and estuaries — carvers of the ivory saltcellars that European nobles collected in the 1500s, hosts of the first Portuguese traders, and inhabitants of a shoreline now being taken by the sea.
Read full profile →Shilluk (Chollo)
South Sudan
The kingdom of Nyikang on the White Nile — the Chollo nation whose divine Reth embodies the immortal founder-hero, whose reed-fleet processions and royal installation dramas are the Nile's oldest living monarchy theatre.
Read full profile →Shirazi
Zanzibar · Tanzania · Comoros
A claim of descent rather than a tribe — the Swahili coast's tradition of Persian founding ancestors from Shiraz, used for a thousand years to assert antiquity and rank, and made in the twentieth century into a political identity that carried Zanzibar into revolution.
Read full profile →Shona
Zimbabwe · Mozambique
Builders of Great Zimbabwe — the largest ancient stone city south of the Sahara — heirs of the Mutapa gold trade, and keepers of the mbira dzavadzimu, whose interlocking music calls the ancestors home.
Read full profile →Shukriya
Sudan
Cattle and camel Arabs of the Butana plain between the Blue Nile and the Atbara, whose paramount Abu Sin family gave Sudan a line of chiefs and a famous poem, and whose grazing has been progressively converted to mechanised sorghum.
Read full profile →Shuwa Arabs (Baggara of the Chad basin)
Chad · Cameroon · Nigeria · Niger
Cattle Arabs of the Lake Chad basin whose ancestors crossed the Sahel from the Nile a thousand years ago, whose dialect is the westernmost Arabic in the world, and who make up a large part of Chad's population and its army.
Read full profile →Sidama
Ethiopia
The enset-farming people of Ethiopia's southern highlands — whose Fichee-Chambalaalla new-year (a UNESCO heritage) counts time by the luwa generation-cycle, whose elders' Songo councils govern by consensus, and who won statehood as Ethiopia's newest region in 2020.
Read full profile →Sihanaka
Madagascar
The people of the marshes — rice farmers of Lake Alaotra whose drained wetland is Madagascar's granary, whose lake is shrinking under silt from the deforested hills, and whose name means those of the swamps.
Read full profile →Silt'e
Ethiopia
Muslim enset farmers and traders of the Gurage highlands who won recognition as a distinct nationality in a 2001 referendum — the only community in Ethiopia to have done so by direct vote — and who dominate whole sectors of Addis Ababa's wholesale trade.
Read full profile →Sinai Bedouin
Egypt
The tribes of the peninsula between two continents — desert and mountain Bedouin whose customary law still settles most disputes among them, who guarded Saint Catherine's monastery for fourteen centuries, and who have been squeezed between tourism, security operations and the loss of their old routes.
Read full profile →Sino-Mauritians
Mauritius
The island's Chinese community — largely Hakka families who arrived as traders and indentured workers from the 1780s, built the shop network of every village, gave Mauritius its Chinatown and its spring festival, and produce a share of its writers and business families out of all proportion to their numbers.
Read full profile →Sino-Seychellois
Seychelles
The Chinese of Seychelles, a few families who arrived from Mauritius and Guangdong around 1900, opened the shops that supplied every district in the archipelago, and became one of the smallest and most thoroughly creolised Chinese diasporas anywhere.
Read full profile →Sinwa of Réunion
Réunion
Réunion's Chinese community — Cantonese and Hakka families who arrived as indentured workers and stayed as shopkeepers, whose boutik chinwa stood on every village corner, and whose New Year is now an island-wide event.
Read full profile →Siwi
Egypt
The Amazigh of Siwa oasis — the easternmost Berber-speaking community in the world, six hundred kilometres from Cairo, guardians of the oracle Alexander consulted, of a salt-block architecture that dissolves in rain, and of a language spoken nowhere else.
Read full profile →Somali
Somalia · Somaliland · Djibouti · Ethiopia · Kenya
The 'nation of bards' of the Horn — camel pastoralists and Indian Ocean mariners bound by the Somali language, clan genealogy and the xeer oral constitution, whose poetry duels have carried politics, love and law for centuries.
Read full profile →Somali Bantu (Jareer)
Somalia
The farmers of the Jubba and Shabelle — descendants of enslaved people taken from Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania and of older Bantu populations, who worked the best land in Somalia without owning it, were pushed off it during the civil war, and were resettled in tens of thousands to the United States.
Read full profile →Songhai
Niger · Mali · Benin
Heirs of West Africa's largest empire — the Niger-bend civilization of Gao, Timbuktu and the askias, whose farmers, fishers and traders still line the great river from Mali through Niger.
Read full profile →Songye
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The power-figure carvers of the Lomami — whose nkisi statues bristling with horn, nails and copper are among Africa's most formidable objects, and whose kifwebe striated masks belong to a society that could police a chief.
Read full profile →Soninke
Mali · Mauritania · Senegal · The Gambia
Founders of Wagadu — the Ghana Empire, West Africa's first great state — whose gold-road merchants, the Wangara, seeded trade diasporas from the Sahara to the forest, and whose epic of the serpent Bida still explains the empire's fall.
Read full profile →Souafa (people of the Souf)
Algeria
Oasis cultivators of the eastern Algerian Sahara who plant date palms in pits dug down to the water table rather than irrigating them, and whose domed town of El Oued is built entirely in vaults because there is no timber.
Read full profile →Suba
Kenya
Bantu-speaking islanders of Lake Victoria descended from Buganda refugees who fled across the water after the killing of Kabaka Kabalega's rival in the eighteenth century, absorbed almost entirely into Luo speech, and now the subject of one of Africa's more determined language revival efforts.
Read full profile →Sukuma
Tanzania
Tanzania's largest nation — the farmer-herders south of Lake Victoria whose competing dance societies, snake-charming and porcupine troupes, healing guilds and cotton fields built a culture of spectacular public performance.
Read full profile →Suri (Surma)
Ethiopia · South Sudan
Body-painters of the southwestern highlands — cattle-herders whose chalk, ochre and flower body-art has fascinated the world's photographers, whose saginye stick-duels decide reputation, and whose gold-rich land is now heavily contested.
Read full profile →Susu (Soso)
Guinea · Sierra Leone · Guinea-Bissau
The coastal Mande of Guinea — traders and rice farmers of the Conakry littoral whose language is the capital's lingua franca, and whose ancestors ruled the Soso kingdom that Sundiata Keita destroyed at Kirina in 1235.
Read full profile →Swahili
Kenya · Tanzania · Mozambique · Comoros
The Indian Ocean's African civilization — a chain of stone towns from Lamu to Kilwa where Bantu Africa met Arabia, Persia and India across two millennia of monsoon trade, giving the continent its most widely spoken language and a literary tradition centuries deep.
Read full profile →Swazi (emaSwati)
Eswatini · South Africa
The nation of the Incwala — Africa's great kingship-renewal ceremony — and the Umhlanga reed dance, where the Ngwenyama and the Ndlovukati (Lion and She-Elephant) rule a dual monarchy that danced its way through empire into the continent's last absolute kingship.
Read full profile →Swazi of Nkomazi
South Africa · Eswatini
The Swazi of South Africa's eastern lowveld, cut off from their kingdom by a colonial boundary, made citizens of the KaNgwane bantustan, and the community that in 1982 refused to be handed over to Eswatini and won.
Read full profile →Tabwa
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Zambia
People of the Marungu highlands and the south-western shore of Lake Tanganyika, whose scarification and sculpture worked a visual language of balanced opposites, and whose nineteenth century was defined by the ivory trade and the warlord Nsama.
Read full profile →Taita
Kenya
Terrace farmers of three mist-covered hill blocks rising out of the Tsavo plains, keepers of ancestral skull caves, of a strikingly biodiverse cloud forest, and of a First World War memory in which their hills were the front line between two empires.
Read full profile →Tamil Mauritians
Mauritius
The oldest Indian community on the island, brought as artisans and masons before indentured labour began, who built much of colonial Port Louis, kept their temples and fire-walking, and are counted separately from the Hindu majority they are usually confused with.
Read full profile →Tawergha
Libya
A Black Libyan town of forty thousand emptied in 2011 by militias from neighbouring Misrata, its name scraped off road signs, its people scattered into camps for a decade, and its return in 2018 into a place with no water and no electricity.
Read full profile →Tebu (Toubou)
Chad · Libya · Niger
The people of the Tibesti — mountain and desert nomads of the central Sahara, famous for enduring journeys on minimal food and water, holders of the volcanic massif where Chad, Libya and Niger meet, and central to the smuggling and conflict economies of the region.
Read full profile →Teke (Bateke)
Republic of the Congo · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Gabon
The plateau kingdom of the Makoko — masters of the Congo River's great markets whose treaty with Brazza founded Brazzaville, whose butti power-figures guard lineages, and whose round tsaayi masks became icons of modern art.
Read full profile →Tekna
Western Sahara · Morocco
The confederation of the desert's northern edge — mixed Amazigh and Arab lineages who ran the caravan trade between Morocco and the Sahara from the port of Goulimine and the fortress of Guelmim, and whose position between Morocco and the Sahrawi movement has been contested ever since.
Read full profile →Tem (Kotokoli)
Togo · Benin · Ghana
The Muslim traders of central Togo — a kingdom at Tchamba and Sokodé whose long-distance merchants linked the forest to the Sahel, and whose Adossa knife festival at the end of Ramadan has men in trance driving blades against their own bodies.
Read full profile →Temne
Sierra Leone
The people of Sierra Leone's central and coastal heartland — heirs of chiefdoms that met the first Atlantic traders, keepers of the Poro and Bondo/Sande societies, the Ragbenle and Ramena institutions, and the paramount chieftaincies that shaped the nation.
Read full profile →Tetela (Atetela)
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Forest and savannah people of Sankuru whose name has run through Congolese history out of all proportion to their numbers: Ngongo Leteta's nineteenth-century warlordism, the 1895 Luluabourg mutinies, and Patrice Lumumba.
Read full profile →Tharaka
Kenya
Beekeepers and dryland cultivators of the hot lowlands east of Mount Kenya, keepers of the ancestral Mugwe institution and of a reputation for sorcery that other Mount Kenya peoples still repeat, farming millet and sorghum on ground the rains reach twice a year if at all.
Read full profile →The 1972 Burundians
Burundi · Tanzania
Hutu Burundians who fled the killings of 1972 into Tanzania, were settled in three great camps in the western forests, farmed there for four decades, and became the longest-standing refugee population in Africa before Tanzania offered them citizenship and then hesitated.
Read full profile →The Rwandan clans (Ubwoko)
Rwanda · Burundi
The eighteen clans that cut across every division Rwanda is known for — Abanyiginya, Abega, Abasinga and the rest, each containing Hutu, Tutsi and Twa alike, and each still named at weddings in a country that has abolished ethnicity by law.
Read full profile →Tigrayans
Ethiopia · Eritrea
The northern highlanders of Ethiopia and Eritrea in whose land the Aksumite empire minted gold, raised granite obelisks and adopted Christianity in the 4th century — keepers of Ge'ez liturgy, rock-hewn churches and the legend of the Ark.
Read full profile →Tigre
Eritrea · Sudan
The pastoralists of Eritrea's western lowlands — Muslim herders speaking a language descended directly from Ge'ez, who overthrew their own hereditary nobility in the 1940s, and who formed the first generation of the independence movement.
Read full profile →Tikar
Cameroon
The 'mother-people' of the Cameroon Grassfields — savanna migrants whose dynasties are claimed as founders by many Grassfields and Bamileke chiefdoms, keepers of the tumbu drum-dances, brass-casting and the sacred kingship of Bankim and Nditam.
Read full profile →Tiv
Nigeria
The great egalitarian farmers of the Benue valley — a segmentary nation of yam and sesame growers whose a'kombo ritual repairs the world, whose swange rhythms and kwagh-hir puppet theatre dazzle Nigeria, and who famously never had kings.
Read full profile →Toma (Loma)
Guinea · Liberia
The forest people of the Guinea-Liberia border — makers of the great horned landai mask of the Poro society, inventors of an indigenous syllabary in the 1930s, and farmers of one of the last patches of Upper Guinean rainforest.
Read full profile →Tonga (Batonga)
Zambia · Zimbabwe
The Zambezi-valley people uprooted by Kariba Dam — matrilineal farmers and fishers famed for the budima and ngoma buntibe dance-orchestras, the Nyaminyami river-serpent, and a resilient culture that survived one of Africa's great forced resettlements.
Read full profile →Tonga of Nkhata Bay
Malawi
Lakeshore fishers and traders of northern Malawi who took to mission schooling earlier and harder than almost anyone in central Africa, supplied the clerks of three colonies, and produced a disproportionate share of the men who argued the country into independence.
Read full profile →Tongas
São Tomé and Príncipe
Those born on the plantation — the children and grandchildren of contract workers brought from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde, who inherited the roça without inheriting land, and whose Portuguese-based speech and music are the sound of the cocoa century.
Read full profile →Topnaar (ǂAonin)
Namibia
The people of the !nara melon — a Nama community living in the Namib desert along the dry Kuiseb river, whose entire economy once rested on a spiny endemic plant, and whose water is now taken by a city upstream.
Read full profile →Toposa
South Sudan · Kenya · Ethiopia
The cattle herders of the Kapoeta plains — Ateker kin of the Turkana and Karamojong, whose age grades, mountain shrines and gold-panning riverbeds sit at the point where South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia meet.
Read full profile →Tsaangui (Batsangui)
Republic of the Congo · Gabon
Farmers and hunters of the Niari and Nyanga valleys on the Congo-Gabon border, initiates of the Bwiti religion that spread across Gabon from the Fang and the Mitsogo, and keepers of the mukisi and mungala masking traditions.
Read full profile →Tsonga (Vatsonga)
South Africa · Mozambique · Zimbabwe
The people of the Limpopo lowveld and the Mozambican coast — whose xibelani skirt-dance shakes across three countries, whose timbila-adjacent music and marimba traditions travelled with migrant labour, and whose Gaza history spans an ocean and a mountain range.
Read full profile →Tswa (Vatswa)
Mozambique · Zimbabwe
Farmers and cashew growers of Inhambane's interior, the westernmost of the Tsonga-related peoples, whose men worked South Africa's gold mines for a century and whose remittances built the province.
Read full profile →Tswana (Batswana)
Botswana · South Africa
The people of the kgotla — southern Africa's great tradition of public deliberation — whose agro-pastoral towns were among precolonial Africa's largest, and whose consensus politics seeded one of the continent's most stable democracies.
Read full profile →Tuareg (Kel Tamasheq)
Mali · Niger · Algeria · Libya · Burkina Faso
The veiled lords of the central Sahara — matrilineal confederations who ran the desert's caravans for a millennium, write in ancient Tifinagh, and whose women own the tents, the poetry and the one-string imzad that carries the nomad soul.
Read full profile →Tumbuka
Malawi · Zambia
The people of the northern Malawi highlands — heirs of the old Chikulamayembe trading state, whose vimbuza healing-dance (a UNESCO heritage) exorcises illness through drum-driven trance, and whose language became a lingua franca of the north.
Read full profile →Tunisian Jews
Tunisia
One of the oldest Jewish communities in the world — present in Tunisia for over two thousand years, sustained on Djerba through Roman, Arab, Ottoman and French rule, and reduced from a hundred thousand to around a thousand within two decades.
Read full profile →Tupuri
Cameroon · Chad
Cattle-keeping farmers of the Cameroon-Chad border plain whose gurna fattening retreat sends young men into seclusion to drink milk for months, and whose harvest dances draw thousands across an international boundary.
Read full profile →Turkana
Kenya
The desert nation of the Jade Sea — Ateker pastoralists who mastered Kenya's harshest land with camels, song-oxen and emuron dreamer-prophets, keepers of a fierce independence never conquered by neighbors, and neighbors to humankind's oldest fossils.
Read full profile →Urhobo
Nigeria
The people of the Delta's freshwater swamps — whose colossal edjo re akare shrine figures stand over ancestral halls, whose Ohworu water-spirit masquerade rises from the creeks, and whose twenty-two kingdoms hold the oil country's western flank.
Read full profile →VaDoma
Zimbabwe
The people of the Zambezi escarpment — hunter-gatherers of the Kanyemba region who resisted settlement longest in Zimbabwe, and who are known worldwide for a hereditary foot condition that outsiders have made into their entire identity.
Read full profile →Vai
Liberia · Sierra Leone
The people who invented a script — coastal traders of the Liberia-Sierra Leone border whose syllabary, devised around 1833 from a dream, is one of the very few writing systems created independently in modern times and still in use.
Read full profile →Venda (Vhavenda)
South Africa · Zimbabwe
The people of the misted Soutpansberg — guardians of Lake Fundudzi's python god, dancers of the domba snake-initiation, heirs of stone-walled Dzata, whose sacred forests and matriarch-guarded drums kept the mysteries of the far north.
Read full profile →Vezo
Madagascar
The people who are Vezo because they fish — a west-coast community defined by activity rather than descent, sailing outrigger pirogues without engines or charts, and now watching industrial fleets take the reef they read like a map.
Read full profile →Vili
Republic of the Congo · Gabon · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The people of Loango — a coastal kingdom that traded ivory, copper and captives with Europe for three centuries from a capital of avenues and palaces, and whose carved ivory tusks recorded the trade in spiral relief.
Read full profile →Wahadimu
Zanzibar · Tanzania
Unguja's oldest farming population — the people whose mwinyi mkuu ruled the island before the Omanis came, who lost the fertile west to clove plantations and kept the coral rag east, and who still work the seaweed and the fishing grounds of the south coast.
Read full profile →Wamakua of the Comoros
Comoros · Mozambique
The descendants of the enslaved — Mozambicans brought to the Comoros in the nineteenth century whose Makua origin is still named, whose sambe drumming is heard at every celebration, and who occupy the bottom of an island social order that officially no longer exists.
Read full profile →Wamakunduchi
Zanzibar · Tanzania
The people of Zanzibar's southern tip, who open the Shirazi new year each July with a ritual stick fight and the burning of a hut, in a festival of Persian origin that has been held on this coast for a thousand years.
Read full profile →Wamwali (Mohéli)
Comoros
The smallest and greenest Comorian island — fifty thousand people, a queen who ruled in the 1840s as a child, the archipelago's only marine park, and the beaches where green turtles nest in numbers found almost nowhere else in the region.
Read full profile →Wandzuwani (Anjouan)
Comoros
The people of the steep green island — the most densely populated land in the Indian Ocean, ylang-ylang distillers and clove growers, whose sultans once supplied East India Company ships and whose separatist revolt in 1997 nearly broke the Comorian union.
Read full profile →Wangazidja (Grande Comore)
Comoros
The people of the largest Comorian island — matrilineal in property and patrilineal in office, organised by age grades, and defined by the grand mariage, a ceremony of such expense that it confers, once completed, the right to speak in public affairs for life.
Read full profile →Wapemba
Zanzibar · Tanzania
The people of the green island — Pemba's farmers and clove growers, who supply most of Zanzibar's cloves, whose reputation for sorcery draws clients from across East Africa, and whose politics have been the archipelago's most contested for thirty years.
Read full profile →Warsangali
Puntland · Somaliland · Somalia
The Darod clan of the Sanaag highlands — sultans at Las Khorey since the fourteenth century, keepers of the frankincense forests of Cal Madow, and holders of territory claimed by both Somaliland and Puntland.
Read full profile →Watumbatu
Zanzibar · Tanzania
The island within the island — sailors and fishermen of Tumbatu off Unguja's north-west, famed as the finest boat handlers on the coast, holders of their own dialect and of a reputation for religious strictness and social distance.
Read full profile →Wodaabe
Niger · Chad · Cameroon · Nigeria
The cattle nomads of the southern Sahara's edge — a Fulani group who kept the older pastoral life when others settled, and whose Guerewol festival has men in ochre and white paint dancing for hours to be judged on beauty by women.
Read full profile →Wolayta
Ethiopia
The enset-farming kingdom of Ethiopia's south — whose Kawo kings ruled until Menelik's conquest, whose densely terraced hills feed one of Africa's most crowded countrysides, and whose Gifata new-year and shoulder-shaking dance are national favourites.
Read full profile →Wolof
Senegal · The Gambia · Mauritania
Senegal's leading nation and the culture of teranga (hospitality) — heirs of the Jolof Empire, marshals of sabar drumming and làmb wrestling, whose Sufi brotherhoods and mbalax rhythms define the modern Senegambian world.
Read full profile →Xhosa (amaXhosa)
South Africa
The nation of the Eastern Cape — famed for izibongo praise poetry, the ulwaluko initiation that makes men, click-rich isiXhosa oratory, and a modern lineage of giants from Mandela and Tambo to Miriam Makeba's click songs.
Read full profile →Yaaku
Kenya
Former forest hunters and beekeepers of Mukogodo in Laikipia who voted as a community in the 1930s to abandon their own language and become Maasai, and whose grandchildren are now trying, with a handful of elderly speakers left, to get it back.
Read full profile →Yabs (Petits Blancs des Hauts)
Réunion
The poor white farmers of Réunion's highlands — descendants of early French settlers who never acquired estates, who farmed the cirques and the volcanic uplands on smallholdings, and who supply the island with its lentils, its geranium oil and a good deal of its self-mockery.
Read full profile →Yaka
Democratic Republic of the Congo · Angola
The people of the Kwango — whose upturned-nose kholuka masks close the n-khanda initiation with satire and acrobatics, whose slit-drums and healing statuettes are famous, and whose kings traced power to the Lunda empire.
Read full profile →Yakoma
Central African Republic · Democratic Republic of the Congo
The river people of the Ubangi — canoe traders and fishers whose language became the basis of Sango, the Central African Republic's national tongue, spoken by nearly everyone in the country.
Read full profile →Yao (Wayao)
Malawi · Mozambique · Tanzania
The long-distance traders of the Lake Malawi–Ruvuma country — matrilineal caravan-merchants who linked the interior to the Swahili coast, embraced Islam early, and carry the masked Midimu and initiation traditions across three nations.
Read full profile →Yemeni Djiboutians
Djibouti · Somaliland
The Arab merchants of the Gulf of Tadjoura — Yemeni families who crossed the Bab el-Mandeb to trade, built the shops and mosques of Djibouti city, and whose kin have crossed the other way as refugees since 2015.
Read full profile →Yoruba
Nigeria · Benin · Togo
One of Africa's great urban civilizations — over 40 million people whose sacred city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, orisha religion, divination science and bronze-casting mastery have shaped world culture from Lagos to Bahia and Havana.
Read full profile →Zabbaleen
Egypt
Cairo's garbage collectors, mostly Coptic Christians who came from Upper Egypt with pigs, who recycle around eighty per cent of what they collect, which is roughly double what any municipal system in the world manages.
Read full profile →Zaghawa (Beri)
Chad · Sudan
The camel-and-cattle nomads of the Chad–Sudan Sahara border — an ancient Saharan people named in medieval Arab chronicles, keepers of the Beri script and the Kobe and Wagi confederations, whose homeland straddles the Darfur frontier.
Read full profile →Zanzibari Arabs
Zanzibar · Tanzania
The Omani and Hadrami families of Stone Town — who moved a sultanate from Muscat to Zanzibar, built the clove economy on slavery, gave the island its carved doors and its taarab, and were killed or driven out in their thousands in 1964.
Read full profile →Zarabes
Réunion
Réunion's Gujarati Muslims — traders who arrived free rather than indentured from the 1860s, built the shops of every town centre and the island's mosques, and kept a distinct religious and commercial identity inside a French department.
Read full profile →Zaramo
Tanzania
Matrilineal coastal farmers whose land became Dar es Salaam, absorbed into the city they were surrounded by, keepers of the mwali girls' seclusion tradition and of the sculptural style that gave Tanzania its best-known figure carvings.
Read full profile →Zarma (Djerma)
Niger · Mali · Benin
The people of Niger's south-west — Songhay-speaking farmers of the river valley who resisted French conquest at Lougou under a woman ruler, whose holey possession cult sends the spirits of the bush into dancers' bodies, and who supply much of Niger's civil service.
Read full profile →Zigua (Zigula)
Tanzania · Somalia
Farmers of the Pangani hinterland whose nineteenth-century warlords armed themselves through the caravan trade, and whose people were taken as slaves to the Somali river valleys in such numbers that a Zigua-speaking community survives on the Jubba to this day.
Read full profile →Zulu (amaZulu)
South Africa
South Africa's largest nation, forged into a kingdom by Shaka kaSenzangakhona in the early 19th century — famed for its regimental history, izibongo praise poetry, beadwork language and living royal ceremonies.
Read full profile →Zuwaya
Libya
The Arab tribe of the Kufra oases — desert traders who took the oasis from its earlier inhabitants in the 1840s, hosted the Sanusi order's greatest lodge, and now sit on the crossroads of the central Saharan migration route.
Read full profile →