Your mother tongue does this too
In Swahili, if a friend stubs their toe, you say "pole." Sorry.
So you'd think 'pole pole' means 'very sorry.' It isn't. It means "slowly."
How come?
Pole really means gently.
A calm, soft-spoken person is....
Plan your next African Festival Trip
Once a year, in the village of Makunduchi, south of Zanzibar, men line up and beat each other with banana stalks.
No one loses. It's how the village clears the past year's grudges.
You hit, you get hit, and by sundown nob....
The Book from Moscow
At ten in the morning, a man collects his mail and drives to the coast to read it in peace.
It is February 1969, in Dar es Salaam, the seaside capital of Tanzania.
The man likes working at a friend's villa in Oyster Bay,....
Same Cradle, Three Graves: The Angola Story
On a Friday morning in February 2002, an old man is running for his life through the bush of Eastern Angola.
He is sixty-seven years old. He has spent four decades fighting a war.
Government soldiers are closing in behind....
The Lisbon Breakout: How a Captive Poet Built a Borderland Army
In July 1962, a man steps out of a house in Lisbon and does not come back.
This should be impossible. The house is watched. The man inside is the most famous political prisoner in the Portuguese empire, a doctor, a poet, the one....
Where Ships Go to Die: The Forgotten Maritime History of Africa
Africa’s coastline carries stories most people never hear about.
Not the stories in tourism brochures and postcard beaches.
The darker stories.
Stories of ships swallowed by storms. Ancient cities sinking be....
What makes a bad name?
I just love good names.
One reason I love history is the names I get to discover. Kunta Kinte. Kwame Nkrumah. Ngolo Kanté.
You don't know why you like them. They just sound cool.
Take Kanté. Here is....