So, because you’re smart and in the know (or are a regular reader of the London metro) you are probably aware of Asa Baako, the music, culture and dance festival that takes place every year in Ghana – but you don’t know much else… well,...

I took a complete break over Christmas and New Year but instead of going somewhere sensible like Scotland or Sri Lanka I went to South Africa and Lesotho. Sunshine everyday and magnificent scenery with lots of Braais, Boerewors and wine, but it was impossible ...

Ask a stupid question….the answer obviously is no.  From his first major break-out as a leading man in Dirty, Pretty Things, in which he plays an illegal immigrant, to his earlier appearance in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, Ejiofor has worked fluidily acros...

Almost no one in the late 1980s believed apartheid would end peacefully. The government was in trouble but the core of its system that kept the whites in power looked solid. It was under attack on the streets of townships – but children with stones and burni...

<> The Rift Valley in Eastern Africa is our hole in the ground, where we all come from. Not far from here our earliest ancestors stopped hanging out in the trees and started to use their rear limbs to get around on. From here we began to migrate and mult...

So now we know a little more. We always knew that in 2001 Britain’s BAE systems sold Tanzania a £28 million air traffic control system. The World Bank and the International Civil Aviation Organisation said it was unnecessarily sophisticated and overpriced. ...

A dangerous bubble – Richard Dowden takes the temperature of Tanzanian democracy and discovers a land of two halves. When our ancestors first looked out across Tanzania’s plains from Olduvai Gorge they must have thought: “This place has got potential...

By Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society On my first visit to Sudan – more than 25 years ago – I took a bus from Khartoum down the Nile to Renk, a trip from the Islamic, Arabic-speaking north to the culturally African south which is more di...