Africa Archives

Grand Egyptian Museum: A Visitor’s Guide for Mature Travellers

The pale stone facade of a museum on the edge of the Giza Plateau near Cairo, Egypt, with the pyramids on the horizon, illustrating the setting of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

Grand Egyptian Museum: A Visitor’s Guide for Mature Travellers On the desert edge west of Cairo, about two kilometres from the pyramids of Giza, stands the Grand Egyptian Museum. It was built to bring the treasures of Tutankhamun together under one roof for the first time since his tomb was found in 1922, and to […]

Cape Point: Fynbos, Shipwrecks and the Making of a Maritime Headland

The rugged sandstone headland of Cape Point, South Africa, running out into a deep blue sea, with proteas and low fynbos on the slopes in the foreground.

Cape Point: Fynbos, Shipwrecks and the Making of a Maritime Headland At the end of the Cape Peninsula, some 60 kilometres south of central Cape Town, a ridge of sandstone runs out into the sea and stops in a sheer drop of cliffs and spray. Cape Point in South Africa is not the southern tip […]

Freedom Charter Kliptown: The Congress of the People and South Africa’s Constitutional Imagination

A tall conical brick monument at the centre of a broad paved square in Kliptown, Soweto, Johannesburg, in clear winter morning light.

Freedom Charter Kliptown: The Congress of the People and South Africa’s Constitutional Imagination On a winter weekend in June 1955, nearly 3,000 delegates gathered on an open patch of ground in Kliptown, on the south-western edge of Johannesburg. They came from across South Africa to adopt a document built from thousands of demands sent in […]

Chobe River Cruise: Riverine Ecology and Reading Wildlife from the Water

A pod of hippos half-submerged in the Chobe River in northern Botswana, one yawning, with the green floodplain behind in warm late-afternoon light.

Chobe River Cruise: Riverine Ecology and Reading Wildlife from the Water Most safaris are seen from a vehicle, looking out across the bush. A Chobe River cruise turns that around. From a small boat drifting along the river near Kasane in northern Botswana, you sit at the level of the water, a few metres from […]

Chobe National Park Elephants: Movement, Water and Conservation in Northern Botswana

A large herd of elephants walking down a dusty bank to the Chobe River in northern Botswana in warm late-afternoon light, with a green floodplain beyond.

Chobe National Park Elephants: Movement, Water and Conservation in Northern Botswana In the late afternoon of a dry-season day on the Chobe River, the elephants come down to drink. They walk out of the woodland in long lines, family groups led by older females, calves hurrying to keep up, and spread along the bank to […]

Victoria Falls Geology: How the Zambezi Cut the Smoke That Thunders

An aerial view of Victoria Falls and the zigzag basalt gorges of the Zambezi below it, with the arched Victoria Falls Bridge spanning the first gorge.

Victoria Falls Geology: How the Zambezi Cut the Smoke That Thunders Above Victoria Falls, the Zambezi is a broad, slow river, as wide as the falls themselves, dotted with palm-covered islands. Then, without warning, the whole river drops into a crack in the earth. The spray rises hundreds of metres into the air, and below […]

Panorama Route South Africa: Blyde River Canyon Geology and the Drakensberg Escarpment

The three round-topped quartzite peaks of the Three Rondavels above the Blyde River Canyon and its reservoir in Mpumalanga, South Africa, in early morning light.

Panorama Route South Africa: Blyde River Canyon Geology and the Drakensberg Escarpment West of Kruger National Park, the flat Lowveld comes to an abrupt end against a wall of cliffs. Climb the road to the top and you are on the edge of the Highveld plateau, looking down over the country you have just crossed. […]

Kruger National Park Conservation: Water, Fences and Wildlife Management

Elephants drinking from a narrow channel in a wide sandy riverbed lined with large trees in Kruger National Park, South Africa, at dawn in the dry season.

Kruger National Park Conservation: Water, Fences and Wildlife Management Kruger National Park looks like wilderness: two million hectares of bushveld running some 360 kilometres along South Africa’s border with Mozambique, crossed by rivers and home to elephant, lion, rhino and hundreds of other species. But almost nothing about what you see from a game vehicle […]

Voortrekker Monument: Afrikaner Memory, Architecture and a Contested Past

The massive square granite Voortrekker Monument on its hilltop outside Pretoria, South Africa, ringed by a carved ox-wagon wall, in late afternoon light.

Voortrekker Monument: Afrikaner Memory, Architecture and a Contested Past On a hilltop at the southern entrance to Pretoria stands a massive block of granite, roughly 40 metres high, ringed by a wall carved with 64 ox-wagons. The Voortrekker Monument was built to honour the Voortrekkers, the Dutch-speaking farmers who left the British-ruled Cape Colony from […]

Constitution Hill Johannesburg: From Prison Complex to Constitutional Court

The grassy earth ramparts and stone gateway of the Old Fort at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, with inner-city apartment towers behind in late afternoon light.

Constitution Hill Johannesburg: From Prison Complex to Constitutional Court On a ridge above Braamfontein, at the edge of Johannesburg’s inner city, stands a group of buildings that spans almost the whole of the city’s history. There is a nineteenth-century fort with grassed ramparts, a cramped prison block where Black men were held for most of […]

Featherbed Nature Reserve: Knysna Lagoon, Milkwood Forest and Protected Landscapes

The surf-filled channel between the sandstone cliffs of the Knysna Heads, with the calm Knysna lagoon beyond, seen from the Western Head on South Africa's Garden Route.

Featherbed Nature Reserve: Knysna Lagoon, Milkwood Forest and Protected Landscapes At the mouth of the Knysna lagoon, two high cliffs face each other across a narrow channel where the Indian Ocean surges in and out with every tide. The western of these headlands carries no road from town and no houses on its seaward slopes. […]

Cango Caves: Karst, Conservation and the Underground Klein Karoo

Cango Caves: Karst, Conservation and the Underground Klein Karoo About 29 kilometres north of Oudtshoorn, where the dry farmland of the Klein Karoo meets the first slopes of the Swartberg, a modest entrance in a limestone hillside opens into one of the oldest tourist attractions in South Africa. The Cango Caves are a chain of […]

Castle of Good Hope: VOC Fortification and Cape Town’s Maritime Replenishment Station

The ochre-yellow walls and stone bastion of the Castle of Good Hope above its moat in central Cape Town, with Table Mountain behind in late afternoon light.

Castle of Good Hope: VOC Fortification and Cape Town’s Maritime Replenishment Station Walk a few blocks east from the Grand Parade in central Cape Town and the street grid gives way to a low, five-pointed fortress of ochre walls and angled bastions. The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest surviving colonial building in South […]

Oudtshoorn Ostrich Farms: Feather Fashion, Farming and the Klein Karoo

Oudtshoorn Ostrich Farms: Feather Fashion, Farming and the Klein Karoo In the dry valley of the Klein Karoo, between the folded ridges of the Swartberg and the mountains that wall it off from the coast, the town of Oudtshoorn owes almost everything it once was to a single bird. A century ago, ostrich feathers were […]

Southern Africa Cultural Journey: Cities, Rivers, Wildlife and Memory on a 19-Day Route

Southern Africa Cultural Journey: Cities, Rivers, Wildlife and Memory on a 19-Day Route Most journeys through Southern Africa are sold as a string of highlights: a mountain, a waterfall, a game drive. Followed from end to end, though, the route from Cape Town to Johannesburg tells one long, connected story. It begins with a Dutch […]

Constantia Wine Route: Vineyards, Empire and Cape Food Culture

Constantia Wine Route: Vineyards, Empire and Cape Food Culture On the far side of Table Mountain from central Cape Town, the land drops into a green bowl of vineyards, oak avenues and white-gabled farmhouses, closed in on one side by the Constantiaberg and open on the other to the light of False Bay. This is […]

Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa: Alexandria’s Greco-Roman World

Principal tomb façade at the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, Alexandria, combining Egyptian funerary form with Greek architectural detailing

Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa: Alexandria’s Greco-Roman World In September 1900, on the western edge of Alexandria, a donkey pulling a cart broke through the ground and dropped into a shaft that Roman-era stonemasons had cut some 1,800 years before. What lay beneath that unremarkable street has become one of the more striking places to […]

Wadi el-Seboua: The Valley of the Lions on Egypt’s Lake Nasser

Wide landscape view of Lake Nasser with the relocated Wadi el-Seboua temple complex on its shore

Wadi el-Seboua: The Valley of the Lions on Egypt’s Lake Nasser Most visitors to Egypt’s ancient temples arrive by road. Reaching Wadi el-Seboua means boarding a boat instead, since its sandstone halls sit on the remote western shore of Lake Nasser, well south of Aswan and beyond any highway. The site takes its name, meaning […]

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History

Small cruise vessel crossing the open water of Lake Nasser, flanked by Nubian desert headlands

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History Most travellers who cruise Egypt never see this stretch of the country. Once the ship leaves Abu Simbel and heads north across the still, blue expanse of Lake Nasser, the crowds thin to almost nothing and the temples along the shore stand largely as they have […]

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Rebuilding Egypt’s Ancient Library

The tilted discus-shaped roof of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on Alexandria's waterfront

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Rebuilding Egypt’s Ancient Library The original Library of Alexandria has been gone for so long, and so completely, that no one can say with certainty when it actually disappeared. What survives instead is an idea: that a single institution once tried to gather all the world’s written knowledge in one place, and lost […]

Abu Simbel: Ramses II’s Temples and Egypt’s UNESCO Rescue

The Great Temple of Abu Simbel above Lake Nasser at sunrise

Abu Simbel: Ramses II’s Temples and Egypt’s UNESCO Rescue Twice a year, at dawn on 22 February and 22 October, sunlight travels sixty metres into the rock-cut sanctuary of the Great Temple at Abu Simbel and strikes the seated figures of three gods, while the fourth, Ptah, a god connected with the underworld, stays deliberately […]

Small-group travel, thoughtfully paced

Category: Africa