Today
Daily Africa
Five doors and a word. Ten minutes a day, and in a year you will know more African history than most degrees teach.
Person of the day
Mansa Musa
The pilgrimage that put Mali on Europe's maps.
Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire at its territorial and commercial height, and his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 was the single most consequential act of African public diplomacy of the medieval period. The gold he distributed disrupted Cairo's markets for years; the scholars, architects and books he returned with reshaped Timbuktu; and within fifty years European cartographers were drawing him on their maps, enthroned with a nugget of gold in his hand.
Place of the day
The Songhai Empire
The largest state in West African history.
From Gao, Sonni Ali and then Askia Muhammad built the largest state West Africa has ever seen — with a professional standing army, a war fleet on the Niger, provincial governors, standardised weights and measures, and a scholarly establishment at Timbuktu — before a Moroccan expedition with firearms broke it in a single afternoon in 1591.
Event of the day
Ifá
A divination system with a 256-chapter corpus.
Ifá is a Yoruba system of knowledge, ethics and divination organised around 256 odù, each with a body of verses, narratives, prescriptions and precedents memorised by babaláwo across many years of training. It is a binary-structured archive of accumulated case law and moral reasoning, it survived the Middle Passage into Cuba and Brazil, and UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Idea of the day
Agenda 2063
The Africa We Want, written by Africans.
The African Union's fifty-year framework, adopted in 2015 on the fiftieth anniversary of the OAU: seven aspirations, twenty goals, and a set of flagship projects delivered through successive ten-year implementation plans. It is the continent's own long-term plan for 2063 — prosperity, integration, good governance, peace, cultural identity, people-driven development, and Africa as a global player.
Word of the day
Fitina
Kiswahili
Discord, mischief-making
A borrowed Arabic root that took on its own East African life.
Question of the day
Should looted objects return to the communities they came from, even where museums are underfunded?
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