HOA - Humans of Africa - Extraordinary stories from the cradle of civilisation

Emmanuel Jal doesn’t know how old he is. He tells people he’s 38. “I don’t know exactly when I was born, just because I was born when my country was at war,” says the chart-topping hip-hop musician, who is from South…

A man in southern Senegal has set himself the ambitious task of planting five million trees over the next five years. This visionary project came to Adama Diémé when he returned home to the Casamance region in 2020 after a few years…

The river was deep and unpredictable, and infested with crocodiles I live in Samburu, in northern Kenya, but I was raised even farther north, on the border of Ethiopia. Where I grew up, there were elephants living in the wild. I was…

When I see our wedding photos, it’s like looking at someone else’s. One cold, crisp evening in February 2016, I went on a white-water kayaking course in Hertfordshire. I’d had lessons, but I was still a beginner and my skills weren’t…

RnB singer Akon says his much-delayed plans for Akon City - an African metropolis on the Senegalese coast - are "100,000% moving". Although goats are currently grazing on the site, he says that critics will look "super stupid" in the…

Little Haftom is nearly five years old. His name means "wealthy" in the Tigriyna language but he weighs just half what he should. As the doctor pulls up his jumper and tracksuit bottoms to show his spindly arms and legs, his mother…

It was the hair accessory of choice in the 1990s - fashionable yet functional - making a comeback in Covid lockdown when a trip to the salon wasn't possible. But few people realise the claw clip started life in a humble workshop in…

The unusual combination of a French horn, a grand piano, an electric sitar and a glockenspiel provided the introduction to Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time), a swooning soul ballad that took the Delfonics, a Philadelphia vocal trio, to…

A fire crackles just after dawn in north Tanzania's bushlands. The sun is starting to rise over the Yaeda Valley and the start of a new day means one thing for the Hadza tribe. It's time to begin their daily ritual of finding the food that…

Global superstar of football who was a hugely prolific goalscorer and three times a World Cup winner with Brazil. Pelé, who has died aged 82 after suffering from cancer, is widely regarded as the greatest footballer the game has ever…