Stories

When I heard rumours of a new contender for the world's tallest man in northern Ghana, I set out to find out if it was true. The only problem? Measuring him. A local hospital in northern Ghana told 29-year-old Sulemana Abdul Samed…

The road to the ring is rarely a straightforward one for boxers, while the path that leads away can often be perilous. Francis Ampofo is a man who fought his way from the streets of London, where he moved as a child from Ghana, to the…

Vernon Vanriel was a talented athlete who fought crack addiction, was sectioned twice and beaten up by police officers. Finally he ended up stateless in Jamaica. A new play tells his extraordinary life story. Vernon Vanriel thinks it’s…

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…