In the gold-rich forests of central Ghana rose one of Africa’s great empires: a kingdom welded from rival chiefdoms by a sacred stool said to have descended from the sky,

Along the upper Niger, in the savanna heart of Mali, live the largest of the Mande peoples, farmers and warriors who kept the old gods when their kinsmen turned to

Along a great sandstone cliff in the heart of Mali, a people built an entire civilization into the rock. The Dogon, farmers and sculptors who took refuge on the Bandiagara

Along the lagoon-laced coast of West Africa, in the well-watered country between the mouth of the Volta River and the hills of Togo, lives a people bound together by a

No people in Africa reaches farther than the Fulani. From the Atlantic coast of Senegal to the plains of Sudan, across some twenty countries and four thousand kilometers of savanna,

Across the northern savanna of Nigeria and Niger rose one of Africa’s great urban civilizations: a chain of walled city-states, workshops and warehouses of the trans-Saharan trade, whose language became

In the densely peopled forests of southeastern Nigeria lives a people who built one of the world’s most remarkable political experiments: a civilization of thousands of independent villages governed by

Around the shallow, shifting waters of Lake Chad, at the very heart of the African continent where the Sahel meets the Sahara, lives a people whose empire ranks among the

On the dry central plateau of West Africa, in the heart of the country now called Burkina Faso, live a people who did what almost no one else in the

Along the great bend of the Niger River, in the borderland where the Sahel savanna gives way to the sands of the Sahara, there once rose one of the largest