How things work, opened up.

How Asante weavers turn thousands of threads into a strip of Kente cloth, one pick at a time.

How the yellow minibus of Lagos works: an engine in the back, a gearbox, rear-wheel drive, a sliding door and a conductor who never stops calling the route.

How eight cylinders in a V, one crankshaft and four camshafts turn thousands of small explosions a minute into the smooth pull of a big car or pickup.

How a wall of concrete across the Volta turns a falling river into electricity for Ghana and its neighbours, and how the spillway keeps floods safe.

How the brass casters of Benin City turn a model in beeswax into a gleaming royal head, using a clay mould that is used only once.

How four chambers, four one-way valves and a built-in electrical spark keep blood moving to the lungs and the body, beat after beat, from rest to a hill run in Iten.

What is inside the phone in your pocket: a sandwich of glass, a lithium battery, a chip with billions of switches, cameras, antennas and a tiny buzzing motor.

How millions of blind insects build a tower of earth that farms fungus, guards a queen and breathes with the daily swing of sun and night, an idea Harare borrowed for a building.

How Egyptian workers cut, dragged, shipped and levered 2.3 million stone blocks into the Great Pyramid, and what lies inside.

How a six-wheeled robot geologist climbs rocks, drills cores, powers itself and talks to Earth from 225 million kilometres away.