Africa

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

How a ripe cocoa pod from a Ghanaian farm becomes a bar of chocolate, station by station.

How a palm oil mill turns heavy bunches of oil palm fruit into drums of red palm oil.

How fresh cassava is peeled, grated, pressed, fermented and roasted into garri, the crisp grain eaten across West Africa.

How a Yoruba drummer squeezes leather cords to bend the pitch of a drum until it speaks.

How a calabash, a cowhide and twenty-one strings make the harp of the Mandinka griots.

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 the Nok people of central Nigeria, more than two thousand years ago, fired clay figures in an open bonfire pit until they became hard terracotta.

How Yoruba dyers draw with cassava paste, dip cloth in indigo and watch it turn from green to blue.

How crude oil is lifted from deep sandstone in the Niger Delta, separated from gas and water, and split by boiling point into gas, petrol, kerosene, diesel and bitumen.

How the small petrol generator, the one Lagos calls "I better pass my neighbour", turns a cup of fuel into light, a cold fridge and a turning fan.

How the three-wheeled keke, the taxi of Nigerian streets, turns a small engine and a twist of the handlebar into a ride for three.

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 green coffee beans are washed, roasted, pounded and brewed in a clay jebena, then poured from high into small cups in three rounds.

Two ancient ways to lift water from the Nile by hand: a counterweighted lever with a bucket, and a spiral turned inside a tube.

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

How the builders of Great Zimbabwe split granite with fire and water and raised walls eleven metres high without a spoonful of mortar.

How the Church of Saint George was carved downward, from the top, out of one solid block of volcanic rock.

How a wooden sailing ship from Lamu catches the monsoon winds to trade between East Africa, Arabia and India, as dhows have for two thousand years.