All 100 cutaways

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.

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 a pressurised water reactor splits uranium atoms to boil water, spin a turbine and light Cape Town, and how it is kept safe.

How a giant rotating machine chews through solid rock, carries the rubble away and lines the tunnel with concrete rings as it goes.

How a diesel engine as tall as a four-storey house turns a propeller nine metres across and pushes a container ship across the ocean.

How three long blades, a gearbox and a generator on top of a tower turn the steady winds of northern Kenya into electricity.

How a fan, curved vanes, a honeycomb and a narrowing duct make a smooth, fast wind, so engineers can watch and weigh the air flowing round a car, a wing or a ball.

How a steam locomotive turns coal and water into pulling power: fire, boiler, steam, pistons and rods, on the railway that runs from Mombasa to Kampala.

How a lift carries people up a Lagos tower: a car and a counterweight on steel ropes, a motor on the roof, and a safety brake that grips the rails if anything goes wrong.

How a lock lifts a boat from one river level to another with nothing but gates, sliding paddles and gravity.

How the legs of a 300-tonne jet catch it on the runway, stop it, steer it and fold away into its belly.

How a submarine sinks on purpose, flies through the deep on little wings, and comes back up again, with a boat of the South African Navy cut in half.

How a tower crane lifts tonnes of concrete high above a Lagos building site without tipping over, and how it climbs to grow with the building.

How a floating rig in a kilometre of sea drills a well three kilometres into the rock, and how heavy mud and a giant valve on the sea floor keep the oil and gas under control.

How one machine cuts the wheat, beats the grain out of the ears, blows away the chaff, and fills a trailer with clean grain while it drives across the field.

How limestone and clay are crushed, ground, burned at 1450 °C into clinker, then milled with gypsum into the grey powder that builds cities.

How a reverse-osmosis plant pushes seawater through membranes so fine that salt cannot follow, turning the Mediterranean into drinking water.

How one engine, a spinning rotor and two clever plates let a pilot lift straight up, hover, and fly any way they like.

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 diesel engine, a pump and three oil-filled cylinders let one person dig rock and load a truck in seconds.

How a lamp, a giant glass lens and a slowly turning table send a coded flash far out to sea.

How a magnet, a coil of wire and a paper-thin dome turn your phone's music into sound, and how noise cancelling silences a roaring danfo.

How a fridge pumps heat out of the box, why the coils at the back feel warm, and what happens to your stew when the power goes off.

How five tiny pins, five springs and one line you cannot see let only the right key turn a lock.

How a magnetron, a metal box and billions of spinning water molecules warm up last night's jollof in two minutes.

How a floating ball, a rubber flap and a siphon in the bowl flush a toilet, and how Cape Town learned to save every litre.

How a lens, a hole that can shrink and a shutter that blinks catch a portrait on film, in a photo studio in Bamako.

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 a needle, a spinning hook and a little bobbin tie two threads together hundreds of times a minute: the lockstitch.

How pressing a key throws a felt hammer at a steel string, lets go just in time, and stops the sound when you lift your finger.

How a front-loading washer fills, tumbles, drains and spins your clothes nearly dry, with water that only ever travels through valves, hoses and a pump.

How a split air conditioner picks heat up in your bedroom, carries it through the wall in copper pipes and throws it out into the street.

How a tiny rolling ball, a tube of thick ink, gravity and two small holes let you write for hours in an exam hall.

How two rows of tiny hooked teeth and one Y-shaped slider close a bag in a second and hold it shut all day.

How a printer steps paper past a head that sweeps to and fro, firing millions of tiny drops of four inks to build words and pictures out of dots.

How a kettle turns electricity into heat, knows when its water boils and clicks itself off, high up in Addis Ababa where water boils at about 92 °C.

How a chain, a stack of sprockets and a little sprung arm let one pair of legs race on the flat and still climb Rwanda's steepest hills.

How a sheet of glass knows exactly where your finger is: a grid of see-through wires, a tiny charge at every crossing and a chip that checks them all over a hundred times a second.

How sunlight on a silicon panel pushes electrons through wires into a battery, and how that stored sunshine lights a bulb after dark.

How a crash sensor, a tiny explosion and a nylon bag catch a driver in less time than it takes to blink.

How a pump, two copper boilers and nine bars of pressure squeeze a shot of espresso out of a puck of Ethiopian coffee.

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.

How the cornea, the pupil and a living lens throw an upside-down picture onto the retina, and how river blindness, once common along West Africa's rivers, is being beaten.

How a dome of muscle and a cage of ribs pull air down your windpipe into 480 million tiny air sacs, where oxygen slips into the blood and carbon dioxide slips out, even on a dusty harmattan morning.

How a talking drum's gliding notes become tiny pushes on your eardrum, a lever of three little bones, and a ripple in the fluid of the cochlea that peaks in a different place for every pitch.

How a nerve cell fires: gates in its skin let salts rush in and out, the signal jumps along a fatty sheath, and a puff of chemicals makes a muscle kick, in a few thousandths of a second.

How two fist-sized kidneys filter all your blood dozens of times a day, take back almost everything good, and decide how much water to let go, on a 40 °C afternoon in Kano.

How a mouthful of pounded yam and egusi soup is chewed, squeezed, dissolved and soaked up on its long trip through one tube, from the mouth to the toilet.

How 27 small bones, the joints between them and long tendons pulled by muscles in the forearm let a drummer's fingers curl, grip, pinch and slap.

How a tiny parasite passes from a mosquito to a person and back again: the bite, the hidden week in the liver, the waves of fever in the blood, and the ways to break the cycle.

How a colony of honeybees runs a wax city: a queen laying eggs, workers raising brood, foragers bringing nectar and pollen from the flowers, a dance that gives directions, and wings that keep the hive cool.

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 a little yellow bird tears grass into strips and knots hundreds of them into a hanging nest, with its door facing down and its tree over the water.

How a baobab stores tens of thousands of litres of water in its swollen trunk, drops its leaves to survive the dry season, opens its flowers at night for fruit bats, and can live for well over a thousand years.

How a leaf turns sunlight, water and carbon dioxide from the air into sugar, and breathes out the oxygen we live on, inside a tea leaf from the green hills of Kericho.

How a hard, dry cowpea seed drinks up the rain, splits open, sends down a root and pushes a hooked shoot up into the light, living on its own packed lunch until its first leaves can feed it.

How a white stork's wing works, from the arm bones inside it to the feathers that open and close, and how it rides rising warm air over Kenya's Rift Valley on its long journey from Europe.

How warm, wet air off Lake Victoria builds a cloud taller than Kilimanjaro, how ice inside it splits electric charge, and how lightning and thunder are born.

How the wind builds waves, why the water in them goes round in circles instead of travelling, why waves break on the beach, and how the Moon and the Sun pull the tides in and out.

How melted rock rises from deep under the East African Rift into the lava lake of Nyiragongo, and why its runny lava is such a danger to the city of Goma below.

A globe with one slice cut away: the thin crust, the slowly churning mantle, the liquid outer core that makes the magnetic field, the solid inner core, and the rift that is slowly splitting Africa in two.

How bones, muscles, nerves, heart, lungs and the organs that refuel them work together in one sprint, peeled back layer by layer on an anatomical model.

How a satellite the size of a loaf of bread rides up in a pod, unfolds its solar wings, turns without rockets, takes pictures of Africa and sends them home in a ten-minute radio pass.

How a satellite the size of a cereal box keeps its camera pointed at a flooding river, thinks about the pictures, and beams a flood map down to the ground.

How a phone on a boda-boda's handlebar finds its place on the map, by timing radio signals from satellites 20,000 km up.

How a two-stage rocket carries a small satellite to orbit: fuel and oxygen tanks, turbopumps, a roaring nozzle, and empty stages dropped along the way.

How a space station keeps people alive 400 km up: pressurised modules, solar arrays, radiators, oxygen made from water, and Africa passing below every 90 minutes.

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

How a gold mirror behind a five-layer sunshield, 1.5 million km from Earth, sees the infrared glow of the first galaxies, and how Africa's radio dishes listen from the ground.

How a curved wing full of fuel lifts a 230-tonne airliner, and how its slats, flaps, ailerons and spoilers change its shape for every part of a flight.

How four spinning rotors, a tiny computer full of motion sensors and a battery keep a drone steady in the air, and how changing just the rotor speeds steers it.

How a bag of hot air lifts a basket of people at dawn: the envelope, the propane burner, buoyancy, the parachute vent, and steering with the wind.

How a lithium-ion battery stores sunshine for the night: lithium ions shuttle between graphite and metal oxide inside, while electrons do the work in the wire outside.

How a six-jointed robot arm in a car plant knows where its hand is, works out how to reach a point, and picks parts off a moving line all day without tiring.

How a spinning laser times its own echoes to measure the world in millions of dots, steering self-driving cars and finding lost cities under the bush.

How a battery, an inverter and one spinning motor move a car with no engine, no exhaust and no gears to change, and how it gets its energy back when it slows down.

How a cable no thicker than a garden hose, lying on the bottom of the Atlantic, carries Africa's messages, videos and calls to Europe as flashes of light.

How a speck of silicon becomes a switch with no moving parts, and how billions of them let a phone think.

What happens in the fifth of a second between a caller speaking in Kano and their family hearing them in Nairobi, about 3,500 kilometres away.

How a printer melts a thread of plastic and lays it down in hundreds of thin layers, building a real, useful part from nothing but a computer file.

How a giant magnet, a tank of liquid helium and pulses of radio make the hydrogen in your body sing, and turn its faint echo into a picture of the inside of your head.

How pulses of laser light, trapped in a strand of glass as thin as a hair, carry the internet under the road to your home.