NEARLY 800 YEARS AGO, Sundiata Keita founded the largest and greatest kingdom in West African history: the Mali Empire. At its height, around 1300, it stretched for some 2,000 kilometers west to east, ...

The soul-shattering abuses suffered by enslaved Africans, who were forcibly stripped of their languages, religions and other key aspects of their culture, were fortunately no match for their ...

A master of the kora who worked with Herbie Hancock and Philip Glass, his career was powered as much by experimentation as by reverence for tradition. By Giovanni Russonello Foday Musa Suso, a griot, ...

Early on in his new book, “Custodians of Wonder,” BBC Travel writer Eliot Stein tallies some recent effects of globalization, a process that seems to only speed up. Nine languages, he notes, are lost ...