Featured Destinations

Malawi’s first permanently settled people were Bantu from the north, who formed villages in 1500 along the central section of the lake and westwards into what is now Zambia. By 1600 these people were trading with the Portuguese and by the 1700s their tribal cohesions seemed to be disintegrating.

Bushmen, Damara and Namaqua people have lived in Namibia since early times with significant Bantu incursions occurring from 1300 AD onwards. The first Europeans to set foot on Africa’s south-west coast were Portuguese and included Bartolomeu Dias, but they did not put down any roots. Just crosses.

Zanzibar is an archipelago consisting of two main Islands of Unguja (commonly referred to as Zanzibar Island), Pemba and about 51 other surrounding small islets....

The Rev’d Francis Rhodes’s Boy

Cecil John Rhodes had a country named after him. Two, in fact. Not many businessmen can claim that honour! Furthermore a South African university (in Grahamstown) bears his name, as does a scholarship at Oxford. Indeed Oxford has a Rhodes House, designed, aptly, by Sir Herbert Baker, who designed Rhodes’s house in Cape Town. Rhodes was sent out to Natal by his vicar father who thought the warm weather might improve Cecil’s weak health. He was expected to help his brother Herbert on his cotton farm but, instead, founded De Beers, was Prime Minister of Cape Colony and almost succeeded in building a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. I imagine Francis and Louisa Rhodes were proud of their son’s achievement, despite the fact that he didn’t stay in cotton as they had hoped.