Yoté is a fast West African strategy game: players keep their pieces in hand, drop them onto the board and capture by jumping. A 1955 survey of West African games found it so popular in Senegal that French speakers there had coined a verb for playing it: "yoter".
📍 Western Russia
In gorodki, "little towns" in Russian, players hurl a heavy bat to knock wooden pins out of a square called the "town". This old Russian game was a favourite of Peter the Great and Leo Tolstoy, yet it only got written rules in 1923.
📍 London (Crufts at Olympia), England
Dog agility began as interval entertainment at the 1978 Crufts dog show in London, with dogs racing round a course modelled on horse show jumping. It became a proper competition at Crufts in 1980.
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📍 Lake City (Lake Pepin), Minnesota, USA
In 1922 Ralph Samuelson, aged 18, became the first recorded water skier, on Lake Pepin at Lake City, Minnesota. After trying barrel staves and snow skis, he made his own skis from pine boards and was towed by a motorboat.
📍 Central Africa (Cameroon to the Congo)
Despite nicknames like 'Chinese water bamboo', lucky bamboo is not a bamboo and not from China: it's a dracaena that grows wild in Central Africa, from Cameroon to the Congo. Its scientific name honours Henry Sander, a German-born orchid grower in England.
📍 Kasai, DR Congo (Kuba Kingdom)
Kuba cloth comes from the old Kuba Kingdom in the Kasai region of DR Congo. Men weave squares from raffia palm fibre, then women embroider them and snip the stitches into a soft pile that looks and feels like velvet.
📍 West Africa (Senegal to Cameroon)
Ackee is Jamaica's national fruit, but the tree is native to West Africa and was carried to the Caribbean by the late 1700s. Its scientific name, Blighia sapida, honours Captain William Bligh.