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.
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📍 Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
The world's first ski chairlifts opened in 1936 at Sun Valley, Idaho. A railroad engineer, Jim Curran, designed them by swapping the hooks of a banana-loading conveyor for chairs.
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📍 The Bronx, New York City, USA
Hip hop was born on 11 August 1973 at a back-to-school party in a Bronx apartment block. Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc played two copies of the same record on two turntables to stretch out the drum break the dancers loved.
📍 Cedar Rapids & Iowa City, USA
Iowa gymnast George Nissen and his coach Larry Griswold built the first modern trampoline in the mid-1930s, inspired by circus trapeze nets. Nissen named it after trampolín, Spanish for 'diving board'.
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📍 Misserghin (near Oran), Algeria
The clementine is a happy accident: a cross of mandarin and sweet orange that sprang up in an orphanage garden at Misserghin, near Oran in Algeria. It was named in 1902 after the brother who tended it, Clément Rodier.
📍 Durban, South Africa
There's no bunny in a bunny chow: it's a hollowed-out loaf of white bread filled with curry. It was created in the 1940s by the Indian community of Durban, where locals still order a 'quarter mutton'.
📍 Mali (Bambara lands)
Shea comes from si, the tree's name in Bambara, a language of Mali; the Scottish explorer Mungo Park spelled it 'shea' in his 1799 travel book. The wild trees grow across Africa's savanna belt, from Senegal to South Sudan.