The shekere, a dried gourd wrapped in a net of beads or cowrie shells, comes from the Yoruba of West Africa; an 1852 Yoruba dictionary already lists it. It later became a staple of Cuban and Brazilian music too.
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📍 Osaka, Japan
The world's first capsule hotel, the Capsule Inn Osaka, opened in 1979 in Osaka's Umeda district. Architect Kisho Kurokawa designed its bed-sized pods, meant for office workers who had missed the last train home.
📍 Honolulu, Hawaii
Madeiran craftsmen who sailed to Hawaii in 1879 turned their little machete guitar into the ukulele in the 1880s, and King Kalākaua made it a royal favourite. The Hawaiian name roughly means 'jumping flea'.
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📍 Croatia (Habsburg Military Frontier)
The necktie goes back to the knotted neck scarves of Croatian soldiers serving in France during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Parisians copied them and named them 'cravates', after 'Croates'. Croatia now celebrates Cravat Day on 18 October.
📍 Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco & Tunisia)
Couscous isn't a grain: it's tiny balls of semolina, rolled by hand and steamed. It began with the Berber peoples of North Africa, and in 2020 Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia put it on UNESCO's heritage list together.
📍 Senegal & neighbouring West Africa
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".
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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.