Features

  Nairobi / DPA Sewing machines clatter and fumes from charcoal-burning irons fill the narrow aisles hung about with lengths of fabric in the Gikomba Market in Nairobi, one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in Africa. It is 7 am, and traders are already heaving large wooden carts fully laden with second-hand clothes pressed into plastic-covered packs weighing some ...

  Gross Pampau / DPA Amateur palaeontologist Wolfgang Hoepfner painstakingly removed all the dirt surrounding some fossilized bones, gradually revealing the skeleton of a 6-metre baleen whale, 11 million years after it had died in the North Sea. “For a palaeontologist like me, it was almost like winning the lottery,” he later explained with pride. Fossil hunting is a hobby ...

  Le Somail / AFP France’s Canal du Midi was once a bustling commercial artery crowded with lock keepers, boatmen and barges weighted down by wine and wheat. These days, 350 years after it was carved out of the soil of southwestern France, its banks and waters have become a haven for slow-living locals, artists and prosperous professionals. They are ...

  Naha / AFP Hollywood may have kicked karate onto the world stage, but its first-ever inclusion at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics promises to shine a light on the rich history of the discipline. At 78, sensei Masahiro Nakamoto has been waiting decades for this decision, insisting there is far more to the martial art than the caricature depicted in ...

  Berlin / DPA Olafur Eliasson’s fascination with natural light led him to illuminate the Tate Gallery in London with a giant fake sun 13 years ago. Since that debut before the wider public, the Danish-Icelandic artist has made hundreds of thousands of small plastic suns that not only bring solar light to the darkest corners of the earth, but ...

  Havana / DPA Carlos Caro is proud of his seed-planter: “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he says. Caro, a farmer in Cuba, assembled his machine completely out of old mechanical parts he gathered assiduously. The seeding device consists of old pipes and four inverted gas cylinders mounted on a chassis. Gravity does the rest — the weight of ...

  Ilan / AFP Under a shady starfruit tree Taiwanese beekeeper Jiang Hwan-bin tends his hives, pumping out pure honey for a rapidly growing market of health-conscious consumers. Jiang’s family has been keeping bees for 80 years and he now manages 500 hives in the northwest county of Hsinchu. In total his family run around 2,000 across northern Taiwan. A ...

  Islamabad / AFP In the corner of a pristine park in an upmarket district of Islamabad, an open-air classroom run by an aging rescue-worker offers a beacon of hope to the city’s poorest. For the past 30 years, “Master” Muhammad Ayub, whose day job includes defusing bombs and putting out fires, has cycled from his office to the makeshift ...

  Port Louis / AFP As the horses round the last bend, the crowd starts shouting, their cries crescendoing into deafening cheers as the jockeys bear down on the finish line. “The Deacon” noses across the line in first place and a man leaps in the air, frantically waving his arms, clutching in his hand the winning betting slip. Horse ...

  Johannesburg / AFP Demand for homegrown contemporary music is sweeping Africa and driving a creative boom in an industry otherwise battered by falling CD sales and rampant piracy. A recent study of the entertainment sector by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) accountants showed rapid earnings growth in many African countries, fuelled largely by live performances by local artists. “Consumers are increasingly wanting ...