Africa's drinks are as regional as its food, and most of them predate the bottled soft drinks that now sit beside them. Some are steeped, some are fermented, some are pressed from a fruit that grows on the tree outside. What follows is twelve of them, what they are, where they come from, and what makes each one distinct.
Hibiscus: zobo, bissap, sobolo
The same deep red infusion travels across West Africa under different names. It is made from the dried calyces of Hibiscus sabdariffa, not the petal, but the fleshy cup left behind after the flower drops.
In Nigeria it is zobo, usually steeped with ginger and cloves. In Senegal and much of francophone West Africa it is bissap. In Ghana it is sobolo, and in Egypt karkade. Across the Caribbean the same plant became sorrel, carried there through the Atlantic trade.
It is caffeine-free, which is part of why it is poured for everyone including children, and it holds its colour for days.
Tigernut milk, kunun aya
Tigernut drink, known as kunun aya in Hausa, is made from tubers rather than nuts, despite the name. They are soaked, blended and strained into something naturally sweet and faintly creamy. It is drunk widely across northern Nigeria, and the same tuber underpins Spanish horchata de chufa, one of several drinks that crossed the Mediterranean in both directions.
Groundnut milk
Groundnut milk is raw peanuts soaked, blended and strained. It contains no dairy, which matters in a region where lactose intolerance is common in adults, and it is made from a crop that runs right through West African cooking. It keeps only a day or two, so it is made in the quantity that will be drunk.
Baobab, bouye
Bouye is Senegalese, made from the powdered pulp of the baobab fruit soaked in water and sweetened, sometimes with milk. The baobab is one of the continent's most recognisable trees and its fruit dries on the branch, which is why the pulp keeps without processing.
Tamarind
Tamarind juice is sharp, dark and genuinely refreshing. The tree is indigenous to tropical Africa and grows wild from Sudan through Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, though it has been cultivated in India so long that it is frequently reported as native there.
Fura da nono
Fura da nono is Fulani, and it is a meal as much as a drink: millet balls broken into fermented milk. It is sold across northern Nigeria and the Sahel and is one of the clearest examples of a pastoralist food that has stayed intact.
Amasi
Amasi is southern African soured milk, milk left to ferment naturally rather than cooked. It is drunk on its own and served with pap, and it belongs to the same broad family as East Africa's fermented milks. Nothing is heated; the culture does the work.
Palm wine
Palm wine is tapped from the palm and begins fermenting immediately, within hours of leaving the tree it has changed. That is why it is drunk fresh and locally, and why it carries ceremonial weight across West and Central Africa in ways a bottled drink cannot.
Umqombothi
Umqombothi is South African sorghum and maize beer, thick, sour and low in alcohol. It is brewed for occasions, weddings, funerals, ceremonies honouring ancestors, and is traditionally drunk from a shared vessel. It is a social object as much as a drink.
Moroccan mint tea
Mint tea is gunpowder green tea with fresh spearmint and a great deal of sugar, poured from a height to aerate it. In Morocco the pouring is not a flourish, it is part of how it is served, and refusing a glass is a considerably bigger gesture than it looks.
Rooibos
Rooibos grows only in the Cederberg region of South Africa's Western Cape and nowhere else on earth. It is naturally caffeine-free and low in tannin, so it does not turn bitter however long it steeps, which is why it is given to children and drunk through the day.
Ethiopian and Sudanese coffee
Coffee is Ethiopian by origin, and the ceremony built around it there is a considerable social ritual rather than a way of making a drink quickly. Jebena, the Sudanese preparation, is brewed in a clay pot of the same name and spiced with ginger and cardamom.
What connects them
Very little, which is the point. A hibiscus infusion in Lagos, a sorghum beer in Johannesburg and a clay-pot coffee in Khartoum have almost nothing in common beyond the continent they are drunk on. Africa is not one drinks culture; it is dozens, and the most useful thing to know about them is where each one actually comes from.
