What is ethnic media and why is it relevant today? In this podcast, several figures active in ethnic media discuss its fundamental importance to societies across the world.

Songs with politically sensitive lyrics are often censored. In this discussion session from the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, panelists discuss how this happens across multiple geographies, and why musicians always find it meaningful to fight back.

This fish dish from the Kenyan island of Lamu is usually made for some kind of special occasion such as a wedding, but it is also especially popular during the month of Ramadan.

Winyo performed throughout the 2014 Folklife Festival, representing the Kenyan benga music scene. At the Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert: Tribute to Pete Seeger, he played his song “Everything Is Okay.”

Ali Abdalla Skanda comes from a family of carpenters and dhow builders in Lamu, Kenya. For the 2014 Folklife Festival, he donated one of his dhows and restored it on the National Mall.

This recipe was taught to me at the 2014 Folklife Festival by Amina Harith Swaleh and Fatma Ali Busaidy, two women from the island of Lamu, just off the Kenyan coast.

In 1965, at age 21, Kenyan artist Elkana Ong’esa sold one of his earliest sculptures to an American student doing research in Kisii. Almost fifty years later, the two met by chance at the Folklife Festival.

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt’s African expedition collected thousands of plant and animal specimens, along with important cultural artifacts.

The vegetable medley called mukimo is common in Nairobi as a side for meals such as roasted chicken.

This year marks the hundred and fifth anniversary of the twenty-sixth president’s expedition to Kenya and eastern Africa, where he traveled and hunted big game with three Smithsonian scientists and his son Kermit Roosevelt