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Less than two months after Sudan’s war began in April 2023, the then African Union (AU) Commission chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, called it the ‘prototype’ for ‘African solutions to African problems’. More than three years later, some of the most consequential diplomacy is taking place through processes that extend well beyond the continent: in Jeddah, […]
Across Africa, the livestock sector supports more than 350 million people. Livestock is much more than an agricultural commodity. For millions of families, cattle, sheep, goats, poultry, and other animals are sources of food and income. They are also productive assets that support trade, processing, services, employment and rural wealth creation. Despite its centrality to […]
All names of individuals interviewed for this article have been changed their safety and privacy. The Fatal Rain of Wadi Saleh In mid-September 2026, when rain finally touched the parched soil of Jebel Issa in North Darfur’s Al-Malha locality, it did not bring life, but rather severe ecological and economic devastation. Under normal conditions along […]
On 9 February 2021, as government troops and Russian mercenaries pushed rebels back from Bangui, the Central African Republic (CAR) signed Decree No. 21.044. It gave a young company called Bois Rouge a forestry permit covering 186,596 hectares in the south-western Lobaye region – roughly 1,866 km² of tropical forest, an area larger than Greater […]
Since the outbreak of the brutal civil war in Sudan in April 2023, the US, British, and Canadian governments, along with the European Union and United Nations, have imposed targeted sanctions on some 32 individuals and 20 companies tied to the bloodshed to restrict their access to assets, international finance, and travel. Three and a […]
Africa’s digital economy is expanding faster than its ability to protect it. INTERPOL’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, drawing on information from 36 countries, found that artificial intelligence was involved in 55 per cent of reported cybercrimes across the continent. Reported losses rose from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million, while 72 per cent […]
On 6 October, Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said again that there would be no negotiations with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, or ‘any other party’, and that the war would go on until victory. A day earlier, Donald Trump’s envoy Massad Boulos had disclosed a meeting […]
Osman Yusuf Oskar‚ wearing a T-shirt with the letters “SUPER EL NINO‚” walks the streets of Mogadishu carrying a megaphone and signs to alert other Somalis of the risks of heavy rains during the upcoming rainy season․ His voice can be heard above the sounds of traffic and crowds, urging others to heed warnings that […]
Attacks on Chinese workers in Mali are testing Beijing’s reliance on African security forces. Russia’s experience there gives China little reason to take on the fighting itself. On 9 May, fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, stopped buses and trucks at Zambougou, in the Ségou region of Mali about […]
On 19 September 2026, the United States lifted its sanctions on Eritrea, one of Africa’s most enigmatic and repressive states. These sanctions were imposed by the Biden administration in 2021 for Eritrea’s role in Ethiopia’s devastating Tigray War (2020-22). Opinions vary as to the possible meanings of their removal: is it morally permissible on the […]
In Alcântara, a quilombola territory in Brazil’s Amazon, students are using DNA tests, historical research and oral memory to uncover ancestral connections to West Africa and reclaim histories erased by slavery and colonialism. In the Brazilian Amazon, a school project set out to investigate a question that had long been difficult to answer: where in […]
The peace agreement between Congo and Rwanda contains one promise about justice: that no fighter will be taken into the Congolese army until someone has checked whether they committed atrocities. The last time Congo skipped that check, the soldiers it absorbed went on to start the war now being negotiated. The check is not happening […]
Flights into Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, trace the coastline on their descent to Aden Adde International Airport, which sits beside the Indian Ocean. In June, when Somaliland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, stood alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter drew attention to the geography connecting them. Israel and Somaliland, Netanyahu said, sit at opposite ends […]
In a surprise to absolutely no one, Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party (PP) led by PM Abiy Ahmed won the 1 June 2026 parliamentary elections in a landslide. The outcome has evoked few commentaries in the global media or even in Ethiopia itself. There was a c. 90% win of parliamentary seats for the PP. This […]
Zambia’s 13 August general election was already fraught before anyone tried to challenge its result, according to an account human rights lawyer Linda Kasonde has since published on her Substack. The army had been deployed to polling stations, she writes, a role outside its constitutional mandate. The Electoral Commission suspended vote tallying for six hours […]
On September 20, 2026, seven Ethiopian armed and political movements announced the formation of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Coalition for Survival, declaring that they sought to remove the Prosperity Party-led government and establish an inclusive transitional government. The announcement was followed by a major TPLF offensive on September 23 across Tigray, Amhara and Afar. Federal […]
The world’s two biggest cocoa producers faced the same price collapse this year and made opposite choices. The reason is not economics alone. It is who holds power in each cocoa sector — a lesson aid and trade partners keep missing. Within three weeks of each other this September, the world’s two largest cocoa producers […]
Many people may have never heard of Minembwe, and those who know it may have learned about it through stories of war, displacement and hunger. For me, however, it is much more than a story. Minembwe is home to me and to many other Banyamulenge families. Generations of my family, including me, were born and […]
On September 14, 2026, more than 900 fuel tankers entered Bamako under military escort, the Malian government announced. The figure sounds like a victory: the capital got its fuel. But the very need to herd 900 tankers into a single protected convoy is not a story about victory — it is a story about how […]
In mid-July, the US Army activated Delta Company of the 7th Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Battalion under 3rd Special Forces Group. The unit has taken on the informal name ‘Drongo’, a nod to an African bird known for its ability to vocally mimic other species to drive off competitors. Its declared purpose is to support US […]
A Democracy Older Than the Ballot Box Every election season, much of East Africa braces itself. Incumbents amend constitutions to erase term limits, and citizens wait to see whether power will change hands at the ballot box or in the streets. The pattern repeats: disputed results, ethnic mobilizations, coups, or leaders who refuse to leave. […]
South Africa’s electricity system has staged a remarkable recovery. On 4 September 2026, Eskom reported that the country had gone 476 consecutive days without load shedding, while the performance of its power stations reached its highest level since 2020. South Africa also made it through the 2026 winter with electricity demand fully met. After years […]
When one Black South African journalist decided to leave the profession after only four years, she did not walk away because she had stopped believing in journalism: ‘I mourned because I knew I could have done so much in that space.’ Her experience is documented in a 2025 Reuters Institute fellowship paper by South African […]
Berbera sits on the Gulf of Aden, about 150 miles south of Yemen. Its deep-water berth and the Emirati investment behind it are what Somaliland has been offering Washington. Illustration generated by the author, not a photograph of the port. Somaliland’s president spent two weeks in Washington this month offering almost everything he has. Access […]
In the summer of 2023, a young man from Gafsa tried to cross the Mediterranean on a small boat. He did not make it. His story is one of thousands — and it is increasingly understood by Tunisian institutions through the language of border management. It is also a story about who defines what a […]
A failed prisoner exchange in Niger has revealed a complex network of Libyan, Nigerien, Chadian, and Russian interests converging on one of the Sahara’s most established smuggling corridors. On the maps that colonial cartographers drew of the Sahara, most features carry the names of the people who ‘discovered’ them, or of the places they resembled. […]
This article draws on in-person interviews at Mt Suswa, Olkaria, and Menengai with Coalition for Human Rights in Development (CHRD) members and partners directly affected by geothermal projects. Interviews were led by the Coalition’s Research and Learning Facilitator and interviewees identified through the Community Resource Exchange (CRE), a system to facilitate collaborations and co-develop strategies […]
On 12 September, CNN reported that around fifteen Ukrainian drone specialists are working with the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) in northern Mali. According to two Ukrainians deployed there, the group does not fight on the front line; it trains fighters and helps run operations. A Ukrainian operator told CNN that he coordinates the rebels’ operations […]
No one can claim that a return to war in Tigray and northern Ethiopia is a surprise, but it makes it no less horrifying. In just a handful of days, and after months of spiralling tensions and sporadic fighting, the ‘grey conflict’ the federal government pursued against Tigray has escalated into ‘‘full-blown war,’ in the […]
When the Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement was signed in November 2022, international observers prematurely celebrated the end of one of this century’s most devastating conflicts. The silence of the guns in Tigray was treated as a definitive roadmap toward peace. What the international community failed to see was that the Pretoria architecture did not […]
For African governments, the significance of China’s humanoid-robotics programme is not that robots may one day appear on African battlefields. It is a diagnostic case of how a dual-use technology can move from commercial deployment to military relevance faster than the institutions responsible for assessing and governing it can adapt. Africa’s stake is therefore not […]
In 1931, Okot p’Bitek was born in Gulu, northern Uganda. It is perhaps fitting that a man who would spend much of his life questioning what Africans had been taught to admire was himself born at a rather interesting intersection of worlds. His father, Jebedayo Opi, was a school teacher shaped by the colonial education […]
A familiar claim keeps surfacing in the rhetoric of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger’s ruling juntas, echoed enthusiastically by Russian state media: the West is deliberately working to destabilise the Sahel’s military governments. It’s a tidy story. It bundles sanctions, frozen aid and diplomatic isolation into a single narrative of conspiracy. But look closely at […]
South Sudan is approaching a critical moment in its political transition. Elections are scheduled for December 2026, while questions around constitutional reform, political inclusion and the faltering implementation of the 2018 peace agreementcontinue to shape debate about the country’s future. As South Sudan considers what legitimate and accountable governance might look like, the experience of […]
On 1 August 2026, Ethiopian federal and Tigrayan forces clashed in western Tigray, a northern Ethiopian region bordering Eritrea and Sudan. By 3 August, fighting had subsided, but hundreds of Tigrayans, including wounded fighters, had crossed into war-torn Sudan. The clash followed Ethiopia’s 1 June election: Tigray did not vote, while Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s […]
The first piece documented who disappeared into Somalia’s detention system. The second — “The Journalists Who Disappeared” — documented who was silenced for reporting it. This piece documents the officials whose orders produced those outcomes — and the institution that now protects them. They are not in hiding. They are not in exile. They are […]
This piece is the winner of the Canon Collins 2026 essay competition. The annual competition invites essays that demonstrate thought leadership and offer fresh perspectives on issues affecting southern Africa. ++++++++++ An essay on why a pen aimed at the Constitution is a dagger aimed at the people The Obituary of a Promise There […]
Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in 2005, seemed to vindicate a model for how wars might end in the Horn of Africa. Under the auspices of the African Union, led by hegemonic Ethiopia and backed by the United States, it wrangled the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army to the table with the promise […]
On Dennis Pritt Road in Nairobi’s Kilimani district, long queues formed outside the Burundian embassy on 7 September. People were waiting for laissez-passers, temporary travel documents enabling them to return home without valid passports. The embassy had offered to issue them free of charge. Early social-media reports also referred to Congolese nationals preparing to leave […]
Since 2023, 14 African countries have introduced export restrictions on unprocessed critical minerals, requiring “local beneficiation” – or in-country processing and manufacturing – prior to export, and demanding technology and financing. Wealthier countries are also supporting the idea of local beneficiation and stepping up investments in resource-rich countries, promising this will help to lift them […]
This piece was a shortlisted finalist for the Canon Collins 2026 essay competition. The annual competition invites essays that demonstrate thought leadership and offer fresh perspectives on issues affecting southern Africa. Some of my earliest memories are not of places but of words. One of those words was kwerekwere. I heard it long before I […]
Somali political life is intensely debated across towns, households, media platforms and diaspora communities. Yet this energy does not consistently produce the power to compel answers, reverse failed policies or remove officials whose conduct has become unacceptable. The distance between participation and political consequence remains one of Somalia’s central democratic problems. Direct local elections in […]
Lesotho is two years into a national state of disaster: US tariffs have gutted its garment factories, unemployment has passed 30%, and its main trade lifeline is guaranteed for less than a year. To understand how the mountain kingdom keeps ending up here, start almost forty years earlier.In 1987, something extraordinary happened in this small […]
Across Africa, assisted reproductive technology (ART) is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Fertility clinics are opening in countries where, until recently, couples had little choice but to travel abroad, often to Europe, India, or within the continent South Africa—to access in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and related treatments. The costs of travel alone made this a […]
The year 2026 marks the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March against extending the dompas to the black women of South Africa. Every August, the commemoration of Women’s Month highlights the inheritances and unfinished legacies of women’s anti-apartheid resistance. This Women’s Month, it is timely to reflect on the legacies of women’s activism in […]
The question of why 70,000 Moroccans migrated to the Spanish-governed territories of Ceuta and Melilla within hours on 30 July – ‘Throne Day’, which is one of the most respectable celebrations of the Morocco Kingdom – still lingers in international media and haunts inquisitive minds. Commentators have talked extensively about the socio-economic and geopolitical incentives, […]
When four members of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms travelled to London in March 2026 to accept the Chatham House Prize on behalf of the movement, the ceremony was widely celebrated as a moment of recognition for one of the most remarkable grassroots humanitarian responses in recent memory. Since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed […]
This essay concludes a three-part series by the author on agriculture in Sudan. Read the previous instalments here and here. A different approach is needed to determine what to invest in, where to invest, who should benefit, how investments should be financed, and how they should adapt when conditions change. This distinction is important. The […]
A network of Christian evangelical organizations has spent nearly two decades and tens of millions of dollars fueling a storm of anti-LGBTI+ legislation across Africa. That same network now drafts and bankrolls a parallel wave of anti-LGBTI legislation including anti-trans bills sweeping through American statehouses. Meanwhile, new and expanding U.S. immigration laws increasingly restrict access to refuge for endangered migrants […]
Somalia’s transition to one-person,one-vote elections is increasingly becoming a struggle not only over democratic reform,but also over who controls political power. The Federal government has stepped into South-West and Galmudug not merely to maintain order or oversees voting,but,critics argue, to shape political outcomes. Across the states, opponents says Mogadishu is using electoral reform to strengthen […]