Africa Archive

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Burundi’s ruling party celebrated Monday after its candidate, Evariste Ndayishimiye, was declared the winner of last week’s presidential election. But the leading opposition party says it will contest the results, prompting fears of a return to the violence that plagued the country after President Pierre Nkurunziza’s disputed reelection in 2015, which sparked widespread protests that were met with a government crackdown. Since then, at least 1,200 people have been killed in intermittent clashes with security forces, while 400,000 have been forced to flee the country. Burundi’s election commission announced that Ndayishimiye won handily, with nearly 69 percent of […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Violence is escalating once again in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province, a region long beset by militant groups and intercommunal conflict. The United Nations reported that an ethnic militia operating in the northeastern province might have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity beginning late last year. Meanwhile, another rebel group slaughtered dozens of civilians in a series of raids this week. Between disease outbreaks and inter-ethnic clashes, the mineral-rich province has been a flashpoint for decades. But starting in […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Voters in Burundi went to the polls Wednesday in a fraught election to replace President Pierre Nkurunziza. The main opposition leader is already accusing the ruling party of voter fraud and abuse and threatening to challenge the results even before they are announced, a move observers worry could fuel political violence. Turnout was high Wednesday despite the risk of COVID-19 and a campaign that was marred by attacks on opposition supporters. Human rights observers have accused the ruling party’s youth militia, the […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Residents in the capital of this small, West African country rejoiced last weekend as their beloved corner bars, known as maquis, reopened seven weeks after the government had ordered them closed to curb the spread of COVID-19. In a maquis in the suburb of Wemtenga on Sunday evening, beer bottles clinked and chairs sidled closer together as patrons smoked and swayed to Ivorian music under drops of colored light pouring from a plastic disco ball. That same day, authorities had called on citizens to respect an earlier government order to wear masks—an edict that many Burkinabe, including those […]

Months into the coronavirus pandemic, it has become clear that countries that recently dealt with other outbreaks of infectious diseases have been more successful in containing COVID-19. From East Asia and the Pacific to West and Central Africa, authorities have made good use of epidemiological expertise they acquired from tackling outbreaks of SARS, MERS, Swine flu and Ebola to quickly roll out containment measures. Yet even governments lacking such experience should have been able to foresee the destructive potential of COVID-19. President Donald Trump may insist that “there’s never been anything like this in history,” but the history of the […]

From the moment the novel coronavirus burst out of China and began to spread around the world, many commentators quickly took for granted that Africa would become the pandemic’s biggest and deadliest target. Yet the continent has so far dodged those dire predictions. In retrospect, few things were more predictable. For decades, the convention in Western media coverage has been to treat Africa with a casual scorn that plays up its problems—pretending wrongly, for example, that its wars are unusually brutal by the standards of our times, or that its politicians, sneeringly dismissed as “Big Men,” are uniquely power hungry […]

A recent survey by Reuters found that across Africa, there is less than one intensive care bed per 100,000 people. The continent’s three most populous countries—Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt—only have 1,920 intensive care beds to service more than 400 million people between them. Just two countries, South Africa and Ghana, accounted for 46 percent of all tests carried out in Africa as of May 7. As recently as April 17, 10 countries in Africa did not possess any ventilators at all, according to the World Health Organization, and just 2,000 ventilators were spread across 41 countries home to hundreds of […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. COVID-19 has reached a camp for internally displaced people outside South Sudan’s capital, Juba, raising alarm that the virus could spread quickly among the thousands living there in crowded conditions. The positive diagnosis of two COVID-19 patients this week is a worst-case scenario for health experts in South Sudan, who warn that sick patients could quickly overwhelm the camp, which has few supplies or health facilities. The country’s already limited health infrastructure was gutted during its recent civil war; there aren’t even […]

Editor’s Note: You can find all of our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here. If you would like to help support our work, please consider taking advantage of our subscription offer here. Late last month, as the coronavirus continued to spread across the globe, the World Food Program warned of a “hunger pandemic.” With lockdowns constraining the incomes of the poor and supply chain disruptions preventing food from reaching consumers, pandemic-related hunger and malnutrition could eventually take more lives than the disease itself. Understanding the geography of the pandemic and the vulnerability of different food systems is critical for a […]

The announcement in late April that Guinea-Bissau’s prime minister, Nuno Gomes Nabiam, and four other senior government officials had tested positive for the coronavirus was just the latest crisis for the fragile West African state. Guinea-Bissau has experienced four coups—the most recent one in 2012—and 16 attempted coups since it gained independence from Portugal in 1974. More recently, the country has been mired in instability since a disputed second-round presidential election last December. The National Electoral Commission has declared that Umaro Sissoco Embalo, a retired military officer and former prime minister, won that poll with 53.6 percent of the vote. […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The mysterious crash this week of a cargo plane registered in Kenya that was delivering COVID-19 relief supplies in neighboring Somalia is threatening to exacerbate existing political tensions between the two countries. After leaving Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, the private aircraft made one medical supply drop before heading to Bardale, a town in Somalia’s southern Bay region. A local Somali official told the Associated Press that a projectile hit the plane as it approached the Bardale runway. The six-person crew, made up of […]

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the entire world—but in vastly different ways. In particular, efforts to “flatten the curve” could create huge but unquantified costs for the most vulnerable. As a result of measures to contain the coronavirus’s spread, the specter of “biblical” hunger now hangs over much of the globe. At the same time, social distancing strategies remain an unattainable mirage for the hundreds of millions of people living in crowded quarters in the developing world. For fragile and conflict-affected countries, the pandemic represents a grim, dual challenge that risks threatening a precious good: peace. Many of these countries […]

NAIROBI, Kenya—The novel coronavirus arrived relatively late to Africa, where the first case was confirmed only in mid-February. Since then, COVID-19 has swept across the continent, with more than 37,000 cases confirmed thus far. Experts point out that the true number of cases is higher than the official tally in many African countries, though, given their limitations in testing. Somalia, the base of operations for the al-Qaida-affiliated extremist group al-Shabab, is no exception. It announced its first COVID-19 case on March 16 and currently has just over 580 cases, with 28 confirmed deaths from the disease. In response, the Somali […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Zimbabwe was facing a food security crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic began, but a lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19 has exacerbated the country’s economic woes and further restricted the food supply. Now more than half the country’s 15 million people are in need of food assistance. The World Food Program was already assisting 3.5 million Zimbabweans before the coronavirus struck. Cyclical periods of drought and flooding have interrupted domestic food production, while hyperinflation, fueled by the government’s reintroduction of […]