Africa Archive

It’s been a busy few months for Emmanuel Macron. The French president has taken the lead in seeking to resolve a range of crises and conflicts within Europe and on its borders and periphery. That has put Macron where he clearly likes to be: center stage and in the spotlight. But in so doing, he has once again created opposition and resentment within Europe, while underlining the limits to his ability to achieve his desired outcomes. Macron’s diplomatic hot streak began at the European Union summit in late July, when he helped push through the EU’s groundbreaking collective debt mechanism […]

If recent news reports are to be believed, Sudan may be on the verge of joining the list of Arab countries to normalize their relations with Israel, pushed by the Trump administration. Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, the Sudanese military chief who jointly leads the transitional government in Khartoum, met with both U.S. and Emirati officials in Abu Dhabi earlier this week to discuss an agreement that would remove Sudan from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, in exchange for Sudan normalizing its ties with Israel. The New York Times reported Thursday that the State Department is preparing to delist […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. African leaders used this week’s virtual United Nations General Assembly to call for international support to help their economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic, pressing for debt cancellation and up to $100 billion in annual support over the next three years. From a health perspective, the continent appears to have withstood the pandemic better than many experts predicted, registering just 5 percent of global cases and 3.6 percent of deaths. But economies across Africa have been battered by the extraordinary measures that […]

In July, jailed separatist leaders in Cameroon fighting for the creation of an independent state held their first formal talks with the government about ending the violence plaguing the country’s two Anglophone regions. While the origins of the conflict are in colonial-era divisions of territory, its proximate cause was protests in 2016 against the marginalization of Cameroon’s Anglophone minority, which makes up roughly 20 percent of the population in the majority French-speaking country. In the years since, the conflict has killed several thousand people and displaced nearly a million more. The recent talks with the government were led by the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Human rights groups are demanding an independent investigation into apparent military abuses in Mozambique, after videos circulated recently showing men in state military uniforms executing a civilian and torturing suspected members of an Islamist militia in the country’s restive province of Cabo Delgado. There are fears that the images could stoke local grievances and generate support for the militants. Officials from Mozambique’s government have accused the militia of shooting the footage to undermine the military in Cabo Delgado. Fighting between the Islamist […]

Following months of anti-government protests and calls for his resignation, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita of Mali was overthrown in a coup last month. Since then, the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, a regional bloc of 15 countries that includes Mali, has been pressuring the ruling military junta to quickly hand power back to a civilian government. But last weekend, the junta defied ECOWAS by releasing a plan that would allow a military leader to oversee an 18-month transitional period before elections are held. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, WPR’s Elliot Waldman was joined by Alex […]

Paul Rusesabagina is best known as a former manager of the upscale Hotel de Mille Collines in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where he sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the 1994 genocide. He held machete-wielding killers at bay, plying them with beer and bribes, in a story made famous by the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda.” A vocal critic of President Paul Kagame’s government, Rusesabagina has lived in self-imposed exile in Belgium and the United States for some 20 years, successfully evading Kagame’s attempts to capture him—until now. Last month, he flew from Chicago to Dubai for […]

After the unpopular president of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, was ousted by the country’s military last month, the leaders of the coup promised to set up a transitional civilian government and eventually hold elections. That came as a relief to the crowds of anti-government protesters who had been in the streets for months, demanding Keita’s resignation. Since the coup, however, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. Following three days of talks with opposition groups and representatives from civil society, Mali’s ruling military junta recently released its blueprint for a transition plan back to civilian government. But the plan was […]

In late April, Luca Esposito was reflecting, like many of us, on how the coronavirus pandemic had upended his family’s life. Esposito wrote in a blog post that his elderly father in southern Italy had turned to WhatsApp to order groceries, because he could no longer visit the store in person; that his children’s school had struggled to adapt to the demands of online learning; and how remote working, once a privilege of senior managers, in his view could become the norm. As the executive director of the World Lottery Association, or WLA, a lobby group that represents national, state […]

It’s been two years since South Sudan’s leaders signed an agreement to end a crippling five-year civil war that killed almost 400,000 people and displaced millions, yet peace remains elusive. The country is reeling from escalating communal violence and a deepening humanitarian crisis, made worse by an ongoing political stalemate. In February, President Salva Kiir swore in opposition leader Riek Machar to once again serve as his deputy in a unity government, providing a glimmer of hope that the war-torn nation might turn a corner. It was the latest attempt for the two leaders to share power, after the last […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Facing record floods that have killed more than 100 people and displaced tens of thousands more, Sudan’s government just declared a three-month state of emergency. Already contending with COVID-19 and a flailing economy, a faltering response to this natural disaster threatens to further destabilize the country’s fragile transitional government. Unusually heavy seasonal rains across the region have caused the Nile River to rise nearly six feet in some parts of Sudan and brought floodwaters to 16 of the country’s 18 states. At […]

In the early hours of Aug. 19, five men in various shades and styles of military fatigues took to Mali’s national TV station to introduce themselves. The mid-ranking officers had begun the previous day with a mutiny in the garrison town of Kati and ended it by arresting the president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in the capital, Bamako. Malians had been glued to their TV sets for hours. First, they watched a detained Keita offer his resignation and dissolve the Malian government on live TV. Then, they met the anonymous men in berets who were now in charge—and still are. Calling […]

Though changes in trade policy create winners and losers within a given country, the net effect of lowering import tariffs is generally positive for the country’s economy as a whole. Now, however, tariffs are already low, so the trade agenda involves mostly addressing regulatory and other “technical” barriers to trade generated by countries’ domestic policies, with a core principle of international trade rules being to ensure that these domestic policies do not discriminate against imports. But using legally binding trade agreements to influence the substance of policies that apply to both imports and domestic products alike can create friction between […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. In an effort to preempt a damning report on massive overpricing and potential fraud in the country’s $26 billion COVID-19 response, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa moved to crack down on corruption within the ruling African National Congress this week. Analysts see it as Ramaphosa’s attempt to finally seize control of a party plagued by graft and the legacy of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. Following a weekend meeting of the ANC’s executive committee, Ramaphosa announced that party officials charged with corruption must […]

Across West Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing back painful memories of the Ebola epidemic, which spread from the remote forest region in Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone, infecting over 28,000 people and claiming the lives of more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. As the region grapples with a new virus, have civil society groups and policymakers applied the lessons they learned from Ebola to the fight against COVID-19? Or are West African countries repeating the same fatal mistakes? With so much public mistrust of the governments in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, local human rights groups and […]

Since early 2019, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been governed by an uneasy coalition built around President Felix Tshisekedi and his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, who ruled the country for 18 years until finally agreeing to step down after the 2018 election. Until recently, tensions between Tshisekedi and Kabila only rarely spilled over into public view. But a recent disagreement, over who to appoint as the chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission, has taken the feud to a new level. In July, the National Assembly—dominated by Kabila’s coalition, the Common Front for Congo, or FCC—nominated Ronsard Malonda, a Kabila […]