KAMPALA, Uganda—Cars and motorcycle taxis rocket over the uneven pavement, while church sermons blare from loudspeakers. Vendors hawk bananas, cakes and chapatti. Brightly colored shops sell stationery and advertise printing services. But amid all the mundane, quotidian commerce here on Nassar Road in Uganda’s capital city, it is widely rumored that traders can buy false certificates to disguise the provenance of gold that has been smuggled over the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, both of which face international sanctions on their gold trade due to its role in funding their internal conflicts. The false certificates [...]
Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Nearly 50 politicians and public officials from 18 African countries have connections to secretive offshore financial structures and trusts in tax havens, according to the Pandora Papers investigation. The leaders implicated by the leaked files—the latest effort of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ—include Kenyan [...]
In 1997, after his longtime Western backers, Belgium and the United States, had abandoned him, Mobutu Sese Seko, the ruler of the country then known as Zaire, turned to mercenaries from Serbia and Ukraine in a desperate bid to beat back an accelerating insurgency. In the middle of that war, I flew to Kisangani—the famous, centrally located river-port city that is a gateway to the vast country’s west—to watch the mercenaries drill Zairian troops and take up positions to repel an impending attack on the town. The mercenaries looked fearsome and seemed to have everything they needed to defend the [...]
