West Africa Archive

DAKAR, Senegal—Mohammed Ouattara, an activist from Cote d’Ivoire who lives in exile in Senegal, doesn’t mince words when speaking about his country’s recent presidential elections. “It’s a constitutional coup d’état,” he told me, as we sat in a café along the corniche in Dakar. “He doesn’t have the right to be a candidate,” he said, his eyes wide and intense. “He stole the elections.” Ouattara was referring to Cote d’Ivoire’s president, Alassane Ouattara, who was reelected to a controversial third term last month in a landslide, according to election officials, although his two main opponents had boycotted the vote and […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. The decades-long dispute between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front in the region of Western Sahara is threatening to erupt into a full-blown war. Frustrated by the lack of international attention to its cause and angered by a recent Moroccan military operation in a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, the Polisario Front broke a three-decade-long cease-fire agreement last weekend. U.N. officials are scrambling to restore the broken deal, as […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. With the conflict between Ethiopian troops and forces from the northern Tigray region rapidly escalating this week, more than 14,500 refugees from the region have flooded into neighboring Sudan. United Nations officials are now warning of a looming humanitarian crisis. But Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is resisting international calls for de-escalation and negotiation until leaders of the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, have been captured […]

Oct. 20 might be remembered as the day Nigeria’s historic uprising against police brutality died. The government’s use of live ammunition against peaceful demonstrators that day reportedly killed at least 12 people and injured dozens more. As President Muhammadu Buhari implicitly threatened to crack down again, the Feminist Coalition, one of the Nigerian organizations spearheading the protest movement, released a statement refusing further donations and calling for Nigerian youth to observe curfews and stay home. The streets of Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city and the one-time epicenter of the demonstrations, are now clear of the tens of thousands of people […]

DAKAR, Senegal—Michael Sang Correa was indicted in federal court in Denver, Colorado, in July, for allegedly torturing multiple people in Gambia in 2006. The indictment is the first for a member of the Junglers, a secretive death squad used by former Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh to arrest, torture, disappear and kill scores of his perceived opponents. His trial is expected to begin next year. Correa’s victims and their family members are relieved that he is finally facing justice. However, experts say that Correa’s trial in the U.S., rather than in Gambia, underscores a lack of political will among Gambian leaders […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. Ethiopia’s military declared it has “entered into a war” with leaders of the northern Tigray region Thursday, escalating a conflict that could tear apart Africa’s second-most populous country and destabilize the Horn of Africa. Troops from across the country are reportedly massing at the border of Tigray in response to what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said was a deadly attack this week on a federal military camp, which […]

Voters in Guinea went to the polls last month for a general election that saw President Alpha Conde clinch a controversial third term. Among a total of 12 candidates on the ballot, competition centered around the 82-year-old Conde and his longtime rival, former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who also ran against Conde in 2010 and 2015. The day after the Oct. 18 election, Diallo claimed that early results showing Conde in the lead were fraudulent, and declared victory based on his own party’s vote tally. Nonetheless, Guinea’s electoral commission subsequently reported official results showing Conde as the winner, with […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone much better versed in basic epidemiological modeling than they were eight months ago. We have all familiarized ourselves with exhaustive data collection and the analysis of epidemic curves based on prior crises, the reproduction rates of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the daily influx of new cases. Yet, even for professional epidemiologists, the question of when this pandemic will end has no simple answer. Certainty is a luxury rarely afforded to scientists, and this is particularly true in the world of public health. However, we do know that pandemics do not attack indiscriminately. While we […]