Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Kenya won a surprisingly contentious race for a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council, defeating Djibouti in a run-off vote Thursday. Djibouti’s loss was an unlikely blow to China, which appeared to have encouraged Djibouti’s unprecedented candidacy in order to increase its influence on the Security Council. Africa is guaranteed three of the council’s 10 elected seats, which rotate every two years and supplement the five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. African countries [...]
France announced earlier this month that its armed forces had killed Abdelmalek Droukdel, the emir of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, during a June 3 military operation in northern Mali. The operation, carried out by French troops with the help of intelligence and surveillance aircraft provided by the United States, represents a rare, quantifiable victory for France and its counterterrorism partners in the region as they struggle to contain a bloody insurgency by jihadist groups. A veteran of Algeria’s brutal civil war in the 1990s, Droukdel’s rise and fall in many ways mirrors the fortunes of the organization [...]
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Liberia is preparing to lift the state of emergency that has been in place since April to curb the spread of the coronavirus, as President George Weah declared that the outbreak had been sufficiently contained. But the pandemic has raised troubling questions about freedom of the press in the country, with senior members of Weah’s administration publicly threatening journalists at its onset. “Press freedom in Liberia has taken a nosedive,” James Harding Giahyue, a Liberian journalist and former colleague who reports for both local and domestic media, told me recently. In April, Liberia’s solicitor general, Sayma Syrenius Cephus, [...]
