Category Archives: Africa

UK teenager who was mauled by crocodile feared losing foot

Posted on by

Amelie Osborn-Smith says she feels ‘very lucky’ in first interview after incident while rafting in Zambia

A British teenager who was mauled by a crocodile in southern Africa feared she would need to have her foot amputated, and said she felt “very lucky” during an interview from her hospital bed.

Amelie Osborn-Smith, 18, was left with her right foot “hanging loose” and a dislocated hip after the attack in the Zambezi River in Zambia while she was taking a break during a white water rafting expedition.

Continue reading...

Can artistic freedom survive in Sudan? The writing’s on the wall…

Posted on by

The recent coup dashed hopes raised by the end of the military regime but newly liberated artists refuse to submit quietly

In the new dawn of a heady post-revolutionary era, Suzannah Mirghani returned in 2019 to the country of her birth for the first time in years. Her mission was to shoot a short film on Sudanese soil. It proved unexpectedly straightforward.

“When the revolution happened, there was this exuberance,” she says, from her Qatari home. “When we came to make our film, we were given the green light. We were told: ‘Anything you want’.

Continue reading...

Gambian opposition parties reject preliminary election results

Posted on by

Incumbent president Adama Barrow leading with twice votes of nearest rival in test of democratic stability after decades of Yahya Jammeh’s rule

Gambian opposition candidates have rejected the preliminary results of Saturday’s historic vote in the West African nation which suggest the incumbent president, Adama Barrow, had easily won re-election.

According to official results announced by the electoral commission, Barrow is leading with a significant margin of more than 200,000 votes. Barrow in 2016 unseated the former president Yahya Jammeh, who is accused of human rights abuses and corruption.

Continue reading...

Dealing with uncertainty about the Omicron variant | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters

Posted on by
Caution is sensible when so much is unknown

The race is on to understand the new variant identified by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, dubbed Omicron (the next Greek letter was “nu”, but this could have been mistaken for “new”). Fears include greater spread, worse disease or reduced effectiveness of treatments and vaccines.

Increased transmission can arise from two factors. First, there is an intrinsic advantage, with a heightened “basic reproduction number” R0; in a susceptible population, that is the average number of people each case infects, although after 20 months of pandemic this has become a notional concept. It was around 3 for the original wild-type virus, compared to around 6 for Delta and possibly rather more for Omicron.

Continue reading...

Kenya: more than 20 drown as bus is swept away in flooded river

Posted on by

Vehicle travelling to wedding keels over and sinks in fast-flowing waters in Kitui County

More than 20 people drowned on Saturday when a bus travelling to a wedding in Kenya was swept away by fast-flowing waters as it tried to cross a flooded river.

Onlookers screamed as the yellow school bus hired to take a church choir and other revellers to the ceremony in Kitui County keeled over and sank as the driver tried to navigate the surging waters.

Continue reading...

Filming wild beasts: Cherry Kearton interviewed – archive, 11 May 1914

Posted on by

11 May 1914: The British wildlife photographer tells the Guardian about filming animals ‘unmolested and unharassed in their native wilds’

I found Mr Cherry Kearton, who has just returned from crossing Africa with a kinema camera for the third time, in the private room of his London office (writes a representative of the Manchester Guardian).

He was endeavouring to conduct a business conversation on the telephone. Round him stood half a dozen merry friends, whose joy at welcoming him home was so ebullient that they refused to be serious. The author of several standard books was giving lifelike imitations of a roaring lion, while the others were laughing loudly at his performance.

Continue reading...

Mali: militants fire on bus, killing at least 31 people

Posted on by

Insurgents shoot villagers going to a market on the same day UN peacekeeping convoy attacked, killing one person

Militants have killed at least 31 people in central Mali when they fired upon a bus ferrying people to a local market and attacked a UN convoy in the north of the country in a region racked by a violent insurgency.

The bus was attacked on Friday by unidentified gunmen as it travelled its twice-weekly route from the village of Songho to a market in Bandiagara six miles (10km) away, said Moulaye Guindo, the mayor of the nearby town of Bankass.

Continue reading...

Omicron driving record rate of Covid infection in South African province

Posted on by

Officials say variant’s R number is believed to be above 6, though most cases are mild and no deaths reported

The pace of Covid infections in the South African province of Gauteng is outstripping anything seen in previous waves, and officials say Omicron is now the dominant variant.

Angelique Coetzee, the chair of the South African Medical Association, said Omicron’s R number, measuring its ability to spread, was believed to be above 6. The R number for Delta, the dominant variant globally, is estimated to be above 5.

Continue reading...

Shell to go ahead with seismic tests in whale breeding grounds after court win

Posted on by

Judgment rules company can blast sound waves in search for oil along South Africa’s eastern coastline

Royal Dutch Shell will move ahead with seismic tests to explore for oil in vital whale breeding grounds along South Africa’s eastern coastline after a court dismissed an 11th-hour legal challenge by environmental groups.

The judgment, by a South African high court, allows Shell to begin firing within days extremely loud sound waves through the relatively untouched marine environment of the Wild Coast, which is home to whales, dolphins and seals.

Continue reading...

‘She didn’t deserve to die’: Kenya fights tuberculosis in Covid’s shadow

Posted on by

For the first time in a decade deaths from TB are rising, with the curable disease killing 20,000 Kenyans last year. Now testing ‘ATMs’ and other innovations are helping to find ‘missing cases’

One day in May last year, Violet Chemesunte, a community health volunteer in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, got a call from a colleague worried about a woman she had visited who kept coughing.

She asked if Chemesunte could go round and convince the 37-year-old woman, a single mother to three young children, to seek medical help. She suspected tuberculosis (TB), and feared it might already be too late.

Continue reading...

How probable is it Omicron Covid variant will take hold in UK?

Posted on by

Analysis: UK’s early vaccine deployment and use of different vaccines from South Africa mean it’s too soon to say

Omicron is causing consternation around the world, with the variant found to be behind an exponential rise in Covid cases in South Africa. Yet with just 42 cases confirmed in the UK so far, and most European countries seeing numbers in the double rather than triple figures, could this be a tentative sign the variant may fail to take hold outside southern Africa? The bottom line is, it is too soon to say.

One issue is that there are important differences that make it difficult to compare the situations in South Africa and beyond.

Continue reading...

The most unsafe passage to Europe has claimed 18,000 victims. Who speaks for them? | Lorenzo Tondo

Posted on by

As Europe outsources its border policing to Libya, rescue operations by NGOs are hampered by criminal inquiries in Italy

In the early hours of 21 June, somewhere in the vast expanse of the central Mediterranean, a Médecins Sans Frontières team on board a rescue vessel received a distress call. The motor of a small boat carrying asylum seekers from Libya had broken down, and the vessel was taking in water.

These are the first dramatic scenes in Unsafe Passage – a Guardian Documentaries film by Ed Ou for the Outlaw Ocean Project, released today – but they are also the first moments in a race against time that repeats itself again and again in the stretch of sea separating Europe from Africa.

Continue reading...

Omicron seems to carry higher Covid reinfection risk, says South Africa

Posted on by

Scientists warn of higher rate of repeat infections but say vaccines appear to protect against serious illness

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 appears to be reinfecting people at three times the rate of previous strains, experts in South Africa have said, as public health officials and scientists from around the world closely monitor developments in the country where it was first identified.

As the EU’s public health agency warned that Omicron could cause more than half of all new Covid infections in Europe within the next few months, evidence was emerging, however, that vaccines still appear to offer protection against serious illness.

Continue reading...

Covid live: Germany to impose ‘lockdown’ on unvaccinated and could make jabs obligatory from February

Posted on by

Germany is seeking to break a surge in coronavirus infections; India detects two cases of new Omicron variant in Karnataka; Greece and Finland detect first Omicron cases

Some Covid numbers from Germany are now in.

The European nation reported another 73,209 new Covid cases for Wednesday and 388 deaths, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute.

Continue reading...

Omicron variant found around world as more nations tighten travel rules

Posted on by

US among more than 50 nations bringing in stricter border controls as variant is identified in 24 countries

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 has been identified in new countries around the globe, including the US, west Africa, the Gulf and Asia, as American authorities indicated they would further tighten border controls over concerns that the new strain may be more transmissible.

Underscoring the fast spread of the variant, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa – where Omicron was first detected – said it had now been found in five out of nine provinces, and accounted for 74% of the virus genomes sequenced in November.

Continue reading...

Activists call for revolution in ‘dated and colonial’ aid funding

Posted on by

Aspen Institute’s New Voices want donors to exercise humility and trust those receiving grants to know what their communities need

Aid donors are being urged to revolutionise the way money is spent to move away from colonial ideas and create meaningful change.

Ahead of a two-day conference this week, activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America have called on public and private global health donors – including governments, the United Nations, private philanthropists and international organisations – to prioritise funding for programmes driven by the needs of the community involved, rather than dictated by preconceived objectives.

Continue reading...

Even after 40 years the response to Aids in many countries is still held back by stigma | Hakima Himmich and Mike Podmore

Posted on by

It is hard to protect yourself from HIV when having sterile syringes or condoms can lead to arrest: discrimination is restricting progress in eliminating HIV

Forty years after the first cases of Aids were discovered, goals for its global elimination have yet to be achieved. In 2020, nearly 700,000 people died of Aids-related illnesses and 1.5 million people were newly infected with HIV.

This is despite scientific and medical advances in the testing, treatment and care of people living with HIV.

Continue reading...

The rising cost of the climate crisis in flooded South Sudan – in pictures

Posted on by

Families facing severe hunger are wading through crocodile-infested waters in search of water lilies to eat. Susan Martinez and photographer Peter Caton return with Action Against Hunger to find that the dire situation they reported on in March has only worsened

Desperate families in flood-ravaged villages in South Sudan are spending hours searching for water lilies to eat after another summer of intense rainfall worsened an already dire situation.

People have no food and no land to cultivate after three years of floods. Fields are submerged in last year’s flood water and higher ground is overcrowded with hungry people, in what is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis.

Nyanyang Tong, 39, on her way to the Action Against Hunger centre with her one-year-old son, Mamuch Gatkuoth, in Paguir

Continue reading...

Botswana upholds ruling decriminalising same-sex relationships

Posted on by

Court of appeal decision hailed as victory for LGBTQ+ community that could encourage other African countries to follow suit

Gay rights campaigners expressed joy at the Botswana court of appeal’s decision to uphold a ruling that decriminalised same-sex relationships, saying the country’s judiciary had set an example for other African countries.

The government had appealed a 2019 ruling that criminalising homosexuality was unconstitutional. The ruling had been hailed as a major victory for gay rights campaigners on the continent, following an unsuccessful attempt in Kenya to repeal colonial-era laws criminalising gay sex.

Continue reading...

Omicron variant: G7 to hold emergency Covid meeting as Japan closes its borders

Posted on by

South African president and WHO’s Africa chief urge against travel bans, saying they ‘attack global solidarity’

G7 health ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Monday about the new Omicron Covid-19 variant spreading across the world and forcing border closures, as experts race to determine the level of threat posed by the new strain.

The meeting was called by G7 chair Britain, which is among a steadily growing number of countries that have detected cases of the heavily mutated new variant.

Continue reading...