Category Archives: Africa

‘We need to stop talking about jollof rice’: Lagos chef aims to ‘conjure pride’ in Nigerian food

Posted on by

Michael Elégbèdé doesn’t just break from western ideas of fine dining, but aims to revive a deeper appreciation of Nigerian food among Nigerians, too

After wine and canapes on a patio overlooking high-rises and greenery in an affluent part of Lagos, 15 guests assemble inside. They sit facing one another across a long dining table, brightly lit by a steel row of low-hanging lights. Nigerian cultural masks and artworks adorn the walls of the restaurant, which evokes a Nigerian home.

The dishes emerge: traditional egusi soup, but with the efo (spinach) crisp amaranth leaves. Grains of gari, or cassava root, typically pounded to make a kind of dough called eba, is instead lightly dusted over it. Unusually, there are croutons. “An egusi crouton,” a guest nods approvingly.

Continue reading...

Zimbabwean man charged with rape after girl, 15, dies giving birth

Posted on by

Death has caused outrage in country where one in three girls are likely to be married by 18, despite ban

Zimbabwean police have charged a man after a 15-year-old girl died while giving birth at a church shrine last month.

Hatirarami Momberume, 26, has been charged with raping Anna Machaya, whose death provoked outrage in the country and was condemned by the UN.

Continue reading...

‘They call us bewitched’: the DRC performers turning trash into art – photo essay

Posted on by

Dolls found in rubbish dumps, radio parts and discarded flip-flops are among items used to create surreal costumes by a Kinshasa collective highlighting political and environmental issues

As a child, Shaka Fumu Kabaka witnessed the atrocities that took place during the six-day war between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in his home town of Kisangani in June 2000.

“It was not even our war, but a war between two foreign armies,” he said.

Continue reading...

Jihadist attack in Burkina Faso kills 80 people

Posted on by

Death toll from the assault near northern town of Gorgadji leaves 59 civilians dead, along with six militiamen and 15 military police

Burkina Faso’s president has declared three days of national mourning after suspected jihadists killed 80 people, including 59 civilians, in an attack in the north of the country.

The attack was the latest bloodshed in an area with high levels of Islamist violence.

Continue reading...

Forty people feared dead as woman rescued from dinghy off Canary Islands

Posted on by

The woman, who was trying to make the trip from Africa, was found lying next to two bodies and ‘in a bad state’, officials say

About 40 migrants are feared dead after rescuers recovered a lone woman clinging to an overturned dinghy that had been carrying dozens of people trying to reach the Canary Islands.

A rescue helicopter carrying the survivor – a 30-year-old woman who appeared exhausted and shaken – landed at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria airport on Tuesday, after a cargo ship found her 135 miles off the coast.

Continue reading...

Sexting, lies and unveiled selfies: the Egyptian film exploring the hidden lives of teenage girls

Posted on by

Ayten Amin’s Souad is a razor-sharp portrayal of sisterhood and sexual awakening that is rarely represented on screen

When the Egyptian director Ayten Amin was 10 years old, a classmate’s sister killed herself. The news gripped the school. But, in a society where suicide is a sin, no one talked about it; instead, they mourned the girl as though she had died mysteriously, or in an accident. “When I was shooting my first film, it suddenly hit me,” Amin says over a video call from her home in Cairo. “How did my classmate feel back then? How did she grow up knowing what happened, but with no one talking about it?”

In her new film, Souad, Amin explores precisely this: the hidden lives of teenage girls in Egypt. It follows the title character (played by Bassant Ahmed) and Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh), sisters of 19 and 13 living in Zagazig, a small city 40 miles north of Cairo in the Nile delta. To her family and friends, Souad is as religious as she is studious – but she lives a different life online. She has virtual relationships with men and becomes enthralled by the glamorous-seeming Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem), an influencer from the fashionable Mediterranean city of Alexandria. Their relationship begins to sour when Souad stands up Ahmed for a real-life date; it gets steadily worse as a cycle of sexts and arguments sets in. Then tragedy strikes.

Continue reading...

‘No one comes here any more’: the human cost as Covid wipes out tourism

Posted on by

From Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca to wildlife tourism in Nepal, we find out how the crisis has affected people in four travel hotspots – and whether or not they want the tourists to return

In March last year, it was predicted that the global travel shutdown would cause international arrivals to plummet by 20 to 30% by the end of 2020.

Six weeks later, the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) revised their warning: international arrivals could fall by up to 80% – equating to a billion fewer tourists and the worst crisis in the history of the industry.

Continue reading...

Africa’s park tourism crash is a wake-up call. Can we find new ways to finance conservation? | Peter Muiruri

Posted on by

As Covid continues to curb visits to see our iconic wildlife, now is the time to move away from western-led funding models

That African governments have failed to mobilise funds to conserve their vast protected areas is not in doubt. Countries were just about managing to pay basic salaries to rangers who barely had enough to put fuel in their patrol vehicles. Covid has exacerbated this already dire situation, with the loss of income from foreign tourism.

The continent has more than 8,500 protected areas, described by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as government-led national parks, areas jointly governed by state agencies, communities, privately owned wildlife reserves, and public-private partnerships between governments, companies and NGOs. Included too, are what the IUCN calls “indigenous peoples and communities conserved territories and areas”.

Continue reading...

‘I ran, my heart was broken’: inside Mozambique’s evolving Cabo Delgado conflict

Posted on by

The oil firms have fled and an Isis-affiliated insurgency has engulfed the region. As foreign troops begin to arrive, hundreds of thousands face desperate journeys to try to find safety

  • Photographs by Ed Ram/The Guardian

Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.

“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”

Continue reading...

Algeria: 61 arrested after mob kills man falsely accused of starting deadly fires

Posted on by

The man had handed himself in to authorities, but was dragged out of a police van and set on fire

Algerian police have announced another 25 arrests over the lynching of a man falsely accused of starting deadly forest fires last week, taking the total number of suspects to 61.

The latest arrests were made in several provinces across the country, police said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that the suspects were also accused of damaging public and police property.

Continue reading...

Stop the east African oil pipeline now | Bill McKibben, Diana Nabiruma and Omar Elmawi

Posted on by

The fate of a planned line from Uganda to Tanzania will be the first test of whether anyone was listening to António Guterres’ call to end fossil fuels

If there is one world leader trying to look out for the planet as a whole, not just their own nation, it’s the UN secretary general. Last week, António Guterres was resolute in the wake of the damning report from the IPCC on the perilious climate crisis. It should, he said, sound “a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet”.

He called for an end to “all new fossil fuel exploration and production”, and told countries to shift fossil fuel subsidies into renewable energy.

Continue reading...

‘The wounds won’t heal’: Kenya’s agonising wait for justice on killings by police

Posted on by

Five years after Willie Kimani’s death, his father is still waiting for a resolution. But as killings continue, cases like his pile up within a crippled justice system

Paul Kinuthia will never forget the moment he saw his son’s body lying on the bank of the river he played in as a child. He threw his hands up in despair and begged God to intervene.

It has been five years since Kinuthia’s son, Willie Kimani, a lawyer, was murdered along with his client, Josephat Mwenda and driver, Joseph Muiruri, in Nairobi in June 2016. At the time, Kimani was representing Mwenda in court, after Mwenda had been shot and injured by police.

Continue reading...

The world is making billions of Covid vaccine doses, so why is Africa not getting them? | Gordon Brown

Posted on by

While western governments get ready to administer booster shots, millions in Africa are still completely unprotected

In a shocking symbol of the west’s failure to honour its promise of equitable vaccine distribution, millions of Covid vaccines manufactured in Africa that should have saved the lives of Africans have been shipped to Europe in recent weeks. Indeed, this month and next, I have learned from African leaders that about 10m single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines filled and finished at the Aspen factory in South Africa will be exported to Europe, at the very time that Africa is grappling with its deadliest wave of Covid-19 infections yet.

Compared with the swift development of the pathbreaking Covid vaccines, getting shots into all the world’s arms should be straightforward. But vaccine nationalism – and Europe’s neocolonial approach to global health – is dividing the world into rich and protected people, who live, and those who are poor, unprotected and at risk of dying.

Continue reading...

Gordon Brown hits out at EU’s ‘neocolonial approach’ to Covid vaccine supplies

Posted on by

Former UK prime minister calls on western leaders to convene summit to address Africa’s vaccine deficit

Gordon Brown has accused the EU of adopting a “neocolonial approach” to the supply of Covid-19 vaccines and demanded rich western nations relinquish their stranglehold on pandemic treatments.

The former UK prime minister has called on Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi to convene a special summit to coincide with next month’s UN general assembly in New York to address Africa’s vaccine deficit.

Continue reading...

Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of people’s broken relationship with the state | Nesrine Malik

Posted on by

From Khartoum to Kansas, vaccine conspiracy theorists share one thing in common: they have lost their faith in government

It’s hard to explain what it feels like when someone you thought you knew intimately starts to repeat conspiracy theories about the pandemic and vaccines. You don’t really grasp what’s happening immediately: it’s too vast and jarring a realisation to gulp down in one go. So you go through phases. First you clutch at straws. Perhaps it’s a bad joke, or they didn’t really mean it, or they’re just misinformed. Then you enter a stage of hot, disorienting rage and frustrated remonstration. Once that is spent, finally you cool off. But inside you is a leaden realisation that not only is this person you love putting their life at risk: perhaps you never really knew them at all.

People with the wildest theories about the pandemic can be found in countries even where most people don’t have access to the internet, cable TV or the shock jocks of commercial radio. A common impulse is to write off those espousing conspiracies, consigning them to the casualties claimed by WhatsApp groups, disinformation or silent mental health issues. These things may be true – but vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of broader failures. What all people wary of vaccines have in common, from Khartoum to Kansas, is their trust in the state has been eroded. Without understanding this, we will be fated to keep channelling our frustrations towards individuals without grasping why they have lost trust in the first place.

Continue reading...

Ivory Coast confirms first Ebola case since 1994

Posted on by

Woman, 18, is in intensive care in Abidjan as emergency plan to identify her contacts begins

Ivory Coast has recorded a case of Ebola, its health minister has said, the first occurrence of the deadly disease in the country in nearly three decades.

Officials at the Institut Pasteur confirmed the case after testing samples taken from an 18-year-old Guinean woman, health minister Pierre N’Gou Demba said on RTI state television.

Continue reading...

Belarus repression and the Taliban advance: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

Posted on by

A round-up of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Thailand to Mexico

Continue reading...

UN ‘gravely concerned’ by Democratic Republic of the Congo mass rape

Posted on by

Hundreds of sexual assaults reported in south-east Tanganyika province as armed groups fight over goldmines

The UN has raised the alarm over widespread, systematic sexual violence in the south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), saying women were reporting armed groups carrying out mass rape.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, said its staff have heard horrific testimonies from forcibly displaced persons in Tanganyika province.

Continue reading...

‘Maestro of humanity’: Italian surgeon Gino Strada dies at 73

Posted on by

Tributes paid to doctor whose NGO set up world-class hospitals in war zones such as Iraq, Yemen and Sudan

Tributes have been paid to Gino Strada, the Italian surgeon and “maestro of humanity” known for setting up world-class hospitals for the victims of war, who has died aged 73.

The medic, who in 1994 co-founded the humanitarian organisation Emergency to provide free, quality healthcare for those injured in conflict, died on Friday in France, reports said.

Continue reading...

Summer in the city: A Igoni Barrett on a rainy bus ride in Lagos

Posted on by

The writer on a stressful commute in Nigeria’s largest city on a day of downpours in 2007

• Read other authors on their memorable urban summers

It had been raining all day the way an old goat pees, in fits and starts, with bleats of sunshine in between. This was a weekday in July 2007, the magical year I moved to Lagos, and only a few months into the nine-to-five that lured me over. The excitement of waking up every day at 5am and catching a jam-packed danfo bus for the two-hour commute had since curdled in my wannabe-writer’s heart. I was standing at Obalende bus stop that afternoon after work, with no bus in sight for the past 40 minutes and rumours of a citywide gridlock swirling around, when the rain started again, a sun shower, proof, they say, that a lion is being born.

Fare hikes were expected on days of heavy traffic, but this time the fare had tripled. Outraged howls rent the air

Continue reading...