Category Archives: Africa

Sampa the Great: ‘I went back to Zambia and people said, you’re different’

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Raised in Zambia, the rapper moved to the US and made her name in Australia. Returning to her roots – and carrying the weight of representation – terrified her

Sampa the Great was terrified before she stepped on stage to play her first ever show in Africa earlier this year. The show was in the Zambian capital of Lusaka – and the artist, MC and poet’s cousins were in the front row.

“I’m based in Australia and all the monumental moments in my career have happened there,” says Sampa (born Sampa Tembo). “But I’m from Zambia. My fear was that they wouldn’t get it – and their opinion matters most.” She sums up her concerns: “A person coming out of Africa and playing globally while still being themselves and pushing for their own culture – to go home and not be understood.”

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How snakebites became an invisible health crisis in Congo

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Daily life is fraught with danger for people living in remote areas of a country where health funding is as scarce as specialist medicine

All photographs by Hugh Kinsella Cunningham

In the vast jungles that cover the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s most invisible health crises burns on. The country’s extensive equatorial forests are home to numerous species of venomous snakes, but their habitat is shared by secluded communities that are being forced to look further and further afield for their resources due to poverty and the pressures of conflict and climate change.

It puts DRC at the centre of an issue Médecins Sans Frontières has called a “neglected crisis”: death by snake bite.

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Tunisia’s presidential election to put young democracy to the test

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Arab spring’s sole democratic state has proved resilient despite anger over price rises

Tunisia will hold its second-ever presidential elections on 15 September in a poll seen as a major test of the only democracy to emerge from the 2011 Arab spring.

The death in July of the country’s president, Beji Caid Essebsi, 92, a secularist who was instrumental in steering the country’s transition to democracy, forced the polls to be held earlier than originally scheduled in November.

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Sally Mugabe should never be forgotten | Letter

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Robert Mugabe’s first wife did a lot of good work for Zimbabwe’s women and children, writes Margaret Owen

I am saddened that your obituary for Robert Mugabe (Journal, 7 September) omits any reference to the work of his wonderful first wife, Sally (though it mentions her name). She was secretary general of the Zanu-PF women’s league, founder of the Zimbabwe Child Survival Programme and a backer of the pan-Africa consortium Akina Mama wa Afrika. She also launched the Zimbabwe Women’s Co-operative in the UK. She was a great feminist, inspiring many of us women’s rights activists and NGOs around the world, and died far too young.

How different she was from her successor, Grace. But why are her unique initiatives for Zimbabwe’s women and children omitted in all these eulogies? More gender bias? She should never be forgotten.
Margaret Owen
Director, Widows for Peace Through Democracy

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Robert Mugabe left millions of us in poverty and despair

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The man who brought freedom to Zimbabwe was once a hero to many – but he died a tyrant who will not be mourned

Robert Mugabe is dead, never to come back again, and so are millions of Zimbabweans who preceded him, dying from easily treatable diseases, and from the violence that visited anyone who attempted to resist his tyrannical rule.

The dreams of millions of young men and women – who, to this day, roam the streets of Zimbabwe with university degrees but without jobs or any decent income – were extinguished long before him.

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Mugabe’s family clashes with Mnangagwa over plans for state funeral

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Zimbabwe’s liberator turned dictator is proving as troublesome to the coup leaders in death as he was in life

Officials and family members are arguing over the arrangements for the burial of Robert Mugabe, the former Zimbabwean president who died in Singapore last week aged 95.

High-ranking members of the ruling Zanu-PF party are understood to have told Mugabe’s close family that his remains should be interred at a hilltop monument outside Harare, the capital, following a ceremony at the nearby national stadium, where dozens of prominent African leaders would be present.

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Robert Mugabe killed the freedoms he had worked so hard for | Fadzayi Mahere

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The former Zimbabwean president will always be an African liberation icon, but his brutality will not be forgotten

“Wafa wanaka” – it is said that it is unAfrican to speak ill of the dead. But what choice does one have when the death of a once towering figure raises complex emotions, and not in a good way?

On 18 April 1980, Zimbabwe was born. In a colourful celebration that started the previous night at Rufaro stadium in Harare (then known as Salisbury), the independence flame was lit. Bob Marley sang Zimbabwe, a song he’d written at the invitation of the government. Hope filled the air as Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the nation’s first prime minister, took his oath of office and swore allegiance to the new nation. Julius Nyerere, the leader of Tanzania, prophetically cautioned Mugabe, saying: “You have inherited a jewel in Africa. Don’t tarnish it.”

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How UK’s foreign policy efforts to dislodge Mugabe ended in failure

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Series of misunderstandings and protection from other African leaders meant Britain could only wound the regime

Britain’s 40-year effort to find a way to either influence or dislodge Robert Mugabe is one of the country’s great post-war foreign policy failures. It is a story spanning six UK prime ministers, nearly £1bn in aid and every conceivable strategy.

Whether the cause of that failure lies at the door of a colonial mindset in the Foreign Office, a failed land transfer policy, the collective weakness of the Commonwealth, a cowardly African political elite or simply the corrupt thuggery of Mugabe himself will be a matter of dispute for generations.

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Robert Mugabe, former Zimbabwe president, dies aged 95

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Final years in power were characterised by financial collapse, violent intimidation and vicious power struggle

Robert Mugabe, the deeply divisive former president of Zimbabwe, was declared a “national hero” by the ruling Zanu-PF party on Friday, as preparations for his funeral got under way in the nation he ruled with an iron first for almost 40 years.

The death of the former president on Thursday night in a clinic in Singapore marks the definitive end of an era in the former British colony.

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From liberator to tyrant: the life and legacy of Robert Mugabe – video obituary

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Robert Mugabe, a hero of Africa’s independence struggle whose long rule in Zimbabwe descended into tyranny, corruption and incompetence, has died at the age of 95. We look back at the life and legacy of one of Africa's most notorious leaders

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Robert Mugabe obituary

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Ruthless president of Zimbabwe once hailed as a beacon of African liberation whose rule bankrupted the country he had fought so hard to win

As the armoured vehicles rolled in to Harare in November 2017, after weeks of political fencing and brinksmanship, Robert Mugabe could not believe he had lost. The senior military leadership who placed the Zimbabwean president under house arrest made it clear they were conducting the politest of coups, while stressing to the outside world that it was not a coup at all. It was merely a corrective action and, indeed, at its end, with Mugabe’s resignation, it was still his party, Zanu-PF, in power.

Mugabe, who has died aged 95, came to power as a result of the gun – wielded by others, as he himself never fought in the field – and fell by those who wielded the gun. And, as he fell, the true depths of the economic mire into which he had plunged Zimbabwe – spending so much time on party and succession battles, and seemingly none on issues of deep impoverishment and national non-productivity – became apparent. Emmerson Mnangagwa, the new president, in stressing an economic emphasis and outreach to the world, seemed to admit that the country was bankrupt and that Mugabe had made it so.

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Thousands protest in South Africa over rising violence against women

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President promises to do more after the most deadly month for violent crimes against women country has ever seen

Thousands of South African women took to the streets on Thursday to protest at the government’s failure to deal with rising violence against women in the wake of a string of brutal attacks that have shocked the country.

Women from across South African society marched to parliament in Cape Town dressed in black and purple in commemoration of those who lost their lives in August, the most deadly month for violent crimes against women the country has ever seen.

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‘Most renewable energy companies’ linked with claims of abuses in mines

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Corporate watchdog urges clean-up of supply chains as analysis finds weak regulation and enforcement has led to lack of scrutiny

Most of the world’s top companies extracting key minerals for electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines have been linked with human rights abuses in their mines, research has found.

Analysis published by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), an international corporate watchdog, revealed that 87% of the 23 largest companies mining cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc – the six minerals essential to the renewable energy industry – have faced allegations of abuse including land rights infringements, corruption, violence or death over the past 10 years.

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Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite

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Drugs derived from Ivermectin, which makes human blood deadly to mosquitoes, could be available within two years

Human trials of new antimalarial drugs are in the pipeline after Kenyan scientists successfully used bacteria to kill the parasite that causes the disease.

The Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and global health partners say the breakthrough could potentially lead to the development of a new class of drugs in less than two years.

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Moffie review – soldiers on the frontline of homophobia

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Hidden passions add to the brutish hell of apartheid-era South African conscripts in Oliver Hermanus’s skilfully tense drama

Moffie, screening in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice, is a tense, stealthy rites-of-passage drama from the dog days of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a tale of callow young conscripts inside a corroded old system. Set in 1981 during the country’s border conflict with communist-backed Angola, Oliver Hermanus’s film manages an unflinching portrait of a society in spasm; paranoid and brutish and largely screaming at itself. It’s a war story of sorts in which the battle has already been lost.

Kai Luke Brummer gives a fine performance as Nicholas, a willowy 18-year-old at a sun-blasted army boot-camp. Nick and his fellow soldiers are supposed to be fighting the enemy, but the only action they’re seeing is on the volleyball court, or the dorm, or sometimes in the toilet cubicle, much to the sergeant’s horror. The way the officers see it, the very worst thing a soldier can be is a “moffie”, an Afrikaans insult that the subtitles translate as “faggot”. “Moffie!” they scream – as though they regard homosexuality as a mad dog that has somehow got under the fence, or an invading swarm of wasps, liable to sting any man who isn’t properly covered up.

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Show me the mummy: the undying allure of ancient Egypt

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Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries

Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.

The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.

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Nigerian officials ponder next move in $9bn energy scandal

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As war of words continues over potential loss of assets, mixed messages of negotiation and scam emanate from government

Nigeria’s top government officials have met to discuss their next move in the $9bn (£7.4bn) energy scandal that is poised to cost their economy dear.

As they exited Monday’s high-level meeting, chaired by vice-president Yemi Osinbajo, the participants remained tight-lipped, refusing to comment on the talks.

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South African president condemns anti-foreigner violence

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Five killed and businesses attacked in wave of violence against immigrants

Police in South Africa are struggling to contain an outbreak of violence against foreigners in major cities that has claimed five lives, ruined dozens of businesses and brought condemnation from other African countries.

President Cyril Ramaphosa condemned the violence on Tuesday and said he was calling in ministers with responsibility for security “to make sure that we keep a close eye on these acts of wanton violence and find ways of stopping them”.

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