Ibrahim Traoré, who took power in 2022 coup, tells state broadcaster ‘we must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us’
People in Burkina Faso should forget about democracy as it is “not for us”, the military president, Ibrahim Traoré, told the country’s state broadcaster.
Traoré took power in a coup in September 2022, toppling another junta that had taken power just nine months earlier. He has since stifled opposition and in January banned political parties outright.
Continue reading...Dozen people arrive under new deal but legal challenges expected with scheme criticised as ‘dehumanising process’
A flight carrying people being deported from the US has landed in Uganda, as Donald Trump’s administration pushes on with its strategy of expelling migrants to countries they have no ties to.
The deported people would stay in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.
Continue reading...Reports, based on X post from unofficial account, follow JD Vance’s accusations and threats of finding ‘legal remedies’
Several news outlets have falsely reported that Somaliland’s government called for the extradition of Ilhan Omar, basing their stories on a post from an X account that does not represent the state despite its claims to the contrary.
Fox News, the New York Post, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s the National News Desk and the Independent ran stories on the US representative. The reports centred on a post by @RepOfSomaliland in reaction to claims by JD Vance that Omar had committed immigration fraud, which echoed prior allegations against the Somali-born Minnesota Democrat that she has vehemently denied.
Continue reading...Football federation president on the run with wife and son
Conviction in absentia of wide-ranging corruption charges
Authorities in Congo-Brazzaville have applied to Interpol for an international arrest warrant against Jean-Guy Blaise Mayolas, the president of the country’s football federation, Fecofoot, after he was convicted of embezzling $1.1m in Fifa funds.
Mayolas is on the run with his wife and son after they were all sentenced to life imprisonment this month for embezzling funds provided by world football’s governing body as part of its Covid-19 relief plan in February 2021. As the Guardian revealed last year, that included almost $500,000 earmarked for the Congo women’s team.
Continue reading...A huge rise in internet users under the age of 30 has fuelled an increase in online violence against women and girls with devastating real-life effects, activists say
Activists and lawyers in Africa are calling for urgent action to protect women, girls and boys as digital violence surges across the continent.
A massive rise in internet users, coupled with huge numbers of people aged under 30, has fuelled an increase in gendered online violence across the continent, according to experts, by giving perpetrators new tools to control and silence women and girls, and influence boys.
Continue reading...• UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’
Despite resistance from states who had role in chattel slavery, many feel this is an idea whose time has come
John Mahama knows a thing or two about beating the establishment. On Wednesday, less than two years after completing a remarkable comeback as Ghana’s president with a landslide defeat of the ruling party candidate, he rallied the world to ratify a landmark vote against transatlantic chattel slavery, despite major opposition from the same western entities that drove it for centuries.
The resolution to declare the practice as “the gravest crime against humanity” passed with a decisive majority at the UN general assembly and has been largely welcomed across Africa. Yet the details of the tally reveal a world still deeply divided on the gravity of the sin of enslaving more than 15 million people as chattel over the course of 400 years.
Continue reading...Piece by late South African artist Dumile Feni is part of new series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme
On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.
While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.
Continue reading...Market in North Darfur and truck carrying civilians in North Kordofan hit as civil war approaches fourth year
At least 28 civilians have been killed in two separate drone strikes in Sudan, according to health workers, as the country’s brutal civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) approaches its fourth year.
A strike hit a market in the town of Saraf Omra, in North Darfur state, on Wednesday, killing “22 people, including an infant, and injuring 17 more”, a health worker at the local clinic told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Continue reading...Ukrainian president says peace deal proposed by US includes handing over land to Russia. What we know on day 1,492
Continue reading...Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’
The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”
Continue reading...Grammy winner seeks more than $20m in damages over mistranslation of The Lion King chant
A Grammy-winning South African composer who wrote and performed the opening chant in Circle of Life for Disney’s The Lion King is suing a comedian for allegedly damaging his reputation by intentionally misrepresenting the song’s meaning on a podcast and in his standup routine.
Lebohang Morake’s lawsuit accuses the Zimbabwean comedian Learnmore Mwanyenyeka, known as Learnmore Jonasi, of intentionally mistranslating the chant, which launches the 1994 movie and is central to staged versions as well as Disney’s 2019 remake.
Continue reading...Conservationists celebrate second twin birth just two months after another found in Virunga national park
A second set of mountain gorilla twins has been born in Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in what conservationists are celebrating as an “extraordinary” event for the endangered primates.
Just two months after tiny twin mountain gorillas were discovered by rangers in the Virunga massif, in eastern DRC, another rare twin birth has been found by park wardens. This time, an infant male and female have been spotted in the Baraka family, a troop of 19 mountain gorillas that roam the region’s high-altitude rainforests.
Continue reading...Victims of army drone attack on East Darfur health facility included children and medical personnel
A strike on a healthcare facility in Sudan has killed 64 people and wounded 89 more, the World Health Organization reported on Saturday.
The UN’s humanitarian office in Sudan had earlier said it was “appalled by the attack on a hospital in East Darfur yesterday, reportedly killing dozens, including children, and injuring more”.
Continue reading...UK’s bilateral aid to African countries, which funds areas such as schools and clinics, to be cut by almost £900m by 2028-29
Some of the world’s poorest countries will lose out on UK aid that funds programmes such as schools and clinics, due to budget cuts set out by the foreign secretary.
The UK’s bilateral aid to African countries will be reduced by almost £900m by 2028-29 – a 56% cut – as part of more than £6bn in cuts which are funding an increase in defence spending.
Continue reading...Lemi Limbu, who has severe intellectual disabilities, remains in prison and will now face retrial for the murder of her daughter
A woman with severe intellectual disabilities in Tanzania has had her conviction and death sentence quashed after spending more than a decade in prison awaiting execution.
Lemi Limbu, now in her early 30s, was convicted of the murder of her daughter in 2015. On 4 March, a court in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania, declared she can appeal. She will face a retrial, but a date has yet to be set.
Continue reading...Nigeria had largest increase in terrorism-related deaths, ranking fourth in global index behind Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Niger
Jihadist violence rose sharply in Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo last year, even as global deaths from terrorism dropped to their lowest level in a decade, according to a new report.
Nigeria recorded the largest increase in terrorism deaths globally in 2025, with fatalities rising by 46% from 513 in 2024 to 750, placing it fourth in the Global Terrorism Index, behind Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Continue reading...Family of then PM, Patrice Lumumba, welcome decision to charge Étienne Davignon as ‘beginning of a reckoning’
A former Belgian diplomat, 93, should stand trial over alleged complicity in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what was then the newly independent Congolese state, a Brussels court has ruled.
Étienne Davignon, the only person still alive among 10 Belgians the Lumumba family accuses of involvement in the killing, is charged with participation in war crimes.
The illegal transfer of Lumumba and his associates from Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) to Katanga.
The “humiliating and degrading treatment” of the men.
Depriving them of a fair trial.
Continue reading...More than 100 others injured in bombings targeting post office, market areas and hospital in Maiduguri
At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.
Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.
Continue reading...Britons learn about the country’s involvement ‘almost as a self-congratulatory narrative’, says historian Joseph Mulhern
In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.
Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.
Continue reading...Food production in many African countries depends heavily on fertiliser imported from the Gulf through the strait of Hormuz
Countries in Africa, where farmers depend heavily on imported fertiliser and a large share of household income goes on food, are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East, experts have said.
The conflict has drastically disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane not just for oil and gas but also for fertiliser, which is produced in vast quantities in the Gulf.
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