The dynamic of Senegal’s Feb. 26 election is a familiar-sounding one: an aging, increasingly autocratic African President trying to cling to power, sending in the security services to beat up – and occasionally kill – young …
The news that malaria kills almost twice as many people a year as previously believed — not 655,000 but a staggering 1.2 million — is only the latest evidence of how poorly even the best scientists and researchers understand …
The killing of more than 178 people by Islamic militants in a series of attacks on state buildings in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, underlines how one of Africa’s most corrupt nations is reaping the rewards of decades of …
Even the best aid agencies find they can rarely admit their faults. Aid depends on donations, and donors need to feel confidence and trust to hand over money to an aid agency, which means the $126-billion-a-year foreign aid …
Africa’s most famous living singer, Youssou N’Dour, announced Jan. 2 he would run for the presidency of his native Senegal at elections on February 26. He spoke to TIME’s African bureau chief Alex Perry from his hometown, …
World music fans know him as a giant, 30-somethings will instantly recognize his voice from the 1994 worldwide smash “7 seconds” and followers of West African politics will, as of this week, know him as a candidate for President in Senegal’s February 26 election. But to see how big Youssou N’Dour really is, you need to hang out with him …
Assassinations. Pitched battles. Cross-border bombing raids. Hundreds of thousands of refugees. At what point will the rising conflict between Sudan and South Sudan be recognized as a new war?
They say a diamond is forever. From today, and for now, that also includes blood diamonds. On Monday the respected rights and commerce watchdog Global Witness announced it was quitting the international certification scheme set …
When the Democratic Republic of Congo held its first multiparty general election for 41 years in 2006, the event was hailed as a milestone on the slow march out of civil war and towards functionality for the world’s largest failed state. Five years later, as the country holds another poll, the naivete of the Western belief in …
If in any revolution, there is a moment after which it becomes unstoppable, that moment came for South Africa on Feb. 11, 1990, when Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in jail. But if there arrives another moment after which a revolutionary party — too long in power, too arrogant, too corrupt — can no longer claim to act …
Kenya’s hasty invasion of its northern neighbor Somalia took a tragic turn late Sunday when, according to witnesses on the ground, the Kenyan air force bombed a refugee camp sheltering those fleeing Somalia’s famine, killing three children and two adults. A spokesman for the Kenyan military in Nairobi insisted that the bombers killed …
In September, Somalis kidnappers kill a British tourist and his wife; later they kidnap a disabled French tourist, who subsequently dies; then in October they abduct two Spanish aid workers. In reply Kenya, whose economy depends heavily on tourism, sends hundreds of troops into southern Somalia in pursuit of an al-Qaeda affiliate, …
If the history of war teaches us anything, it’s that invading a foreign country is dicey. Storming across too many borders was the undoing of many of the world’s great conquerors, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon to the Nazis. The last few decades of US foreign policy – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq – only underline how tricky …
