How illicit Trade destabilises the Swahili Coast
The ancient trade routes of East Africa’s Swahili Coast – a 3,000 kilometre littoral stretching from Somalia in the north to Northern Mozambique in the south – is riddled with illegal trading. These networks are connected to political instability in the wider region as well as the emergence of extremist movements which threaten to undermine and corrode the region’s fragile institutions.
The seizure of the town of Palma in the extreme north of Mozambique by armed groups associated with the Islamist Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jamaah (ASWJ) in March has galvanised the world’s attention. Although the event seemed to come as a shock to governments of the region, analysts of the illegal trade have warned of the area’s vulnerability for several years. In 2018, a report by the United Nations sponsored Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI) revealed that a substantial narcotic-trafficking economy had emerged. Heroin, originally produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and often carried on ocean-going dhows, is routed through the area on its way to the wider global market.
But heroin is only one of many illicit trade items and the Palma incident is but one example of a much wider phenomenon. A recent report by the distinguished scholar and former British diplomat, Sir Ivor Roberts, contains more detail of illicit trade and the way it fuels political extremism and crime across the entire wider region. Among items being traded from Somalia to Mozambique as well as inland (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, the Central African Republic [CAR] and the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]) are wildlife products, including ivory and rhino horn, small arms, narcotics, gold, gemstones and valuable ‘green minerals’ such as coltan, illegally logged wood, cigarettes, alcohol, counterfeit goods, sugar and human beings.
Roberts describes the scale of the problem as ‘staggering’. He writes that a recent survey in Kenya determined that 40 percent of consumer products, including cigarettes and alcohol, are illicit. As much as 70 percent of the alcohol sold in Uganda is thought to be illegal and a billion illegal cigarettes are sold in the region each year. Counterfeit goods alone rob Kenya of US$900 million a year, Roberts estimates.
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https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/how-ill ... ee9d77dc9f
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Innovation is key to unlocking Africa’s banking potential
Technological breakthroughs in the banking industry have shaped how we bank today, advancing an industry that is reliant on innovation to meet the needs of its clients. These advancements are a part of our everyday life and challenge banks to create innovative solutions that make their clients’ run their business easier and it is imperative that the industry adopts the latest trends in technology, security, design and data.
As a Transactional Banking business, Absa’s ambition is to provide its clients with a Pan-African platform that will enable them to effortlessly oversee their payments, collections, information products, trade finance, FX and international banking as well as liquidity management through a single platform.
For this reason, Absa Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) has over the past three years been investing in building out the Absa Access platform. Absa Access is a Pan-African, single sign-on platform that gives clients standardised, secure, and near real-time access to their business portfolios and the banking services. This enables them to make informed decisions to drive the growth of their businesses, managing their finances with the speed and intelligence that the platform provides.
“This platform will offer our Corporate clients with an integrated solution to complete their domestic and cross border payments including verified payments – including Tax and Custom Payments. This ensures greater visibility of their cash flow needs in all their markets, says Yasmin Masithela, Managing Executive for Transactional Banking at Absa Corporate and Investment Banking
More...
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/innovat ... ee9d77dc9f
AFRICA
World Bank’s IFC to invest $2 bln to support Africa’s recovery
JOHANNESBURG, May 19 (Reuters) – The International Finance Corporation (IFC) said on Wednesday it was investing $2 billion to support small businesses in Africa and boost international trade as part of efforts to bolster the continent’s recovery from the pandemic.
While the pandemic’s impact has been less acute in Africa than in the United States, Europe and now India, the economic fallout has been severe. Sub-Saharan Africa is set to record the slowest economic growth of any world region this year.
The IFC, investment arm of the World Bank, said it would invest $1 billion in new direct financing for micro, small and medium enterprises, including via mezzanine financing and risk-sharing instruments.
Another $1 billion will support international trade finance “to facilitate the flow of imports and exports of essential goods, including food and medical products,” the IFC said in a statement.
“This is a critical time for people, businesses, and economies across Africa. Long-term recovery will depend on getting funding to the pillars of the economy that need it today,” said Makhtar Diop, the IFC’s Managing Director.
The initiatives will be open to public and private partners, the statement said.
The IFC last year announced a global $8 billion fast-track financing facility for help existing clients and their countries’ economies during the pandemic.
More than half has already been deployed, the IFC said, with more than 30% going to IFC clients in Africa.
(Reporting by Joe Bavier; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/world-b ... ee9d77dc9f
JOHANNESBURG, May 19 (Reuters) – The International Finance Corporation (IFC) said on Wednesday it was investing $2 billion to support small businesses in Africa and boost international trade as part of efforts to bolster the continent’s recovery from the pandemic.
While the pandemic’s impact has been less acute in Africa than in the United States, Europe and now India, the economic fallout has been severe. Sub-Saharan Africa is set to record the slowest economic growth of any world region this year.
The IFC, investment arm of the World Bank, said it would invest $1 billion in new direct financing for micro, small and medium enterprises, including via mezzanine financing and risk-sharing instruments.
Another $1 billion will support international trade finance “to facilitate the flow of imports and exports of essential goods, including food and medical products,” the IFC said in a statement.
“This is a critical time for people, businesses, and economies across Africa. Long-term recovery will depend on getting funding to the pillars of the economy that need it today,” said Makhtar Diop, the IFC’s Managing Director.
The initiatives will be open to public and private partners, the statement said.
The IFC last year announced a global $8 billion fast-track financing facility for help existing clients and their countries’ economies during the pandemic.
More than half has already been deployed, the IFC said, with more than 30% going to IFC clients in Africa.
(Reporting by Joe Bavier; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/world-b ... ee9d77dc9f
THIS YOU WILL NEVER LEARN IN SCHOOL
° Area of Africa = 30.37 million km2
° Area of China = 9.6 million km2
° US area = 9.8 million km2
° Area of Europe = 10.18 million km2
Africa is bigger than all of Europe, China and the United States of America combined. But on most world maps, Africa is represented in a small size.
This is done deliberately to create the visual effect of a small Africa to manipulate, brainwash and deceive Africans wherever they are.
- Africa has 60% of arable land;
- Africa has 90% of the raw material reserve;
- Africa has 40% of the global gold reserve;
- Africa, 33% of the diamond reserve;
-Africa has 80% of the global reserve of Coltan (mineral for the production of telephones and electronics), mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
-Africa owns 60% of the global reserve of cobalt (mineral for the manufacture of automotive batteries)
-Africa is rich in oil and natural gases.
-Africa (Namibia) has the most fish-rich coastline in the world.
- Africa is rich in manganese, iron and wood.
- Africa is three times the area of China, three times the area of Europe, three times the area of the United States of America.
- Africa has thirty and a half million km² (30 415 875 km²);
- Africa has 1.3 billion inhabitants (China has 1.4 billion inhabitants in 9.6 million km²).
Which means that Africa is unprotected.
- The arable land in the Democratic Republic of Congo is capable of feeding all of Africa.
“And all of Africa's arable land is a cable to feed the entire world.
-The Democratic Republic of Congo has important rivers that can light up Africa.
The problem is that the CIA, Western companies and some African puppets have destabilized the DRC for decades.
- Africa is a culturally diverse continent in terms of dance, music, architecture, sculpture, etc.
- Africa accommodates 30,000 recipes for medicines and herbs that the West modifies in its laboratories.
- Africa has a young global population that is expected to reach 2.5 billion by the year 2050.
AFRICA REPRESENTS THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY from Africa
Quote:
His Royal Highness Prince Aga Khan declared, "A continent which in sheer size equals the United States, Western Europe, China and India put together is awakening from the slumber of centuries. Two hundred million people speaking at least 700 different languages, divided literally into thousands of different tribal entities are groping, reaching, grasping for a brave new world. What the shape of this world will be, even the most sophisticated African has, as yet, only the haziest idea. But certainly it will be a world where the old indignities can be forgotten and the dead weight of poverty, hunger and ignorance can be lifted."
Aga Khan - Monday, 1962, May 14
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/25301
° Area of Africa = 30.37 million km2
° Area of China = 9.6 million km2
° US area = 9.8 million km2
° Area of Europe = 10.18 million km2
Africa is bigger than all of Europe, China and the United States of America combined. But on most world maps, Africa is represented in a small size.
This is done deliberately to create the visual effect of a small Africa to manipulate, brainwash and deceive Africans wherever they are.
- Africa has 60% of arable land;
- Africa has 90% of the raw material reserve;
- Africa has 40% of the global gold reserve;
- Africa, 33% of the diamond reserve;
-Africa has 80% of the global reserve of Coltan (mineral for the production of telephones and electronics), mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
-Africa owns 60% of the global reserve of cobalt (mineral for the manufacture of automotive batteries)
-Africa is rich in oil and natural gases.
-Africa (Namibia) has the most fish-rich coastline in the world.
- Africa is rich in manganese, iron and wood.
- Africa is three times the area of China, three times the area of Europe, three times the area of the United States of America.
- Africa has thirty and a half million km² (30 415 875 km²);
- Africa has 1.3 billion inhabitants (China has 1.4 billion inhabitants in 9.6 million km²).
Which means that Africa is unprotected.
- The arable land in the Democratic Republic of Congo is capable of feeding all of Africa.
“And all of Africa's arable land is a cable to feed the entire world.
-The Democratic Republic of Congo has important rivers that can light up Africa.
The problem is that the CIA, Western companies and some African puppets have destabilized the DRC for decades.
- Africa is a culturally diverse continent in terms of dance, music, architecture, sculpture, etc.
- Africa accommodates 30,000 recipes for medicines and herbs that the West modifies in its laboratories.
- Africa has a young global population that is expected to reach 2.5 billion by the year 2050.
AFRICA REPRESENTS THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY from Africa
Quote:
His Royal Highness Prince Aga Khan declared, "A continent which in sheer size equals the United States, Western Europe, China and India put together is awakening from the slumber of centuries. Two hundred million people speaking at least 700 different languages, divided literally into thousands of different tribal entities are groping, reaching, grasping for a brave new world. What the shape of this world will be, even the most sophisticated African has, as yet, only the haziest idea. But certainly it will be a world where the old indignities can be forgotten and the dead weight of poverty, hunger and ignorance can be lifted."
Aga Khan - Monday, 1962, May 14
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/25301
Africans Welcome New Malaria Vaccine. But Is It a ‘Game Changer'?
The arsenal of weapons to use against malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, just grew bigger.
NAIROBI, Kenya — When babies are born in western Kenya, where malaria is rife, many mothers are sent home from the hospital with one all-important baby gift: a bed net treated with insecticide.
“Malaria is our number one health problem,” said Mathews Ajwala, a community health worker who gives out the nets to ward off malarial mosquitoes that can cause severe illness and death. More than 400,000 people died of malaria worldwide in 2019, and two-thirds of those were children in Africa under age 5.
So when the World Health Organization on Wednesday announced that it had approved the world’s first malaria vaccine, African parents, government officials and health workers like Mr. Ajwala celebrated the moment as a milestone in the fight against a scourge that has plagued humans for millennia.
“This vaccine will be a big game-changer,” Mr. Ajwala said in a telephone interview.
The vaccine, the first developed for any parasitic disease, was widely discussed on social media and on radio and television stations on Thursday. Many across the continent took pride in the fact that African scientists, research institutions and citizens helped provide and interpret the data that eventually led to the approval of the vaccine. The W.H.O. endorsement was based on the results of more than 2.3 million doses administered since 2019 to about 800,000 children in Kenya, Malawi and Ghana.
But Africans were also coming to grips with the fact that the vaccine alone will not solve the malaria problem.
In clinical trials, the vaccine, made by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, was effective at reducing severe malaria by only 30 percent in the first year after it was administered, according to the W.H.O. — though some experts put the figure at closer to 50 percent.
To be effective, four doses of the vaccine must be administered starting at the age of 5 months — which could pose logistical problems since delivering vaccines on the continent is already a challenge.
“The vaccine saves lives but it will not be a silver bullet,” said Dr. Githinji Gitahi, the chief executive officer for Amref Health Africa, a nongovernmental organization.
The vaccine, called Mosquirix, targets the deadliest malaria parasite and the most common in Africa — Plasmodium falciparum. While the vaccines are a “huge addition to the fight” against malaria, said Dr. Gitahi, health officials will still have to deploy “a Swiss cheese strategy,” which includes insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying.
Faith Walucho is the mother of an 11-month-old who was recently diagnosed with malaria. The 29-year-old trader of used clothing in the city of Kisumu in western Kenya said she received the news about the vaccines “with a lot of happiness.” In Kenya, an estimated 10,700 deaths from malaria are recorded annually, and Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria, is one of the high-malaria regions where the vaccine was tested.
As soon as she’s able to get a dose for her daughter, Ms. Walucho said, “I will run” to get it.
In Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, Jenala Mwafulirwa, a 52-year-old mother of five, welcomed the news of the vaccine, saying that too many children in her family had been lost to the disease, particularly in rural areas where access to health care is limited.
“This vaccine has come at the right time,” she said.
But in some places, people voiced skepticism about the vaccine, in part because of mistrust of the World Health Organization.
“I wonder why they want to help Africa,” said Mamadou Tounkara, a 40-year-old-teacher in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. He asked why the W.H.O. did not instead fund better hygiene and sanitation systems. “If W.H.O. wants to help eradicate this disease, they can do it without the vaccine.”
Yet public health officials say the vaccine, which has been in development for more than 30 years, has already proved to be an important weapon in the war against the disease.
Lilyana Dayo, a malaria program officer in Kisumu county, said the pilot testing reduced the effects of malaria by 18 percent.
At the Kisumu County hospital, the vaccine has helped free up beds that could be used for other ailments, said Salome Situma, a pediatric nurse. Hospitals in the county had been overwhelmed a few months ago as the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, fueled by the Delta variant, swept Kenya and the continent.
“I feel privileged to be part of the system that is achieving and heading in the right direction,” Mr. Situma said.
Dr. Gitahi says the main challenge facing the malaria vaccine will be how to efficiently distribute it, not just to regions with moderate to high transmission, but also to conflict zones where malaria is endemic. Health officials will also have to figure out, he says, how best to balance and match malaria vaccination with other child immunization campaigns like polio and measles.
“That’s really the big policy question,” he said.
It is unclear how soon the vaccine will be widely available in Africa, said Dr. John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news conference on Thursday. He said the Africa C.D.C. will be talking with the W.H.O.
But many hope that when the vaccine is available, it will turn the tide on the disease once and for all.
When he was 5 years old, George Owino said he got so sick with malaria that his parents worried whether he would ever recover. Two of his three children — now ages 24, 21 and 18 — also got severely ill with the disease over the years.
“When people are told the vaccines are being rolled out, they should come out,” Mr. Owino said. “It’s a huge relief.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The arsenal of weapons to use against malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, just grew bigger.
NAIROBI, Kenya — When babies are born in western Kenya, where malaria is rife, many mothers are sent home from the hospital with one all-important baby gift: a bed net treated with insecticide.
“Malaria is our number one health problem,” said Mathews Ajwala, a community health worker who gives out the nets to ward off malarial mosquitoes that can cause severe illness and death. More than 400,000 people died of malaria worldwide in 2019, and two-thirds of those were children in Africa under age 5.
So when the World Health Organization on Wednesday announced that it had approved the world’s first malaria vaccine, African parents, government officials and health workers like Mr. Ajwala celebrated the moment as a milestone in the fight against a scourge that has plagued humans for millennia.
“This vaccine will be a big game-changer,” Mr. Ajwala said in a telephone interview.
The vaccine, the first developed for any parasitic disease, was widely discussed on social media and on radio and television stations on Thursday. Many across the continent took pride in the fact that African scientists, research institutions and citizens helped provide and interpret the data that eventually led to the approval of the vaccine. The W.H.O. endorsement was based on the results of more than 2.3 million doses administered since 2019 to about 800,000 children in Kenya, Malawi and Ghana.
But Africans were also coming to grips with the fact that the vaccine alone will not solve the malaria problem.
In clinical trials, the vaccine, made by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, was effective at reducing severe malaria by only 30 percent in the first year after it was administered, according to the W.H.O. — though some experts put the figure at closer to 50 percent.
To be effective, four doses of the vaccine must be administered starting at the age of 5 months — which could pose logistical problems since delivering vaccines on the continent is already a challenge.
“The vaccine saves lives but it will not be a silver bullet,” said Dr. Githinji Gitahi, the chief executive officer for Amref Health Africa, a nongovernmental organization.
The vaccine, called Mosquirix, targets the deadliest malaria parasite and the most common in Africa — Plasmodium falciparum. While the vaccines are a “huge addition to the fight” against malaria, said Dr. Gitahi, health officials will still have to deploy “a Swiss cheese strategy,” which includes insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying.
Faith Walucho is the mother of an 11-month-old who was recently diagnosed with malaria. The 29-year-old trader of used clothing in the city of Kisumu in western Kenya said she received the news about the vaccines “with a lot of happiness.” In Kenya, an estimated 10,700 deaths from malaria are recorded annually, and Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria, is one of the high-malaria regions where the vaccine was tested.
As soon as she’s able to get a dose for her daughter, Ms. Walucho said, “I will run” to get it.
In Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, Jenala Mwafulirwa, a 52-year-old mother of five, welcomed the news of the vaccine, saying that too many children in her family had been lost to the disease, particularly in rural areas where access to health care is limited.
“This vaccine has come at the right time,” she said.
But in some places, people voiced skepticism about the vaccine, in part because of mistrust of the World Health Organization.
“I wonder why they want to help Africa,” said Mamadou Tounkara, a 40-year-old-teacher in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. He asked why the W.H.O. did not instead fund better hygiene and sanitation systems. “If W.H.O. wants to help eradicate this disease, they can do it without the vaccine.”
Yet public health officials say the vaccine, which has been in development for more than 30 years, has already proved to be an important weapon in the war against the disease.
Lilyana Dayo, a malaria program officer in Kisumu county, said the pilot testing reduced the effects of malaria by 18 percent.
At the Kisumu County hospital, the vaccine has helped free up beds that could be used for other ailments, said Salome Situma, a pediatric nurse. Hospitals in the county had been overwhelmed a few months ago as the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, fueled by the Delta variant, swept Kenya and the continent.
“I feel privileged to be part of the system that is achieving and heading in the right direction,” Mr. Situma said.
Dr. Gitahi says the main challenge facing the malaria vaccine will be how to efficiently distribute it, not just to regions with moderate to high transmission, but also to conflict zones where malaria is endemic. Health officials will also have to figure out, he says, how best to balance and match malaria vaccination with other child immunization campaigns like polio and measles.
“That’s really the big policy question,” he said.
It is unclear how soon the vaccine will be widely available in Africa, said Dr. John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news conference on Thursday. He said the Africa C.D.C. will be talking with the W.H.O.
But many hope that when the vaccine is available, it will turn the tide on the disease once and for all.
When he was 5 years old, George Owino said he got so sick with malaria that his parents worried whether he would ever recover. Two of his three children — now ages 24, 21 and 18 — also got severely ill with the disease over the years.
“When people are told the vaccines are being rolled out, they should come out,” Mr. Owino said. “It’s a huge relief.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
What the Malaria Vaccine Means for Africa
Like many who work in public health, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve been waiting my whole career for a malaria vaccine. And even longer than that: I suffered from severe malaria when I was 10.
The World Health Organization has now endorsed the first vaccine as a complementary tool for widespread use among children in at-risk areas, including my country, Senegal. This announcement, hailed as “historic” by the W.H.O. and global health experts worldwide, is indeed cause for celebration. Malaria is a preventable disease that has been virtually eliminated in wealthy countries and yet kills around 400,000 people a year, mostly African children.
While this is a watershed moment for global health, the vaccine — called Mosquirix — has modest efficacy, preventing about 30 percent of severe malaria cases. It’s not perfect and will not be a miracle solution.
To save the most lives, countries must stay invested in scaling up teams of local health workers to respond to cases and increase access to the right set of tools such as mosquito nets and antimalarial drugs for preventing the disease. The new vaccine is an important proof of concept, and is paving the way for the next generation of potentially more effective malaria vaccines using a variety of technologies, like mRNA, which is used for some Covid-19 vaccines.
Inspired in part by my own experience with malaria and disparities I have seen in getting treatment, I founded a nonprofit, Speak Up Africa, 10 years ago to champion solutions that are developed in Africa to address public health challenges facing the continent. Malaria is at the top of the list, as it has arguably the greatest impact on African nations’ economic and social development. But other endemic illnesses — often grouped as neglected tropical diseases — are no less debilitating and in need of greater research and development investments.
Africa must be at the heart of these investments. The continent is a fertile ground for innovation in health care and beyond, and I am convinced more solutions to fight malaria and other deadly diseases will emerge from here. Continued efforts and support — such as financial and technical assistance to increase local lab capacity for research — are critical.
Countries need strong health systems that can deliver the best prevention tools, including vaccines. This includes investing in hundreds of thousands of additional community health workers who can go door-to-door in remote and rural communities to more quickly detect, diagnose, treat and report malaria cases and other diseases. The new malaria vaccine will be most successful if it’s a complement to other measures, such as mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs and the indoor spraying of houses. African countries also need access to high-quality epidemiological data to understand where people are most at risk for infections, where insecticide and drug resistance is taking hold, and which tools are working best in local communities. This can allow for more tailored and effective malaria interventions.
This milestone in the global malaria fight should also spur further investment in additional malaria vaccines already in the pipeline to ensure a healthy market, but also in other much-needed new tools such as genomic surveillance to stay one step ahead of growing drug and insecticide resistance.
Covid-19 has taught the world that vaccine manufacturing in Africa must be expanded to end the current pandemic and prevent future ones. Currently, Africa imports 99 percent of its vaccines.
A new African Medicines Agency, under the African Union, is set to launch in November with the goal of improving safety regulation of medical products in the continent. I am hopeful that regulatory pathways will be established to accelerate the development and uptake of safe and effective health products — including vaccines.
My country, Senegal, is being considered as a potential manufacturing hub by the Covid-19 vaccine maker BioNTech for future mRNA vaccines against not only Covid-19, but also malaria and tuberculosis. Along with H.I.V./AIDS, these are still the continent’s biggest killers. More investments into African scientists and institutions are needed if the world wants to gain the upper hand on deadly diseases.
It has taken a generation to develop the first-ever malaria vaccine thanks to political commitment and financial support from many partners. With more investments and effective tools, we can be the generation that will end the disease for good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Like many who work in public health, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve been waiting my whole career for a malaria vaccine. And even longer than that: I suffered from severe malaria when I was 10.
The World Health Organization has now endorsed the first vaccine as a complementary tool for widespread use among children in at-risk areas, including my country, Senegal. This announcement, hailed as “historic” by the W.H.O. and global health experts worldwide, is indeed cause for celebration. Malaria is a preventable disease that has been virtually eliminated in wealthy countries and yet kills around 400,000 people a year, mostly African children.
While this is a watershed moment for global health, the vaccine — called Mosquirix — has modest efficacy, preventing about 30 percent of severe malaria cases. It’s not perfect and will not be a miracle solution.
To save the most lives, countries must stay invested in scaling up teams of local health workers to respond to cases and increase access to the right set of tools such as mosquito nets and antimalarial drugs for preventing the disease. The new vaccine is an important proof of concept, and is paving the way for the next generation of potentially more effective malaria vaccines using a variety of technologies, like mRNA, which is used for some Covid-19 vaccines.
Inspired in part by my own experience with malaria and disparities I have seen in getting treatment, I founded a nonprofit, Speak Up Africa, 10 years ago to champion solutions that are developed in Africa to address public health challenges facing the continent. Malaria is at the top of the list, as it has arguably the greatest impact on African nations’ economic and social development. But other endemic illnesses — often grouped as neglected tropical diseases — are no less debilitating and in need of greater research and development investments.
Africa must be at the heart of these investments. The continent is a fertile ground for innovation in health care and beyond, and I am convinced more solutions to fight malaria and other deadly diseases will emerge from here. Continued efforts and support — such as financial and technical assistance to increase local lab capacity for research — are critical.
Countries need strong health systems that can deliver the best prevention tools, including vaccines. This includes investing in hundreds of thousands of additional community health workers who can go door-to-door in remote and rural communities to more quickly detect, diagnose, treat and report malaria cases and other diseases. The new malaria vaccine will be most successful if it’s a complement to other measures, such as mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs and the indoor spraying of houses. African countries also need access to high-quality epidemiological data to understand where people are most at risk for infections, where insecticide and drug resistance is taking hold, and which tools are working best in local communities. This can allow for more tailored and effective malaria interventions.
This milestone in the global malaria fight should also spur further investment in additional malaria vaccines already in the pipeline to ensure a healthy market, but also in other much-needed new tools such as genomic surveillance to stay one step ahead of growing drug and insecticide resistance.
Covid-19 has taught the world that vaccine manufacturing in Africa must be expanded to end the current pandemic and prevent future ones. Currently, Africa imports 99 percent of its vaccines.
A new African Medicines Agency, under the African Union, is set to launch in November with the goal of improving safety regulation of medical products in the continent. I am hopeful that regulatory pathways will be established to accelerate the development and uptake of safe and effective health products — including vaccines.
My country, Senegal, is being considered as a potential manufacturing hub by the Covid-19 vaccine maker BioNTech for future mRNA vaccines against not only Covid-19, but also malaria and tuberculosis. Along with H.I.V./AIDS, these are still the continent’s biggest killers. More investments into African scientists and institutions are needed if the world wants to gain the upper hand on deadly diseases.
It has taken a generation to develop the first-ever malaria vaccine thanks to political commitment and financial support from many partners. With more investments and effective tools, we can be the generation that will end the disease for good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Mo Dewji on how Africa is rising
Tanzanian billionaire businessman Mohammed "Mo" Gulamabbas Dewji,
Dar es Salaam. Africa’s home-grown companies are aggressively investing in production as they seek to cash in on the continent’s growing population, and dislodge the dominance of multinationals, tycoon Mohammed Dewji has said.
Speaking during a CNN Interview - the video of which was circulated on Twitter yesterday - Mr Mohammed Dewji, popularly known simply as ‘MO,’ said local beverage manufacturers like himself were currently giving multinationals a run for their money.
MeTL’s beverage line manufactures a number of products including Mo Cola, Mo Xtra and Mo Embe among others which Mo says was one of the best businesses for Africa.
“Africa is big in fast moving consumer goods. Usually, in the past, multinationals – like Coca-Cola [and others] - used to dominate that space and now we are taking them head-on. We are manufacturing locally and creating our own brands,” he told a forum that was hosted by Rally Madowo and Eleni Giokos.
During an interview that was conducted on the sidelines of the continent’s participation in the Expo 2020 Dubai, Mo - whose Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) employs 34,800 people in 11 countries across Africa - said the firm’s beverage products were currently being traded regionally while the company was also setting up extended manufacturing facilities all across the region.
“Currently, we are exploring East and Central Africa which has a population of between 300 and 350 million people and, once we are successful, then we will expand all over Africa,” he said.
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Asked on how they were competing with multinationals, Mo said in the past, the conglomerates did not have enough competition but with time, African businesses have invested millions and millions of US dollars in technology and in distribution channels.
“We are also fighting them on pricing. People want a quality product at a good price. We are well priced and we have a great demand and now we are selling almost a billion bottles a year,” said Mo.
The business was growing steadily and that the plan was to grow it further so that it can become a $1 billion business within five years.
Asked on the influence of China in Africa’s effort to grow its manufacturing sector, Mo said the continent was in the past facing issues in terms of power and bureaucracy among others.
He, however, noted that - with a rise in population - Africa was geared up to creating a good investment policy for Foreign Direct Investment to come and invest and create jobs and stability. “They are now investing heavily in infrastructure, road network, rail network and power sector. I think we will become very competitive and Africa is a very good place,” he said.
He heaped praise on President Samia Suluhu Hassan, saying she was undertaking policies that were changing Tanzania’s investment climate, a complete shift from a stagnation of some past year that were precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The country may have stagnated on investment in the past but the fundamentals are very good. As far as business is concerned, Tanzania did not go into lockdowns so the country continued with manufacturing and thus manufacturers continued to thrive,” he said, noting that with ongoing improvements, Tanzania’s growth must soon rise to between six and seven percent.
On agriculture, Mo said his company has invested about $100 million in the sisal industry as it seeks to become the single largest sisal producer in the world by the end of 2022.
“We have this vision, and we are going to reach this target by next year,” he said.
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ng-3584142
Tanzanian billionaire businessman Mohammed "Mo" Gulamabbas Dewji,
Dar es Salaam. Africa’s home-grown companies are aggressively investing in production as they seek to cash in on the continent’s growing population, and dislodge the dominance of multinationals, tycoon Mohammed Dewji has said.
Speaking during a CNN Interview - the video of which was circulated on Twitter yesterday - Mr Mohammed Dewji, popularly known simply as ‘MO,’ said local beverage manufacturers like himself were currently giving multinationals a run for their money.
MeTL’s beverage line manufactures a number of products including Mo Cola, Mo Xtra and Mo Embe among others which Mo says was one of the best businesses for Africa.
“Africa is big in fast moving consumer goods. Usually, in the past, multinationals – like Coca-Cola [and others] - used to dominate that space and now we are taking them head-on. We are manufacturing locally and creating our own brands,” he told a forum that was hosted by Rally Madowo and Eleni Giokos.
During an interview that was conducted on the sidelines of the continent’s participation in the Expo 2020 Dubai, Mo - whose Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) employs 34,800 people in 11 countries across Africa - said the firm’s beverage products were currently being traded regionally while the company was also setting up extended manufacturing facilities all across the region.
“Currently, we are exploring East and Central Africa which has a population of between 300 and 350 million people and, once we are successful, then we will expand all over Africa,” he said.
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Asked on how they were competing with multinationals, Mo said in the past, the conglomerates did not have enough competition but with time, African businesses have invested millions and millions of US dollars in technology and in distribution channels.
“We are also fighting them on pricing. People want a quality product at a good price. We are well priced and we have a great demand and now we are selling almost a billion bottles a year,” said Mo.
The business was growing steadily and that the plan was to grow it further so that it can become a $1 billion business within five years.
Asked on the influence of China in Africa’s effort to grow its manufacturing sector, Mo said the continent was in the past facing issues in terms of power and bureaucracy among others.
He, however, noted that - with a rise in population - Africa was geared up to creating a good investment policy for Foreign Direct Investment to come and invest and create jobs and stability. “They are now investing heavily in infrastructure, road network, rail network and power sector. I think we will become very competitive and Africa is a very good place,” he said.
He heaped praise on President Samia Suluhu Hassan, saying she was undertaking policies that were changing Tanzania’s investment climate, a complete shift from a stagnation of some past year that were precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The country may have stagnated on investment in the past but the fundamentals are very good. As far as business is concerned, Tanzania did not go into lockdowns so the country continued with manufacturing and thus manufacturers continued to thrive,” he said, noting that with ongoing improvements, Tanzania’s growth must soon rise to between six and seven percent.
On agriculture, Mo said his company has invested about $100 million in the sisal industry as it seeks to become the single largest sisal producer in the world by the end of 2022.
“We have this vision, and we are going to reach this target by next year,” he said.
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ng-3584142
Many African Countries Toughen Covid Restrictions as Fourth Wave Spreads
Infections have more than doubled or tripled in many countries, prompting the authorities to reimpose curfews and quarantines and introduce vaccine mandates as the holiday season gets underway.
NAIROBI, Kenya — In just the past three weeks, the percentage of Kenyans who tested positive for the coronavirus jumped from less than 1 percent to more than 30 percent — the country’s highest positivity rate yet.
In Uganda, nearly 50 lawmakers and their staff members, some of them vaccinated, tested positive this week after attending a sports tournament in neighboring Tanzania.
And in Zimbabwe, skyrocketing infections have pushed the government to institute new restrictions on businesses and incoming travelers.
Across Africa, countries are reporting a surge in Covid cases, and health officials worry about how the new Omicron variant will affect the world’s least-vaccinated continent. Omicron, which was first detected in southern Africa, remains highly contagious, but so far it is causing fewer deaths and hospitalizations than previous variants such as Delta.
The latest wave comes as many African countries were beginning to reopen and businesses were hoping for a robust holiday season — only for governments to reintroduce curfews and quarantines and impose new vaccine mandates.
Even as Britain and the United States lifted Omicron-related travel restrictions on southern African states in the past week, Africans faced new travel restrictions from elsewhere because of the rising infections. Beginning Saturday, the United Arab Emirates is suspending entry for travelers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, and impose additional requirements for those traveling from Ghana and Uganda.
“We are unfortunately going to be celebrating the end-of-the-year holiday season in the middle of the fourth wave that’s sweeping across the continent,” Dr. John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference on Thursday.
At least 21 African countries are now experiencing a fourth wave of the pandemic, according to the Africa C.D.C. Three countries — Algeria, Kenya and Mauritius — are undergoing a fifth one.
Cases have more than doubled in recent weeks in nations including Botswana, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Positivity rates have soared, too: Malawi reported a 46.29 percent positivity rate on Thursday compared with just a 1.54 percent rate on Nov. 30. Infections are surging among young people in Uganda, with some epidemiologists attributing that to younger age groups being the most active during the holiday season.
Omicron is tearing through Africa, with 22 nations now reporting the variant. It is not known whether the highly contagious variant is the dominant one or the one driving the surge of infections across Africa. But health experts say that even in countries where genomic sequencing is not readily available, the sudden bump in cases could point to the spread of the Omicron variant.
And experts say overall Covid infections in Africa are likely higher given the lack of widespread testing in many countries.
Early data from South Africa this past week suggested that the country’s Omicron wave might have peaked, with officials ending tracing efforts and scrapping isolation for people who were possibly exposed but not experiencing symptoms. Another study showed that people diagnosed with Omicron in South Africa were less likely to be hospitalized than those with previous variants like Delta.
But Dr. Nkengasong warned that the data from South Africa might not hold for other countries, because the population there is relatively young and the vaccination rate is high compared with that of many other African countries.
In hospitals in many African cities, doctors are reporting more infections.
Tinashe Gede, an immunologist who works at the public Parirenyatwa General Hospital in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, said he had seen an increase in admissions, but without the need for ventilators and life-support machines. A significant number of new cases he has treated have been breakthrough infections, he said, but symptoms have not been severe.
Health workers are getting sick, too.
At least 436 health workers tested positive last week at Dr. Gede’s hospital, according to Linos Dhire, the hospital’s spokesman.
Dr. Nelly Bosire, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Nairobi, said she had to call 10 pediatricians to find one to attend to a newborn on a recent night. Eight of them, she said, were either coughing, in isolation or had a confirmed Covid diagnosis. The virus, she said, was spreading like “wildfire.”
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, said she was still “cautiously optimistic” that severe illness and deaths will remain low in the fourth wave.
But slow vaccine rollouts might hamper those prospects, she added, given that only six African countries have hit the target set by the W.H.O. of fully vaccinating 40 percent of their population.
Even as vaccine supplies arrive, many African countries continue to face challenges getting them into people’s arms. It is difficult to deliver the vaccines to rural areas and to find enough temperature-controlled storage. Vaccine skepticism plays a role, too; Dr. Nkengasong said that about 20 percent of Africans remained hesitant to get vaccinated.
Some donated vaccines do not have a long shelf life, prompting the authorities in nations like Nigeria to destroy them.
In Kenya, vaccine rollouts are hampered because health officials have not launched nationwide campaigns to convince their population of the benefits of Covid vaccines, said Anand Madhvani, the Covid Kenya network coordinator.
For now, governments are racing to institute a motley of rules to curb the fresh wave of infections. Rwanda reimposed a night curfew and suspended concerts. Several nations, including Botswana, Ghana and Malawi, have introduced vaccine mandates targeting local populations or incoming travelers.
On Wednesday, Kenya’s health ministry said it would bar unvaccinated people from public spaces, even though a court recently halted the vaccine mandate. By Friday, some malls in the capital, Nairobi, had started asking shoppers and employees to show proof of vaccination.
The spike in cases and the ensuing restrictions are upending holiday plans for those like Denis Munjanja, a businessman in Harare who got sick with Covid last year. Mr. Munjanja said he was afraid of contracting the virus again, and he and his family have decided to stay indoors during the holiday season instead of mixing with loved ones.
Almost two years into a pandemic, he said, this wasn’t the festive mood he had hoped for. But he said, “We just have to be extra cautious.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Infections have more than doubled or tripled in many countries, prompting the authorities to reimpose curfews and quarantines and introduce vaccine mandates as the holiday season gets underway.
NAIROBI, Kenya — In just the past three weeks, the percentage of Kenyans who tested positive for the coronavirus jumped from less than 1 percent to more than 30 percent — the country’s highest positivity rate yet.
In Uganda, nearly 50 lawmakers and their staff members, some of them vaccinated, tested positive this week after attending a sports tournament in neighboring Tanzania.
And in Zimbabwe, skyrocketing infections have pushed the government to institute new restrictions on businesses and incoming travelers.
Across Africa, countries are reporting a surge in Covid cases, and health officials worry about how the new Omicron variant will affect the world’s least-vaccinated continent. Omicron, which was first detected in southern Africa, remains highly contagious, but so far it is causing fewer deaths and hospitalizations than previous variants such as Delta.
The latest wave comes as many African countries were beginning to reopen and businesses were hoping for a robust holiday season — only for governments to reintroduce curfews and quarantines and impose new vaccine mandates.
Even as Britain and the United States lifted Omicron-related travel restrictions on southern African states in the past week, Africans faced new travel restrictions from elsewhere because of the rising infections. Beginning Saturday, the United Arab Emirates is suspending entry for travelers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, and impose additional requirements for those traveling from Ghana and Uganda.
“We are unfortunately going to be celebrating the end-of-the-year holiday season in the middle of the fourth wave that’s sweeping across the continent,” Dr. John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference on Thursday.
At least 21 African countries are now experiencing a fourth wave of the pandemic, according to the Africa C.D.C. Three countries — Algeria, Kenya and Mauritius — are undergoing a fifth one.
Cases have more than doubled in recent weeks in nations including Botswana, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Positivity rates have soared, too: Malawi reported a 46.29 percent positivity rate on Thursday compared with just a 1.54 percent rate on Nov. 30. Infections are surging among young people in Uganda, with some epidemiologists attributing that to younger age groups being the most active during the holiday season.
Omicron is tearing through Africa, with 22 nations now reporting the variant. It is not known whether the highly contagious variant is the dominant one or the one driving the surge of infections across Africa. But health experts say that even in countries where genomic sequencing is not readily available, the sudden bump in cases could point to the spread of the Omicron variant.
And experts say overall Covid infections in Africa are likely higher given the lack of widespread testing in many countries.
Early data from South Africa this past week suggested that the country’s Omicron wave might have peaked, with officials ending tracing efforts and scrapping isolation for people who were possibly exposed but not experiencing symptoms. Another study showed that people diagnosed with Omicron in South Africa were less likely to be hospitalized than those with previous variants like Delta.
But Dr. Nkengasong warned that the data from South Africa might not hold for other countries, because the population there is relatively young and the vaccination rate is high compared with that of many other African countries.
In hospitals in many African cities, doctors are reporting more infections.
Tinashe Gede, an immunologist who works at the public Parirenyatwa General Hospital in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, said he had seen an increase in admissions, but without the need for ventilators and life-support machines. A significant number of new cases he has treated have been breakthrough infections, he said, but symptoms have not been severe.
Health workers are getting sick, too.
At least 436 health workers tested positive last week at Dr. Gede’s hospital, according to Linos Dhire, the hospital’s spokesman.
Dr. Nelly Bosire, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Nairobi, said she had to call 10 pediatricians to find one to attend to a newborn on a recent night. Eight of them, she said, were either coughing, in isolation or had a confirmed Covid diagnosis. The virus, she said, was spreading like “wildfire.”
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, said she was still “cautiously optimistic” that severe illness and deaths will remain low in the fourth wave.
But slow vaccine rollouts might hamper those prospects, she added, given that only six African countries have hit the target set by the W.H.O. of fully vaccinating 40 percent of their population.
Even as vaccine supplies arrive, many African countries continue to face challenges getting them into people’s arms. It is difficult to deliver the vaccines to rural areas and to find enough temperature-controlled storage. Vaccine skepticism plays a role, too; Dr. Nkengasong said that about 20 percent of Africans remained hesitant to get vaccinated.
Some donated vaccines do not have a long shelf life, prompting the authorities in nations like Nigeria to destroy them.
In Kenya, vaccine rollouts are hampered because health officials have not launched nationwide campaigns to convince their population of the benefits of Covid vaccines, said Anand Madhvani, the Covid Kenya network coordinator.
For now, governments are racing to institute a motley of rules to curb the fresh wave of infections. Rwanda reimposed a night curfew and suspended concerts. Several nations, including Botswana, Ghana and Malawi, have introduced vaccine mandates targeting local populations or incoming travelers.
On Wednesday, Kenya’s health ministry said it would bar unvaccinated people from public spaces, even though a court recently halted the vaccine mandate. By Friday, some malls in the capital, Nairobi, had started asking shoppers and employees to show proof of vaccination.
The spike in cases and the ensuing restrictions are upending holiday plans for those like Denis Munjanja, a businessman in Harare who got sick with Covid last year. Mr. Munjanja said he was afraid of contracting the virus again, and he and his family have decided to stay indoors during the holiday season instead of mixing with loved ones.
Almost two years into a pandemic, he said, this wasn’t the festive mood he had hoped for. But he said, “We just have to be extra cautious.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3
These Novels Are Asking You to Read More, and Read Better
By Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Dr. Jackson is a literary scholar and the author of “The African Novel of Ideas.”
Everyone is saying it: 2021 was the year for African literature. Writers from the continent scooped the Nobel, Booker, Goncourt and Camões prizes. And these honors — arguably the highest-sheen literary awards in the world — do not make up even half the list. The Neustadt, or “American Nobel,” and International Booker Prizes went to Senegalese writers, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to a Zimbabwean one.
In light of this sweep, it’s fair to ask what the African books and writers feted last year by Western nations have in common. The best answer is simple: very little. The novels honored last year run a very wide gamut, of genre and style and political outlook, as well as more obvious things like nation, race and ethnicity.
That’s a good thing. While Africans don’t need to be told that no one person or book can represent a huge, culturally and linguistically diverse continent, readers from Western countries have been slow to grasp that fact. The sheer diversity of last year’s winners — from Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning South African farm novel “The Promise” to the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s subtle examinations of emigrant Zanzibari life — puts the point beyond any doubt.
The tantalizingly wide range of these books should encourage us to read more, of course, but also to read better. It’s an invitation to set aside preconceptions — about what sort of story should come from where and how it should be told — and instead to step into the richly drawn interior worlds of Africans who are themselves still figuring out what to make of their histories.
Take the work of Mr. Gurnah, whose award of the Nobel Prize took many people by surprise. They clearly hadn’t read “Paradise,” which traverses centuries-old trade routes between Tanzania and Central Africa. Or “By the Sea,” which moves among multiple narrators to explore how selfhood, under the pressure of migration, flickers in and out of legibility. By tracing the lasting psychic imprint of Zanzibari life on people who end up far from home, Mr. Gurnah goes well beyond the history of Western colonization with which most readers may be more familiar, offering up a body of work at once revelatory and restrained.
That’s not to say many novels recognized last year eschewed the subject. Many focus in some way on the violent legacies of European colonialism. But the insights and approaches are far from conventional. David Diop’s International Booker-winning “At Night All Blood Is Black,” for example, is about the largely forgotten history of French African soldiers in World War I. Yet it is also a gritty exercise in expressing paranoia and mental anguish through what seems, at first, like a straightforward narration of events. Through one man’s isolated rituals, captured in blood-soaked prose, Mr. Diop draws the reader into collective trauma.
In this way Mr. Diop asks readers both to learn about new things and to feel them — surely two of the major reasons most people read any work of fiction. What he does not do is offer an easy way to connect these effects to a broader idea of Africa, and that’s where things get more interesting. By holding open the experiences it recounts without predetermination, the book asks the reader to do the same. For Western readers, long fed on mistaken impressions of what Africa is, maintaining openness and humility can acquire a radical power.
The elephant in the room is always, well, the elephant: a vision of Africa as wild, exotic and unmodern. And because African writers are also aware of the odds stacked against them by long histories of bad representation, the best African literature builds this kind of purposeful openness into itself. It carefully balances the universal with the particular or the local with the global in order to do justice to real places without abandoning claims to art for its own sake. Many of the most pleasurable and achieved African novels published in 2021 wed cultural recovery to creative abundance especially well, building new worlds from deep roots.
The South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s “The Wanderers” is a good example. It moves deftly between deep knowledge of 19th-century divisions among Xhosa people and contemplation of how its main character, in grieving the loss of a father she never knew, finds new forms of cross-generational intimacy. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s “The History of Man,” out in 2020 in South Africa but forthcoming in America, similarly braids the social and the personal. Her style is deceptively simple as she describes the great mysteries of how we come to be who we are. Through the figure of Emil, a white man on the wrong side of Zimbabwean liberation history, she paints a fine-grained portrait of lost forms of Rhodesian city life
To read these books in the spirit of openness is to take them seriously as literature rather than as flat texts either telling us what we already know or confirming the false idea that Africa is unknowable. The long history of racist tokenization makes this more difficult to do — but the rewards are well worth the effort. From Nigeria’s madcap styling in T.J. Benson’s debut novel, “The Madhouse,” to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s taboo-breaking rendition of a Ugandan girls’ boarding school in “The First Woman” (titled “A Girl Is a Body of Water” in the United States), the top-notch African writing published last year entertains at least as much as it instructs.
African literature’s big year is a reckoning. For too long, the major Western awards have ignored the sure-footed, endlessly inventive work coming out of the continent, and even award winners encounter a publishing world skewed against them. But it’s also, more profoundly and pleasurably, an invitation to readers to open themselves up to African fiction’s many variations — and see what new strands of connection they might find.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opin ... 6_50_ranks
By Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Dr. Jackson is a literary scholar and the author of “The African Novel of Ideas.”
Everyone is saying it: 2021 was the year for African literature. Writers from the continent scooped the Nobel, Booker, Goncourt and Camões prizes. And these honors — arguably the highest-sheen literary awards in the world — do not make up even half the list. The Neustadt, or “American Nobel,” and International Booker Prizes went to Senegalese writers, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to a Zimbabwean one.
In light of this sweep, it’s fair to ask what the African books and writers feted last year by Western nations have in common. The best answer is simple: very little. The novels honored last year run a very wide gamut, of genre and style and political outlook, as well as more obvious things like nation, race and ethnicity.
That’s a good thing. While Africans don’t need to be told that no one person or book can represent a huge, culturally and linguistically diverse continent, readers from Western countries have been slow to grasp that fact. The sheer diversity of last year’s winners — from Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning South African farm novel “The Promise” to the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s subtle examinations of emigrant Zanzibari life — puts the point beyond any doubt.
The tantalizingly wide range of these books should encourage us to read more, of course, but also to read better. It’s an invitation to set aside preconceptions — about what sort of story should come from where and how it should be told — and instead to step into the richly drawn interior worlds of Africans who are themselves still figuring out what to make of their histories.
Take the work of Mr. Gurnah, whose award of the Nobel Prize took many people by surprise. They clearly hadn’t read “Paradise,” which traverses centuries-old trade routes between Tanzania and Central Africa. Or “By the Sea,” which moves among multiple narrators to explore how selfhood, under the pressure of migration, flickers in and out of legibility. By tracing the lasting psychic imprint of Zanzibari life on people who end up far from home, Mr. Gurnah goes well beyond the history of Western colonization with which most readers may be more familiar, offering up a body of work at once revelatory and restrained.
That’s not to say many novels recognized last year eschewed the subject. Many focus in some way on the violent legacies of European colonialism. But the insights and approaches are far from conventional. David Diop’s International Booker-winning “At Night All Blood Is Black,” for example, is about the largely forgotten history of French African soldiers in World War I. Yet it is also a gritty exercise in expressing paranoia and mental anguish through what seems, at first, like a straightforward narration of events. Through one man’s isolated rituals, captured in blood-soaked prose, Mr. Diop draws the reader into collective trauma.
In this way Mr. Diop asks readers both to learn about new things and to feel them — surely two of the major reasons most people read any work of fiction. What he does not do is offer an easy way to connect these effects to a broader idea of Africa, and that’s where things get more interesting. By holding open the experiences it recounts without predetermination, the book asks the reader to do the same. For Western readers, long fed on mistaken impressions of what Africa is, maintaining openness and humility can acquire a radical power.
The elephant in the room is always, well, the elephant: a vision of Africa as wild, exotic and unmodern. And because African writers are also aware of the odds stacked against them by long histories of bad representation, the best African literature builds this kind of purposeful openness into itself. It carefully balances the universal with the particular or the local with the global in order to do justice to real places without abandoning claims to art for its own sake. Many of the most pleasurable and achieved African novels published in 2021 wed cultural recovery to creative abundance especially well, building new worlds from deep roots.
The South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s “The Wanderers” is a good example. It moves deftly between deep knowledge of 19th-century divisions among Xhosa people and contemplation of how its main character, in grieving the loss of a father she never knew, finds new forms of cross-generational intimacy. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s “The History of Man,” out in 2020 in South Africa but forthcoming in America, similarly braids the social and the personal. Her style is deceptively simple as she describes the great mysteries of how we come to be who we are. Through the figure of Emil, a white man on the wrong side of Zimbabwean liberation history, she paints a fine-grained portrait of lost forms of Rhodesian city life
To read these books in the spirit of openness is to take them seriously as literature rather than as flat texts either telling us what we already know or confirming the false idea that Africa is unknowable. The long history of racist tokenization makes this more difficult to do — but the rewards are well worth the effort. From Nigeria’s madcap styling in T.J. Benson’s debut novel, “The Madhouse,” to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s taboo-breaking rendition of a Ugandan girls’ boarding school in “The First Woman” (titled “A Girl Is a Body of Water” in the United States), the top-notch African writing published last year entertains at least as much as it instructs.
African literature’s big year is a reckoning. For too long, the major Western awards have ignored the sure-footed, endlessly inventive work coming out of the continent, and even award winners encounter a publishing world skewed against them. But it’s also, more profoundly and pleasurably, an invitation to readers to open themselves up to African fiction’s many variations — and see what new strands of connection they might find.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opin ... 6_50_ranks
New pan-African payment platform empowers SMEs and strengthens local currencies
This article was contributed to TechCabal by Conrad Onyango/bird
A new pan-African payment system removes legacy complexities, including the cost of cross-border payments, bolsters operational efficiencies and sets a new path to more stable and stronger African currencies and is set to spur intra-Africa trade.
A Kenyan customer can now pay for a product from Ghana in Kenya shillings, while the trader receives payment for the goods in Ghanaian cedi, without troublesome conversion issues, following the official launch of a revolutionary payment system in Africa.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that enables traders make real-time transfers of funds from one African country to another went live in Ghana last week, setting in motion its roll-out to other African countries.
Strengthening local currencies
The Afreximbank, Africa Union and AfCFTA initiative removes the use of the dollar and other third currencies in the transaction matrix, offering a new opportunity to create demand for, and strengthen, local currencies.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will be the biggest beneficiaries of a projected 5 billion US dollar in savings on clearance and transactional costs annually, as more people begin to use the continent’s new cross-border payment platform.
The savings will enable small businesses to unlock billions of dollars and ease the financial burden needed by traders to scale beyond their country borders to tap into the world’s largest free-trade zone, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area, with a market value of 3 trillion US Dollars.
“The commercial launch marks a significant milestone in connecting African markets seamlessly. It will provide a fresh impetus for businesses to scale more easily across Africa and is likely to save the continent more than $5 billion in transactions costs every year,” Said, Chief Executive Officer of PAPSS Mike Ogbalu.
Small and medium-sized enterprises form the backbone of the African economy, representing more than 90 percent of businesses and employing about 60 percent of workers, according to the International Trade Centre.
However, central to its ‘Promoting SME Competitiveness in Africa’ report, is the revelations that African SMEs face a huge financing gap, estimated at more than 136 billion US dollars every year.
And while the report affirms capital as local traders’ biggest impediment to growth – due to scarcity, high interest rates, large collateral requirements and burdensome application processes, it also reveals that women traders are the hardest hit.
“It is especially difficult for women to obtain financing, as fewer African women have bank accounts, compared to men, and the legal rights of family capital and collateral can be restrictive, given local laws and customs about land ownership,” according to the report.
International Trade Centre, Executive Director, Pamela Coke-Hamilton, said African countries now have a commercially viable tool that can address a critical barrier for MSMEs to trade competitively- even in uncertain times, pointing to an end of the negative impact of currency exchange fluctuations.
“ITC is preparing enterprises to benefit from PAPSS, creating new opportunities for growth in cross-border e-commerce and sustainable trade,” said Coke-Hamilton.
The new payment platform has the potential to reduce transaction time to seconds, removing a major impediment to intra-African e-commerce, services, and goods trade growth.
The platform had a successful pilot in the seven West African countries – Gambia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone – that make up the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ).
With ongoing discussions to bring on board other African Central Banks, the continent could be also be seen to be inching closer to a single currency.
https://techcabal.com/2022/01/19/new-pa ... urrencies/
This article was contributed to TechCabal by Conrad Onyango/bird
A new pan-African payment system removes legacy complexities, including the cost of cross-border payments, bolsters operational efficiencies and sets a new path to more stable and stronger African currencies and is set to spur intra-Africa trade.
A Kenyan customer can now pay for a product from Ghana in Kenya shillings, while the trader receives payment for the goods in Ghanaian cedi, without troublesome conversion issues, following the official launch of a revolutionary payment system in Africa.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that enables traders make real-time transfers of funds from one African country to another went live in Ghana last week, setting in motion its roll-out to other African countries.
Strengthening local currencies
The Afreximbank, Africa Union and AfCFTA initiative removes the use of the dollar and other third currencies in the transaction matrix, offering a new opportunity to create demand for, and strengthen, local currencies.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will be the biggest beneficiaries of a projected 5 billion US dollar in savings on clearance and transactional costs annually, as more people begin to use the continent’s new cross-border payment platform.
The savings will enable small businesses to unlock billions of dollars and ease the financial burden needed by traders to scale beyond their country borders to tap into the world’s largest free-trade zone, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area, with a market value of 3 trillion US Dollars.
“The commercial launch marks a significant milestone in connecting African markets seamlessly. It will provide a fresh impetus for businesses to scale more easily across Africa and is likely to save the continent more than $5 billion in transactions costs every year,” Said, Chief Executive Officer of PAPSS Mike Ogbalu.
Small and medium-sized enterprises form the backbone of the African economy, representing more than 90 percent of businesses and employing about 60 percent of workers, according to the International Trade Centre.
However, central to its ‘Promoting SME Competitiveness in Africa’ report, is the revelations that African SMEs face a huge financing gap, estimated at more than 136 billion US dollars every year.
And while the report affirms capital as local traders’ biggest impediment to growth – due to scarcity, high interest rates, large collateral requirements and burdensome application processes, it also reveals that women traders are the hardest hit.
“It is especially difficult for women to obtain financing, as fewer African women have bank accounts, compared to men, and the legal rights of family capital and collateral can be restrictive, given local laws and customs about land ownership,” according to the report.
International Trade Centre, Executive Director, Pamela Coke-Hamilton, said African countries now have a commercially viable tool that can address a critical barrier for MSMEs to trade competitively- even in uncertain times, pointing to an end of the negative impact of currency exchange fluctuations.
“ITC is preparing enterprises to benefit from PAPSS, creating new opportunities for growth in cross-border e-commerce and sustainable trade,” said Coke-Hamilton.
The new payment platform has the potential to reduce transaction time to seconds, removing a major impediment to intra-African e-commerce, services, and goods trade growth.
The platform had a successful pilot in the seven West African countries – Gambia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone – that make up the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ).
With ongoing discussions to bring on board other African Central Banks, the continent could be also be seen to be inching closer to a single currency.
https://techcabal.com/2022/01/19/new-pa ... urrencies/
Re: AFRICA
Timbuktu manuscripts: Mali's ancient documents captured online
A virtual gallery to showcase Mali's cultural history has been launched, featuring tens of thousands of Timbuktu's ancient manuscripts.
The manuscripts were smuggled to safety from Timbuktu after Islamist militant groups took control of the city in northern Mali in 2012.
They contain centuries of African knowledge and scholarship on topics ranging from maths to astrological charts.
Ancient manuscripts showing Astrology charts
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
"Central to the heritage of Mali, they represent the long legacy of written knowledge and academic excellence in Africa," said Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian known for smuggling the manuscripts out of Timbuktu, who was also involved in the project.
The collection, called Mali Magic https://artsandculture.google.com/project/mali-heritage , also captures Malian culture beyond the manuscripts. It was put together by Google, along with local and international partners.
It features a picture of the dance of the Dogon ethnic group. It also showcases art, such as that of award-winning Abdoulaye Konaté, and an image of builders plastering the Great Mosque of Djenné, a Unesco world heritage site about 500km (310 miles) south of Timbuktu.
Dancer of the Dogon Elders
IMAGE SOURCE,BRIAN DAVID MELNYK/ GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Man standing by work of art
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Builders plastering the great mosque of Djenne
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ART AND CULTURE
The ancient documents were originally written in medieval Arabic but have now been translated to English, French, Spanish and modern Arabic to make them more accessible, which Google Program Manager and Digital Archaeologist Chance Coughenour told the BBC was a first.
"Making a digital record and copy of the manuscripts is very important and for the first time we're bringing the fruits of our labour after so many years," he said.
For centuries Timbuktu was a cultural hub on the African continent, as well as an Islamic centre of learning. The city's mosques played a critical role in the spread of Islam throughout West Africa in the 15th and 16th Centuries, according to Unesco.
Over the last seven years Mali's traditional leaders, historians and digital archaeologists have been hard at work to make sure that the ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 11th Century, containing the country's rich history are preserved by digitising them.
The project presents an opportunity for people to learn from those who came before them, said Dr Haidara (below).
Dr Abdel Kader Haidara in the library
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
The digitising of these manuscripts began with a call to Google by Dr Haidara in 2014.
He invited the company to visit Mali to see the renowned manuscripts of Timbuktu and to learn the story of why they were at risk.
On arrival they found texts which included early Qurans and some with diverse topics including astronomy, maths and geography.
The team then had the task of not only going through hundreds of pages to make a digital record of these but to make them visually appealing online.
Up to 40,000 pages will now be available online, covering topics from biology to music.
Manuscript with writing and pictures
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Ancient manuscript sewn back together
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
It is a project the people of Mali have kept their eyes on for many years since Islamist militants set fire to libraries in Timbuktu as they tried to destroy the priceless papers.
Over a period of six months, manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu to Mali's capital Bamako, as time was running out to rescue and preserve the documents from near destruction.
In 2016 an alleged member of an Islamist group, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, was found guilty of intentionally ordering attacks on religious and historic building in Timbuktu by the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was sentenced to nine years in jail and apologised.
It was the first time that the court in The Hague had tried a case of cultural destruction.
Destroyed manuscripts
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
This project to preserve Mali's manuscripts is not however the first attempt. The University of Cape Town launched the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in 2003, with an emphasis on "manuscript traditions throughout the African continent", according to the website.
Similarly, the US Library of Congress has made some of the manuscripts available online.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60689699
********
Also
https://www.akdn.org/where-we-work/west ... t-overview
A virtual gallery to showcase Mali's cultural history has been launched, featuring tens of thousands of Timbuktu's ancient manuscripts.
The manuscripts were smuggled to safety from Timbuktu after Islamist militant groups took control of the city in northern Mali in 2012.
They contain centuries of African knowledge and scholarship on topics ranging from maths to astrological charts.
Ancient manuscripts showing Astrology charts
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
"Central to the heritage of Mali, they represent the long legacy of written knowledge and academic excellence in Africa," said Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian known for smuggling the manuscripts out of Timbuktu, who was also involved in the project.
The collection, called Mali Magic https://artsandculture.google.com/project/mali-heritage , also captures Malian culture beyond the manuscripts. It was put together by Google, along with local and international partners.
It features a picture of the dance of the Dogon ethnic group. It also showcases art, such as that of award-winning Abdoulaye Konaté, and an image of builders plastering the Great Mosque of Djenné, a Unesco world heritage site about 500km (310 miles) south of Timbuktu.
Dancer of the Dogon Elders
IMAGE SOURCE,BRIAN DAVID MELNYK/ GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Man standing by work of art
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Builders plastering the great mosque of Djenne
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ART AND CULTURE
The ancient documents were originally written in medieval Arabic but have now been translated to English, French, Spanish and modern Arabic to make them more accessible, which Google Program Manager and Digital Archaeologist Chance Coughenour told the BBC was a first.
"Making a digital record and copy of the manuscripts is very important and for the first time we're bringing the fruits of our labour after so many years," he said.
For centuries Timbuktu was a cultural hub on the African continent, as well as an Islamic centre of learning. The city's mosques played a critical role in the spread of Islam throughout West Africa in the 15th and 16th Centuries, according to Unesco.
Over the last seven years Mali's traditional leaders, historians and digital archaeologists have been hard at work to make sure that the ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 11th Century, containing the country's rich history are preserved by digitising them.
The project presents an opportunity for people to learn from those who came before them, said Dr Haidara (below).
Dr Abdel Kader Haidara in the library
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
The digitising of these manuscripts began with a call to Google by Dr Haidara in 2014.
He invited the company to visit Mali to see the renowned manuscripts of Timbuktu and to learn the story of why they were at risk.
On arrival they found texts which included early Qurans and some with diverse topics including astronomy, maths and geography.
The team then had the task of not only going through hundreds of pages to make a digital record of these but to make them visually appealing online.
Up to 40,000 pages will now be available online, covering topics from biology to music.
Manuscript with writing and pictures
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Ancient manuscript sewn back together
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
It is a project the people of Mali have kept their eyes on for many years since Islamist militants set fire to libraries in Timbuktu as they tried to destroy the priceless papers.
Over a period of six months, manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu to Mali's capital Bamako, as time was running out to rescue and preserve the documents from near destruction.
In 2016 an alleged member of an Islamist group, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, was found guilty of intentionally ordering attacks on religious and historic building in Timbuktu by the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was sentenced to nine years in jail and apologised.
It was the first time that the court in The Hague had tried a case of cultural destruction.
Destroyed manuscripts
IMAGE SOURCE,GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
1px transparent line
This project to preserve Mali's manuscripts is not however the first attempt. The University of Cape Town launched the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in 2003, with an emphasis on "manuscript traditions throughout the African continent", according to the website.
Similarly, the US Library of Congress has made some of the manuscripts available online.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60689699
********
Also
https://www.akdn.org/where-we-work/west ... t-overview
Re: AFRICA
Moderna To Build A State Of The Art MRNA Facility In Kenya
President Uhuru Kenyatta today in State House, Nairobi witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Kenya and Moderna to establish the first mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa.
The state-of-the-art mRNA facility in Africa is expected to produce up to 500 million doses of vaccines each year.
The Company anticipates investing up to $500 million in the new facility, which will focus on drug substance manufacturing on the continent of Africa for the continent of Africa.
President Kenyatta has been in fore front championing for the African continent to manufacture its own COVID-19 vaccines in order to meet the demand of its population. His Excellency has always emphasized on the fact that Africa’s capacity to manufacture vaccines would help arrest emerging pandemics.
The President pointed out that the setting up of the mRNA manufacturing facility will be a game changer especially for Kenya who has had a vision to produce vaccines.
“We are celebrating one of the greatest things that has possibly happened since the onset of COVID-19 at the African continent,” said President Kenyatta when he spoke.
The President reiterated the challenges faced by the African continent during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was not because of lack of finances to buy the vaccines but because the vaccines were not available for them for purchase.
His Excellency thanked Moderna company for coming up to fill the space which made the continent suffer in meeting its vaccines needs saying the new facility will go along way in enabling African countries tackle any emerging future pandemics.
“We all know the challenges that Kenya and the entire continent of Africa went through in the earlier stages of this pandemic that resulted in Africa being left behind. Not because of want but because of lack and moderna has come to fill that space.
“We are truly grateful, for this and I think it will be transformative not just in helping us with the current pandemic but also preparing the continent of Africa for future pandemics,” President Kenyatta said.
The President thanked the Director for Africa Centre for Disease Control Dr. John Nkengasong and the Government of America for supporting Kenya in its endeavor to set up the facility.
“Thank you for the support we have received from you (Dr. John Nkengasong) and your entire team from Africa CDC. I would also want to thank the American Government that has also been very supportive to Kenya and Africa not only to make this day happen but also for the support they gave us of vaccines at a time we needed them,” he added
Moderna’s Chief Executive Officer Stéphane Bancel said his company is committed to partnering to provide a health solution saying the investment the company is making in Kenya is crucial as it is part of the solution to ensuring global health equity.
“Battling the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years has provided a reminder of the work that must be done to ensure global health equity. Moderna is committed to being a part of the solution and today, we announce another step in this journey – an investment in the Republic of Kenya to build a drug substance mRNA manufacturing facility capable of supplying up to 500 million doses for the African continent each year,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna.
He said the mRNA global public health vaccine program, including vaccine programs against HIV and Nipah, will ensure sustainable access to transformative mRNA innovation on the African continent.
Director for Africa Centre for Disease Control Dr. John Nkengasong said the setting up of the facility is critical to Africa’s security noting that the production of the vaccines will ensure the continent is able to tackle current and future health challenges.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe signed the MOU on behalf of the Kenyan Government while Shannon Klinger who is the Moderna’s chief legal officer signed on behalf of the company.
Also present during the function were the Head of Public Service Dr. Joseph Kinyua, Health Principal Secretary Susan Mochache and Director General of Health Dr. Patrick Amoth among other senior Government officials.
https://www.president.go.ke/2022/03/07/ ... -in-kenya/
President Uhuru Kenyatta today in State House, Nairobi witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Kenya and Moderna to establish the first mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa.
The state-of-the-art mRNA facility in Africa is expected to produce up to 500 million doses of vaccines each year.
The Company anticipates investing up to $500 million in the new facility, which will focus on drug substance manufacturing on the continent of Africa for the continent of Africa.
President Kenyatta has been in fore front championing for the African continent to manufacture its own COVID-19 vaccines in order to meet the demand of its population. His Excellency has always emphasized on the fact that Africa’s capacity to manufacture vaccines would help arrest emerging pandemics.
The President pointed out that the setting up of the mRNA manufacturing facility will be a game changer especially for Kenya who has had a vision to produce vaccines.
“We are celebrating one of the greatest things that has possibly happened since the onset of COVID-19 at the African continent,” said President Kenyatta when he spoke.
The President reiterated the challenges faced by the African continent during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was not because of lack of finances to buy the vaccines but because the vaccines were not available for them for purchase.
His Excellency thanked Moderna company for coming up to fill the space which made the continent suffer in meeting its vaccines needs saying the new facility will go along way in enabling African countries tackle any emerging future pandemics.
“We all know the challenges that Kenya and the entire continent of Africa went through in the earlier stages of this pandemic that resulted in Africa being left behind. Not because of want but because of lack and moderna has come to fill that space.
“We are truly grateful, for this and I think it will be transformative not just in helping us with the current pandemic but also preparing the continent of Africa for future pandemics,” President Kenyatta said.
The President thanked the Director for Africa Centre for Disease Control Dr. John Nkengasong and the Government of America for supporting Kenya in its endeavor to set up the facility.
“Thank you for the support we have received from you (Dr. John Nkengasong) and your entire team from Africa CDC. I would also want to thank the American Government that has also been very supportive to Kenya and Africa not only to make this day happen but also for the support they gave us of vaccines at a time we needed them,” he added
Moderna’s Chief Executive Officer Stéphane Bancel said his company is committed to partnering to provide a health solution saying the investment the company is making in Kenya is crucial as it is part of the solution to ensuring global health equity.
“Battling the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years has provided a reminder of the work that must be done to ensure global health equity. Moderna is committed to being a part of the solution and today, we announce another step in this journey – an investment in the Republic of Kenya to build a drug substance mRNA manufacturing facility capable of supplying up to 500 million doses for the African continent each year,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna.
He said the mRNA global public health vaccine program, including vaccine programs against HIV and Nipah, will ensure sustainable access to transformative mRNA innovation on the African continent.
Director for Africa Centre for Disease Control Dr. John Nkengasong said the setting up of the facility is critical to Africa’s security noting that the production of the vaccines will ensure the continent is able to tackle current and future health challenges.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe signed the MOU on behalf of the Kenyan Government while Shannon Klinger who is the Moderna’s chief legal officer signed on behalf of the company.
Also present during the function were the Head of Public Service Dr. Joseph Kinyua, Health Principal Secretary Susan Mochache and Director General of Health Dr. Patrick Amoth among other senior Government officials.
https://www.president.go.ke/2022/03/07/ ... -in-kenya/
Re: AFRICA
Africa’s Low Vaccination Rates Should Concern Everyone
By John Nkengasong
Dr. Nkengasong is the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last month, in my role as leader of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I asked that donations of Covid-19 vaccines to Africa be momentarily delayed until the third and fourth quarter of the year. At the moment, Africa’s most pressing need is administering the vaccines we have to willing people. Every country is unique in what it needs to fight Covid-19, but logistical challenges and issues of vaccine hesitancy — similar to those seen in other places around the world — have momentarily outstripped shortages for the continent. We do not want vaccines to go to waste. Now that supply is not the primary challenge, we need to focus on better delivery.
Africa has a robust plan to tackle Covid-19; long-awaited donations of vaccines are critical to that goal. Just because right now the greatest challenge is vaccine demand and delivery, as opposed to supply, does not mean there are not important ways for the global community to assist our efforts to protect Africans. But we need the world to better understand Africa’s health needs.
Many countries in the developed world are rapidly lifting restrictions like mask mandates and vaccine passports. There seems to be optimism that for many countries, 2022 will be the year that the emergency phase of the pandemic will end. But leaders must remain cautious and humble. There’s still much work to be done before this optimism is shared by everyone. The push toward normalcy should be accompanied by concerted efforts to achieve universally high rates of vaccination.
Only about 15 percent of the population in Africa has been fully vaccinated. Because of this, the trajectory of the pandemic on the continent remains unpredictable and uncertain. With low vaccination rates, we run the risk of being hit by new variants that may severely impact the effectiveness of vaccines globally and limit people’s lives once again.
African countries have been remarkably resilient in fighting the pandemic so far, and we are working on a strategy to end the Covid emergency in 2022 as well. On Feb. 5, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, the leader of the African Union’s Covid-19 response, presented a comprehensive report at the A.U. Summit of heads of state and governments.
As part of this plan, which was unanimously endorsed, governments must commit to achieving more than 70 percent vaccination rates for their countries by the end of 2022. Only about 14 of the 55 A.U. member states have so far vaccinated more than 40 percent of their eligible populations.
For vaccination campaigns to be successful, vaccine donation must be closely coordinated with either the COVAX and African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team initiatives, to ensure that countries in Africa are not overwhelmed. Too many doses without the infrastructure or coordination to distribute them could lead to vaccines expiring. Because it is very likely that repeated vaccination and boosting will be required, African countries need to be able to accelerate and strengthen their own vaccine manufacturing capacity, and need partnerships with vaccine makers.
Africa C.D.C. recently announced the launch of the Partnership for Africa Vaccine Manufacturing, which provides a framework for how Africa can manufacture 60 percent of its vaccines locally by 2040. There is also an urgent need to reshape the vaccine purchasing market to ensure that vaccines produced in Africa will be purchased and distributed across the continent and can be exported elsewhere, too.
As more vaccines continue to arrive, country leaders in Africa must now turn to vaccine delivery — getting shots into arms. This will require countries to decentralize vaccination centers, whether by employing mobile vaccination units for mass vaccination efforts, engaging faith-based organizations to encourage congregations and communities to get vaccinated, allowing vaccination centers to operate during weekends so people busy during the week can get vaccinated, or encouraging young people to get vaccinated — some estimates suggest about 60 percent of the continent’s population is under 25. In some African countries, such as Uganda, mass vaccination campaigns at places like bars have been shown to be effective in improving vaccine uptake.
Countries should also leverage existing global health infrastructure that has been used effectively to respond to H.I.V./AIDS, including ways of managing drug supply chains and virus surveillance. There also must be a specific focus on making sure people with H.I.V./AIDS can get vaccinated, as people who are immunocompromised may have a harder time fighting off the virus, which can increase the risk of new variants.
Another goal is to scale up the availability of rapid, at-home antigen tests so that at least 200 million people will have access to these tests by the end of this year. Africa also needs equitable access to drugs that treat Covid-19, so that people who test positive can quickly take drugs early on, when they are most effective. African countries can model this after successful strategies to test for and quickly treat H.I.V. To manage treatment of Covid, we need partnerships with the pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs to ensure that the medications are made and sold inexpensively in African countries.
Surveillance and monitoring of variants remains crucial, as is promoting measures like mask-wearing when cases are high. The continent must continue to strengthen its routine surveillance systems to rapidly follow and respond to the evolution of the coronavirus and its impact on communities. This is how scientists in South Africa and Botswana were able to rapidly warn the world about Omicron. It’s also becoming increasingly important to do population antibody testing and surveillance to understand what proportion of people have some immunity from vaccination and prior infections and what the impact of new variants might be because of that.
Finally, in many households in Africa, the pandemic has created a perfect storm for mental health, stress, economic uncertainty and social isolation. These conditions have given rise to domestic abuse of family members or partners as well as rising alcohol and substance use. Addressing the consequences of lockdowns, through efforts like establishing local counseling services, is urgent for Africa.
The global community must act collectively and decisively to control the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. Otherwise, the rising sense of optimism that people around the world feel as they return to normal may be compromised by the emergence of new variants in other parts of the world with limited vaccination. This pandemic has shown that we are more connected and vulnerable than many of us believed, and that the risk of allowing health inequities to persist is too great. We must come out of this pandemic together, for the interest of our common humanity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By John Nkengasong
Dr. Nkengasong is the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last month, in my role as leader of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I asked that donations of Covid-19 vaccines to Africa be momentarily delayed until the third and fourth quarter of the year. At the moment, Africa’s most pressing need is administering the vaccines we have to willing people. Every country is unique in what it needs to fight Covid-19, but logistical challenges and issues of vaccine hesitancy — similar to those seen in other places around the world — have momentarily outstripped shortages for the continent. We do not want vaccines to go to waste. Now that supply is not the primary challenge, we need to focus on better delivery.
Africa has a robust plan to tackle Covid-19; long-awaited donations of vaccines are critical to that goal. Just because right now the greatest challenge is vaccine demand and delivery, as opposed to supply, does not mean there are not important ways for the global community to assist our efforts to protect Africans. But we need the world to better understand Africa’s health needs.
Many countries in the developed world are rapidly lifting restrictions like mask mandates and vaccine passports. There seems to be optimism that for many countries, 2022 will be the year that the emergency phase of the pandemic will end. But leaders must remain cautious and humble. There’s still much work to be done before this optimism is shared by everyone. The push toward normalcy should be accompanied by concerted efforts to achieve universally high rates of vaccination.
Only about 15 percent of the population in Africa has been fully vaccinated. Because of this, the trajectory of the pandemic on the continent remains unpredictable and uncertain. With low vaccination rates, we run the risk of being hit by new variants that may severely impact the effectiveness of vaccines globally and limit people’s lives once again.
African countries have been remarkably resilient in fighting the pandemic so far, and we are working on a strategy to end the Covid emergency in 2022 as well. On Feb. 5, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, the leader of the African Union’s Covid-19 response, presented a comprehensive report at the A.U. Summit of heads of state and governments.
As part of this plan, which was unanimously endorsed, governments must commit to achieving more than 70 percent vaccination rates for their countries by the end of 2022. Only about 14 of the 55 A.U. member states have so far vaccinated more than 40 percent of their eligible populations.
For vaccination campaigns to be successful, vaccine donation must be closely coordinated with either the COVAX and African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team initiatives, to ensure that countries in Africa are not overwhelmed. Too many doses without the infrastructure or coordination to distribute them could lead to vaccines expiring. Because it is very likely that repeated vaccination and boosting will be required, African countries need to be able to accelerate and strengthen their own vaccine manufacturing capacity, and need partnerships with vaccine makers.
Africa C.D.C. recently announced the launch of the Partnership for Africa Vaccine Manufacturing, which provides a framework for how Africa can manufacture 60 percent of its vaccines locally by 2040. There is also an urgent need to reshape the vaccine purchasing market to ensure that vaccines produced in Africa will be purchased and distributed across the continent and can be exported elsewhere, too.
As more vaccines continue to arrive, country leaders in Africa must now turn to vaccine delivery — getting shots into arms. This will require countries to decentralize vaccination centers, whether by employing mobile vaccination units for mass vaccination efforts, engaging faith-based organizations to encourage congregations and communities to get vaccinated, allowing vaccination centers to operate during weekends so people busy during the week can get vaccinated, or encouraging young people to get vaccinated — some estimates suggest about 60 percent of the continent’s population is under 25. In some African countries, such as Uganda, mass vaccination campaigns at places like bars have been shown to be effective in improving vaccine uptake.
Countries should also leverage existing global health infrastructure that has been used effectively to respond to H.I.V./AIDS, including ways of managing drug supply chains and virus surveillance. There also must be a specific focus on making sure people with H.I.V./AIDS can get vaccinated, as people who are immunocompromised may have a harder time fighting off the virus, which can increase the risk of new variants.
Another goal is to scale up the availability of rapid, at-home antigen tests so that at least 200 million people will have access to these tests by the end of this year. Africa also needs equitable access to drugs that treat Covid-19, so that people who test positive can quickly take drugs early on, when they are most effective. African countries can model this after successful strategies to test for and quickly treat H.I.V. To manage treatment of Covid, we need partnerships with the pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs to ensure that the medications are made and sold inexpensively in African countries.
Surveillance and monitoring of variants remains crucial, as is promoting measures like mask-wearing when cases are high. The continent must continue to strengthen its routine surveillance systems to rapidly follow and respond to the evolution of the coronavirus and its impact on communities. This is how scientists in South Africa and Botswana were able to rapidly warn the world about Omicron. It’s also becoming increasingly important to do population antibody testing and surveillance to understand what proportion of people have some immunity from vaccination and prior infections and what the impact of new variants might be because of that.
Finally, in many households in Africa, the pandemic has created a perfect storm for mental health, stress, economic uncertainty and social isolation. These conditions have given rise to domestic abuse of family members or partners as well as rising alcohol and substance use. Addressing the consequences of lockdowns, through efforts like establishing local counseling services, is urgent for Africa.
The global community must act collectively and decisively to control the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. Otherwise, the rising sense of optimism that people around the world feel as they return to normal may be compromised by the emergence of new variants in other parts of the world with limited vaccination. This pandemic has shown that we are more connected and vulnerable than many of us believed, and that the risk of allowing health inequities to persist is too great. We must come out of this pandemic together, for the interest of our common humanity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: AFRICA
WHO: Two-thirds of people in Africa may have had COVID
The global average of true infection numbers is believed to be 16 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases – but could have been 97 times higher in Africa, WHO says.
More than two-thirds of people living in Africa may have contracted COVID-19 over the past two years, about 97 times more than the number of reported infections, a World Health Organization (WHO) report has suggested.
Laboratory tests have detected 11.5 million COVID-19 cases and 252,000 fatalities across the African continent. But according to the report released on Thursday, some 800 million people could have already been infected by last September.
Officials at the WHO’s Africa region said the study – which is still being peer-reviewed – suggests the officially confirmed numbers were “likely only scratching the surface of the real extent of coronavirus infections in Africa”.
“A new meta-analysis of standardised sero-prevalence study revealed that the true number of infections could be as much as 97 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases,” said WHO Africa boss Matshidiso Moeti.
“This suggests that more than two-thirds of all Africans have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus,” she added.
The report analysed more than 150 studies published between January 2020 and December last year. It showed exposure to the virus jumped from just three percent in June 2020 to 65 percent by September last year.
“In real terms, this means that in September 2021, rather than the reported 8.2 million cases, there were 800 million,” said Moeti.
The global average of true infection numbers is believed to be 16 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases.
With limited access to testing facilities for much of Africa’s population, many infections went undetected, as testing was mainly carried out on symptomatic patients in hospitals and travellers requiring negative PCR results.
“The focus was very much on testing people who were symptomatic when there were challenges in having access to testing supplies” and this resulted in “under-representing the true number of people who have been exposed and are infected by the virus”, Moeti told journalists.
Moeti said producing accurate data on the continent, which largely has inadequate and under-resourced health facilities, has been difficult because “67 percent” of people in Africa show no symptoms.
While the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus has had a catastrophic effect on some parts of the globe, Africa appeared to have escaped the worst and was not as badly hit as initially feared at the start of the pandemic.
With weak health facilities and services, many experts had feared the systems would be overwhelmed.
Several analyses have been made of the pattern of the pandemic in Africa, with some concluding that the continent’s youthful population acted as a buffer against severe illness.
In Ghana, the WHO study established that young people were infected the most, according to Dr Irene Owusu Donkor of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research.
Many African countries are accustomed to epidemics, but reported numbers do not always reflect the reality.
The WHO had last year already cautioned that six of every seven COVID infections went undetected in Africa.
Most COVID cases on the continent have been recorded in South Africa – with more than 3.7 million infections – which conducted the most tests and boasts of better-resourced health facilities compared with most sub-Saharan African countries.
Even so, its official COVID death toll is believed to be much lower than the actual numbers of people killed by the virus.
The latest data compiled by the South African Medical Research Council shows the number of deaths could be triple the reported figures.
South Africa recorded 303,969 excess deaths from natural causes between May 3, 2020 and last Saturday – yet official figures show that COVID killed 100,075 people since the start of the pandemic.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/8 ... -who-study
The global average of true infection numbers is believed to be 16 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases – but could have been 97 times higher in Africa, WHO says.
More than two-thirds of people living in Africa may have contracted COVID-19 over the past two years, about 97 times more than the number of reported infections, a World Health Organization (WHO) report has suggested.
Laboratory tests have detected 11.5 million COVID-19 cases and 252,000 fatalities across the African continent. But according to the report released on Thursday, some 800 million people could have already been infected by last September.
Officials at the WHO’s Africa region said the study – which is still being peer-reviewed – suggests the officially confirmed numbers were “likely only scratching the surface of the real extent of coronavirus infections in Africa”.
“A new meta-analysis of standardised sero-prevalence study revealed that the true number of infections could be as much as 97 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases,” said WHO Africa boss Matshidiso Moeti.
“This suggests that more than two-thirds of all Africans have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus,” she added.
The report analysed more than 150 studies published between January 2020 and December last year. It showed exposure to the virus jumped from just three percent in June 2020 to 65 percent by September last year.
“In real terms, this means that in September 2021, rather than the reported 8.2 million cases, there were 800 million,” said Moeti.
The global average of true infection numbers is believed to be 16 times higher than the number of confirmed reported cases.
With limited access to testing facilities for much of Africa’s population, many infections went undetected, as testing was mainly carried out on symptomatic patients in hospitals and travellers requiring negative PCR results.
“The focus was very much on testing people who were symptomatic when there were challenges in having access to testing supplies” and this resulted in “under-representing the true number of people who have been exposed and are infected by the virus”, Moeti told journalists.
Moeti said producing accurate data on the continent, which largely has inadequate and under-resourced health facilities, has been difficult because “67 percent” of people in Africa show no symptoms.
While the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus has had a catastrophic effect on some parts of the globe, Africa appeared to have escaped the worst and was not as badly hit as initially feared at the start of the pandemic.
With weak health facilities and services, many experts had feared the systems would be overwhelmed.
Several analyses have been made of the pattern of the pandemic in Africa, with some concluding that the continent’s youthful population acted as a buffer against severe illness.
In Ghana, the WHO study established that young people were infected the most, according to Dr Irene Owusu Donkor of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research.
Many African countries are accustomed to epidemics, but reported numbers do not always reflect the reality.
The WHO had last year already cautioned that six of every seven COVID infections went undetected in Africa.
Most COVID cases on the continent have been recorded in South Africa – with more than 3.7 million infections – which conducted the most tests and boasts of better-resourced health facilities compared with most sub-Saharan African countries.
Even so, its official COVID death toll is believed to be much lower than the actual numbers of people killed by the virus.
The latest data compiled by the South African Medical Research Council shows the number of deaths could be triple the reported figures.
South Africa recorded 303,969 excess deaths from natural causes between May 3, 2020 and last Saturday – yet official figures show that COVID killed 100,075 people since the start of the pandemic.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/8 ... -who-study
Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World (Hardback)
A riveting study of Africa's demographics - its youth and growth - and what they mean for the continent, today and into the future.
'Essential reading' Guardian
'Intensely researched - and very important!' The Week
'The research in Youthquake is meticulous' Tim Marshall, Reaction
'Attempts to end the hysteria and ignorance surrounding demographic trends' New Statesman
'Meticulously researched, nuanced and brilliant' Mary Harper
Africa's population growth in the last 50 years has been unprecedented. By mid-century, the continent will make up a quarter of the global population, compared to one-tenth in 1980. Africa's youth is the most striking aspect of its demography. As the rest of the world ages, almost 60 per cent of Africa's population is younger than 25 years old. This 'youthquake' will have immense consequences for the social, economic and political reality in Africa. Edward Paice presents a detailed, nuanced analysis of the varied demography of Africa. He rejects the fanciful over-optimism of some commentators and doom-laden prophecies of others, while scrutinising received wisdom, and carefully considering the ramifications of the youthquake for Africa and the world.
Publisher: Head of Zeus
ISBN: 9781800241589
Number of pages: 432
Dimensions: 234 x 153 mm
Belgian King Returns Mask to Congo in Landmark Visit
But so far, the monarch has not apologized for decades of brutal Belgian rule during which up to 10 million Congolese people died.
The president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, looks at a ceremonial mask handed over by Belgium’s King Philippe at the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Kinshasa on Wednesday.Credit...Arsene Mpiana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
DAKAR, Senegal — The king of Belgium on Wednesday handed over a large wooden mask to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of thousands of objects taken long ago to the European country from its former colony.
King Philippe, on his first visit to the country since assuming the throne in 2013, said that handing over the mask to the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi, was an important symbolic step.
But for many Congolese, speaking out on social media, it was not nearly enough. They asked for an apology for the notorious crimes committed against their ancestors in order to enrich the king’s forebear, Leopold II, who claimed the territory as his personal fiefdom in 1885 and plundered it for more than two decades.
The return of the Kakungu mask, used by the Suku people in the country’s southwest during ceremonies and bought by a Belgian scientist in 1954, was not a full restitution. It is on “indefinite loan,” the king said.
“I am here to return to you this exceptional work in order to allow Congolese to discover and admire it,” he said.
It was a small, symbolic moment in Belgium’s increasing acknowledgment of its exploitation of Congo, which today is plagued by violence and poverty despite its wealth of natural resources.
The restitution of looted works is high on the agenda for the king’s six-day visit, which coincides with ongoing parliamentary debates in Belgium about legislation that would pave the way for some objects to be returned.
Belgium gave the Congolese authorities an inventory in February of more than 84,000 works taken to Belgium before Congo’s independence in 1960. These objects make up 70 percent of the collection in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, just outside Brussels. Belgium’s Parliament is set to approve a law by the end of the month that will pave the way for restitution of the works on a case-by-case basis.
King Philippe and Queen Mathilde and Mr. Tshisekedi at the international airport in Kinshasa, on Tuesday.Credit...Justin Makangara/Reuters
According to the Belgian plan, which has yet to be approved by the Congolese authorities, the Congolese government would make individual requests for each work it wished to be returned. A joint commission of Congolese and Belgian experts would then examine each request.
“Belgium no longer looks at Africa in the same way,” Thomas Dermine, the Belgian official who is overseeing the restitution of objects to Congo, told the Africa Report last week.
But some Congolese citizens took to Twitter to say that the king did not go far enough. “The Belgian king is not welcome in the DRC,” said one, Roger Kakul. “He just needs to apologize to the Congolese people.”
King Leopold II turned his private fortunes around on the backs of the Congolese people, forcing them to hand over quotas of rubber and ivory using torture and murder in what the Congolese professor Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja called “the Congo holocaust.” While funding antislavery conferences in Europe, he encouraged slave raids in central Africa.
King Leopold II.Credit...Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
He was forced to relinquish Congo as his personal possession in 1908, and it became a colony of Belgium, under which the brutality subsided but oppression and the system of economic exploitation remained.
King Philippe expressed regret for Belgium’s crimes in a letter to President Tshisekedi in 2020, on the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence, but stopped short of apologizing. He echoed that sentiment in an address to the Congolese parliament on Wednesday afternoon.
“The colonial regime was based on exploitation and domination,” the king said in his speech. “This regime was that of an unequal relationship, in itself unjustifiable, marked by paternalism, discrimination and racism,” he added. “On the occasion of my first trip to Congo, here, in front of the Congolese people, and those who still suffer from it today, I wish to reaffirm my deepest regrets for these wounds of the past,” he said.
Later this month, Belgium is also scheduled to return the remains of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister, who was assassinated in 1960 following a coup supported by the Belgian authorities. All that will be returned is a gold-capped tooth pulled from his mouth by Belgian police before his body was dissolved in acid.
King Philippe planting a tree with Mr. Tshisekedi as a symbolic bond between the two countries at the Palais de la Nation in Kinshasa.Credit...Arsene Mpiana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting from Brussels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, looks at a ceremonial mask handed over by Belgium’s King Philippe at the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Kinshasa on Wednesday.Credit...Arsene Mpiana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
DAKAR, Senegal — The king of Belgium on Wednesday handed over a large wooden mask to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of thousands of objects taken long ago to the European country from its former colony.
King Philippe, on his first visit to the country since assuming the throne in 2013, said that handing over the mask to the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi, was an important symbolic step.
But for many Congolese, speaking out on social media, it was not nearly enough. They asked for an apology for the notorious crimes committed against their ancestors in order to enrich the king’s forebear, Leopold II, who claimed the territory as his personal fiefdom in 1885 and plundered it for more than two decades.
The return of the Kakungu mask, used by the Suku people in the country’s southwest during ceremonies and bought by a Belgian scientist in 1954, was not a full restitution. It is on “indefinite loan,” the king said.
“I am here to return to you this exceptional work in order to allow Congolese to discover and admire it,” he said.
It was a small, symbolic moment in Belgium’s increasing acknowledgment of its exploitation of Congo, which today is plagued by violence and poverty despite its wealth of natural resources.
The restitution of looted works is high on the agenda for the king’s six-day visit, which coincides with ongoing parliamentary debates in Belgium about legislation that would pave the way for some objects to be returned.
Belgium gave the Congolese authorities an inventory in February of more than 84,000 works taken to Belgium before Congo’s independence in 1960. These objects make up 70 percent of the collection in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, just outside Brussels. Belgium’s Parliament is set to approve a law by the end of the month that will pave the way for restitution of the works on a case-by-case basis.
King Philippe and Queen Mathilde and Mr. Tshisekedi at the international airport in Kinshasa, on Tuesday.Credit...Justin Makangara/Reuters
According to the Belgian plan, which has yet to be approved by the Congolese authorities, the Congolese government would make individual requests for each work it wished to be returned. A joint commission of Congolese and Belgian experts would then examine each request.
“Belgium no longer looks at Africa in the same way,” Thomas Dermine, the Belgian official who is overseeing the restitution of objects to Congo, told the Africa Report last week.
But some Congolese citizens took to Twitter to say that the king did not go far enough. “The Belgian king is not welcome in the DRC,” said one, Roger Kakul. “He just needs to apologize to the Congolese people.”
King Leopold II turned his private fortunes around on the backs of the Congolese people, forcing them to hand over quotas of rubber and ivory using torture and murder in what the Congolese professor Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja called “the Congo holocaust.” While funding antislavery conferences in Europe, he encouraged slave raids in central Africa.
King Leopold II.Credit...Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
He was forced to relinquish Congo as his personal possession in 1908, and it became a colony of Belgium, under which the brutality subsided but oppression and the system of economic exploitation remained.
King Philippe expressed regret for Belgium’s crimes in a letter to President Tshisekedi in 2020, on the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence, but stopped short of apologizing. He echoed that sentiment in an address to the Congolese parliament on Wednesday afternoon.
“The colonial regime was based on exploitation and domination,” the king said in his speech. “This regime was that of an unequal relationship, in itself unjustifiable, marked by paternalism, discrimination and racism,” he added. “On the occasion of my first trip to Congo, here, in front of the Congolese people, and those who still suffer from it today, I wish to reaffirm my deepest regrets for these wounds of the past,” he said.
Later this month, Belgium is also scheduled to return the remains of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister, who was assassinated in 1960 following a coup supported by the Belgian authorities. All that will be returned is a gold-capped tooth pulled from his mouth by Belgian police before his body was dissolved in acid.
King Philippe planting a tree with Mr. Tshisekedi as a symbolic bond between the two countries at the Palais de la Nation in Kinshasa.Credit...Arsene Mpiana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting from Brussels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Uganda announces discovery of huge gold deposits
Summary
Uganda’s gold exports have been on the rise since opening the Africa Gold Refinery in Entebbe, according to official records
Uganda has announced that it has struck a deposit of 31 million tonnes of gold ore, with extractable pure gold estimated to gross 320,000 tonnes.
President Museveni broke news of the find in his State-of-the-Nation Address yesterday, but provided little detail, pointing in general that it would fetch the country more than $12 trillion.
Technocrats in the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, Mr Museveni noted, had informed Cabinet that the country was positioned to get slightly under $700m in royalty payments, with the investors poised to cash in on the windfall.
Citing six local gold refineries, among them Africa Gold Refinery in Entebbe that the United States sanctioned in March over illicit source of its gold, the President declared that the time for Uganda to ship unprocessed exports is over.
In details provided at our request, Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development spokesperson Solomon Muyita noted that the gold-endowed parts of Uganda include Alupe in Busia and Karamoja, both in eastern Uganda; Kameleng, Kisita, and Ngugo in Kassanda District in central region; and, Bushenyi’s Tiira area in western Uganda.
The volume of the reserves is estimated at 31 million tonnes of gold ore, or net 320,158 tonnes of gold, valued at $12.8 trillion, according to a document prepared by the line ministry.
If the computations are accurate, it would suggest the new gold find would topple the estimated windfall from oil still in the ground in the Albertine region.
Mr Muyita said a Chinese-run firm, Wagagai, which picked its name from the highest peak of Mt Elgon, expects to mine and start refining at least 5,000 kilogrammes of gold a day in Busia by the close of this year.
The district has about 2,000 artisanal miners, adding to thousands more eking a living in Karamoja and Kassanda by engaging in rudimentary extraction of the precious gem, leading to health hazards and collision with law enforcement personnel.
There were no readily available figures on how many new jobs the huge gold find will create.
It remained unclear what the immediate and long-term impact of the expected gold windfall would be on the economy where more billions of dollars are expected to flow when the country starts extracting oil likely in 2025.
Uganda’s gold exports have been on the rise since opening the Africa Gold Refinery in Entebbe, according to official records.
For instance, in 2019 and 2020, the country exported gold worth $1.9b to the United Arab Emirates, $1.4b to South Korea, and $28.7m to Hong Kong.
In contrast, Uganda imported nearly $2b worth of gold, making it the 18th largest gold importer in the world, according to Cabinet record.
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ts-3842400
Indian university scholarships to students and professionals in Africa
Government of India through the Ministry of External Affairs is granting Indian university scholarships to students and professionals in Africa
Good news for the students looking to completing studies online from well-known and reputed Indian Universities in various fields from management, computer science, commerce, arts, Humanities, social science and others.
Good news for the students looking to completing studies online from well-known and reputed Indian Universities in various fields from management, computer science, commerce, arts, Humanities, social science and others.
African Slave Trade – Analysis
Indian Ocean slave trade. Arab-Swahili slave traders and their captives along the Ruvuma River in Mozambique. Credit: Horace Waller: The last journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1865 to his death. Wikipedia Commons
Indian Merchants From Gujarat Played Key Role In African Slave Trade – Analysis
By P. K. Balachandran
They not only traded in slaves but financed the trade and helped transport them in their ocean going vessels.
The trading communities of Gujarat and Sindh had been in world trade in African slaves in one way or the other since at least the 15th Century. But it was in the 18th and 19th Centuries that these merchants became central to the international trade in African slaves.
Prof. Pedro Machado of the Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, in his fascinating book: Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean traces the history of the involvement of Indian merchants cum shippers in slave trade.
In collaboration with the Portuguese, who ruled Mozambique and had territorial possessions in Daman and Diu in Gujarat in Western India, the Gujarati merchants extended their business across the Atlantic to Brazil. They managed to be in this lucrative business long after the British imperial power banned slave trading in 1807 – this again with the help of the Portuguese who were allies of the British.
Early Involvement
Abyssinian or Ethiopian slaves (also called Habshi or Siddi) were used in military service in Bengal in the third quarter of the 15 th. Century. African captives were in the Deccan plateau in central India. In Gujarat they served prominently in the armies of domestic rulers and their navies. By the 1630s and 1640s, Indian merchants were purchasing African slaves at Red Sea ports such as Mocha and Jidda for markets in Western India.
Modern Era
Later in the 18th and 19th Centuries trading communities from Gujarat like the Vanias (Banias), Bhatias, Khojas, and Bohras, both Hindu and Muslim, were part of the world slave business network as traders as well as financiers and slave ship owners.
The trigger for this enterprise was the rising French and Brazilian demand for African slaves from Mozambique from the early 19 th., Century onwards. West Africa had dried up as the principal source of slaves because of British policing following the abolition of slave trade by law in 1807.
By the 1810s, Gujarati merchants were in the center of the business as the trade was relying on Gujarati currency, which, interestingly, was cotton textiles! Gujarati cotton textiles were very much in demand in East Africa and naturally these became currency. The Gujaratis were trading cloth for ivory, for which there was a craze in India. Ivory was used in royal decorations and on Hind religious occasions.
Machado says that although Gujarati traders dealt in slaves, their focus was not on slave trade. Their main interest was in ivory. They began their involvement in slave trade as financiers using cotton textiles as money. But it did not take them very long to become slave traders themselves, supplying African slaves to South America (especially Brazil which needed slaves to work in the plantations) and to South Asia, where African slaves were seen as good soldier material and as loyal domestics in the houses of rich merchants.
Indian rulers in Gujarat and Maharashtra used African slaves as bodyguards. Having Africans in service was considered a mark of high status. The Brahmin rulers of Maharashtra called Peshwas even used them as cooks as the Africans did not form part of the Hindu caste hierarchy of high and low castes or clean or unclean castes. Merchants who were in seaborne trade found the African slaves to be excellent seamen and invariably used them on their trading vessels. Often joining as boys, African ship laborers gained experience in navigation even through rough waters.
Pioneer Shobhachand Sowchand
Indians got into the Mozambique-based slave trade in 1805-1806 when the wealthy Gujarati trader, Shobhachand Sowchand bought the vessel General Izidro from Joaquim do Rosario Monteiro, a leading Portuguese slave merchant with whom he had a business relationship since the mid-1790s, Machado says.
Shobachand was keen on exploiting the expanding trade in African slaves who were in demand in the French islands of Mauritius and Réunion. There was a demand for slaves from the Arabian peninsula also. Slaves were shipped to Cape Town for use by Dutch and English companies who in turn shipped them to South and Southeast Asia.
“Such was the expansion in African slave trading that, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, slaves were a mainstay of the export economy of northern Mozambique,” Machado notes.
Money Lending
Before the Vaniya merchants joined the slave trade they were buyers and users of slaves. They used saves as workers in their ships, loaders and even as navigators. As money lenders to slave traders they were underwriting the business and therefore were part of it, albeit indirectly. The borrowers included the Portguese, the Dutch, the French and the English besides Arabs who were major slave traders before the Portuguese arrived in the 15 th.Century.
The Portuguese were hard on the Muslim Arabs as they feared that they would convert the African slaves, especially the Catholics among them, to Islam. The Portuguese rulers of Mozambique banned the sale of slaves to the Arabs and also to the Indian Hindus. Shocked the Hindu merchants petitioned the Portuguese authorities to exempt them on the plea that Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion. The Portuguese relented and allowed the Hindu Gujaratis to resume slave trade.
In 1746, Indian merchants were allowed to own and openly trade in slaves. This happened because of a growing demand for slaves across the world. No Gujrati Vaniya ship sailed from the Mozambique coast for Diu or Daman in India without a cargo of slaves, Machado notes.
Silver Currency
From the mid 18th Century onwards, slave merchants began to finance their purchases of Gujarati textiles with Spanish silver dollars brought by French and Brazilian slave trading vessels. But the introduction of silver currency did not affect the Gujarati merchants because there was a huge market for silver in India. In India, silver could be utilized by merchants to secure credit from bankers and fellow merchants. Machado cites data between 1600 and 1800 to show that around 28,000 tons of silver, which represented about 20% of the world’s production of 142,000 tons, had entered the Indian subcontinent from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, Central and Southeast Asia and Europe via the Cape of Good Hope route.
British Abolition of Slave Trade
The abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807 resulted in a great deal of pressure on the merchants dealing in slaves, especially the Portuguese. But being Britain’s ally, Portugal was allowed to trade in slaves only between Portuguese territories. In 1815 and 1817 trade was further restricted to Portuguese possessions in Africa south of the equator. Nevertheless, slave trade boomed as more than 150,000 slaves were transported from Mozambique to Brazil. Indian merchants were co-beneficiaries. Prominent Indians in the Brazilian slave trade were Premchand Virji and Narsin Kunwarji.
Slaves as Currency
In those days, slaves were used as currency apart from cotton textiles and silver. Textiles could be bought or debts could be settled with slaves as a medium of exchange. Ruling families gifted slaves to loyal and favored officials. Slaves were also acquired through outright purchase. Subordinate chiefs, in their turn, sent female slaves to the Maratha rulers called Peshwas, as a form of tribute.
Female slaves and young boys were shipped to India throughout the 18 th., Century. Kutchi women were sent to East Africa to acquire young girls, some of whom were imported to become the wives of African slaves. African female slaves performed ancillary military tasks in the Maratha armies in Maharashtra. East African slave women prepared gunpowder in the arsenals of the Maratha forts.
However, Brazil’s ban on the import of slaves in 1830, and the Royal Navy’s Anti-Slave Trade Patrol along the East African coast and Mozambique Channel gradually brought the curtains down on slave trade and the Indian merchants’ involvement in it.
P. K. Balachandran
P. K. Balachandran is a senior Indian journalist working in Sri Lanka for local and international media and has been writing on South Asian issues for the past 21 years.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/02062021- ... -analysis/
Mali’s Famed Manuscripts Are Put to Use
In West Africa and Beyond, Mali’s Famed Manuscripts Are Put to Use
Tens of thousands of manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu under jihadists’ noses, containing a wealth of knowledge about science, governance and peace-making. Now the public is getting a look.
Ousmane Sarmoye Ascofare works his way through a manuscript stack, carefully photographing each page. Hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages have been digitized in the Malian capital, Bamako.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
By Ruth Maclean
Published July 12, 2022
Updated July 13, 2022
BAMAKO, Mali — In an air-conditioned room on a quiet tree-lined street in Mali’s capital, Bamako, three young men sat at desks with cameras mounted overhead, picked up one page of parchment at a time from tall stacks at their left, clicked the shutter button and then reached for the next page. Click. Flash. Repeat.
One of the men, Amadou Koita, said he had been doing this work for five years. But the job is far from complete. Rooms full of metal trunks crammed with manuscripts await him.
The documents are part of a trove of tens of thousands of old manuscripts — legal documents, copies of the Quran, scientific writings — that for centuries were conserved and passed down by the desert-dwelling families who owned them, or collected in libraries. Then, suddenly, they were in danger.
In 2012, jihadists took over Timbuktu — today a small, sunbaked city in northern Mali, but once the most prominent of numerous centers of Islamic learning in pre-colonial West Africa — and burned many manuscripts, according to librarians and Timbuktu’s mayor at the time. In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40,000 pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture.
“Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did,” said Andogoly Guindo, Mali’s minister of culture. “These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past.”
But bringing them to a wider audience faces significant obstacles. For the most part they are undecipherable to people not educated in the West African Islamic tradition — those unable to read Arabic as well as African languages written in modified Arabic script, known as Ajami. Only a tiny proportion of the documents are being translated because there are not many scholars with the skills to do it.
Andogoly Guindo, Mali’s minister of culture, center with face mask, at a concert organized by Manny Ansar, in white, for the Bamako launch of “Mali Magic,” a project by Google Arts & Culture.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
“There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts,” said Abdulbasit Kassim, a historian of West and Central Africa who specializes in manuscripts. “What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”
West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.
The manuscripts from Timbuktu show that the city’s scholars had found that the earth revolved around the sun — having the insight at around the same time Galileo did — and used mathematics far earlier than scientists in other parts of the world, said Cynthia Schneider, co-director of the Timbuktu Renaissance initiative, which recently organized an exuberant event in Bamako, ending with a dance party, to launch the Google project.
The scholars also produced millions of pages of jurisprudence, and writings on the Prophet Muhammad, and on mysticism.
An employee of SAVAMA-DCI, an organization that works to preserve the Timbuktu manuscripts, blows dust off a page, preparing it for digitization.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
But for modern purposes, the most useful portion of the Timbuktu manuscripts — which also contain travel diaries, correspondence and sex tips — might be those on how to govern justly, corruption-busting techniques and conflict resolution.
“Each problem has a solution in the manuscripts,” said Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian who helped coordinate the rescue of the documents from Timbuktu. He pulled down his mask, revealing a bounteous mustache, downed his glass of attaya — sweet, strong tea — and put the mask back. “We have to use them.”
Mr. Haidara founded SAVAMA-DCI, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts, which collaborated with Google on the project. The Bamako offices of the group house some of the manuscripts in specially made boxes to protect their leather bindings and fragile pages of calligraphy and illustrations, often of tiny, colorful flowers.
Abdel Kader Haidara, who helped coordinate the evacuation of the manuscripts from Timbuktu, in an archive containing thousands of manuscripts stored in custom-made boxes at the headquarters of the organization he founded, SAVAMA-DCI.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
A manuscript in its leather binding.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
Mohamed El Beshir Tall, center, tells scholars and leaders in the Malian city of Segou that the teachings of ancient manuscripts can inform modern-day governance, and peace and reconciliation.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
Omar Tall composed his tract as he walked through the Sahara, a journey “so hard and tiring,” he wrote, made harder by his wife and brother being gravely ill. He cited Quranic verses, hadiths — sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad — and commentaries by Muslim scholars, all condemning clashes between believers.
The Segou scholars looked to his experience for inspiration on ending the modern conflict.
“What Sheikh Omar Tall did to bring peace to Borno and Sokoto — people from Segou can use these same tactics to talk to people from Mopti, and Bandiagara, and so on,” his descendant said, referring to areas of Mali, and switching between French and Bambara, the country’s most widely spoken language. “Without peace there is no development.”
His audience listened, some of the robed men wrapping woolen scarves tighter despite the 100-degree heat.
The city of Segou has mostly escaped the conflict that has torn through Mali in the past decade, but armed groups and abusive soldiers have wreaked devastation on nearby vulnerable towns and hamlets, and people in the city are fed up.
“They have to sit and talk,” said Malick Dara, who opened the Peace and Reconciliation Café so that people from different communities could do just that while enjoying plates of liver and tomatoes.
Back in the hall, many audience members agreed that the manuscripts could help bring peace, but some pointed out that translations into languages spoken by more Malians, like Bambara, would be more useful than French.
Others thought the guest list for the reading should have been expanded.
“You should invite the many villages living under jihadists,” said one, Oumar Cissé. “Listening to this would heal their hearts.”
A maze of calligraphic notes on one of Mali’s ancient manuscripts.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Tens of thousands of manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu under jihadists’ noses, containing a wealth of knowledge about science, governance and peace-making. Now the public is getting a look.
Ousmane Sarmoye Ascofare works his way through a manuscript stack, carefully photographing each page. Hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages have been digitized in the Malian capital, Bamako.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
By Ruth Maclean
Published July 12, 2022
Updated July 13, 2022
BAMAKO, Mali — In an air-conditioned room on a quiet tree-lined street in Mali’s capital, Bamako, three young men sat at desks with cameras mounted overhead, picked up one page of parchment at a time from tall stacks at their left, clicked the shutter button and then reached for the next page. Click. Flash. Repeat.
One of the men, Amadou Koita, said he had been doing this work for five years. But the job is far from complete. Rooms full of metal trunks crammed with manuscripts await him.
The documents are part of a trove of tens of thousands of old manuscripts — legal documents, copies of the Quran, scientific writings — that for centuries were conserved and passed down by the desert-dwelling families who owned them, or collected in libraries. Then, suddenly, they were in danger.
In 2012, jihadists took over Timbuktu — today a small, sunbaked city in northern Mali, but once the most prominent of numerous centers of Islamic learning in pre-colonial West Africa — and burned many manuscripts, according to librarians and Timbuktu’s mayor at the time. In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40,000 pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture.
“Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did,” said Andogoly Guindo, Mali’s minister of culture. “These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past.”
But bringing them to a wider audience faces significant obstacles. For the most part they are undecipherable to people not educated in the West African Islamic tradition — those unable to read Arabic as well as African languages written in modified Arabic script, known as Ajami. Only a tiny proportion of the documents are being translated because there are not many scholars with the skills to do it.
Andogoly Guindo, Mali’s minister of culture, center with face mask, at a concert organized by Manny Ansar, in white, for the Bamako launch of “Mali Magic,” a project by Google Arts & Culture.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
“There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts,” said Abdulbasit Kassim, a historian of West and Central Africa who specializes in manuscripts. “What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”
West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.
The manuscripts from Timbuktu show that the city’s scholars had found that the earth revolved around the sun — having the insight at around the same time Galileo did — and used mathematics far earlier than scientists in other parts of the world, said Cynthia Schneider, co-director of the Timbuktu Renaissance initiative, which recently organized an exuberant event in Bamako, ending with a dance party, to launch the Google project.
The scholars also produced millions of pages of jurisprudence, and writings on the Prophet Muhammad, and on mysticism.
An employee of SAVAMA-DCI, an organization that works to preserve the Timbuktu manuscripts, blows dust off a page, preparing it for digitization.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
But for modern purposes, the most useful portion of the Timbuktu manuscripts — which also contain travel diaries, correspondence and sex tips — might be those on how to govern justly, corruption-busting techniques and conflict resolution.
“Each problem has a solution in the manuscripts,” said Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian who helped coordinate the rescue of the documents from Timbuktu. He pulled down his mask, revealing a bounteous mustache, downed his glass of attaya — sweet, strong tea — and put the mask back. “We have to use them.”
Mr. Haidara founded SAVAMA-DCI, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts, which collaborated with Google on the project. The Bamako offices of the group house some of the manuscripts in specially made boxes to protect their leather bindings and fragile pages of calligraphy and illustrations, often of tiny, colorful flowers.
Abdel Kader Haidara, who helped coordinate the evacuation of the manuscripts from Timbuktu, in an archive containing thousands of manuscripts stored in custom-made boxes at the headquarters of the organization he founded, SAVAMA-DCI.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
A manuscript in its leather binding.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
Mohamed El Beshir Tall, center, tells scholars and leaders in the Malian city of Segou that the teachings of ancient manuscripts can inform modern-day governance, and peace and reconciliation.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
Omar Tall composed his tract as he walked through the Sahara, a journey “so hard and tiring,” he wrote, made harder by his wife and brother being gravely ill. He cited Quranic verses, hadiths — sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad — and commentaries by Muslim scholars, all condemning clashes between believers.
The Segou scholars looked to his experience for inspiration on ending the modern conflict.
“What Sheikh Omar Tall did to bring peace to Borno and Sokoto — people from Segou can use these same tactics to talk to people from Mopti, and Bandiagara, and so on,” his descendant said, referring to areas of Mali, and switching between French and Bambara, the country’s most widely spoken language. “Without peace there is no development.”
His audience listened, some of the robed men wrapping woolen scarves tighter despite the 100-degree heat.
The city of Segou has mostly escaped the conflict that has torn through Mali in the past decade, but armed groups and abusive soldiers have wreaked devastation on nearby vulnerable towns and hamlets, and people in the city are fed up.
“They have to sit and talk,” said Malick Dara, who opened the Peace and Reconciliation Café so that people from different communities could do just that while enjoying plates of liver and tomatoes.
Back in the hall, many audience members agreed that the manuscripts could help bring peace, but some pointed out that translations into languages spoken by more Malians, like Bambara, would be more useful than French.
Others thought the guest list for the reading should have been expanded.
“You should invite the many villages living under jihadists,” said one, Oumar Cissé. “Listening to this would heal their hearts.”
A maze of calligraphic notes on one of Mali’s ancient manuscripts.Credit...Nicolas Réméné for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Congo to Auction Land to Oil Companies: ‘Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet’
Peatlands and rainforests in the Congo Basin protect the planet by storing carbon. Now, in a giant leap backward for the climate, they’re being auctioned off for drilling.
Peatlands in Équateur province in Congo last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
By Ruth Maclean and Dionne Searcey
Published July 24, 2022
Updated July 25, 2022, 7:04 a.m. ET
DAKAR, Senegal — The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels.
The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
Congo’s about-face in allowing new oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas comes eight months after its president, Félix Tshisekedi, stood alongside world leaders at the global climate summit in Glasgow and endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect its rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin, which is second in size only to the Amazon.
The deal included international pledges of $500 million for Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the first five years.
But since then, the world’s immediate priorities have shifted.
Forests in Équateur province in Congo last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.
At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.
Congo has taken note of each of these global events, said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons.
Congo’s sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth.
“That’s our priority,” Mr. Mpanu said, in an interview last week. “Our priority is not to save the planet.”
Congo announced the auction in May, with a video posted on Twitter that showed a shining river nestled in a deep bed of lush rainforest. The video quickly cut to a close-up of a filling station pump, where yellowish gas gushed into an automobile tank. The American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies were tagged in the post.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Peatlands in Équateur province in Congo last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
By Ruth Maclean and Dionne Searcey
Published July 24, 2022
Updated July 25, 2022, 7:04 a.m. ET
DAKAR, Senegal — The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels.
The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
Congo’s about-face in allowing new oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas comes eight months after its president, Félix Tshisekedi, stood alongside world leaders at the global climate summit in Glasgow and endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect its rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin, which is second in size only to the Amazon.
The deal included international pledges of $500 million for Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the first five years.
But since then, the world’s immediate priorities have shifted.
Forests in Équateur province in Congo last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.
At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.
Congo has taken note of each of these global events, said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons.
Congo’s sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth.
“That’s our priority,” Mr. Mpanu said, in an interview last week. “Our priority is not to save the planet.”
Congo announced the auction in May, with a video posted on Twitter that showed a shining river nestled in a deep bed of lush rainforest. The video quickly cut to a close-up of a filling station pump, where yellowish gas gushed into an automobile tank. The American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies were tagged in the post.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3
These Young Kenyans Aren’t Voting, and Who Can Blame Them?
By Samira Sawlani
Ms. Sawlani is a journalist who writes often about politics and society in East Africa.
NAIROBI, Kenya — It was a sight to behold. Scores of young people, excited and expectant, gathered in Nairobi, chanting slogans and waving banners. But it was no entertainment: They were there for a campaign rally. In the months leading up to Kenya’s elections on Tuesday, the scene was repeated across the country. Here, it seemed, were the future custodians of the country taking a lively interest in the political process.
But appearances can be deceptive. Some, it turned out, attended only on the promise of payment; others were paid to gather crowds from nearby. The actual enthusiasm of the country’s young, in contrast to the contrived air of engagement, is rather cooler. While those age 18 to 35 make up 75 percent of the population, only about 40 percent of people from that cohort have registered to vote.
For some, this lackluster showing was evidence of worrisome apathy among the country’s youth. And sure enough, the early signs from Tuesday’s vote, where turnout across the board was low, at around 60 percent, suggest that the young stayed home in large numbers. But the charge of apathy misses the point. For many young Kenyans, refusing to vote is not a result of disinterest or indifference or even ignorance. It is instead — as Mumbi Kanyago, a 26-year-old communications consultant, told me — a “political choice.”
You can see why. The two leading candidates in Kenya’s election, William Ruto and Raila Odinga, who are neck and neck in the early count, are both established members of the political class. They sit at the apex of a system that has failed to counter endemic youth unemployment, skyrocketing debt and a rising cost of living. In the eyes of many young people, expecting change from such stalwarts of the status quo is a fool’s errand. If the choice is a false one, they reason, better to refuse it altogether than collude in a fiction.
On the surface, the two candidates seem pretty different. Mr. Ruto has branded himself a “hustler,” sharing stories about how he sold chicken by the roadside before his rise through the ranks to businessman and political leader — a back story that has earned him support from members of the working class, despite allegations of corruption. Mr. Odinga, by contrast, is political royalty. This is his fifth attempt to win the presidency, and his years of experience and exposure have earned him a kind of star power few can match.
But the differences obscure the underlying similarities. Mr. Ruto, the newer candidate, has been deputy president for nearly a decade. Mr. Odinga is not only the country’s most famous opposition leader but has also been backed by the current president. Both candidates profess — often when animatedly addressing crowds — to care deeply about the electorate and its troubles. Yet in the eyes of many young voters, both belong to the same flawed system. They have no faith that either could seriously change things for the better.
With good reason. In the dozens of conversations I had with young Kenyans, one refrain kept coming up: Politicians are out for themselves, not the country. In their view, self-interest and financial advancement are why politicians seek office. There’s something to it, certainly. The country regularly ranks poorly in corruption scores, and the two leading parties have members accused of graft and corruption in their ranks. The candidates like to talk about tackling corruption: Mr. Ruto has said he would deal with the problem “firmly and decisively,” and Mr. Odinga has branded corruption one of the “four enemies” of the country. But given their tolerance of dubious behavior, these promises fall flat.
Kenya can ill afford such self-serving leadership. Parts of the country are experiencing what the United Nations has described as “the worst drought in 40 years” in the Horn of Africa, with some 4.1 million people in Kenya suffering from severe food insecurity. The cost of food and fuel, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has risen sharply. If that were not bad enough, the country — in part because of the government’s borrowing spree over the past decade — is heavily laden with debt, and inflation is at a five-year high. But in response to this troubling situation, the candidates have offered little more than bickering and bragging.
In the absence of substantial policy, there could at least be symbolic representation of the young. But there too things are lacking. In 2017, Kenyans age 18 to 34 made up roughly 24 percent of all candidates. Less than a tenth of them won office, under 3 percent of the total. With such a tiny number of young people making the cut in electoral politics, who could blame the young, without representation or recourse to a more responsive state, for turning away?
Still, young people in the country have found other ways to engage in political work — in community projects, mutual aid programs and social centers. One example is the Mathare Social Justice Center in Nairobi, which aims to promote social justice for the community living in Mathare, an area historically subject to police brutality, extrajudicial killings and land grabs.
In this way, Kenyans are in step with other developments on the continent, where young people have sought alternative means to make their voices heard. For instance, young Sudanese have been bravely organizing and leading protests since October last year, demanding a return to civilian rule. In Nigeria, the young are at the forefront of a movement against police brutality that erupted with the enormous #EndSARS protests in 2020. And young people in Guinea played a huge part in the 2019-20 mass protests against the president’s attempt to run for a third term.
Of course, the right to vote and participate in elections is a hard-won privilege, which many around the world are denied. But demanding that people vote, no matter how limited the candidates, is akin to exhorting people to joyously crown their oppressors. Citizens, after all, have the right to choose. And democracy does not begin and end at the ballot box.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Ms. Sawlani is a journalist who writes often about politics and society in East Africa.
NAIROBI, Kenya — It was a sight to behold. Scores of young people, excited and expectant, gathered in Nairobi, chanting slogans and waving banners. But it was no entertainment: They were there for a campaign rally. In the months leading up to Kenya’s elections on Tuesday, the scene was repeated across the country. Here, it seemed, were the future custodians of the country taking a lively interest in the political process.
But appearances can be deceptive. Some, it turned out, attended only on the promise of payment; others were paid to gather crowds from nearby. The actual enthusiasm of the country’s young, in contrast to the contrived air of engagement, is rather cooler. While those age 18 to 35 make up 75 percent of the population, only about 40 percent of people from that cohort have registered to vote.
For some, this lackluster showing was evidence of worrisome apathy among the country’s youth. And sure enough, the early signs from Tuesday’s vote, where turnout across the board was low, at around 60 percent, suggest that the young stayed home in large numbers. But the charge of apathy misses the point. For many young Kenyans, refusing to vote is not a result of disinterest or indifference or even ignorance. It is instead — as Mumbi Kanyago, a 26-year-old communications consultant, told me — a “political choice.”
You can see why. The two leading candidates in Kenya’s election, William Ruto and Raila Odinga, who are neck and neck in the early count, are both established members of the political class. They sit at the apex of a system that has failed to counter endemic youth unemployment, skyrocketing debt and a rising cost of living. In the eyes of many young people, expecting change from such stalwarts of the status quo is a fool’s errand. If the choice is a false one, they reason, better to refuse it altogether than collude in a fiction.
On the surface, the two candidates seem pretty different. Mr. Ruto has branded himself a “hustler,” sharing stories about how he sold chicken by the roadside before his rise through the ranks to businessman and political leader — a back story that has earned him support from members of the working class, despite allegations of corruption. Mr. Odinga, by contrast, is political royalty. This is his fifth attempt to win the presidency, and his years of experience and exposure have earned him a kind of star power few can match.
But the differences obscure the underlying similarities. Mr. Ruto, the newer candidate, has been deputy president for nearly a decade. Mr. Odinga is not only the country’s most famous opposition leader but has also been backed by the current president. Both candidates profess — often when animatedly addressing crowds — to care deeply about the electorate and its troubles. Yet in the eyes of many young voters, both belong to the same flawed system. They have no faith that either could seriously change things for the better.
With good reason. In the dozens of conversations I had with young Kenyans, one refrain kept coming up: Politicians are out for themselves, not the country. In their view, self-interest and financial advancement are why politicians seek office. There’s something to it, certainly. The country regularly ranks poorly in corruption scores, and the two leading parties have members accused of graft and corruption in their ranks. The candidates like to talk about tackling corruption: Mr. Ruto has said he would deal with the problem “firmly and decisively,” and Mr. Odinga has branded corruption one of the “four enemies” of the country. But given their tolerance of dubious behavior, these promises fall flat.
Kenya can ill afford such self-serving leadership. Parts of the country are experiencing what the United Nations has described as “the worst drought in 40 years” in the Horn of Africa, with some 4.1 million people in Kenya suffering from severe food insecurity. The cost of food and fuel, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has risen sharply. If that were not bad enough, the country — in part because of the government’s borrowing spree over the past decade — is heavily laden with debt, and inflation is at a five-year high. But in response to this troubling situation, the candidates have offered little more than bickering and bragging.
In the absence of substantial policy, there could at least be symbolic representation of the young. But there too things are lacking. In 2017, Kenyans age 18 to 34 made up roughly 24 percent of all candidates. Less than a tenth of them won office, under 3 percent of the total. With such a tiny number of young people making the cut in electoral politics, who could blame the young, without representation or recourse to a more responsive state, for turning away?
Still, young people in the country have found other ways to engage in political work — in community projects, mutual aid programs and social centers. One example is the Mathare Social Justice Center in Nairobi, which aims to promote social justice for the community living in Mathare, an area historically subject to police brutality, extrajudicial killings and land grabs.
In this way, Kenyans are in step with other developments on the continent, where young people have sought alternative means to make their voices heard. For instance, young Sudanese have been bravely organizing and leading protests since October last year, demanding a return to civilian rule. In Nigeria, the young are at the forefront of a movement against police brutality that erupted with the enormous #EndSARS protests in 2020. And young people in Guinea played a huge part in the 2019-20 mass protests against the president’s attempt to run for a third term.
Of course, the right to vote and participate in elections is a hard-won privilege, which many around the world are denied. But demanding that people vote, no matter how limited the candidates, is akin to exhorting people to joyously crown their oppressors. Citizens, after all, have the right to choose. And democracy does not begin and end at the ballot box.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Experts: Tanzania can be hub of space exploration in Africa
The Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Prof James Mdoe, listens to the Chinese ambassador to Tanzania, Ms Chen Mingjian, during an event held in Dar es Salaam on Tuesday, where Chinese astronauts spoke from space with students from eight African countries. Left is a Chinese embassy official, Mr Wang Siping. PHOTO | ERICKY BONIPHACE
Summary
China has decided to expand its space diplomacy policy by inviting various countries, especially Africa, to seize the opportunities available in space exploration, improve science and produce many astronauts
Dar es Salaam. Experts believe that Tanzania can be the hub of space exploration in Africa, saying it is also possible for the country to be among the pioneers in this field on the continent.
Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC-Tanzania) is a group of students and young professionals who strive to benefit from international organisations that encourage space activities in order to accelerate initiatives and achieve the best for Tanzania, Africa, and the world at large.
The group says the natural occurrences of space-related phenomena in Tanzania have greatly influenced their interest in space exploration, and that the country can join other African states in tapping into the continent’s space market.
They said this following the move by the government of China to expand its space diplomacy policy by inviting various countries, especially Africa, to seize the opportunities available in space exploration, improve science and produce many astronauts.
As part of the move, the Chinese Embassy in Tanzania on Tuesday held an event dubbed “Connecting Heaven and Earth” where youth representatives from Africa and astronauts from aboard the Chinese spacecraft Shenzhou engaged in a dialogue.
The event attracted more than 60 teachers, students from schools in Dar es Salaam and government officials, and saw aspiring space scientists participate in a question-and-answer show that was broadcast live on TV.
The teenagers were full of curiosity about the life and work of Chinese astronauts in space, and they asked questions aimed at helping them develop the desire to become future astronauts.
The answers by astronauts gave young people a better understanding of space knowledge through vivid space displays.
The Chinese ambassador to Tanzania, Ms Chen Mingjian, said she was impressed to watch African youth dialogue with Chinese astronauts via video link, noting further that since the successful launch of manned spacecraft Shenzhou-14 on June 5, three Chinese astronauts have been working in outer space for three months.
She said space exploration has created opportunities for all human beings to work together and inspired the world, noting that China and Tanzania have extensive potential for cooperation in future space exploration and will encourage more young generations to continue exploring.
“I encourage you (students) to do your part to contribute to your space dream, love science and build up confidence in the country’s self-reliance in innovation,” Ms Chen said.
“Today we have so many youths here and I believe you may admire these spacemen and also dream of becoming an astronaut and walk in space,” she added.
This comes at a time when Tanzania, through the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, has continued to design and introduce various methods to motivate young people to choose science careers to help the government meet the current and future needs in science and technology.
Speaking during the event, the Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Prof James Mdoe, China’s decision had come at the right time.
“This step has come at the right time when we are reviewing the curricula to be able to add important issues needed for the current times, and the fourth industrial revolution.
“We are encouraging young people to embrace science, technology and innovation and space exploration brings yet another opportunity. I ask the students here to be able to ask questions that will help them become future astronauts for our country,” Prof Mdoe said
China adheres to the peaceful exploration and use of outer space aiming to popularize space knowledge, encourage scientific exploration, raise awareness and promote culture training on outer space.
For instance, Tanzania is home to one of the world’s largest meteorites to ever hit the Earth’s surface. Located in Mbozi District, Mbeya Region, the meteorite was discovered in 1930 and it measures three metres long, one metre high, and weighs an estimated 16 metric tons, according to Dr Amos Njomvu, a space expert based in South Africa.
Also, he said Tanzania’s geographical positioning is the most suitable in support of space exploration activities.
“Our ministry of education should work to encourage the upcoming generation to facilitate the country’s involvement in the multi-billion dollar space market and China’s welcoming opportunity should be seized,” he noted.
According to the African Union Commission’s Department of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, cumulatively, Africa has spent about $4.5 billion until 2020 in the space activities with a valuation standing at $7.37 billion. The market is projected to grow over 40 percent (Compound annual growth rate) for five years.
It further states challenges that entangle the continent’s space market as; inadequate connectivity, infrastructure gap, human capital and low or lack of investment and funding.
In the areas of collaboration with China, Tanzania, like other African countries, can focus on training and capacity development, data sharing and utilisation, and satellite manufacture.
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ca-3941454
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Government launches “Silicon Zanzibar” initiative with Wasoko
Zanzibar Minister of Investment & Economic Development, Mudrick Soraga (left) and CPS’s CEO Sebastian Dietzold unveiling the The Pavilion in Fumba Town at the event held in the isles. PHOTO | COURTESY
Summary
Silicon Zanzibar will streamline the issuance of work visas to skilled tech workers from across Africa and beyond to relocate to Zanzibar.
Zanzibar. The Government of Zanzibar on Tuesday August 30, announced the launch of Silicon Zanzibar, a new initiative to attract and relocate tech companies from across Africa to the island.
It is believed that Silicon Zanzibar will streamline the issuance of work visas to skilled tech workers from across Africa and beyond to relocate to Zanzibar.
The government will also offer strong incentives to participating companies under Zanzibar’s existing Free Economic Zone program, which includes exemption from corporate income tax for 10 years.
Tech companies in Africa received over $6 billion in financing in 2021, in what has become the continent’s fastest growing major industry.
In response to the opportunity, Zanzibar Minister of Investment & Economic Development, Mudrick Soraga said that tech companies will no longer have to open offices and move their people to Dubai or London to manage their operations in Africa.
“ We are providing an open and enabling environment for all tech companies and their team members to be based in Zanzibar—one of the world’s most attractive destinations—allowing everyone building tech for Africa to be based in Africa.”
He added: Silicon Zanzibar directly supports the government’s Blue Economy Policy to promote economic development with low environmental footprint and sustainable resource requirements. Technology businesses are particularly economically resilient to climate change risks since they are not dependent on weather conditions, which will support Zanzibar in diversifying its economy against seasonal industries such as agriculture and tourism. The relocation of world-class technology workers will also significantly contribute to the Zanzibar tax base through their income and local spending power while sharing their skills and experience with the local ICT workforce.
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ko-3932592
Re: AFRICA
AFP
S.African women to defy criticism and dance for Zulu king
Zama LUTHULI
Fri, September 16, 2022 at 1:39 AM
Thousands of young women and teenage girls will dance before the new king of South Africa's Zulu nation on Saturday, defying critics of the tradition and a row over the legitimacy of the royal succession.
Every September, tens of thousands of women, known locally as maidens, descend on the royal palace in the mountain town of Nongoma in the southeast KwaZulu-Natal province, to perform a reed dance.
During the ceremony, each girl will present a tall reed to the new king which, legend has it, will wilt if the holder is not a virgin.
The ceremony is a traditional rite of womanhood, rooted historically in an occasion for the king to select new wives among his subjects.
The newly crowned head of South Africa's largest ethnic group is the 47-year-old King MisuZulu Zulu, also known by his official title as MisuZulu kaZwelithini.
He was recognised as monarch at a traditional ceremony last month following the death last year of his father King Goodwill Zwelithini, who had reigned for 50 years.
A succession row involving two factions of the royal family rumbles on, however.
- First since Covid -
This year's festivities are eagerly awaited -- it will be the first time the dance will take place since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"I can't wait for this weekend. I am so excited -- it's been a long time since we have all been together as girls," Thembalami Dumakade, 23, told AFP.
Prior to the dance, the participants will have their genitalia inspected, a practice condemned by rights advocates who say it is demeaning and an invasion of privacy.
"The girls have the right to partake in the virginity testing if they want, it is their bodies. Those who are telling us our traditions are dated are entitled to their opinion," said Nomagugu Ngobese, one of the virginity testers, told AFP by telephone.
"But it is our culture, we do not have to consult with anyone about it."
Virginity is a precondition to partake in the dance.
This year's event is also clouded by the ongoing succession battle.
Those opposed to King MisuZulu ascending the throne have warned of "bloodshed" if the reed dance goes ahead, according to local media reports.
- 'Only one king' -
"We have tight security on our side. Everything will go ahead as normal and we will be welcoming maidens from all corners of our country," the royal family's spokesman, Prince Thulani Zulu, told AFP.
"People are free to say what they want. It is a democracy after all. They can claim to be kings, but there is only one king".
One faction of the royal family believes Misuzulu is the rightful heir as his late mother, Queen Mantfombi Dlamini Zulu the third queen consort and sister to Eswatini King Mswati III, was a royal princess.
But Prince Simakade, the late king's first-born son who was born out of wedlock, has been championed by dissenting relatives by virtue of being the eldest son and therefore the rightful heir.
Simakade on Wednesday filed an urgent court application seeking to dethrone his half-brother, according to local media.
The first-born son also challenged South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's decision to recognise Misuzulu as the rightful Zulu monarch.
"I promise I will work to unite the Zulu nation," MisuZulu, who has not addressed the succession tussle publicly, vowed during his coronation speech last month.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/af ... 08010.html
S.African women to defy criticism and dance for Zulu king
Zama LUTHULI
Fri, September 16, 2022 at 1:39 AM
Thousands of young women and teenage girls will dance before the new king of South Africa's Zulu nation on Saturday, defying critics of the tradition and a row over the legitimacy of the royal succession.
Every September, tens of thousands of women, known locally as maidens, descend on the royal palace in the mountain town of Nongoma in the southeast KwaZulu-Natal province, to perform a reed dance.
During the ceremony, each girl will present a tall reed to the new king which, legend has it, will wilt if the holder is not a virgin.
The ceremony is a traditional rite of womanhood, rooted historically in an occasion for the king to select new wives among his subjects.
The newly crowned head of South Africa's largest ethnic group is the 47-year-old King MisuZulu Zulu, also known by his official title as MisuZulu kaZwelithini.
He was recognised as monarch at a traditional ceremony last month following the death last year of his father King Goodwill Zwelithini, who had reigned for 50 years.
A succession row involving two factions of the royal family rumbles on, however.
- First since Covid -
This year's festivities are eagerly awaited -- it will be the first time the dance will take place since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"I can't wait for this weekend. I am so excited -- it's been a long time since we have all been together as girls," Thembalami Dumakade, 23, told AFP.
Prior to the dance, the participants will have their genitalia inspected, a practice condemned by rights advocates who say it is demeaning and an invasion of privacy.
"The girls have the right to partake in the virginity testing if they want, it is their bodies. Those who are telling us our traditions are dated are entitled to their opinion," said Nomagugu Ngobese, one of the virginity testers, told AFP by telephone.
"But it is our culture, we do not have to consult with anyone about it."
Virginity is a precondition to partake in the dance.
This year's event is also clouded by the ongoing succession battle.
Those opposed to King MisuZulu ascending the throne have warned of "bloodshed" if the reed dance goes ahead, according to local media reports.
- 'Only one king' -
"We have tight security on our side. Everything will go ahead as normal and we will be welcoming maidens from all corners of our country," the royal family's spokesman, Prince Thulani Zulu, told AFP.
"People are free to say what they want. It is a democracy after all. They can claim to be kings, but there is only one king".
One faction of the royal family believes Misuzulu is the rightful heir as his late mother, Queen Mantfombi Dlamini Zulu the third queen consort and sister to Eswatini King Mswati III, was a royal princess.
But Prince Simakade, the late king's first-born son who was born out of wedlock, has been championed by dissenting relatives by virtue of being the eldest son and therefore the rightful heir.
Simakade on Wednesday filed an urgent court application seeking to dethrone his half-brother, according to local media.
The first-born son also challenged South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's decision to recognise Misuzulu as the rightful Zulu monarch.
"I promise I will work to unite the Zulu nation," MisuZulu, who has not addressed the succession tussle publicly, vowed during his coronation speech last month.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/af ... 08010.html
Students on the Run, Schools Taken by Troops and a Generation’s Catastrophe
With an estimated 19 million children out of school for months because of war, Sudan is on the verge of becoming “the worst education crisis in the world,” U.N. officials say.
Refugees who fled the war in Sudan attended an English class at a refugee resettlement camp in Aweil, in South Sudan.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
The young girls and boys, wearing colorful scarves, tattered shirts and flip-flops, ran across the dusty ground to form jagged lines and face the teachers at the start of the school day.
The children, hundreds of them gathered in makeshift classrooms, had arrived in this aid camp in recent months after fleeing the war in their homeland of Sudan. But even as they began to gain a sense of normalcy in their schooling, many were still burdened with memories of the vicious conflict they endured, which had left loved ones dead and their homes destroyed.
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” said Mujahid Yaqub, a 23-year-old who fled Sudan and now teaches English at the school in the Wedwil refugee center, in Aweil in South Sudan. Many of the children, he said, were unable to focus in class and often cried over the memories of their terrifying escape from shellings and massacres.
“We want to inform them that there’s hope,” he said, but “it is painful.”
Universities and primary and secondary schools across Sudan remain closed six months after the war began, jeopardizing the future of an entire generation. With an estimated 19 million children out of school, Sudan is on the verge of becoming “the worst education crisis in the world,” the United Nations Children’s Fund warned this month.
Image
People who fled the war in Sudan at a processing center in Renk, South Sudan. The United Nations says Sudan now has the largest internal displacement crisis in the world.
People who fled the war in Sudan at a processing center in Renk, South Sudan. The United Nations says Sudan now has the largest internal displacement crisis in the world. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
Teachers across the northeast African nation have gone unpaid and young people out of school have been exposed to physical and mental threats, including recruitment into armed groups.
Universities and government educational offices have been destroyed or used as defense positions, and at least 171 schools have been turned into emergency shelters for displaced people, according to a spokesman with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
//Violence in Sudan
//Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles.
What to Know: Two generals have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in April. Millions of Sudanese people have fled, but many are stuck in war zones struggling to survive.
//Darfur: The discovery of a mass graves and the killing of a powerful governor have heightened worries that fighting between the country’s warring military factions is pushing a region blighted by genocide two decades ago into a new ethnic civil war.
//Leaving Everything Behind: Thanasis Pagoulatos led his family business, Khartoum’s oldest inn, through decades of tumult. Sudan’s latest breakdown proved too much.
“If this war continues, the damage to the education system will be irreparable,” said Munzoul Assal, who until April was a social anthropology professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Studies at the University of Khartoum.
The war between the Sudanese Army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has killed up to 9,000 people and injured thousands more, according to the U.N.
Both sides to the conflict said on Thursday that their delegates arrived for the cease-fire talks brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia in Jeddah — though neither side agreed to a pause in the fighting. Representatives from the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an eight-member regional bloc that Sudan belongs to, were also attending the talks.
With over 7 million people internally displaced, including more than 4.6 million since the conflict began, Sudan is now the largest internal displacement crisis in the world, the U.N. said.
More than 70 percent of health care facilities nationwide have also been shuttered, even as the country confronts rising infections and deaths from cholera, dengue and malaria and tens of thousands of pregnant women struggle to find lifesaving care. Aid efforts are also being encumbered by funding shortfalls, with the U.N. receiving only 33 percent of the $2.6 billion it needs to deliver humanitarian assistance in Sudan this year.
Image
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” Mujahid Yaqub, 23, who teaches English in the Wedwil refugee center in South Sudan, said of the displaced students.
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” Mujahid Yaqub, 23, who teaches English in the Wedwil refugee center in South Sudan, said of the displaced students.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
The conflict has continued to intensify in recent weeks across the Darfur region in western Sudan, where ethnically motivated attacks have prompted investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The U.N. Human Rights Council this month also established an independent fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations in the conflict, a move that was widely welcomed by rights groups.
The paramilitary group, which has increasingly solidified its grip in Darfur, has in recent days shelled Nyala city in South Darfur as it faced off with the army, activists and aid workers said. The clashes have overwhelmed health services, disrupted internet and phone connectivity and destroyed homes and markets.
The paramilitary forces said on Thursday that they had overrun the army’s headquarters in Nyala, giving them effective control over Sudan’s second-largest city.
The paramilitary forces also continued clashing with the army in the capital, Khartoum, and the adjoining city of Omdurman. In recent weeks, both parties have been accused of either shelling hospitals or blocking crucial medical supplies that would keep them running. The fighting has continued amid pervasive reports of looting, torture and sexual violence, pushing many people to pack everything and leave the country altogether.
Many of those arriving in neighboring countries are students whose learning has now been disrupted.
Image
Sudanese refugees, mainly women and children, camping out in makeshift tents, in Koufroun, in neighboring Chad. Many of the schoolchildren have had no classes since April.
Sudanese refugees, mainly women and children, camping out in makeshift tents, in Koufroun, in neighboring Chad. Many of the schoolchildren have had no classes since April.Credit...Yagazie Emezi for The New York Times
For decades, the education system in Sudan suffered from underfunding and a lack of teacher training, in addition to political interference by the government of the dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But the hopes that many had that conditions would improve after he was ousted in 2019 were quickly dashed. The enduring political crises and the tumbling economy left students crammed into overcrowded classrooms and teachers going on strike over unpaid salaries and poor working conditions.
The war that has now convulsed the nation has only deepened those problems, leaving many students without any prospects.
“I had ambitions for myself, my family and my country,” said Braa Nureyn, a 21-year-old who fled with her family to the Aweil camp and was now sharing a tent with eight members of her family. Fetching water on a recent morning, Ms. Nureyn, a second-year dental student in Khartoum, said it pained her that she was no longer going to campus every day.
“The idea of being a refugee is impossible,” she said. “I avoid thinking about it because there’s no solution.”
The war has also affected thousands of foreign university students who were studying for free in Sudan. For decades, the Sudanese government awarded scholarships to foreign students, mostly from African and Arab countries, as a way to boost Sudan’s cultural diplomacy but also to spread Islam, Mr. Assal, the social anthropology professor, said in a phone interview from Bergen, Norway.
For those students — many of them from poor backgrounds — the war has meant returning home without any prospects of continuing or finishing their education.
Students gathering outside makeshift classrooms at an aid camp in Aweil in August. The United Nations says Sudan is on the verge of becoming the “worst education crisis in the world.”
Students gathering outside makeshift classrooms at an aid camp in Aweil in August. The United Nations says Sudan is on the verge of becoming the “worst education crisis in the world.”Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
“I was hoping I would graduate and help my father with raising the family,” said Alekiir Kaman, a 25-year-old South Sudanese national who was studying computer science at the International University of Africa in Khartoum. But now, she said, “I am starting from zero.”
Aid groups and U.N. agencies say they are ramping up efforts to ensure that access to education is done hand-in-hand with the humanitarian response. Some Sudanese students have been able to enter primary and secondary schools in host countries like Egypt and South Sudan. Rwanda has taken in 200 Sudanese medical students. Education Cannot Wait, a U.N. fund dedicated to educational emergencies, has announced a $5 million grant to support vulnerable school-aged girls and boys.
But as the war drags on, those like Mr. Yaqub, the English teacher at the refugee settlement in Aweil, say they will keep doing what they can with the little they have.
“Being a teacher means having hope in a new future,” he said. “We are teaching the children to be strong mentally and physically so that they can go back to Sudan and be the new generation that rebuilds Sudan.”
Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington.
Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. More about Abdi Latif Dahir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Refugees who fled the war in Sudan attended an English class at a refugee resettlement camp in Aweil, in South Sudan.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
The young girls and boys, wearing colorful scarves, tattered shirts and flip-flops, ran across the dusty ground to form jagged lines and face the teachers at the start of the school day.
The children, hundreds of them gathered in makeshift classrooms, had arrived in this aid camp in recent months after fleeing the war in their homeland of Sudan. But even as they began to gain a sense of normalcy in their schooling, many were still burdened with memories of the vicious conflict they endured, which had left loved ones dead and their homes destroyed.
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” said Mujahid Yaqub, a 23-year-old who fled Sudan and now teaches English at the school in the Wedwil refugee center, in Aweil in South Sudan. Many of the children, he said, were unable to focus in class and often cried over the memories of their terrifying escape from shellings and massacres.
“We want to inform them that there’s hope,” he said, but “it is painful.”
Universities and primary and secondary schools across Sudan remain closed six months after the war began, jeopardizing the future of an entire generation. With an estimated 19 million children out of school, Sudan is on the verge of becoming “the worst education crisis in the world,” the United Nations Children’s Fund warned this month.
Image
People who fled the war in Sudan at a processing center in Renk, South Sudan. The United Nations says Sudan now has the largest internal displacement crisis in the world.
People who fled the war in Sudan at a processing center in Renk, South Sudan. The United Nations says Sudan now has the largest internal displacement crisis in the world. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
Teachers across the northeast African nation have gone unpaid and young people out of school have been exposed to physical and mental threats, including recruitment into armed groups.
Universities and government educational offices have been destroyed or used as defense positions, and at least 171 schools have been turned into emergency shelters for displaced people, according to a spokesman with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
//Violence in Sudan
//Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles.
What to Know: Two generals have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in April. Millions of Sudanese people have fled, but many are stuck in war zones struggling to survive.
//Darfur: The discovery of a mass graves and the killing of a powerful governor have heightened worries that fighting between the country’s warring military factions is pushing a region blighted by genocide two decades ago into a new ethnic civil war.
//Leaving Everything Behind: Thanasis Pagoulatos led his family business, Khartoum’s oldest inn, through decades of tumult. Sudan’s latest breakdown proved too much.
“If this war continues, the damage to the education system will be irreparable,” said Munzoul Assal, who until April was a social anthropology professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Studies at the University of Khartoum.
The war between the Sudanese Army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has killed up to 9,000 people and injured thousands more, according to the U.N.
Both sides to the conflict said on Thursday that their delegates arrived for the cease-fire talks brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia in Jeddah — though neither side agreed to a pause in the fighting. Representatives from the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an eight-member regional bloc that Sudan belongs to, were also attending the talks.
With over 7 million people internally displaced, including more than 4.6 million since the conflict began, Sudan is now the largest internal displacement crisis in the world, the U.N. said.
More than 70 percent of health care facilities nationwide have also been shuttered, even as the country confronts rising infections and deaths from cholera, dengue and malaria and tens of thousands of pregnant women struggle to find lifesaving care. Aid efforts are also being encumbered by funding shortfalls, with the U.N. receiving only 33 percent of the $2.6 billion it needs to deliver humanitarian assistance in Sudan this year.
Image
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” Mujahid Yaqub, 23, who teaches English in the Wedwil refugee center in South Sudan, said of the displaced students.
“We know that pain is lasting inside their hearts,” Mujahid Yaqub, 23, who teaches English in the Wedwil refugee center in South Sudan, said of the displaced students.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
The conflict has continued to intensify in recent weeks across the Darfur region in western Sudan, where ethnically motivated attacks have prompted investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The U.N. Human Rights Council this month also established an independent fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations in the conflict, a move that was widely welcomed by rights groups.
The paramilitary group, which has increasingly solidified its grip in Darfur, has in recent days shelled Nyala city in South Darfur as it faced off with the army, activists and aid workers said. The clashes have overwhelmed health services, disrupted internet and phone connectivity and destroyed homes and markets.
The paramilitary forces said on Thursday that they had overrun the army’s headquarters in Nyala, giving them effective control over Sudan’s second-largest city.
The paramilitary forces also continued clashing with the army in the capital, Khartoum, and the adjoining city of Omdurman. In recent weeks, both parties have been accused of either shelling hospitals or blocking crucial medical supplies that would keep them running. The fighting has continued amid pervasive reports of looting, torture and sexual violence, pushing many people to pack everything and leave the country altogether.
Many of those arriving in neighboring countries are students whose learning has now been disrupted.
Image
Sudanese refugees, mainly women and children, camping out in makeshift tents, in Koufroun, in neighboring Chad. Many of the schoolchildren have had no classes since April.
Sudanese refugees, mainly women and children, camping out in makeshift tents, in Koufroun, in neighboring Chad. Many of the schoolchildren have had no classes since April.Credit...Yagazie Emezi for The New York Times
For decades, the education system in Sudan suffered from underfunding and a lack of teacher training, in addition to political interference by the government of the dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But the hopes that many had that conditions would improve after he was ousted in 2019 were quickly dashed. The enduring political crises and the tumbling economy left students crammed into overcrowded classrooms and teachers going on strike over unpaid salaries and poor working conditions.
The war that has now convulsed the nation has only deepened those problems, leaving many students without any prospects.
“I had ambitions for myself, my family and my country,” said Braa Nureyn, a 21-year-old who fled with her family to the Aweil camp and was now sharing a tent with eight members of her family. Fetching water on a recent morning, Ms. Nureyn, a second-year dental student in Khartoum, said it pained her that she was no longer going to campus every day.
“The idea of being a refugee is impossible,” she said. “I avoid thinking about it because there’s no solution.”
The war has also affected thousands of foreign university students who were studying for free in Sudan. For decades, the Sudanese government awarded scholarships to foreign students, mostly from African and Arab countries, as a way to boost Sudan’s cultural diplomacy but also to spread Islam, Mr. Assal, the social anthropology professor, said in a phone interview from Bergen, Norway.
For those students — many of them from poor backgrounds — the war has meant returning home without any prospects of continuing or finishing their education.
Students gathering outside makeshift classrooms at an aid camp in Aweil in August. The United Nations says Sudan is on the verge of becoming the “worst education crisis in the world.”
Students gathering outside makeshift classrooms at an aid camp in Aweil in August. The United Nations says Sudan is on the verge of becoming the “worst education crisis in the world.”Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
“I was hoping I would graduate and help my father with raising the family,” said Alekiir Kaman, a 25-year-old South Sudanese national who was studying computer science at the International University of Africa in Khartoum. But now, she said, “I am starting from zero.”
Aid groups and U.N. agencies say they are ramping up efforts to ensure that access to education is done hand-in-hand with the humanitarian response. Some Sudanese students have been able to enter primary and secondary schools in host countries like Egypt and South Sudan. Rwanda has taken in 200 Sudanese medical students. Education Cannot Wait, a U.N. fund dedicated to educational emergencies, has announced a $5 million grant to support vulnerable school-aged girls and boys.
But as the war drags on, those like Mr. Yaqub, the English teacher at the refugee settlement in Aweil, say they will keep doing what they can with the little they have.
“Being a teacher means having hope in a new future,” he said. “We are teaching the children to be strong mentally and physically so that they can go back to Sudan and be the new generation that rebuilds Sudan.”
Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington.
Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. More about Abdi Latif Dahir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The World Is Becoming More African
Part one of a series on how the youth boom is changing the continent, and beyond.
Astonishing change is underway in Africa, where the population is projected to nearly double to 2.5 billion over the next quarter-century — an era that will not only transform many African countries, experts say, but also radically reshape their relationship with the rest of the world.
Birthrates are tumbling in richer nations, creating anxiety about how to care for, and pay for, their aging societies. But Africa’s baby boom continues apace, fueling the youngest, fastest growing population on earth.
In 1950, Africans made up 8 percent of the world’s people. A century later, they will account for one-quarter of humanity, and at least one-third of all young people aged 15 to 24, according to United Nations forecasts.
The median age on the African continent is 19. In India, the world’s most populous country, it is 28. In China and the United States, it is 38.
More than a third of the world’s young people will live in Africa by 2050
Share of global population aged 15 to 24
2023
2050
35%
Africa
29%
Southern Asia
26%
24%
23%
Eastern and Southeastern Asia
17%
Latin America and the Caribbean
6.9%
8.6%
6.3%
Europe 5.1%
Western Asia 4.4%
4%
Northern America
3.5%
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022. Regions are based on U.N. classifications. Regions with less than 1 percent of the global population are not shown. By Lauren Leatherby
The implications of this “youthquake,” as some call it, are immense yet uncertain, and likely to vary greatly across Africa, a continent of myriad cultures and some 54 countries that covers an area larger than China, Europe, India and the United States combined. But its first signs are already here.
It reverberates in the bustle and thrum of the continent’s ballooning cities, their hectic streets jammed with new arrivals, that make Africa the most rapidly urbanizing continent on earth.
It pulses in the packed stadiums of London or New York, where African musicians are storming the world of pop, and in the heaving megachurches of West Africa, where the future of Christianity is being shaped.
And it shows in the glow of Africa’s 670 million cellphones, one for every second person on the continent — the dominant internet device used to move money, launch revolutions, stoke frustrations and feed dreams.
“It feels like the opportunities are unlimited for us right now,” said Jean-Patrick Niambé, a 24-year-old hip-hop artist from Ivory Coast who uses the stage name Dofy, as he rode in a taxi to a concert in the capital, Abidjan, this year.
Africa’s political reach is growing, too. Its leaders are courted at flashy summits by foreign powers that covet their huge reserves of the minerals needed to make electric cars and solar panels.
With a growing choice of eager allies, including Russia, China, the United States, Turkey and Gulf petrostates, African leaders are spurning the image of victim and demanding a bigger say. In September, the African Union joined the Group of 20, the premier forum for international economic cooperation, taking a seat at the same table as the European Union.
Businesses are chasing Africa’s tens of millions of new consumers emerging every year, representing untapped markets for cosmetics, organic foods, even champagne. Hilton plans to open 65 new hotels on the continent within five years. Its population of millionaires, the fastest growing on earth, is expected to double to 768,000 by 2027, the bank Credit Suisse estimates.
Dinner at Sushi Mitsuki, a new restaurant in a neighborhood with a rising skyline in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, starts at $200 per person.
“Africa is entering a period of truly staggering change,” said Edward Paice, the director of the Africa Research Institute in London and the author of “Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World.”
He added:
An expansive crowd of Muslims in holiday dress, standing shoulder to shoulder, their hands clasped and heads bowed in prayer.
NIGERIA
A woman lying under a blanket, nursing a baby wrapped in cloth.
MOZAMBIQUE
Three young people doing a synchronized dance on a traffic island in a street.
KENYA
“The world is changing.”
An expansive crowd of Muslims in holiday dress, standing shoulder to shoulder, their hands clasped and heads bowed in prayer.
“And we need to start reimagining Africa’s place in it.”
A woman lying under a blanket, nursing a baby wrapped in cloth.
The energy in Africa contrasts with the rising uneasiness in Europe and Asia.
Three young people doing a synchronized dance on a traffic island in a street.
In many countries, historically low birthrates are creating older, smaller populations. Caregivers in Italy, which is expected to have 12 percent fewer people by 2050, are experimenting with robots to look after the aged. The prime minister of Japan, where the median age is 48, warned in January that his society was “on the verge” of dysfunction.
Africa’s challenge is to manage unbridled growth. It has always been a young continent — only two decades ago the median age was 17 — but never on such a scale. Within the next decade, Africa will have the world’s largest work force, surpassing China and India. By the 2040s, it will account for two out of every five children born on the planet.
The median age on the African continent is 19
Median age group: 10-19 years old 20-29 30-39 40-49
Russia
Canada
Germany
United
States
Japan
China
Iran
Egypt
India
Mexico
Nigeria
Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Dem. Rep.
of Congo
Indonesia
Brazil
Australia
South
Africa
Argentina
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022 By Lauren Leatherby
Experts say this approaching tide of humanity will push Africa to the fore of the most pressing concerns of our age, like climate change, the energy transition and migration.
But it has also exposed the continent’s gaping vulnerabilities.
PERIL AND POTENTIAL
Africa’s soaring population is partly a result of remarkable progress. Africans eat better and live longer than ever, on average. Infant mortality has been halved since 2000; calorie intake has soared.
But while a handful of African countries are poised to ride the demographic wave, others risk being swamped by it.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average.
Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.
Young Africans are better educated and more connected than ever: 44 percent graduated from high school in 2020, up from 27 percent in 2000, and about 570 million people use the internet. But finding a good job, or any job, is another matter.
Up to one million Africans enter the labor market every month, but fewer than one in four get a formal job, the World Bank says. Unemployment in South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized nation, runs at a crushing 35 percent.
Frustration feeds desperation.
In countries like Somalia, Mozambique and Mali, opportunity-starved youths pick up guns to fight for jihad, or for money. In Gabon and Niger, youngsters fed up with sham politics crowd streets and stadiums to yell slogans in favor of military coups.
On the high seas, smugglers’ boats make perilous journeys to Europe and the Middle East, carrying desperate young Africans and their dreams of a better future. At least 28,000 have died on the Mediterranean since 2014, the United Nations says.
The climate crisis is an especially urgent concern.
Two boys walk by a large, resulted fishing boat stranded out of the water on a sandy beach, at sunset.
MOZAMBIQUE
Two young girls, one in a pink hijab, the other in a green one, sitting at a work table with others, welding a metal piece as they learn how to fix electronics.
NIGERIA
A busy street scene in [], Kenya, with a man standing in the doorway of a bus as it passes schoolchildren in uniforms, and a woman in commute, wearing a floral suit set.
KENYA
Floods, droughts and storms have battered African countries.
Two boys walk by a large, resulted fishing boat stranded out of the water on a sandy beach, at sunset.
Concern about climate change is shaping plans for the future
Two young girls, one in a pink hijab, the other in a green one, sitting at a work table with others, welding a metal piece as they learn how to fix electronics.
and stoking worries about its impact.
A busy street scene in [], Kenya, with a man standing in the doorway of a bus as it passes schoolchildren in uniforms, and a woman in commute, wearing a floral suit set.
“Our generation takes things personally,” said Keziah Keya, a 21-year-old software engineer from Kenya.
Ms. Keya exemplifies the potential of that generation. Born into a poor family, she taught herself to code using the internet, and later represented Kenya at the International Math Olympiad in London. Last year, she was hired by a renewable energy company.
But she recently watched in dismay as a river near her home ran dry. Soon after, her grandmother’s crop of tomatoes withered. Starving cattle began to die. Three local herders took their own lives, she said.
“If we want to change things, we have to do it ourselves,” said Ms. Keya, who last month flew to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to study computer science, on a full scholarship. But she sees her future in Kenya. “We can’t afford to wait.”
Forecasting population trends is a fraught and contentious business, with a history of flawed predictions. In the 1970s, books like “The Population Bomb” by Paul R. Ehrlich popularized fears that an overcrowded planet would lead to mass starvation and societal collapse.
Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.
But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.
Population by country
Angola
Ivory Coast
Cameroon
Dem. Rep.of Congo
Algeria
Egypt
113M
160M
Ethiopia
127M
Ghana
Kenya
Madagascar
Mozambique
Niger
Nigeria
224M
377M
Sudan
Tanzania
Uganda
South Africa
2023
2050
Region:
Northern Africa
Eastern Africa
Western Africa
Middle Africa
Southern Africa
Total:
1.5BTotal:
2.5B
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022. Regions are based on U.N. classifications. By Lauren Leatherby
“It’s the mother of all megatrends,” said Carlos Lopes, an economist from Guinea-Bissau who formerly headed the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.
Many others agree. The economic rise of China and India were the first great shocks of this century, they say. Africa’s youthful tide will most likely drive the next seismic shift.
Its first tremors are already being felt, and nowhere more than in global culture.
CULTURAL POWERHOUSE
When the Nigerian star Burna Boy stepped out before an adoring crowd at New York’s Citi Field this summer, he confirmed himself as pop royalty.
Weeks earlier, in London, he had filled an 80,000-capacity venue. In New York, he became the first African artist to sell out an American stadium.
He sang his new single, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”
It was yet another milestone for Afrobeats, a West African musical genre that is becoming a global sensation. Afrobeats songs were streamed over 13 billion times on Spotify last year, up from eight billion in 2021; the genre’s biggest hit, Rema’s “Calm Down,” was a fan phenomenon at the soccer World Cup in Qatar. Countless TikTok dance challenges were born.
“It’s a great time to be alive,” said Laolu Senbanjo, a Nigerian artist living in Brooklyn. “Whether I’m in Target or an Uber, I hear the Afrobeats. It’s like a bridge. The world has come together.”
African artists seemed to be on red carpets everywhere this year — at the Grammy Awards, which added a new category for Best African Music; at the Met Gala, where the Nigerian singer Tems came fringed in ostrich feathers; and at the Cannes Film Festival, where a young French-Senegalese director, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, was a breakout star.
African fashion had its own shows in Paris and Milan. In Venice, Africa is the focus of this year’s Architectural Biennale. Last year, an architect from Burkina Faso won the prestigious Pritzker Prize. In 2021, Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Africa’s not just one place,” he said in an interview. “It’s complicated and complex; differentiated, contrasted.”
Long viewed in the West as a niche interest — or worse, exotica — African culture has become the continent’s soft power, and, increasingly, a source of hard cash.
The world’s fastest growing music market is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the main industry body. By 2030, Africa’s film and music industries could be worth $20 billion and create 20 million jobs, according to UNESCO estimates.
Young Africans are honing their talents, sensing an opening.
Onlookers look up and some cheer a model striding on a runway in a cropped t-shirt, embroidered wide-legged jeans and stiletto heels.
NIGERIA
Three young Kenyans in the foreground of a classroom concentrating as they play violins.
KENYA
A group of young adults sharing a laugh, including a woman sitting on the floor in front of a bowl of dates next to two smiling men holding cellphones.
SENEGAL
In Lagos, young designers show their creations.
Onlookers look up and some cheer a model striding on a runway in a cropped t-shirt, embroidered wide-legged jeans and stiletto heels.
In Nairobi, hundreds in a poor neighborhood are learning to play classical music.
Three young Kenyans in the foreground of a classroom concentrating as they play violins.
In Dakar, a break-dancing team prepares to perform in the youth Olympics.
A group of young adults sharing a laugh, including a woman sitting on the floor in front of a bowl of dates next to two smiling men holding cellphones.
Scriptwriters and animators are shaking off the clichéd image of a continent defined by famine and conflict to tell new stories — frothy reality shows, gritty gangster tales and even children’s cartoons, made in Africa by Africans, that have aired on streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime.
This summer, “Supa Team Four,” a cartoon series about teenage superheroes from Zambia who save the world, aired on Netflix. The theme is power — girl power, teen power but also plain electricity: The chief villain tries to knock out the city power grid.
Malenga Mulendema, the show’s creator, worked with a team across six African countries, and said that the movie “Black Panther,” when it came out in 2018, “paved the way” for new depictions of Africa. “People want to box us in,” she said. “But when you have multiple shows like this you can’t box in, anymore, what it means to tell an African story.”
The commercial potential of Africa’s cultural might is only starting to be realized. Netflix has spent $175 million in Africa since 2016, but has plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korea. It was not until 2004 that a work by an African artist sold for over $1 million at auction, according to Hannah O’Leary, the head of modern and contemporary African art at Sotheby’s. Since then, another 11 have passed that bar. “But the market is still hugely under-realized,” she said.
Foreign companies are looking to cash in. This year gamma, a music company owned in part by Apple, set up an office in Lagos, hoping to discover the next Burna Boy, or even a host of smaller stars. “We’re going straight to the source,” said Sipho Dlamini, a gamma executive.
Born in Zimbabwe but raised in Watford, outside London, in the 1980s, Mr. Dlamini remembers being bullied because of his background. “We were called names,” he said. “All kinds of names.”
Now, “African” is a badge of pride. “Historically, the image was what people saw on TV: kids starving, kwashiorkor and flies,” he said, referring to a severe form of malnutrition marked by a swollen belly. “Now they will tell you they are dying to come to Cape Town, to Mombasa, to Zanzibar. It’s cool to be African.”
JOBS CRISIS
Zeinab Moawad wondered if she was wasting her time.
The 18-year-old stood outside the tutoring center in Cairo where she had spent a year cramming for college entrance exams. But even if she was granted a place in Egypt’s best engineering or medical schools, she doubted that it would lead to a good job.
“We’re on our own,” she said.
Not long ago, technology was the big idea for enabling Africa to leapfrog its way out of poverty.
Start-ups sprouted in countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco. Innovative technologies, like M-Pesa, brought mobile banking to tens of millions of people. Women-only coding schools emerged. Microsoft and Google established major centers in Kenya, the self-styled “Silicon Savannah” of East Africa. Optimists spoke of an “Africa rising.”
But while technology brought billions in investment, it failed dismally on one crucial front: creating jobs.
A young boy, covered in white dust, holding a bucket and walking by sacks of grain in a market.
NIGERIA
Five fishermen working in a wooden boat on a gray sea under gray skies.
MOZAMBIQUE
A man in a white t-shirt and shorts leaning against the open doorway of a cinderblock house.
MOROCCO
Chronic unemployment, an old problem, is now a major crisis.
A young boy, covered in white dust, holding a bucket and walking by sacks of grain in a market.
The continent’s working-age population — people aged 15 to 65 — will hit one billion in the next decade.
Five fishermen working in a wooden boat on a gray sea under gray skies.
What will these one billion workers do?
A man in a white t-shirt and shorts leaning against the open doorway of a cinderblock house.
“That’s a problem,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecommunications tycoon and philanthropist.
It is also a problem for the world, said Aubrey Hruby, an investor in Africa and an author of “The Next Africa.” She said, “After climate change, Africa’s jobs crisis will be a defining challenge of our era.”
Elsewhere, the answer was industrialization. In the 1970s and 1980s, when China, South Korea and Japan were the engines of population growth, their factories were filled with young people producing clothes, cars and TVs. It made them rich and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Africa is poorly positioned to repeat that feat. Other than South Africa and a handful of countries in North Africa, most of the continent has failed to industrialize. In fact, it is losing ground: Africa’s share of global manufacturing is smaller today than it was in 1980.
Infrastructure is an obstacle. Six hundred million Africans, or four in 10, lack electricity. An average American refrigerator consumes more power in a year than a typical person in Africa. Major roads and railways often lead to the coasts, a legacy of extractive colonialism, which inhibits trade between countries.
And the baby boom endures, smothering economic growth.
Other regions, like East Asia, prospered only after their birthrates had fallen substantially and a majority of their people had joined the work force — a phenomenon known as the “demographic transition” that has long driven global growth. Britain’s transition took two centuries, from the 1740s to the 1940s. Thailand did it in about 40 years.
But in Africa, where birthrates remain stubbornly high — nearly twice the global average — that transition has proved elusive.
The picture changes greatly from one country to another. In South Africa, women have two children on average, while in Niger they have seven. Some smaller economies, like those of Rwanda and Ivory Coast, are among the world’s fastest growing. But on the whole, the continent cannot keep pace with its swelling population.
Adjusted for population size, Africa’s economy has grown by 1 percent annually since 1990, according to the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the same period, India’s grew 5 percent per year and China’s grew 9 percent.
Despite making up 18 percent of the global population, Africa accounts for just 3 percent of all trade.
For legions of jobless and frustrated young Africans, that leaves only one good option: Get out. Every year, tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, academics and other skilled migrants flee the continent. (At least one million Africans from south of the Sahara have moved to Europe since 2010, according to the Pew Research Center.) Migration is such a feature of life in Nigeria that young people have a name for it — “japa,” Yoruba slang that means “to run away.”
And the countries they leave behind depend on them to survive. In 2021, African migrants sent home $96 billion in remittances, three times more than the sum of all foreign aid, according to the African Development Bank.
“The African diaspora has become the largest financier of Africa,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the bank’s head.
In fact, the majority of young migrants do not even leave the continent, moving instead to other countries in Africa. But the plight of those who gamble their lives to travel further — left to die in sinking boats by the Greek Coast Guard, gunned down by Saudi border police or even stumbling through Central American jungle to reach the United States — has become a potent emblem of generational desperation.
The new big idea to invigorate African economies is the transition to green energy. African governments and investors are angling for a piece of the global effort, sure to involve trillions of dollars in the coming decades, which they hope can deliver Africa’s much-sought-after industrial revolution.
Africa has 60 percent of the world’s solar energy potential and 70 percent of its cobalt, a key mineral for making electric vehicles. Its tropical rainforests pull more carbon from the atmosphere than the Amazon. Ambitious ventures are taking shape in numerous countries: a dazzling solar tower in Morocco; a $10 billion green hydrogen plant in Namibia; a Kenyan-made machine that extracts carbon from the air.
The Africa Climate Summit, which took place in Nairobi in September, not only galvanized those seeking to profit from the climate transition, it also produced a bullish new narrative.
“Africa is neither poor nor desperate,” President William Ruto of Kenya said.
Whether young Africans can truly tap the potential of the coming energy revolution depends on other factors, too, not least the capacities of their entrenched and aging leaders.
YOUNG VOTERS, OLD LEADERS
A youthful continent is run by old men. The average African leader is 63 years old; the oldest, President Paul Biya of Cameroon, is 90, a full 72 years older than the average Cameroonian. Under their grip, democracy has fallen to its lowest point in decades: Half of all Africans live in countries considered “not free” by Freedom House.
Five African heads of state, including Mr. Biya, have held power for more than three decades; nearly all are grooming their sons as successors. “Sick old men,” said the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, in an interview.
Even so, foreign powers are scrambling to back them.
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, in power since 1994, receives over $1 billion in Western aid annually, and has established his tiny country as a hub for sports and international conferences — even as he is accused of killing or kidnapping his critics, or purports to win elections by a margin of 99 percent.
As the United States, China and Russia vie for position, an array of middle powers is crowding in too. About 400 new embassies have opened in African countries since 2012, according to the Diplometrics Program at the University of Denver; Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and India top the list.
Embassies in Africa, 2012 to 2021
Opened more than 10 new embassies since 2012
01020304050
China
2012202148 embassies53
United States
France
Turkey
+26 embassies20122021
Germany
U.K.
+10
Russia
India
+14 embassies
Brazil
+10
Japan
Cuba
Vatican City
Spain
Italy
Saudi Arabia
Qatar
+16 embassies
Netherlands
South Korea
Belgium
U.A.E.
+11 embassies
Iran
Canada
Note: Includes non-African countries with more than 20 embassies in Africa in 2021. Source: University of Denver Pardee Center Diplomatic Representation Database By Lauren Leatherby
Yet there is one key group that Africa’s gerontocrats have disastrously failed to win over: the alienated youth of their own nations.
“Our elites treat us like idiots,” Nourdine Aouadé, a lawyer and young political leader, said at his office in Niger’s capital, Niamey, after a military takeover in August. Like many young Nigeriens, Mr. Awade, 32, supported the action.
“Coups are just the consequence of social injustice,” he said.
Male students in a university dorm room, sitting on wooden bunk beds and looking at laptops together.
SENEGAL
Young men throwing rocks, next to an overturned car in an urban shantytown.
KENYA
Three people standing upright in rubble next to a patched corrugated iron building. They are wearing uniforms with straps crossing in X’s over their chests and small potted trees balanced on their heads.
KENYA
Most young Africans admire and desire democracy, numerous polls have found.
Male students in a university dorm room, sitting on wooden bunk beds and looking at laptops together.
But disillusionment with politicians’ empty promises is giving rise to a new age of protest
Young men throwing rocks, next to an overturned car in an urban shantytown.
and to political activism, like these performance artists focused on climate change.
Three people standing upright in rubble next to a patched corrugated iron building. They are wearing uniforms with straps crossing in X’s over their chests and small potted trees balanced on their heads.
Youthful uprisings first flared in 2011, during the Arab Spring, when an uprising in Tunisia inspired others in Egypt and Libya. Later, powerful demonstrations erupted in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Senegal and even Eswatini, a tiny kingdom of 1.2 million people in southern Africa.
This year, young people have channeled their anger into pro-military populism — cheering the new junta in Niger or, weeks later, Gabon, where they posted TikTok videos mocking their newly ousted president, Ali Bongo Ondimba. Other leaders, watching nervously, worry that they could be next.
The age gap between geriatric leaders and restless youth is “a major source of tension” in many African countries, said Simon Mulongo, a former African Union diplomat from Uganda. “It’s a powder keg, and it can explode anytime.”
One day last spring, Nuha Abdelgadir was hunched over her phone at a cafe in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Her thumb flicked restlessly through a gallery of smiling faces — friends who had been killed by Sudan’s security forces in pro-democracy demonstrations. Ms. Abdelgadir, 18, had come to take their place.
“We’re equal with the boys,” she said, gesturing to another young woman. “We’ve got shields, we throw stones, we clash.”
Her group, “Anger Without Limits,” was at the fore of the street clashes that had occurred every week since Sudan’s military had seized power in a coup 18 months earlier. Ms. Abdelgadir’s job was to pluck streaming tear-gas canisters from the ground and fling them back at the police. It was risky work, she admitted; over 100 protesters had been killed. But, she said, “I don’t care.”
Weeks later, Sudan tumbled into war. Fighting between rival military factions in mid-April rippled across Khartoum, then the country. On the third day of fighting, a stray shell punched through Ms. Abdelgadir’s home, sending it up in flames. She fled with her family to the countryside. By September, she was planning to leave Sudan, and even the continent.
Even then, she insisted she would be back to finish what she had started. “We will take to the streets again,” she texted, the night before boarding a bus taking her over Sudan’s border into Ethiopia. “The democracy we dream of will come.”
MILITANTS SPREADING
While some take flight, others pick up a gun.
In the Sahel, the semiarid region bordering the Sahara that runs across the African continent, tens of thousands of teenagers have joined militant groups linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State. They bring havoc in their wake — thousands of civilians killed, five million forced from their homes and political destabilization that has led to a string of military coups.
But the main driver of this powerful insurgency is not an extremist ideology or religious belief, according to a U.N. study of 1,000 former fighters from eight countries. Instead, researchers found, the single biggest reason for joining a militant group was the simple desire to have a job.
Modu Ali, from a poor family with 10 children in northern Nigeria, had barely finished primary school when he joined the extremist group Boko Haram, over a decade ago. His goal was to “fight for the rights of the deprived,” he said. “Instead it ruined my life.” He surrendered and joined a rehabilitation program for former fighters.
The Sahel leads the world in two ways. It is the global center of extremist violence, accounting for 43 percent of all such deaths in 2022, according to the Global Terrorism Index. And it has the highest birthrates — on average seven children per woman in Niger and northern Nigeria, six in Mali and Chad, and five in Sudan and Burkina Faso.
Women in hijabs and flowing dresses, many holding babies and children, waiting at a maternity clinic.
NIGERIA
A boy holding an axe over his head, chopping wood in a pen holding longhorn cattle.
NIGERIA
Young boys sitting on a small wooden boat that is stranded on a cracked, dry riverbed.
MOROCCO
High birthrates alone do not cause insurgencies.
Women in hijabs and flowing dresses, many holding babies and children, waiting at a maternity clinic.
But they are a major accelerant when combined with weak states and deep poverty.
A boy holding an axe over his head, chopping wood in a pen holding longhorn cattle.
A warming planet is also a major factor, erasing livelihoods and driving people to desperation.
Young boys sitting on a small wooden boat that is stranded on a cracked, dry riverbed.
These factors are why many view the Sahel as the most worrisome manifestation of Africa’s “youthquake.”
One key to tackling that problem lies with teenage girls like Asiya Saidu.
Like many in Zaria, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, Ms. Saidu expected to be married by 14 and to have her first child soon after. “My uncle was hellbent on finding me a husband,” she recalled.
Instead, she enrolled at the Center for Girls Education, an American-funded program that has helped as many as 70,000 girls to stay in school, and ultimately to have smaller families.
Educating girls has an unusually large effect on family size in Africa because it delays the age of marriage and helps young women to space out their children, researchers have found. “It’s a natural kind of birth control,” said Habiba Mohammed, the program’s director.
Ms. Saidu, now 17, recently applied for nursing school.
“I do want to get married,” she said. But first, she said, “I want to be independent and learn to support myself.”
THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
It could be that Africa will undergo transformations that are hard to see now.
When the economist Ha-Joon Chang was growing up in South Korea in the 1960s, his country was subjected to the same condescension and racism leveled at many African nations today, he said. It was poor, had just emerged from war, and was seen by American officials as a basket case.
“Nobody took us seriously,” said Mr. Chang, now a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
That South Korea has become one of the world’s largest economies shows how success can strike in the most unlikely places, Mr. Chang added: “With time and effort, remarkable transformations are possible.”
A young population was a big part of South Korea’s success, Mr. Chang said. But it took other ingredients, too: visionary leaders, wise policies and education, as well as intangibles like drive, innovation and sheer good fortune, he said. “A lot of things have to work together.”
Could Africa’s youth boom portend a similar miracle?
This year’s surging turmoil — new crises, new wars and new economic slumps — would give pause to the greatest of optimists. Yet there are also reasons to hope.
“I tell my friends in England that the time will come when they will put out a red carpet for those guys now coming in boats,” said Mr. Ibrahim, the philanthropist.
Young people in sunglasses are among those walking across a plaza in front of a mosque with two tall fluted minarets
SENEGAL
A photo taken through the sun-filled window of an office building, showing workers in headphones sitting at laptops. Reflections create streaks of light across the window.
KENYA
A young man skateboarding in the air on a skateboard, as he skates down a ramp
KENYA
African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing: a youthful population
Young people in sunglasses are among those walking across a plaza in front of a mosque with two tall fluted minarets
brimming with energy, ideas and creativity
A photo taken through the sun-filled window of an office building, showing workers in headphones sitting at laptops. Reflections create streaks of light across the window.
that will shape their future, and the world’s.
A young man skateboarding in the air on a skateboard, as he skates down a ramp
Some, like Nedye Astou Touré, are already reaching for the stars.
Ms. Touré, a 23-year-old student, stood over a pile of old aircraft parts at a university lab in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation. “It’s for a rocket,” she said of the pile.
She and another senior at the university hope to launch their projectile 100 meters into the air, a first step toward building a low-orbit satellite.
It might take a while, Ms. Touré admitted. But while others with such grand dreams have typically left Africa behind, she wanted to show it can be done at home.
“Just wait,” she said. “Three years from now you might be hearing about us.”
Two people on the open sea in a small boat with a tattered sail.
Ismail Alfa contributed reporting from Nigeria, Elian Peltier from Ivory Coast and Niger, Dionne Searcey from Senegal, and Vivian Yee from Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
Astonishing change is underway in Africa, where the population is projected to nearly double to 2.5 billion over the next quarter-century — an era that will not only transform many African countries, experts say, but also radically reshape their relationship with the rest of the world.
Birthrates are tumbling in richer nations, creating anxiety about how to care for, and pay for, their aging societies. But Africa’s baby boom continues apace, fueling the youngest, fastest growing population on earth.
In 1950, Africans made up 8 percent of the world’s people. A century later, they will account for one-quarter of humanity, and at least one-third of all young people aged 15 to 24, according to United Nations forecasts.
The median age on the African continent is 19. In India, the world’s most populous country, it is 28. In China and the United States, it is 38.
More than a third of the world’s young people will live in Africa by 2050
Share of global population aged 15 to 24
2023
2050
35%
Africa
29%
Southern Asia
26%
24%
23%
Eastern and Southeastern Asia
17%
Latin America and the Caribbean
6.9%
8.6%
6.3%
Europe 5.1%
Western Asia 4.4%
4%
Northern America
3.5%
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022. Regions are based on U.N. classifications. Regions with less than 1 percent of the global population are not shown. By Lauren Leatherby
The implications of this “youthquake,” as some call it, are immense yet uncertain, and likely to vary greatly across Africa, a continent of myriad cultures and some 54 countries that covers an area larger than China, Europe, India and the United States combined. But its first signs are already here.
It reverberates in the bustle and thrum of the continent’s ballooning cities, their hectic streets jammed with new arrivals, that make Africa the most rapidly urbanizing continent on earth.
It pulses in the packed stadiums of London or New York, where African musicians are storming the world of pop, and in the heaving megachurches of West Africa, where the future of Christianity is being shaped.
And it shows in the glow of Africa’s 670 million cellphones, one for every second person on the continent — the dominant internet device used to move money, launch revolutions, stoke frustrations and feed dreams.
“It feels like the opportunities are unlimited for us right now,” said Jean-Patrick Niambé, a 24-year-old hip-hop artist from Ivory Coast who uses the stage name Dofy, as he rode in a taxi to a concert in the capital, Abidjan, this year.
Africa’s political reach is growing, too. Its leaders are courted at flashy summits by foreign powers that covet their huge reserves of the minerals needed to make electric cars and solar panels.
With a growing choice of eager allies, including Russia, China, the United States, Turkey and Gulf petrostates, African leaders are spurning the image of victim and demanding a bigger say. In September, the African Union joined the Group of 20, the premier forum for international economic cooperation, taking a seat at the same table as the European Union.
Businesses are chasing Africa’s tens of millions of new consumers emerging every year, representing untapped markets for cosmetics, organic foods, even champagne. Hilton plans to open 65 new hotels on the continent within five years. Its population of millionaires, the fastest growing on earth, is expected to double to 768,000 by 2027, the bank Credit Suisse estimates.
Dinner at Sushi Mitsuki, a new restaurant in a neighborhood with a rising skyline in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, starts at $200 per person.
“Africa is entering a period of truly staggering change,” said Edward Paice, the director of the Africa Research Institute in London and the author of “Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World.”
He added:
An expansive crowd of Muslims in holiday dress, standing shoulder to shoulder, their hands clasped and heads bowed in prayer.
NIGERIA
A woman lying under a blanket, nursing a baby wrapped in cloth.
MOZAMBIQUE
Three young people doing a synchronized dance on a traffic island in a street.
KENYA
“The world is changing.”
An expansive crowd of Muslims in holiday dress, standing shoulder to shoulder, their hands clasped and heads bowed in prayer.
“And we need to start reimagining Africa’s place in it.”
A woman lying under a blanket, nursing a baby wrapped in cloth.
The energy in Africa contrasts with the rising uneasiness in Europe and Asia.
Three young people doing a synchronized dance on a traffic island in a street.
In many countries, historically low birthrates are creating older, smaller populations. Caregivers in Italy, which is expected to have 12 percent fewer people by 2050, are experimenting with robots to look after the aged. The prime minister of Japan, where the median age is 48, warned in January that his society was “on the verge” of dysfunction.
Africa’s challenge is to manage unbridled growth. It has always been a young continent — only two decades ago the median age was 17 — but never on such a scale. Within the next decade, Africa will have the world’s largest work force, surpassing China and India. By the 2040s, it will account for two out of every five children born on the planet.
The median age on the African continent is 19
Median age group: 10-19 years old 20-29 30-39 40-49
Russia
Canada
Germany
United
States
Japan
China
Iran
Egypt
India
Mexico
Nigeria
Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Dem. Rep.
of Congo
Indonesia
Brazil
Australia
South
Africa
Argentina
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022 By Lauren Leatherby
Experts say this approaching tide of humanity will push Africa to the fore of the most pressing concerns of our age, like climate change, the energy transition and migration.
But it has also exposed the continent’s gaping vulnerabilities.
PERIL AND POTENTIAL
Africa’s soaring population is partly a result of remarkable progress. Africans eat better and live longer than ever, on average. Infant mortality has been halved since 2000; calorie intake has soared.
But while a handful of African countries are poised to ride the demographic wave, others risk being swamped by it.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average.
Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.
Young Africans are better educated and more connected than ever: 44 percent graduated from high school in 2020, up from 27 percent in 2000, and about 570 million people use the internet. But finding a good job, or any job, is another matter.
Up to one million Africans enter the labor market every month, but fewer than one in four get a formal job, the World Bank says. Unemployment in South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized nation, runs at a crushing 35 percent.
Frustration feeds desperation.
In countries like Somalia, Mozambique and Mali, opportunity-starved youths pick up guns to fight for jihad, or for money. In Gabon and Niger, youngsters fed up with sham politics crowd streets and stadiums to yell slogans in favor of military coups.
On the high seas, smugglers’ boats make perilous journeys to Europe and the Middle East, carrying desperate young Africans and their dreams of a better future. At least 28,000 have died on the Mediterranean since 2014, the United Nations says.
The climate crisis is an especially urgent concern.
Two boys walk by a large, resulted fishing boat stranded out of the water on a sandy beach, at sunset.
MOZAMBIQUE
Two young girls, one in a pink hijab, the other in a green one, sitting at a work table with others, welding a metal piece as they learn how to fix electronics.
NIGERIA
A busy street scene in [], Kenya, with a man standing in the doorway of a bus as it passes schoolchildren in uniforms, and a woman in commute, wearing a floral suit set.
KENYA
Floods, droughts and storms have battered African countries.
Two boys walk by a large, resulted fishing boat stranded out of the water on a sandy beach, at sunset.
Concern about climate change is shaping plans for the future
Two young girls, one in a pink hijab, the other in a green one, sitting at a work table with others, welding a metal piece as they learn how to fix electronics.
and stoking worries about its impact.
A busy street scene in [], Kenya, with a man standing in the doorway of a bus as it passes schoolchildren in uniforms, and a woman in commute, wearing a floral suit set.
“Our generation takes things personally,” said Keziah Keya, a 21-year-old software engineer from Kenya.
Ms. Keya exemplifies the potential of that generation. Born into a poor family, she taught herself to code using the internet, and later represented Kenya at the International Math Olympiad in London. Last year, she was hired by a renewable energy company.
But she recently watched in dismay as a river near her home ran dry. Soon after, her grandmother’s crop of tomatoes withered. Starving cattle began to die. Three local herders took their own lives, she said.
“If we want to change things, we have to do it ourselves,” said Ms. Keya, who last month flew to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to study computer science, on a full scholarship. But she sees her future in Kenya. “We can’t afford to wait.”
Forecasting population trends is a fraught and contentious business, with a history of flawed predictions. In the 1970s, books like “The Population Bomb” by Paul R. Ehrlich popularized fears that an overcrowded planet would lead to mass starvation and societal collapse.
Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.
But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.
Population by country
Angola
Ivory Coast
Cameroon
Dem. Rep.of Congo
Algeria
Egypt
113M
160M
Ethiopia
127M
Ghana
Kenya
Madagascar
Mozambique
Niger
Nigeria
224M
377M
Sudan
Tanzania
Uganda
South Africa
2023
2050
Region:
Northern Africa
Eastern Africa
Western Africa
Middle Africa
Southern Africa
Total:
1.5BTotal:
2.5B
Source: U.N. World Population Prospects 2022. Regions are based on U.N. classifications. By Lauren Leatherby
“It’s the mother of all megatrends,” said Carlos Lopes, an economist from Guinea-Bissau who formerly headed the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.
Many others agree. The economic rise of China and India were the first great shocks of this century, they say. Africa’s youthful tide will most likely drive the next seismic shift.
Its first tremors are already being felt, and nowhere more than in global culture.
CULTURAL POWERHOUSE
When the Nigerian star Burna Boy stepped out before an adoring crowd at New York’s Citi Field this summer, he confirmed himself as pop royalty.
Weeks earlier, in London, he had filled an 80,000-capacity venue. In New York, he became the first African artist to sell out an American stadium.
He sang his new single, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”
It was yet another milestone for Afrobeats, a West African musical genre that is becoming a global sensation. Afrobeats songs were streamed over 13 billion times on Spotify last year, up from eight billion in 2021; the genre’s biggest hit, Rema’s “Calm Down,” was a fan phenomenon at the soccer World Cup in Qatar. Countless TikTok dance challenges were born.
“It’s a great time to be alive,” said Laolu Senbanjo, a Nigerian artist living in Brooklyn. “Whether I’m in Target or an Uber, I hear the Afrobeats. It’s like a bridge. The world has come together.”
African artists seemed to be on red carpets everywhere this year — at the Grammy Awards, which added a new category for Best African Music; at the Met Gala, where the Nigerian singer Tems came fringed in ostrich feathers; and at the Cannes Film Festival, where a young French-Senegalese director, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, was a breakout star.
African fashion had its own shows in Paris and Milan. In Venice, Africa is the focus of this year’s Architectural Biennale. Last year, an architect from Burkina Faso won the prestigious Pritzker Prize. In 2021, Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Africa’s not just one place,” he said in an interview. “It’s complicated and complex; differentiated, contrasted.”
Long viewed in the West as a niche interest — or worse, exotica — African culture has become the continent’s soft power, and, increasingly, a source of hard cash.
The world’s fastest growing music market is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the main industry body. By 2030, Africa’s film and music industries could be worth $20 billion and create 20 million jobs, according to UNESCO estimates.
Young Africans are honing their talents, sensing an opening.
Onlookers look up and some cheer a model striding on a runway in a cropped t-shirt, embroidered wide-legged jeans and stiletto heels.
NIGERIA
Three young Kenyans in the foreground of a classroom concentrating as they play violins.
KENYA
A group of young adults sharing a laugh, including a woman sitting on the floor in front of a bowl of dates next to two smiling men holding cellphones.
SENEGAL
In Lagos, young designers show their creations.
Onlookers look up and some cheer a model striding on a runway in a cropped t-shirt, embroidered wide-legged jeans and stiletto heels.
In Nairobi, hundreds in a poor neighborhood are learning to play classical music.
Three young Kenyans in the foreground of a classroom concentrating as they play violins.
In Dakar, a break-dancing team prepares to perform in the youth Olympics.
A group of young adults sharing a laugh, including a woman sitting on the floor in front of a bowl of dates next to two smiling men holding cellphones.
Scriptwriters and animators are shaking off the clichéd image of a continent defined by famine and conflict to tell new stories — frothy reality shows, gritty gangster tales and even children’s cartoons, made in Africa by Africans, that have aired on streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime.
This summer, “Supa Team Four,” a cartoon series about teenage superheroes from Zambia who save the world, aired on Netflix. The theme is power — girl power, teen power but also plain electricity: The chief villain tries to knock out the city power grid.
Malenga Mulendema, the show’s creator, worked with a team across six African countries, and said that the movie “Black Panther,” when it came out in 2018, “paved the way” for new depictions of Africa. “People want to box us in,” she said. “But when you have multiple shows like this you can’t box in, anymore, what it means to tell an African story.”
The commercial potential of Africa’s cultural might is only starting to be realized. Netflix has spent $175 million in Africa since 2016, but has plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korea. It was not until 2004 that a work by an African artist sold for over $1 million at auction, according to Hannah O’Leary, the head of modern and contemporary African art at Sotheby’s. Since then, another 11 have passed that bar. “But the market is still hugely under-realized,” she said.
Foreign companies are looking to cash in. This year gamma, a music company owned in part by Apple, set up an office in Lagos, hoping to discover the next Burna Boy, or even a host of smaller stars. “We’re going straight to the source,” said Sipho Dlamini, a gamma executive.
Born in Zimbabwe but raised in Watford, outside London, in the 1980s, Mr. Dlamini remembers being bullied because of his background. “We were called names,” he said. “All kinds of names.”
Now, “African” is a badge of pride. “Historically, the image was what people saw on TV: kids starving, kwashiorkor and flies,” he said, referring to a severe form of malnutrition marked by a swollen belly. “Now they will tell you they are dying to come to Cape Town, to Mombasa, to Zanzibar. It’s cool to be African.”
JOBS CRISIS
Zeinab Moawad wondered if she was wasting her time.
The 18-year-old stood outside the tutoring center in Cairo where she had spent a year cramming for college entrance exams. But even if she was granted a place in Egypt’s best engineering or medical schools, she doubted that it would lead to a good job.
“We’re on our own,” she said.
Not long ago, technology was the big idea for enabling Africa to leapfrog its way out of poverty.
Start-ups sprouted in countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco. Innovative technologies, like M-Pesa, brought mobile banking to tens of millions of people. Women-only coding schools emerged. Microsoft and Google established major centers in Kenya, the self-styled “Silicon Savannah” of East Africa. Optimists spoke of an “Africa rising.”
But while technology brought billions in investment, it failed dismally on one crucial front: creating jobs.
A young boy, covered in white dust, holding a bucket and walking by sacks of grain in a market.
NIGERIA
Five fishermen working in a wooden boat on a gray sea under gray skies.
MOZAMBIQUE
A man in a white t-shirt and shorts leaning against the open doorway of a cinderblock house.
MOROCCO
Chronic unemployment, an old problem, is now a major crisis.
A young boy, covered in white dust, holding a bucket and walking by sacks of grain in a market.
The continent’s working-age population — people aged 15 to 65 — will hit one billion in the next decade.
Five fishermen working in a wooden boat on a gray sea under gray skies.
What will these one billion workers do?
A man in a white t-shirt and shorts leaning against the open doorway of a cinderblock house.
“That’s a problem,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born telecommunications tycoon and philanthropist.
It is also a problem for the world, said Aubrey Hruby, an investor in Africa and an author of “The Next Africa.” She said, “After climate change, Africa’s jobs crisis will be a defining challenge of our era.”
Elsewhere, the answer was industrialization. In the 1970s and 1980s, when China, South Korea and Japan were the engines of population growth, their factories were filled with young people producing clothes, cars and TVs. It made them rich and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Africa is poorly positioned to repeat that feat. Other than South Africa and a handful of countries in North Africa, most of the continent has failed to industrialize. In fact, it is losing ground: Africa’s share of global manufacturing is smaller today than it was in 1980.
Infrastructure is an obstacle. Six hundred million Africans, or four in 10, lack electricity. An average American refrigerator consumes more power in a year than a typical person in Africa. Major roads and railways often lead to the coasts, a legacy of extractive colonialism, which inhibits trade between countries.
And the baby boom endures, smothering economic growth.
Other regions, like East Asia, prospered only after their birthrates had fallen substantially and a majority of their people had joined the work force — a phenomenon known as the “demographic transition” that has long driven global growth. Britain’s transition took two centuries, from the 1740s to the 1940s. Thailand did it in about 40 years.
But in Africa, where birthrates remain stubbornly high — nearly twice the global average — that transition has proved elusive.
The picture changes greatly from one country to another. In South Africa, women have two children on average, while in Niger they have seven. Some smaller economies, like those of Rwanda and Ivory Coast, are among the world’s fastest growing. But on the whole, the continent cannot keep pace with its swelling population.
Adjusted for population size, Africa’s economy has grown by 1 percent annually since 1990, according to the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the same period, India’s grew 5 percent per year and China’s grew 9 percent.
Despite making up 18 percent of the global population, Africa accounts for just 3 percent of all trade.
For legions of jobless and frustrated young Africans, that leaves only one good option: Get out. Every year, tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, academics and other skilled migrants flee the continent. (At least one million Africans from south of the Sahara have moved to Europe since 2010, according to the Pew Research Center.) Migration is such a feature of life in Nigeria that young people have a name for it — “japa,” Yoruba slang that means “to run away.”
And the countries they leave behind depend on them to survive. In 2021, African migrants sent home $96 billion in remittances, three times more than the sum of all foreign aid, according to the African Development Bank.
“The African diaspora has become the largest financier of Africa,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the bank’s head.
In fact, the majority of young migrants do not even leave the continent, moving instead to other countries in Africa. But the plight of those who gamble their lives to travel further — left to die in sinking boats by the Greek Coast Guard, gunned down by Saudi border police or even stumbling through Central American jungle to reach the United States — has become a potent emblem of generational desperation.
The new big idea to invigorate African economies is the transition to green energy. African governments and investors are angling for a piece of the global effort, sure to involve trillions of dollars in the coming decades, which they hope can deliver Africa’s much-sought-after industrial revolution.
Africa has 60 percent of the world’s solar energy potential and 70 percent of its cobalt, a key mineral for making electric vehicles. Its tropical rainforests pull more carbon from the atmosphere than the Amazon. Ambitious ventures are taking shape in numerous countries: a dazzling solar tower in Morocco; a $10 billion green hydrogen plant in Namibia; a Kenyan-made machine that extracts carbon from the air.
The Africa Climate Summit, which took place in Nairobi in September, not only galvanized those seeking to profit from the climate transition, it also produced a bullish new narrative.
“Africa is neither poor nor desperate,” President William Ruto of Kenya said.
Whether young Africans can truly tap the potential of the coming energy revolution depends on other factors, too, not least the capacities of their entrenched and aging leaders.
YOUNG VOTERS, OLD LEADERS
A youthful continent is run by old men. The average African leader is 63 years old; the oldest, President Paul Biya of Cameroon, is 90, a full 72 years older than the average Cameroonian. Under their grip, democracy has fallen to its lowest point in decades: Half of all Africans live in countries considered “not free” by Freedom House.
Five African heads of state, including Mr. Biya, have held power for more than three decades; nearly all are grooming their sons as successors. “Sick old men,” said the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, in an interview.
Even so, foreign powers are scrambling to back them.
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, in power since 1994, receives over $1 billion in Western aid annually, and has established his tiny country as a hub for sports and international conferences — even as he is accused of killing or kidnapping his critics, or purports to win elections by a margin of 99 percent.
As the United States, China and Russia vie for position, an array of middle powers is crowding in too. About 400 new embassies have opened in African countries since 2012, according to the Diplometrics Program at the University of Denver; Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and India top the list.
Embassies in Africa, 2012 to 2021
Opened more than 10 new embassies since 2012
01020304050
China
2012202148 embassies53
United States
France
Turkey
+26 embassies20122021
Germany
U.K.
+10
Russia
India
+14 embassies
Brazil
+10
Japan
Cuba
Vatican City
Spain
Italy
Saudi Arabia
Qatar
+16 embassies
Netherlands
South Korea
Belgium
U.A.E.
+11 embassies
Iran
Canada
Note: Includes non-African countries with more than 20 embassies in Africa in 2021. Source: University of Denver Pardee Center Diplomatic Representation Database By Lauren Leatherby
Yet there is one key group that Africa’s gerontocrats have disastrously failed to win over: the alienated youth of their own nations.
“Our elites treat us like idiots,” Nourdine Aouadé, a lawyer and young political leader, said at his office in Niger’s capital, Niamey, after a military takeover in August. Like many young Nigeriens, Mr. Awade, 32, supported the action.
“Coups are just the consequence of social injustice,” he said.
Male students in a university dorm room, sitting on wooden bunk beds and looking at laptops together.
SENEGAL
Young men throwing rocks, next to an overturned car in an urban shantytown.
KENYA
Three people standing upright in rubble next to a patched corrugated iron building. They are wearing uniforms with straps crossing in X’s over their chests and small potted trees balanced on their heads.
KENYA
Most young Africans admire and desire democracy, numerous polls have found.
Male students in a university dorm room, sitting on wooden bunk beds and looking at laptops together.
But disillusionment with politicians’ empty promises is giving rise to a new age of protest
Young men throwing rocks, next to an overturned car in an urban shantytown.
and to political activism, like these performance artists focused on climate change.
Three people standing upright in rubble next to a patched corrugated iron building. They are wearing uniforms with straps crossing in X’s over their chests and small potted trees balanced on their heads.
Youthful uprisings first flared in 2011, during the Arab Spring, when an uprising in Tunisia inspired others in Egypt and Libya. Later, powerful demonstrations erupted in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Senegal and even Eswatini, a tiny kingdom of 1.2 million people in southern Africa.
This year, young people have channeled their anger into pro-military populism — cheering the new junta in Niger or, weeks later, Gabon, where they posted TikTok videos mocking their newly ousted president, Ali Bongo Ondimba. Other leaders, watching nervously, worry that they could be next.
The age gap between geriatric leaders and restless youth is “a major source of tension” in many African countries, said Simon Mulongo, a former African Union diplomat from Uganda. “It’s a powder keg, and it can explode anytime.”
One day last spring, Nuha Abdelgadir was hunched over her phone at a cafe in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Her thumb flicked restlessly through a gallery of smiling faces — friends who had been killed by Sudan’s security forces in pro-democracy demonstrations. Ms. Abdelgadir, 18, had come to take their place.
“We’re equal with the boys,” she said, gesturing to another young woman. “We’ve got shields, we throw stones, we clash.”
Her group, “Anger Without Limits,” was at the fore of the street clashes that had occurred every week since Sudan’s military had seized power in a coup 18 months earlier. Ms. Abdelgadir’s job was to pluck streaming tear-gas canisters from the ground and fling them back at the police. It was risky work, she admitted; over 100 protesters had been killed. But, she said, “I don’t care.”
Weeks later, Sudan tumbled into war. Fighting between rival military factions in mid-April rippled across Khartoum, then the country. On the third day of fighting, a stray shell punched through Ms. Abdelgadir’s home, sending it up in flames. She fled with her family to the countryside. By September, she was planning to leave Sudan, and even the continent.
Even then, she insisted she would be back to finish what she had started. “We will take to the streets again,” she texted, the night before boarding a bus taking her over Sudan’s border into Ethiopia. “The democracy we dream of will come.”
MILITANTS SPREADING
While some take flight, others pick up a gun.
In the Sahel, the semiarid region bordering the Sahara that runs across the African continent, tens of thousands of teenagers have joined militant groups linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State. They bring havoc in their wake — thousands of civilians killed, five million forced from their homes and political destabilization that has led to a string of military coups.
But the main driver of this powerful insurgency is not an extremist ideology or religious belief, according to a U.N. study of 1,000 former fighters from eight countries. Instead, researchers found, the single biggest reason for joining a militant group was the simple desire to have a job.
Modu Ali, from a poor family with 10 children in northern Nigeria, had barely finished primary school when he joined the extremist group Boko Haram, over a decade ago. His goal was to “fight for the rights of the deprived,” he said. “Instead it ruined my life.” He surrendered and joined a rehabilitation program for former fighters.
The Sahel leads the world in two ways. It is the global center of extremist violence, accounting for 43 percent of all such deaths in 2022, according to the Global Terrorism Index. And it has the highest birthrates — on average seven children per woman in Niger and northern Nigeria, six in Mali and Chad, and five in Sudan and Burkina Faso.
Women in hijabs and flowing dresses, many holding babies and children, waiting at a maternity clinic.
NIGERIA
A boy holding an axe over his head, chopping wood in a pen holding longhorn cattle.
NIGERIA
Young boys sitting on a small wooden boat that is stranded on a cracked, dry riverbed.
MOROCCO
High birthrates alone do not cause insurgencies.
Women in hijabs and flowing dresses, many holding babies and children, waiting at a maternity clinic.
But they are a major accelerant when combined with weak states and deep poverty.
A boy holding an axe over his head, chopping wood in a pen holding longhorn cattle.
A warming planet is also a major factor, erasing livelihoods and driving people to desperation.
Young boys sitting on a small wooden boat that is stranded on a cracked, dry riverbed.
These factors are why many view the Sahel as the most worrisome manifestation of Africa’s “youthquake.”
One key to tackling that problem lies with teenage girls like Asiya Saidu.
Like many in Zaria, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, Ms. Saidu expected to be married by 14 and to have her first child soon after. “My uncle was hellbent on finding me a husband,” she recalled.
Instead, she enrolled at the Center for Girls Education, an American-funded program that has helped as many as 70,000 girls to stay in school, and ultimately to have smaller families.
Educating girls has an unusually large effect on family size in Africa because it delays the age of marriage and helps young women to space out their children, researchers have found. “It’s a natural kind of birth control,” said Habiba Mohammed, the program’s director.
Ms. Saidu, now 17, recently applied for nursing school.
“I do want to get married,” she said. But first, she said, “I want to be independent and learn to support myself.”
THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
It could be that Africa will undergo transformations that are hard to see now.
When the economist Ha-Joon Chang was growing up in South Korea in the 1960s, his country was subjected to the same condescension and racism leveled at many African nations today, he said. It was poor, had just emerged from war, and was seen by American officials as a basket case.
“Nobody took us seriously,” said Mr. Chang, now a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
That South Korea has become one of the world’s largest economies shows how success can strike in the most unlikely places, Mr. Chang added: “With time and effort, remarkable transformations are possible.”
A young population was a big part of South Korea’s success, Mr. Chang said. But it took other ingredients, too: visionary leaders, wise policies and education, as well as intangibles like drive, innovation and sheer good fortune, he said. “A lot of things have to work together.”
Could Africa’s youth boom portend a similar miracle?
This year’s surging turmoil — new crises, new wars and new economic slumps — would give pause to the greatest of optimists. Yet there are also reasons to hope.
“I tell my friends in England that the time will come when they will put out a red carpet for those guys now coming in boats,” said Mr. Ibrahim, the philanthropist.
Young people in sunglasses are among those walking across a plaza in front of a mosque with two tall fluted minarets
SENEGAL
A photo taken through the sun-filled window of an office building, showing workers in headphones sitting at laptops. Reflections create streaks of light across the window.
KENYA
A young man skateboarding in the air on a skateboard, as he skates down a ramp
KENYA
African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing: a youthful population
Young people in sunglasses are among those walking across a plaza in front of a mosque with two tall fluted minarets
brimming with energy, ideas and creativity
A photo taken through the sun-filled window of an office building, showing workers in headphones sitting at laptops. Reflections create streaks of light across the window.
that will shape their future, and the world’s.
A young man skateboarding in the air on a skateboard, as he skates down a ramp
Some, like Nedye Astou Touré, are already reaching for the stars.
Ms. Touré, a 23-year-old student, stood over a pile of old aircraft parts at a university lab in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation. “It’s for a rocket,” she said of the pile.
She and another senior at the university hope to launch their projectile 100 meters into the air, a first step toward building a low-orbit satellite.
It might take a while, Ms. Touré admitted. But while others with such grand dreams have typically left Africa behind, she wanted to show it can be done at home.
“Just wait,” she said. “Three years from now you might be hearing about us.”
Two people on the open sea in a small boat with a tattered sail.
Ismail Alfa contributed reporting from Nigeria, Elian Peltier from Ivory Coast and Niger, Dionne Searcey from Senegal, and Vivian Yee from Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
King Charles, Visiting Kenya, Faces Calls to Answer for Colonial Abuses
Older Kenyans who lived through the British colonial period want an apology and reparations. Younger Kenyans want an acknowledgment of more recent alleged abuses by British companies and troops.
Joseph Macharia Mwangi is among the last surviving veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial forces in Kenya in the 1950s. He has a message for King Charles.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
At 86, his gnarled hands grasping a walking stick as he ambled around his small patch of land facing Mount Kenya, Joseph Macharia Mwangi recalled with bitterness the years that he had spent fighting the British colonial government in Kenya.
Seven decades ago, he had camped with Mau Mau rebels on that mountain and in the forests, braving frigid rain, lions and elephants. He was shot twice by British troops, he said, and almost died. And when the colonial forces eventually captured him, he said he was tortured and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
“The British forces were really hard on us. They were terrible,” said Mr. Mwangi, who served directly under the uprising’s storied leader, Dedan Kimathi. “Now we want an apology and money for what they did.”
Kenya’s bleak colonial past loomed large as King Charles III officially began a four-day tour of the East African nation on Tuesday. It is his first state visit to any member of the Commonwealth group of nations since he became king last year, and the first to an African country.
Charles and Queen Camilla arrived in a Kenya where many communities are still grappling with the pain and loss they or their families endured over decades of British colonial rule, which lasted from 1895 to 1963. The king is under pressure from human rights groups, elders and activists to redress historical injustices, apologize and pay reparations to those who were tortured and removed from their ancestral lands.
His family has a close association with Kenya. His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was visiting the Treetops game lodge in 1952 when she learned that her father had died and she would succeed him as monarch. That year, Britain launched a bloody eight-year campaign to crush Kenya’s independence movement, led by the Mau Mau rebels.
Image
King Charles, wearing a dark suit and with his hands behind his back, looked at a large photograph at a museum.
King Charles III visited a new museum dedicated to Kenya’s history.Credit...Pool photo by Ian Vogler
There are still about 400 British military personnel stationed in Kenya for training. King Charles is also being asked to address abuses that some of those troops have been accused of committing over the years. The issue is so touchy that on Monday, Kenyan police blocked a news conference aimed at raising awareness about the accusations.
The king faces a younger generation of Kenyans, some apathetic and others welcoming, but many who are disdainful of the monarchy after learning about its grim and cruel legacy. Many Kenyans have keenly watched as other former British colonies, like Barbados, severed ties with the monarchy or are considering doing so, like Jamaica.
Kenya is a republic, and Charles has no official governmental role, but the country does belong to the Commonwealth, headed by Charles. The Commonwealth, which comprises 56 nations across five continents, was born out of the embers of the British Empire.
//The British Royal Family
//The King’s Swans: A centuries-old law gives Britain’s reigning monarch the right to claim any unmarked mute swans found in open waters during an annual counting mission. This year, the numbers were not good.
//Britain’s Most Famous Landlord: Rents in the United Kingdom are rising at a record pace, a trend that helped King Charles III, the owner of a vast property empire, make a big payday.
//Swelling Expenses: A report on the royal family’s finances shows that the king had to dip into reserves to pay for official expenses amid rising costs and expensive events like the queen’s funeral.
Buckingham Palace has said that the king will “acknowledge the more painful aspects” of the two countries’ history and “deepen his understanding of the wrongs suffered” during the intense counterinsurgency from 1952 to 1960.
Image
A small group of people sit atop a cargo container painted in bright colors with faces of African personalities.
Young people on a cargo container depicting different African leaders in Nairobi, on Sunday. King Charles faces a generation of Kenyans who are apathetic or disdainful of the monarchy.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
Britain has never directly apologized for its abuses in Kenya but has expressed regret for them. After a lawsuit was filed, Britain paid about 20 million pounds ($24.3 million) a decade ago to more than 5,000 people who had suffered abuse during the Mau Mau uprising. Mr. Mwangi was not among them.
“There’s a lot of pain and harm that has gone unacknowledged and that they refuse to reckon with,” said Aleya Kassam, a Kenyan writer and a co-founder of the LAM Sisterhood, which produces plays, podcasts and musicals about women, including those involved in Kenya’s liberation movements.
“I felt just rage when I learned about that dark history and how much of it is still present,” she said, adding, “I don’t think he should be comfortable at all coming here.”
But for Charles, the trip is a chance to bolster Britain’s relationship with Kenya, a key economic and military ally in a turbulent region.
He will attend a state dinner hosted by President William Ruto, and visit a naval base in the coastal city of Mombasa. A lifelong environmental champion, Charles will visit Nairobi National Park and attend an event celebrating the life of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai in Karura Forest, which she helped save from developers before she died in 2011.
Wanjira Mathai, the daughter of Ms. Maathai, and an environmental activist herself, said, “I have admired how he’s leveraged his influence and his support on issues of sustainability and the environment for decades, and that has to be acknowledged.”
Ms. Mathai said that Charles and her mother had been close friends who would spend hours talking at conferences or over tea at his office about environmental sustainability and climate change. “So for him to come and honor her legacy is deeply personal,” said Ms. Mathai, who will meet the king on this visit.
Image
A person looks at a museum display featuring shields, policehelmets and other items.
Helmets used by British colonial forces are among the items displayed at the Nyeri Museum in Nyeri County, Kenya.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Charles and Camilla visited a new museum dedicated to Kenya’s history at the site where the country was declared independent in 1963. He nodded occasionally, hands behind his back, as he viewed exhibits documenting Britain’s colonial legacy, including the state of emergency period when the British government sought to apprehend anyone suspected of belonging to or aiding the Mau Mau.
Millions of people, mostly from the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, were rounded up during this period, forcibly moved and put in detention camps or villages surrounded by barbed wire fences and trenches lined with sharp sticks. Many of them were tortured, raped, put into forced labor and left to die of disease and starvation.
The crackdown divided the Kikuyu. Those who collaborated with the colonial authorities gained access to large swaths of land that they and their heirs continue to benefit from today.
“There was a lot of agony in those villages,” said Jane Wangechi, 96, who acted as a spy and cook for the Mau Mau. Ms. Wangechi said that her family was moved into the detention villages for three years, during which she said she lost two uncles and a cousin.
Image
An old woman sits on a couch looking to the side.
Jane Wangechi, 96, acted as a spy and cook for the Mau Mau. She and her family were moved into detention villages for three years as part of a campaign to quash the anticolonial movement.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
The king is also facing calls to account for other abuses and injustices, old and new.
Across Kenya’s Rift Valley, elders from the Nandi ethnic group are calling on the British government to return the head of Koitalel Arap Samoei, a spiritual leader and anticolonial fighter. The Nandi elders say his head was severed by a British officer in the late 19th century and shipped to England as a war trophy. The Nandi are part of the Kalenjin tribe that Mr. Ruto belongs to.
The leaders of the Kipsigis ethnic group also say they want compensation for being forcibly removed from their fertile lands, which paved the way for the arrival of white settlers and the establishment of profitable tea and pineapple farms. This year, a BBC report on sexual abuse on the tea farms owned by British companies sparked resentment and tension over land in Kenya.
Charles’s visit is also resurfacing grievances about the conduct of British soldiers currently in Kenya.
The training unit has been accused of sexually abusing women, sparking a devastating fire and using harmful chemicals.
In addition, a British soldier was a suspect in the killing of Agnes Wanjiru, a sex worker, in 2012, but was never arrested or charged. An agreement between the two countries exempts British soldiers from prosecution. Some lawmakers want to change that. In August, Kenya’s Parliament launched an inquiry into the activities of British soldiers.
“Agnes has never rested in peace,” Esther Muchiri, Ms. Wanjiru’s niece, said in an interview. “We are not asking for special treatment from the king. We just want him to deliver justice.”
Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. More about Abdi Latif Dahir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/worl ... alism.html
Joseph Macharia Mwangi is among the last surviving veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial forces in Kenya in the 1950s. He has a message for King Charles.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
At 86, his gnarled hands grasping a walking stick as he ambled around his small patch of land facing Mount Kenya, Joseph Macharia Mwangi recalled with bitterness the years that he had spent fighting the British colonial government in Kenya.
Seven decades ago, he had camped with Mau Mau rebels on that mountain and in the forests, braving frigid rain, lions and elephants. He was shot twice by British troops, he said, and almost died. And when the colonial forces eventually captured him, he said he was tortured and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
“The British forces were really hard on us. They were terrible,” said Mr. Mwangi, who served directly under the uprising’s storied leader, Dedan Kimathi. “Now we want an apology and money for what they did.”
Kenya’s bleak colonial past loomed large as King Charles III officially began a four-day tour of the East African nation on Tuesday. It is his first state visit to any member of the Commonwealth group of nations since he became king last year, and the first to an African country.
Charles and Queen Camilla arrived in a Kenya where many communities are still grappling with the pain and loss they or their families endured over decades of British colonial rule, which lasted from 1895 to 1963. The king is under pressure from human rights groups, elders and activists to redress historical injustices, apologize and pay reparations to those who were tortured and removed from their ancestral lands.
His family has a close association with Kenya. His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was visiting the Treetops game lodge in 1952 when she learned that her father had died and she would succeed him as monarch. That year, Britain launched a bloody eight-year campaign to crush Kenya’s independence movement, led by the Mau Mau rebels.
Image
King Charles, wearing a dark suit and with his hands behind his back, looked at a large photograph at a museum.
King Charles III visited a new museum dedicated to Kenya’s history.Credit...Pool photo by Ian Vogler
There are still about 400 British military personnel stationed in Kenya for training. King Charles is also being asked to address abuses that some of those troops have been accused of committing over the years. The issue is so touchy that on Monday, Kenyan police blocked a news conference aimed at raising awareness about the accusations.
The king faces a younger generation of Kenyans, some apathetic and others welcoming, but many who are disdainful of the monarchy after learning about its grim and cruel legacy. Many Kenyans have keenly watched as other former British colonies, like Barbados, severed ties with the monarchy or are considering doing so, like Jamaica.
Kenya is a republic, and Charles has no official governmental role, but the country does belong to the Commonwealth, headed by Charles. The Commonwealth, which comprises 56 nations across five continents, was born out of the embers of the British Empire.
//The British Royal Family
//The King’s Swans: A centuries-old law gives Britain’s reigning monarch the right to claim any unmarked mute swans found in open waters during an annual counting mission. This year, the numbers were not good.
//Britain’s Most Famous Landlord: Rents in the United Kingdom are rising at a record pace, a trend that helped King Charles III, the owner of a vast property empire, make a big payday.
//Swelling Expenses: A report on the royal family’s finances shows that the king had to dip into reserves to pay for official expenses amid rising costs and expensive events like the queen’s funeral.
Buckingham Palace has said that the king will “acknowledge the more painful aspects” of the two countries’ history and “deepen his understanding of the wrongs suffered” during the intense counterinsurgency from 1952 to 1960.
Image
A small group of people sit atop a cargo container painted in bright colors with faces of African personalities.
Young people on a cargo container depicting different African leaders in Nairobi, on Sunday. King Charles faces a generation of Kenyans who are apathetic or disdainful of the monarchy.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
Britain has never directly apologized for its abuses in Kenya but has expressed regret for them. After a lawsuit was filed, Britain paid about 20 million pounds ($24.3 million) a decade ago to more than 5,000 people who had suffered abuse during the Mau Mau uprising. Mr. Mwangi was not among them.
“There’s a lot of pain and harm that has gone unacknowledged and that they refuse to reckon with,” said Aleya Kassam, a Kenyan writer and a co-founder of the LAM Sisterhood, which produces plays, podcasts and musicals about women, including those involved in Kenya’s liberation movements.
“I felt just rage when I learned about that dark history and how much of it is still present,” she said, adding, “I don’t think he should be comfortable at all coming here.”
But for Charles, the trip is a chance to bolster Britain’s relationship with Kenya, a key economic and military ally in a turbulent region.
He will attend a state dinner hosted by President William Ruto, and visit a naval base in the coastal city of Mombasa. A lifelong environmental champion, Charles will visit Nairobi National Park and attend an event celebrating the life of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai in Karura Forest, which she helped save from developers before she died in 2011.
Wanjira Mathai, the daughter of Ms. Maathai, and an environmental activist herself, said, “I have admired how he’s leveraged his influence and his support on issues of sustainability and the environment for decades, and that has to be acknowledged.”
Ms. Mathai said that Charles and her mother had been close friends who would spend hours talking at conferences or over tea at his office about environmental sustainability and climate change. “So for him to come and honor her legacy is deeply personal,” said Ms. Mathai, who will meet the king on this visit.
Image
A person looks at a museum display featuring shields, policehelmets and other items.
Helmets used by British colonial forces are among the items displayed at the Nyeri Museum in Nyeri County, Kenya.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Charles and Camilla visited a new museum dedicated to Kenya’s history at the site where the country was declared independent in 1963. He nodded occasionally, hands behind his back, as he viewed exhibits documenting Britain’s colonial legacy, including the state of emergency period when the British government sought to apprehend anyone suspected of belonging to or aiding the Mau Mau.
Millions of people, mostly from the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, were rounded up during this period, forcibly moved and put in detention camps or villages surrounded by barbed wire fences and trenches lined with sharp sticks. Many of them were tortured, raped, put into forced labor and left to die of disease and starvation.
The crackdown divided the Kikuyu. Those who collaborated with the colonial authorities gained access to large swaths of land that they and their heirs continue to benefit from today.
“There was a lot of agony in those villages,” said Jane Wangechi, 96, who acted as a spy and cook for the Mau Mau. Ms. Wangechi said that her family was moved into the detention villages for three years, during which she said she lost two uncles and a cousin.
Image
An old woman sits on a couch looking to the side.
Jane Wangechi, 96, acted as a spy and cook for the Mau Mau. She and her family were moved into detention villages for three years as part of a campaign to quash the anticolonial movement.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt for The New York Times
The king is also facing calls to account for other abuses and injustices, old and new.
Across Kenya’s Rift Valley, elders from the Nandi ethnic group are calling on the British government to return the head of Koitalel Arap Samoei, a spiritual leader and anticolonial fighter. The Nandi elders say his head was severed by a British officer in the late 19th century and shipped to England as a war trophy. The Nandi are part of the Kalenjin tribe that Mr. Ruto belongs to.
The leaders of the Kipsigis ethnic group also say they want compensation for being forcibly removed from their fertile lands, which paved the way for the arrival of white settlers and the establishment of profitable tea and pineapple farms. This year, a BBC report on sexual abuse on the tea farms owned by British companies sparked resentment and tension over land in Kenya.
Charles’s visit is also resurfacing grievances about the conduct of British soldiers currently in Kenya.
The training unit has been accused of sexually abusing women, sparking a devastating fire and using harmful chemicals.
In addition, a British soldier was a suspect in the killing of Agnes Wanjiru, a sex worker, in 2012, but was never arrested or charged. An agreement between the two countries exempts British soldiers from prosecution. Some lawmakers want to change that. In August, Kenya’s Parliament launched an inquiry into the activities of British soldiers.
“Agnes has never rested in peace,” Esther Muchiri, Ms. Wanjiru’s niece, said in an interview. “We are not asking for special treatment from the king. We just want him to deliver justice.”
Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. More about Abdi Latif Dahir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/worl ... alism.html
U.S. Faces Tricky Questions With African Trade Group
Tensions hung over a trade summit in Johannesburg after the Biden administration suspended four African countries that had belonged to a program aimed at promoting economic development.
Delegates from the United States and Africa attend the African Growth and Opportunity Act summit in Johannesburg on Friday. Credit...Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
As the United States seeks to deepen its relationships with African nations and counter the influence of rivals like Russia and China, it confronts a tricky question: How does it respond when countries do things that run afoul of Washington’s stated commitment to democracy and human rights?
That tension hung over a major trade conference between the U.S. and African countries that started in Johannesburg this week, after President Biden announced that he was suspending four nations from a critical trade program that aims to promote economic development in Africa.
One of the suspended countries, Uganda, which passed a law this year calling for life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex, sent a delegation to the conference to argue for its reinstatement to the program, the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or AGOA. Mr. Biden wrote to Congress that Uganda had been removed because it “engaged in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
Susan Muhwezi, a trade adviser to the Ugandan president, rejected that statement, describing Uganda as “an island of peace.”
“If we are supposed to be friends, to trade with each other,” she said in an interview at the conference, “I think there are better ways of expressing your concerns than saying, ‘I’m the boss and I have to punch you.’” She added that removing Uganda from the program would damage the livelihoods of traders of cotton, coffee, vanilla and other goods that accounted for the $12.3 million in exports that the East African nation made through the U.S. trade program last year.
“Isn’t it also a violation of human rights in a different way?” she said, referring to the U.S. decision to suspend Uganda from the program.
Once the suspensions take effect on Jan. 1, there will be 31 countries participating in the trade program. It was signed into law in 2000 and is open to nations in sub-Saharan Africa, allowing them to export certain goods to the U.S. without having to pay duties. Last year, the U.S. took in about $30 billion worth of goods through AGOA.
The tension between promoting democracy and human rights, on one hand, and maintaining influence abroad is hardly a new one for the U.S. It is very much alive in Africa today with the competition between the U.S., Russia and China, where Moscow and Beijing promise aid and security without strings. But for the U.S., the campaign to promote democracy is, among other things, an essential selling point for a domestic audience that has grown increasingly isolationist in recent years.
Gabon and Niger were suspended by Mr. Biden in the aftermath of coups that ran afoul of the trade program’s eligibility requirements. The president of the Central African Republic, which was also suspended, pushed through a measure this year to scrap presidential term limits. Wagner, the Russian mercenary group, runs the country’s security.
Image
Mercenaries wearing military uniforms guard seated politicians in suits at an outdoor event.
Wagner mercenaries guarding the president and other high-ranking attendees in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, in 2019.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
To maintain eligibility in the program, countries must adhere to certain conditions, including supporting democracy, protecting human rights and not acting against U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
They can be suspended for committing “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” or supporting terrorism and efforts to eliminate human rights. Enforcing these requirements comes with difficult calculations for the United States.
The Biden administration has stressed the importance of engaging African nations as equals. But in taking punitive actions, Washington risks being seen as lecturing or trying to impose its values on countries that have a painful and not-too-distant experience of colonial rule.
While these suspensions were the result of violations that the White House found to be egregious, Biden administration officials say they are trying to be sensitive to these concerns. Judd Devermont, a top adviser to the White House on African affairs, said the administration has prioritized “injecting some more complexity in our relationships” in Africa and accepting that it will disagree with countries on some issues.
“When we have differences, we should lean in and talk about them,” he said. “By the way, that’s what we do with other countries in other regions of the world.”
Even some American lawmakers have argued that the U.S. needs to be cautious in revoking privileges from African countries that may violate the standards it has set. Doing so, they argue, could end up punishing ordinary people for the actions of their governments, and it could cause African nations on the continent to drift toward rival countries that would result in an even greater threat to American interests.
Other than “egregious violations of principle or undermining core American interests,” it is important to keep countries in the trade program for “the entrepreneurs and small business people in the country as well as for the overall relationship,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland.
At the same time, the Biden administration is facing pressure from lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to scrutinize the nations that benefit from AGOA even more closely.
They point to the host nation of the conference, South Africa, which just six months ago was in a tense standoff with Washington over allegations made by the U.S. ambassador that South Africa provided weapons to Russia for the Ukraine war.
Republican senators James Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Tim Scott of South Carolina released separate statements this week criticizing the Biden administration’s decision to proceed with the conference in South Africa while the issues around South Africa’s support of Russia remain unresolved.
Image
Senator Tim Scott speaking with a microphone in his hand.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican who is running for president, criticized the Biden administration’s decision to proceed with the conference in South Africa.Credit...Nora Williams for The New York Times
They also criticized South Africa’s response to the war in Gaza, noting that South Africa’s foreign minister spoke with the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on the phone and visited Iran, where she met with President Ebrahim Raisi. Hamas, which controls Gaza and orchestrated the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, is a proxy of Iran.
“The administration’s decision to host the AGOA forum in South Africa and maintain South Africa’s eligibility for AGOA benefits in 2024 compromises the program’s integrity and our trade preferences,” Mr. Risch wrote.
The trade program is set to expire in 2025, when Congress must decide whether to reauthorize it. While Mr. Risch said he supported its renewal, he suggested that lawmakers might demand significant changes to the program, which could lead to a difficult reauthorization process.
The White House likely concluded that whatever sins South Africa may have committed, imploding the relationship over them wasn’t worth it, several analysts said in recent interviews.
South Africa is the largest beneficiary of the trade pact, with $3 billion in exports last year. It is one of the continent’s most advanced economies, and the U.S. sees it as an important ally with influence over other African nations.
South Africa has mediated peace efforts in several conflicts across Africa, helping to create a stability that the U.S. sees as vital to its own interests, in part because it can prevent the spread of extremist groups.
Teddy Ruge, a business owner from Uganda, was on a plane on his way to Johannesburg when Mr. Biden announced the suspensions. Mr. Ruge is the founder of Raintree Farms, which exports to the U.S. moringa, a plant-based powder that is used in many health products.
Sitting at the conference behind a booth draped in the Ugandan flag, he said he felt embarrassed that everyone was staring at them as if they were “the bad child.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Delegates from the United States and Africa attend the African Growth and Opportunity Act summit in Johannesburg on Friday. Credit...Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
As the United States seeks to deepen its relationships with African nations and counter the influence of rivals like Russia and China, it confronts a tricky question: How does it respond when countries do things that run afoul of Washington’s stated commitment to democracy and human rights?
That tension hung over a major trade conference between the U.S. and African countries that started in Johannesburg this week, after President Biden announced that he was suspending four nations from a critical trade program that aims to promote economic development in Africa.
One of the suspended countries, Uganda, which passed a law this year calling for life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex, sent a delegation to the conference to argue for its reinstatement to the program, the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or AGOA. Mr. Biden wrote to Congress that Uganda had been removed because it “engaged in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
Susan Muhwezi, a trade adviser to the Ugandan president, rejected that statement, describing Uganda as “an island of peace.”
“If we are supposed to be friends, to trade with each other,” she said in an interview at the conference, “I think there are better ways of expressing your concerns than saying, ‘I’m the boss and I have to punch you.’” She added that removing Uganda from the program would damage the livelihoods of traders of cotton, coffee, vanilla and other goods that accounted for the $12.3 million in exports that the East African nation made through the U.S. trade program last year.
“Isn’t it also a violation of human rights in a different way?” she said, referring to the U.S. decision to suspend Uganda from the program.
Once the suspensions take effect on Jan. 1, there will be 31 countries participating in the trade program. It was signed into law in 2000 and is open to nations in sub-Saharan Africa, allowing them to export certain goods to the U.S. without having to pay duties. Last year, the U.S. took in about $30 billion worth of goods through AGOA.
The tension between promoting democracy and human rights, on one hand, and maintaining influence abroad is hardly a new one for the U.S. It is very much alive in Africa today with the competition between the U.S., Russia and China, where Moscow and Beijing promise aid and security without strings. But for the U.S., the campaign to promote democracy is, among other things, an essential selling point for a domestic audience that has grown increasingly isolationist in recent years.
Gabon and Niger were suspended by Mr. Biden in the aftermath of coups that ran afoul of the trade program’s eligibility requirements. The president of the Central African Republic, which was also suspended, pushed through a measure this year to scrap presidential term limits. Wagner, the Russian mercenary group, runs the country’s security.
Image
Mercenaries wearing military uniforms guard seated politicians in suits at an outdoor event.
Wagner mercenaries guarding the president and other high-ranking attendees in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, in 2019.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
To maintain eligibility in the program, countries must adhere to certain conditions, including supporting democracy, protecting human rights and not acting against U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
They can be suspended for committing “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” or supporting terrorism and efforts to eliminate human rights. Enforcing these requirements comes with difficult calculations for the United States.
The Biden administration has stressed the importance of engaging African nations as equals. But in taking punitive actions, Washington risks being seen as lecturing or trying to impose its values on countries that have a painful and not-too-distant experience of colonial rule.
While these suspensions were the result of violations that the White House found to be egregious, Biden administration officials say they are trying to be sensitive to these concerns. Judd Devermont, a top adviser to the White House on African affairs, said the administration has prioritized “injecting some more complexity in our relationships” in Africa and accepting that it will disagree with countries on some issues.
“When we have differences, we should lean in and talk about them,” he said. “By the way, that’s what we do with other countries in other regions of the world.”
Even some American lawmakers have argued that the U.S. needs to be cautious in revoking privileges from African countries that may violate the standards it has set. Doing so, they argue, could end up punishing ordinary people for the actions of their governments, and it could cause African nations on the continent to drift toward rival countries that would result in an even greater threat to American interests.
Other than “egregious violations of principle or undermining core American interests,” it is important to keep countries in the trade program for “the entrepreneurs and small business people in the country as well as for the overall relationship,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland.
At the same time, the Biden administration is facing pressure from lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to scrutinize the nations that benefit from AGOA even more closely.
They point to the host nation of the conference, South Africa, which just six months ago was in a tense standoff with Washington over allegations made by the U.S. ambassador that South Africa provided weapons to Russia for the Ukraine war.
Republican senators James Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Tim Scott of South Carolina released separate statements this week criticizing the Biden administration’s decision to proceed with the conference in South Africa while the issues around South Africa’s support of Russia remain unresolved.
Image
Senator Tim Scott speaking with a microphone in his hand.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican who is running for president, criticized the Biden administration’s decision to proceed with the conference in South Africa.Credit...Nora Williams for The New York Times
They also criticized South Africa’s response to the war in Gaza, noting that South Africa’s foreign minister spoke with the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on the phone and visited Iran, where she met with President Ebrahim Raisi. Hamas, which controls Gaza and orchestrated the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, is a proxy of Iran.
“The administration’s decision to host the AGOA forum in South Africa and maintain South Africa’s eligibility for AGOA benefits in 2024 compromises the program’s integrity and our trade preferences,” Mr. Risch wrote.
The trade program is set to expire in 2025, when Congress must decide whether to reauthorize it. While Mr. Risch said he supported its renewal, he suggested that lawmakers might demand significant changes to the program, which could lead to a difficult reauthorization process.
The White House likely concluded that whatever sins South Africa may have committed, imploding the relationship over them wasn’t worth it, several analysts said in recent interviews.
South Africa is the largest beneficiary of the trade pact, with $3 billion in exports last year. It is one of the continent’s most advanced economies, and the U.S. sees it as an important ally with influence over other African nations.
South Africa has mediated peace efforts in several conflicts across Africa, helping to create a stability that the U.S. sees as vital to its own interests, in part because it can prevent the spread of extremist groups.
Teddy Ruge, a business owner from Uganda, was on a plane on his way to Johannesburg when Mr. Biden announced the suspensions. Mr. Ruge is the founder of Raintree Farms, which exports to the U.S. moringa, a plant-based powder that is used in many health products.
Sitting at the conference behind a booth draped in the Ugandan flag, he said he felt embarrassed that everyone was staring at them as if they were “the bad child.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Youth Struggle to Find Jobs in South Africa, Where 6 in 10 Are Unemployed
OLD WORLD YOUNG AFRICA
One Year in the Infuriating and Humiliating Search for a Job in South Africa
Portia Stafford, above left, and her friends are among a generation of determined Africans who are working hard at finding a job.
This is a part of a series on how Africa’s youth boom is changing the continent, and beyond.
Portia Stafford, a petite and usually soft-spoken 22-year-old, shouted through the razor wire at the burly men guarding the construction site in Soweto, a sprawling township in South Africa. Pumped up with frustration and anger, she and a dozen young friends threatened to storm the site where a new settlement was being built.
They wanted — no, they demanded — jobs.
When a guard threatened to shoot, the group backed off and Ms. Stafford felt her resolve deflate. Shaken but unharmed, she made it home that day in February to the concrete-block bungalow that she shares with her parents and three young relatives.
Ms. Stafford, her sister and two cousins all have high school diplomas — historically a ticket to a decent job in South Africa. But all of them were still unemployed after searching for work for years. Their quest has been full of humiliations and surprises. Ms. Stafford’s odyssey has taken her to a company that vanished when she was supposed to pick up her check, a pyramid scheme and even, unwittingly, a brothel.
“There’s no moving forward,” Ms. Stafford said. She frets that only those with connections succeed, but she said, “I keep trying to get a job, and I go all out.”
She is part of a generation of South Africans, born nearly a decade after the fall of the apartheid regime, who expected to have better prospects than their parents and grandparents.
She lives in the Soweto neighborhood of Kliptown, where, in 1955, anti-apartheid activists, including the African National Congress that now leads the country, adopted the Freedom Charter — principles that still guide the nation. Among them was “the right and duty of all to work.”
South Africa is the most industrialized country in Africa and was once considered an economic success story. But it has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world — 61 percent of people ages 15 to 24 are unemployed, according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency. The overall unemployment rate is 33 percent, and 35 percent for high school graduates.
Image
An open sewer runs through an unpaved road in the Kliptown neighborhood of Johannesburg.
Kliptown, a neighborhood in the sprawling township of Soweto, is where the anti-apartheid movement in 1955 adopted a Freedom Charter of principles for an independent nation, including the right to work.
Image
Portia Stafford and two other people, one of whom is holding the hand of a toddler, walk past shacks of brick and tin on an unpaved dirt street.
Ms. Stafford, left, and her friends and relatives, all in their late teens or early 20s, have been looking for work for years, going from store to store, dropping off résumés and submitting applications on their cellphones.
If South Africa, the most developed economy on the continent, cannot create enough jobs, economists warn, then how are poorer countries in Africa going to generate opportunities for their booming youth populations?
Much of the industrialized world is facing the opposite problem. In the coming decades, parts of Europe and Asia are expected to have the oldest populations in recorded history, with extraordinary numbers of retirees depending on shrinking numbers of working-age people to support them.
Africa, by contrast, has plenty of young people with higher expectations than ever. A push to get more children in the classroom has paid off: Forty-four percent of Africans graduated from high school in 2020 — an increase from 27 percent two decades earlier. But the shortfall of jobs could push them deeper into poverty and desperation.
About one million Africans enter the work force every month, researchers found, but fewer than one in four find a formal job. So, young Africans, even those with college degrees, do menial labor, accept payment in food, migrate to other countries on the continent looking for better opportunities and cross oceans in rickety boats to find work.
Even relatively stable countries are failing their young labor force: Ghana’s tech industry has not created abundant jobs, while in Botswana, one of the continent’s fastest-growing economies, college graduates languish.
The map locates Johannesburg, South Africa. The detail shows Johannesburg, Soweto and Kliptown.
NAMIBIA
BOTSWANA
Johannesburg
SOUTH
AFRICA
400 MILES
Johannesburg
Soweto
Kliptown
SOUTH AFRICA
10 MILES
By The New York Times
Ms. Stafford and her friends spend their days in Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic engine, going from store to store to drop off their résumés. She fills in applications on her cellphone with rapid taps of her thumbs.
In January, she dropped off her résumé at a police station. In February, she sprinted to the local post office to put her name on a sign-up sheet for a temp job. In March, she signed up to volunteer at a social service nonprofit. One Saturday in April, she woke early to join a cleaning crew that was part of a public works program, a model inspired by a Depression-era program in the United States. None of those led to a job.
Ms. Stafford had been the beneficiary of a national experiment to make the high school curriculum more practical. She learned how to keep books in business studies, to cater to guests in tourism, and to run a professional kitchen in consumer studies. She hoped these subjects would give her an edge in the job scramble. School wasn’t easy for her, but she kept at it, even after getting pregnant. Her son is now 4 years old.
Image
Portia Stafford sitting on a bed next to her son, Clinton, who plays with makeshift toys made from two plastic soda bottles.
Ms. Stafford persisted until she got her diploma from high school, where she studied business and tourism, even after giving birth to her son, Clinton, who is now 4 years old.
Image
Four framed pictures of students in Portia Stafford’s family, hanging on a wall next to a calendar.
A wall in the Stafford family home is adorned with school and graduation portraits.
Looming over her neighborhood of shacks is a four-star hotel, built when South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010, intended to bring tourists and jobs to Soweto. Despite her tourism training, Ms. Stafford has never dropped off her résumé there because she knows no one in her community who has ever been hired there. (The hotel manager did not respond to an interview request.)
Ms. Stafford’s parents had dropped out of high school to find work during South Africa’s tumultuous transition from apartheid. For a while, Johnson and Anna Niewenhoudt, teenage sweethearts who met on their neighborhood’s bald soccer field — he on the team, she in the crowd — had it relatively good. They had four children together, two girls and two boys.
Mr. Niewenhoudt earned enough in a steel factory to add two extra rooms to their modest house. The girls had their own room, and the boys had one, too — a luxury in their neighborhood of open sewers and dirt roads. The family had an electric stove and a flat-screen TV. All the children went to school.
Then the steel factory mechanized, replacing Mr. Niewenhoudt with a robot. Now he runs a welding business from his backyard, making wrought-iron gates. When power blackouts silence his grinder, Mr. Niewenhoudt rummages through a landfill to find anything to recycle for cash.
“If he’s home,” said Ms. Stafford, watching her father sweep his workshop, “it’s very bad.”
If he earns nothing, the family has tea for dinner. As a sign of faith, the girls boil water on a gas cooker, preparing for whatever Mr. Niewenhoudt brings home: pap, South Africa’s staple of ground maize; potatoes; maybe even bones for a broth.
Ms. Stafford’s job search became even more desperate when she began noticing spots on her father’s eyes — which the family believes is scarring from the welder’s flame. The second eldest, she had to pick up the slack when her eldest sister, Nochrisha, gave up looking for work after a fruitless decade.
Image
Anna Niewenhoudt sits on a chair in a cinder block house with a ladder on the wall.
Ms. Stafford, left, with her mother, Anna Niewenhoudt, at their home in Kliptown.
Image
Johnson Niewenhoudt in his workshop, fixing a tow bar and bicycle with a welder’s torch that is producing orange sparks.
Ms. Stafford’s father, Johnson Niewenhoudt, is a welder who was laid off when his factory mechanized. He struggles to earn money now by doing welding jobs in his workshop.
Nochrisha Stafford is one of the 3.2 million South Africans classified as “discouraged work-seekers.” (If they were to be included in the official unemployment rate, it would rise to 42 percent from 33 percent.) The family has watched helplessly as she succumbed to depression and alcoholism.
One Thursday around noon, Nochrisha Stafford wandered unsteadily into the kitchen. She opened the empty bread bin, then slapped it shut.
“We need soap,” she said, slumping into a chair.
Then she told her mother that the loan shark that the family borrows money from to get by each month wanted her $2 back.
“Tell her I’ll give her month end,” Anna Niewenhoudt said.
The family pools their welfare payouts — about $28 a month for each of the four children in the house, plus $19 for each unemployed adult. But it’s only enough to buy food for two weeks.
While seeking work, Portia Stafford tried to run a business from the kitchen. She baked two dozen muffins several times a week, the smell of mint chocolate chip filling the house by 7 a.m. Her younger brother sold them on the playground, and she gave him a cut of the nearly $4 she made with each batch.
In doing so, she joined the more than 80 percent of workers in sub-Saharan Africa who scrounge out a living in what is called the “informal sector.”
Teenagers in Lagos hawk cellphone chargers in rush-hour traffic. Women in Nairobi grill maize at bus stops. Optimistic policymakers envision turning these entrepreneurs into formal business owners. But Ms. Stafford’s muffin enterprise shows how challenging that really is.
Inflation drove up the cost of her ingredients so quickly that she lost money.
One Tuesday morning in May, she and two friends pooled the little money they had to take a taxi to what was billed as a job fair. It was nothing but a pyramid scheme. However, they spotted a hotel nearby and decided to drop their résumés there. A beefy man appeared and directed them to a side door, saying that all the girls looking for work entered there.
It turned out to be a brothel. They fled as fast as they could.
In job seekers’ groups on social media, Ms. Stafford had seen dozens of stories of women lured to interviews, only to be attacked. In South Africa, Black women have the highest unemployment rate, and they are also most vulnerable to crime and poverty. Ms. Stafford and her friends always moved around as a group.
Image
Portia Stafford, in a black shirt and braids, grasps a pole while talking with two friends.
Ms. Stafford and her friends Nandipha Wauchope, left, and Keitumetse Mofokeng often look for work together. It is safer to travel in numbers, they said.
Image
Portia Stafford holds her printed résumé, which lists her job objective, experience, education and skills.
Ms. Stafford’s résumé describes her as a young, passionate woman looking for “a challenging job with a rapidly growing organization.” But she has lowered her expectations to finding any job at all.
They thought they had found real jobs when they heard of openings with a company that said it had a government contract to help seniors register for ID cards. The company’s address was a house, and the interview was in a kitchen. Their prospective employers fired off a few interview questions while eating fries drenched in vinegar. The smell reminded the friends how long it had been since they’d eaten.
They were hired on the spot. They set off, going door to door, sticking together as they faced barking dogs and muggers.
When they went to pick up their paychecks, their new employers had disappeared. The people living in the house said they had never heard of the company.
But the construction site protest finally seemed to pay off. The owners agreed to hire two people from Ms. Stafford’s block. But since nearly every house had someone who was unemployed, a fight erupted over who would get the two slots. A community leader suggested a lottery, with each job seeker assigned a number.
The winning number was 37, and it happened to belong to Ms. Stafford’s cousin, Boitshoko Mokgobi, who shared a room with her.
Instead of excited, Ms. Mokgobi was guilt-ridden. Ms. Stafford told her cousin, “At least one of us got something.”
But when Ms. Mokgobi showed up to the construction site, the bosses just laughed at her skinny frame. They told her to go home and send a man from her family instead.
So she did. Her 21-year old male cousin, Thabo Wessels, replaced her.
At last, someone in the family had a job. The family cooed over him in his overalls and packed his lunch.
Image
Portia Stafford and two friends standing and talking outside. Two of them are holding bright pink bags. One of them is wearing a matching pink beanie given out by a local program.
Ms. Mofokeng, left, Zimasa Ndodiana and Ms. Stafford after meeting with representatives of a program that trains people to teach young children in Kliptown.
Image
A red shirt with a collar hanging up in a kitchen with a table, bread box and shelves holding glasses.
A uniform in the kitchen of the Stafford home.
When payday arrived, he disappeared. They found him a day later, carousing with Ms. Stafford’s eldest sister, his check spent on a bender.
Ms. Stafford’s luck finally began to turn in June, when she was admitted to a six-week computer training course, where she progressed from typing with one finger to four. At her graduation ceremony, her mother shouted and whistled.
Back home, Ms. Stafford carefully placed her new certificate in the cupboard, on top of the same certificate that her still-unemployed sister had received a few years before.
The computer course yielded no job for Ms. Stafford, either, but it created an opportunity.
A family friend tipped her off that the same nonprofit agency was training young women to run a day care program in the building. “Connections,” she said, laughing sheepishly.
By October, Ms. Stafford and a friend with whom she had dodged dogs and brothels took charge of more than a dozen toddlers. She expects to earn 500 rand, or $26, a month — below minimum wage, but coupled with the welfare she receives for her son, it will nearly double her income.
Ms. Stafford is already planning to open her own child care center. It isn’t what she dreamed of or trained for, but it’s her first reliable paycheck since graduating from high school nearly two years ago. As she cleaned up the bowls of watery sorghum porridge she had fed the toddlers, she was feeling overwhelmed but, after long last, hopeful.
Image
Portia Stafford stands at the front of a classroom. Children are seated at wooden tables, eating from large bowls.
Ms. Stafford talking to the children in her class at the Kliptown Youth Program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/worl ... frica.html
One Year in the Infuriating and Humiliating Search for a Job in South Africa
Portia Stafford, above left, and her friends are among a generation of determined Africans who are working hard at finding a job.
This is a part of a series on how Africa’s youth boom is changing the continent, and beyond.
Portia Stafford, a petite and usually soft-spoken 22-year-old, shouted through the razor wire at the burly men guarding the construction site in Soweto, a sprawling township in South Africa. Pumped up with frustration and anger, she and a dozen young friends threatened to storm the site where a new settlement was being built.
They wanted — no, they demanded — jobs.
When a guard threatened to shoot, the group backed off and Ms. Stafford felt her resolve deflate. Shaken but unharmed, she made it home that day in February to the concrete-block bungalow that she shares with her parents and three young relatives.
Ms. Stafford, her sister and two cousins all have high school diplomas — historically a ticket to a decent job in South Africa. But all of them were still unemployed after searching for work for years. Their quest has been full of humiliations and surprises. Ms. Stafford’s odyssey has taken her to a company that vanished when she was supposed to pick up her check, a pyramid scheme and even, unwittingly, a brothel.
“There’s no moving forward,” Ms. Stafford said. She frets that only those with connections succeed, but she said, “I keep trying to get a job, and I go all out.”
She is part of a generation of South Africans, born nearly a decade after the fall of the apartheid regime, who expected to have better prospects than their parents and grandparents.
She lives in the Soweto neighborhood of Kliptown, where, in 1955, anti-apartheid activists, including the African National Congress that now leads the country, adopted the Freedom Charter — principles that still guide the nation. Among them was “the right and duty of all to work.”
South Africa is the most industrialized country in Africa and was once considered an economic success story. But it has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world — 61 percent of people ages 15 to 24 are unemployed, according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency. The overall unemployment rate is 33 percent, and 35 percent for high school graduates.
Image
An open sewer runs through an unpaved road in the Kliptown neighborhood of Johannesburg.
Kliptown, a neighborhood in the sprawling township of Soweto, is where the anti-apartheid movement in 1955 adopted a Freedom Charter of principles for an independent nation, including the right to work.
Image
Portia Stafford and two other people, one of whom is holding the hand of a toddler, walk past shacks of brick and tin on an unpaved dirt street.
Ms. Stafford, left, and her friends and relatives, all in their late teens or early 20s, have been looking for work for years, going from store to store, dropping off résumés and submitting applications on their cellphones.
If South Africa, the most developed economy on the continent, cannot create enough jobs, economists warn, then how are poorer countries in Africa going to generate opportunities for their booming youth populations?
Much of the industrialized world is facing the opposite problem. In the coming decades, parts of Europe and Asia are expected to have the oldest populations in recorded history, with extraordinary numbers of retirees depending on shrinking numbers of working-age people to support them.
Africa, by contrast, has plenty of young people with higher expectations than ever. A push to get more children in the classroom has paid off: Forty-four percent of Africans graduated from high school in 2020 — an increase from 27 percent two decades earlier. But the shortfall of jobs could push them deeper into poverty and desperation.
About one million Africans enter the work force every month, researchers found, but fewer than one in four find a formal job. So, young Africans, even those with college degrees, do menial labor, accept payment in food, migrate to other countries on the continent looking for better opportunities and cross oceans in rickety boats to find work.
Even relatively stable countries are failing their young labor force: Ghana’s tech industry has not created abundant jobs, while in Botswana, one of the continent’s fastest-growing economies, college graduates languish.
The map locates Johannesburg, South Africa. The detail shows Johannesburg, Soweto and Kliptown.
NAMIBIA
BOTSWANA
Johannesburg
SOUTH
AFRICA
400 MILES
Johannesburg
Soweto
Kliptown
SOUTH AFRICA
10 MILES
By The New York Times
Ms. Stafford and her friends spend their days in Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic engine, going from store to store to drop off their résumés. She fills in applications on her cellphone with rapid taps of her thumbs.
In January, she dropped off her résumé at a police station. In February, she sprinted to the local post office to put her name on a sign-up sheet for a temp job. In March, she signed up to volunteer at a social service nonprofit. One Saturday in April, she woke early to join a cleaning crew that was part of a public works program, a model inspired by a Depression-era program in the United States. None of those led to a job.
Ms. Stafford had been the beneficiary of a national experiment to make the high school curriculum more practical. She learned how to keep books in business studies, to cater to guests in tourism, and to run a professional kitchen in consumer studies. She hoped these subjects would give her an edge in the job scramble. School wasn’t easy for her, but she kept at it, even after getting pregnant. Her son is now 4 years old.
Image
Portia Stafford sitting on a bed next to her son, Clinton, who plays with makeshift toys made from two plastic soda bottles.
Ms. Stafford persisted until she got her diploma from high school, where she studied business and tourism, even after giving birth to her son, Clinton, who is now 4 years old.
Image
Four framed pictures of students in Portia Stafford’s family, hanging on a wall next to a calendar.
A wall in the Stafford family home is adorned with school and graduation portraits.
Looming over her neighborhood of shacks is a four-star hotel, built when South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010, intended to bring tourists and jobs to Soweto. Despite her tourism training, Ms. Stafford has never dropped off her résumé there because she knows no one in her community who has ever been hired there. (The hotel manager did not respond to an interview request.)
Ms. Stafford’s parents had dropped out of high school to find work during South Africa’s tumultuous transition from apartheid. For a while, Johnson and Anna Niewenhoudt, teenage sweethearts who met on their neighborhood’s bald soccer field — he on the team, she in the crowd — had it relatively good. They had four children together, two girls and two boys.
Mr. Niewenhoudt earned enough in a steel factory to add two extra rooms to their modest house. The girls had their own room, and the boys had one, too — a luxury in their neighborhood of open sewers and dirt roads. The family had an electric stove and a flat-screen TV. All the children went to school.
Then the steel factory mechanized, replacing Mr. Niewenhoudt with a robot. Now he runs a welding business from his backyard, making wrought-iron gates. When power blackouts silence his grinder, Mr. Niewenhoudt rummages through a landfill to find anything to recycle for cash.
“If he’s home,” said Ms. Stafford, watching her father sweep his workshop, “it’s very bad.”
If he earns nothing, the family has tea for dinner. As a sign of faith, the girls boil water on a gas cooker, preparing for whatever Mr. Niewenhoudt brings home: pap, South Africa’s staple of ground maize; potatoes; maybe even bones for a broth.
Ms. Stafford’s job search became even more desperate when she began noticing spots on her father’s eyes — which the family believes is scarring from the welder’s flame. The second eldest, she had to pick up the slack when her eldest sister, Nochrisha, gave up looking for work after a fruitless decade.
Image
Anna Niewenhoudt sits on a chair in a cinder block house with a ladder on the wall.
Ms. Stafford, left, with her mother, Anna Niewenhoudt, at their home in Kliptown.
Image
Johnson Niewenhoudt in his workshop, fixing a tow bar and bicycle with a welder’s torch that is producing orange sparks.
Ms. Stafford’s father, Johnson Niewenhoudt, is a welder who was laid off when his factory mechanized. He struggles to earn money now by doing welding jobs in his workshop.
Nochrisha Stafford is one of the 3.2 million South Africans classified as “discouraged work-seekers.” (If they were to be included in the official unemployment rate, it would rise to 42 percent from 33 percent.) The family has watched helplessly as she succumbed to depression and alcoholism.
One Thursday around noon, Nochrisha Stafford wandered unsteadily into the kitchen. She opened the empty bread bin, then slapped it shut.
“We need soap,” she said, slumping into a chair.
Then she told her mother that the loan shark that the family borrows money from to get by each month wanted her $2 back.
“Tell her I’ll give her month end,” Anna Niewenhoudt said.
The family pools their welfare payouts — about $28 a month for each of the four children in the house, plus $19 for each unemployed adult. But it’s only enough to buy food for two weeks.
While seeking work, Portia Stafford tried to run a business from the kitchen. She baked two dozen muffins several times a week, the smell of mint chocolate chip filling the house by 7 a.m. Her younger brother sold them on the playground, and she gave him a cut of the nearly $4 she made with each batch.
In doing so, she joined the more than 80 percent of workers in sub-Saharan Africa who scrounge out a living in what is called the “informal sector.”
Teenagers in Lagos hawk cellphone chargers in rush-hour traffic. Women in Nairobi grill maize at bus stops. Optimistic policymakers envision turning these entrepreneurs into formal business owners. But Ms. Stafford’s muffin enterprise shows how challenging that really is.
Inflation drove up the cost of her ingredients so quickly that she lost money.
One Tuesday morning in May, she and two friends pooled the little money they had to take a taxi to what was billed as a job fair. It was nothing but a pyramid scheme. However, they spotted a hotel nearby and decided to drop their résumés there. A beefy man appeared and directed them to a side door, saying that all the girls looking for work entered there.
It turned out to be a brothel. They fled as fast as they could.
In job seekers’ groups on social media, Ms. Stafford had seen dozens of stories of women lured to interviews, only to be attacked. In South Africa, Black women have the highest unemployment rate, and they are also most vulnerable to crime and poverty. Ms. Stafford and her friends always moved around as a group.
Image
Portia Stafford, in a black shirt and braids, grasps a pole while talking with two friends.
Ms. Stafford and her friends Nandipha Wauchope, left, and Keitumetse Mofokeng often look for work together. It is safer to travel in numbers, they said.
Image
Portia Stafford holds her printed résumé, which lists her job objective, experience, education and skills.
Ms. Stafford’s résumé describes her as a young, passionate woman looking for “a challenging job with a rapidly growing organization.” But she has lowered her expectations to finding any job at all.
They thought they had found real jobs when they heard of openings with a company that said it had a government contract to help seniors register for ID cards. The company’s address was a house, and the interview was in a kitchen. Their prospective employers fired off a few interview questions while eating fries drenched in vinegar. The smell reminded the friends how long it had been since they’d eaten.
They were hired on the spot. They set off, going door to door, sticking together as they faced barking dogs and muggers.
When they went to pick up their paychecks, their new employers had disappeared. The people living in the house said they had never heard of the company.
But the construction site protest finally seemed to pay off. The owners agreed to hire two people from Ms. Stafford’s block. But since nearly every house had someone who was unemployed, a fight erupted over who would get the two slots. A community leader suggested a lottery, with each job seeker assigned a number.
The winning number was 37, and it happened to belong to Ms. Stafford’s cousin, Boitshoko Mokgobi, who shared a room with her.
Instead of excited, Ms. Mokgobi was guilt-ridden. Ms. Stafford told her cousin, “At least one of us got something.”
But when Ms. Mokgobi showed up to the construction site, the bosses just laughed at her skinny frame. They told her to go home and send a man from her family instead.
So she did. Her 21-year old male cousin, Thabo Wessels, replaced her.
At last, someone in the family had a job. The family cooed over him in his overalls and packed his lunch.
Image
Portia Stafford and two friends standing and talking outside. Two of them are holding bright pink bags. One of them is wearing a matching pink beanie given out by a local program.
Ms. Mofokeng, left, Zimasa Ndodiana and Ms. Stafford after meeting with representatives of a program that trains people to teach young children in Kliptown.
Image
A red shirt with a collar hanging up in a kitchen with a table, bread box and shelves holding glasses.
A uniform in the kitchen of the Stafford home.
When payday arrived, he disappeared. They found him a day later, carousing with Ms. Stafford’s eldest sister, his check spent on a bender.
Ms. Stafford’s luck finally began to turn in June, when she was admitted to a six-week computer training course, where she progressed from typing with one finger to four. At her graduation ceremony, her mother shouted and whistled.
Back home, Ms. Stafford carefully placed her new certificate in the cupboard, on top of the same certificate that her still-unemployed sister had received a few years before.
The computer course yielded no job for Ms. Stafford, either, but it created an opportunity.
A family friend tipped her off that the same nonprofit agency was training young women to run a day care program in the building. “Connections,” she said, laughing sheepishly.
By October, Ms. Stafford and a friend with whom she had dodged dogs and brothels took charge of more than a dozen toddlers. She expects to earn 500 rand, or $26, a month — below minimum wage, but coupled with the welfare she receives for her son, it will nearly double her income.
Ms. Stafford is already planning to open her own child care center. It isn’t what she dreamed of or trained for, but it’s her first reliable paycheck since graduating from high school nearly two years ago. As she cleaned up the bowls of watery sorghum porridge she had fed the toddlers, she was feeling overwhelmed but, after long last, hopeful.
Image
Portia Stafford stands at the front of a classroom. Children are seated at wooden tables, eating from large bowls.
Ms. Stafford talking to the children in her class at the Kliptown Youth Program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/worl ... frica.html
Re: AFRICA
Biden Hosts Angola’s President, Seeking to Strengthen Africa Ties
President Biden recommitted to a promise to invest in the continent, as the United States has lagged behind Russia and China in competing for influence.
President Biden meeting in the Oval Office with President João Lourenço of Angola on Thursday. Mr. Lourenço said the meeting “was better than I expected.”Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
President Biden hosted President João Lourenço of Angola at the White House on Thursday, promoting a major U.S. investment in the country as he tries to shore up his pledge to revitalize relations with African nations.
The visit marked three decades of diplomatic relations between the countries, and the two leaders discussed cooperation on critical issues such as trade, energy, climate and a $1 billion U.S.-backed infrastructure project that would aid Angola’s economy. But it came as the administration has faced questions about the United States’ commitment to the continent as plans for a long-promised visit by Mr. Biden — originally expected this year — remain up in the air.
Mr. Biden made the pledge nearly a year ago at a U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, during which he convened delegations of 49 nations for the first time in eight years. At the summit, Mr. Biden declared that the United States “is all in on Africa’s future,” and made a litany of promises for how it would demonstrate its commitment, including telling leaders that he was “looking forward to seeing many of you in your home countries.”
On Thursday, Mr. Biden appeared to try to kick-start that commitment again at a critical time. The United States lags behind major countries like Russia and China in competing for influence on the continent, which has become an increasingly important sphere of global competition, with the fastest-growing, youngest population in the world.
Mr. Biden said the Oval Office meeting, the first he has hosted with an African leader since the summit, was taking place at a “historic moment.” He went on to promote Angola as an example of how his administration had made good on its promise to invest in the continent.
//The Biden Presidency
Israel-Hamas War: President Biden is facing deep anger over his solidarity with Israel among supporters and even inside the White House, where some younger staff members have said they feel disenchanted.
2024 Election: Biden isn’t the first incumbent to face grim polling a year out from Election Day. The Bush and Obama re-election campaigns could show him a way forward.
//A Key Moment: A recent prime-time address showed how the wars between Israel and Hamas and Ukraine and Russia have brought out a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from President Biden’s speeches. Will Americans rally behind him?
Crumbled Promises: In 2020, Biden vowed to end many Trump-era policies on immigration. But a massive surge of migration has scrambled the dynamics of an issue that has vexed presidents for decades and forced him to revisit his approach.
The United States is helping to finance a $1 billion rail project for Angola’s Lobito Corridor, which would link Angola with mineral-rich parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
On Thursday, Mr. Biden called the project “the biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever,” and said it would “create jobs and connect markets for generations to come.” It is also a project in which the United States, dependent on rare-earth minerals, has a significant self-interest.
Mr. Biden said the United States was also investing another $1 billion in Africa “for a number of items,” including solar energy projects.
“Simply put, a partnership between Angola and America is more important and more impactful,” Mr. Biden said in remarks during the meeting.
He also reiterated his pledge to visit the continent, saying that he would return to Angola, the home of the first enslaved Black people who were brought to the United States in 1619 and a country he traveled to before he was president, although he did not say when.
Mr. Lourenço, who previously visited the United States as Angola’s minister of defense, told reporters after the meeting that it “was better than I expected.”
“Our relationship is at a high level,” he said. “There is a total opening by the U.S. government and Angola will win with this. Not just Angola, but the continent.”
The United States’ major rivals are not standing still, however. This year, President Xi Jinping of China visited the continent, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia held his own summit with leaders. The United States has maintained that its interest in Africa has not been motivated by competition with other nations.
During Mr. Biden’s tenure, 16 administration officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the first lady, Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have visited the continent.
During a September visit to Angola, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III reiterated that “Africa matters.”
“I am here because Africa matters,” Mr. Austin said. “It matters profoundly to the shape of the 21st-century world. And it matters for our common prosperity and our shared security.”
But Cameron Hudson, a senior associate with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration should not underestimate the symbolic importance of the promise the president made last year.
“I guess the question is how many cabinet secretaries on the continent is equal to one president picking up the phone, or one president hosting an African head of state, or one president traveling to the continent?” Mr. Hudson said.
“I think the sentiment from within the African community is that the reality is falling far short of the rhetoric,” he said. “The rhetoric was soaring at the African leaders summit last year, and the reality is somewhere much closer to Earth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/p ... frica.html
President Biden recommitted to a promise to invest in the continent, as the United States has lagged behind Russia and China in competing for influence.
President Biden meeting in the Oval Office with President João Lourenço of Angola on Thursday. Mr. Lourenço said the meeting “was better than I expected.”Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
President Biden hosted President João Lourenço of Angola at the White House on Thursday, promoting a major U.S. investment in the country as he tries to shore up his pledge to revitalize relations with African nations.
The visit marked three decades of diplomatic relations between the countries, and the two leaders discussed cooperation on critical issues such as trade, energy, climate and a $1 billion U.S.-backed infrastructure project that would aid Angola’s economy. But it came as the administration has faced questions about the United States’ commitment to the continent as plans for a long-promised visit by Mr. Biden — originally expected this year — remain up in the air.
Mr. Biden made the pledge nearly a year ago at a U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, during which he convened delegations of 49 nations for the first time in eight years. At the summit, Mr. Biden declared that the United States “is all in on Africa’s future,” and made a litany of promises for how it would demonstrate its commitment, including telling leaders that he was “looking forward to seeing many of you in your home countries.”
On Thursday, Mr. Biden appeared to try to kick-start that commitment again at a critical time. The United States lags behind major countries like Russia and China in competing for influence on the continent, which has become an increasingly important sphere of global competition, with the fastest-growing, youngest population in the world.
Mr. Biden said the Oval Office meeting, the first he has hosted with an African leader since the summit, was taking place at a “historic moment.” He went on to promote Angola as an example of how his administration had made good on its promise to invest in the continent.
//The Biden Presidency
Israel-Hamas War: President Biden is facing deep anger over his solidarity with Israel among supporters and even inside the White House, where some younger staff members have said they feel disenchanted.
2024 Election: Biden isn’t the first incumbent to face grim polling a year out from Election Day. The Bush and Obama re-election campaigns could show him a way forward.
//A Key Moment: A recent prime-time address showed how the wars between Israel and Hamas and Ukraine and Russia have brought out a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from President Biden’s speeches. Will Americans rally behind him?
Crumbled Promises: In 2020, Biden vowed to end many Trump-era policies on immigration. But a massive surge of migration has scrambled the dynamics of an issue that has vexed presidents for decades and forced him to revisit his approach.
The United States is helping to finance a $1 billion rail project for Angola’s Lobito Corridor, which would link Angola with mineral-rich parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
On Thursday, Mr. Biden called the project “the biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever,” and said it would “create jobs and connect markets for generations to come.” It is also a project in which the United States, dependent on rare-earth minerals, has a significant self-interest.
Mr. Biden said the United States was also investing another $1 billion in Africa “for a number of items,” including solar energy projects.
“Simply put, a partnership between Angola and America is more important and more impactful,” Mr. Biden said in remarks during the meeting.
He also reiterated his pledge to visit the continent, saying that he would return to Angola, the home of the first enslaved Black people who were brought to the United States in 1619 and a country he traveled to before he was president, although he did not say when.
Mr. Lourenço, who previously visited the United States as Angola’s minister of defense, told reporters after the meeting that it “was better than I expected.”
“Our relationship is at a high level,” he said. “There is a total opening by the U.S. government and Angola will win with this. Not just Angola, but the continent.”
The United States’ major rivals are not standing still, however. This year, President Xi Jinping of China visited the continent, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia held his own summit with leaders. The United States has maintained that its interest in Africa has not been motivated by competition with other nations.
During Mr. Biden’s tenure, 16 administration officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the first lady, Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have visited the continent.
During a September visit to Angola, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III reiterated that “Africa matters.”
“I am here because Africa matters,” Mr. Austin said. “It matters profoundly to the shape of the 21st-century world. And it matters for our common prosperity and our shared security.”
But Cameron Hudson, a senior associate with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration should not underestimate the symbolic importance of the promise the president made last year.
“I guess the question is how many cabinet secretaries on the continent is equal to one president picking up the phone, or one president hosting an African head of state, or one president traveling to the continent?” Mr. Hudson said.
“I think the sentiment from within the African community is that the reality is falling far short of the rhetoric,” he said. “The rhetoric was soaring at the African leaders summit last year, and the reality is somewhere much closer to Earth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/p ... frica.html