Central Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The arrest took place in a Paris suburb, but its ramifications may be felt most acutely thousands of miles to the south, in West Africa. On Tuesday, Vincent Bollore, the French billionaire and head of the Bollore Group, was detained in Nanterre for questioning over the circumstances under which the holding company obtained major port deals in Guinea and Togo. He was placed under formal investigation the following day. The allegations touch on the shady dealings that persist at […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Over a three-day period in December 2015, Nigerian security forces carried out an operation in the northern town of Zaria that resulted in the deaths of more than 300 civilians, according to an official commission of inquiry. The attack targeted the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, or IMN, a Shiite organization founded in the 1980s by Nigerians inspired by the Iranian revolution. Nigeria is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni. As […]

On this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss the political fallout from another suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, including a potential military response from the United States. For the Report, Celeste Hicks talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how courageous survivors of sexual violence helped bring Chad’s former dictator, Hissene Habre, to justice. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It was a rare example of a protest in the Central African Republic that managed to get the world’s attention, however briefly. On Wednesday, demonstrators placed at least 16 dead bodies outside the offices of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the capital, Bangui. The demonstrators said the dead were civilians killed by U.N. peacekeepers during recent operations in a mostly Muslim neighborhood of Bangui known as PK5. For the past several years, the Central African Republic has been […]

An opinion poll conducted in January and February offered a window into the mindset of voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo as they headed into another year of political uncertainty. Perhaps surprisingly, the news wasn’t entirely grim. While 82 percent of respondents said they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction, and 80 percent reported having a negative opinion of President Joseph Kabila, a majority nevertheless expressed faith that things would improve. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Congolese felt “very optimistic” about the future of the country over the next five years—a figure that rose to 82 […]

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from Celeste Hicks’ book “The Trial of Hissene Habre: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to Justice,” which was published by Zed Books this month. In July 2015, the unthinkable happened. After having spent more than 20 years living in comfortable exile in a plush suburb of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, Chad’s former president, Hissene Habre, was brought before the Extraordinary African Chambers, or EAC, a special court set up within the Senegalese judiciary. The beginning of his trial came two years after he was arrested in Dakar and charged with war crimes, […]