Central Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Last month, news emerged that Nnamdi Kanu had been arrested and repatriated to Nigeria to face charges of terrorism and unlawful possession of firearms, among other alleged offenses related to his role as the leader of the separatist group Indigenous People of Biafra, or IPOB. Kanu was first detained […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. We are all in this together. COVID-19 is the great leveler. The pandemic knows no borders. Build back better together.  The coronavirus pandemic has yielded enough shopworn cliches to last an entire lifetime of Model United Nations speeches. Yet, nearly 18 months after Africa’s first recorded case […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. South African civil society campaigners and social activists have long cautioned about the perils of the country’s extreme levels of economic inequality. Now the violent uprisings in parts of South Africa, initially triggered by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma for his refusal to testify before […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about the African continent. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. If you’re a regular reader of Africa Watch, it’s possibly because you were tired of reading about “Africa” as if it were a monolithic country of 1.3 billion people with all the same traits, habits and perspectives. Or better yet, that might have been your own impression […]

One of the most important problems in modern African history is also among the most widely misunderstood. For decades, both journalists and scholars have lamented that Africa’s borders were drawn up by outside powers, beginning with Europe’s so-called Scramble for Africa, between 1881 and World War I. This threw all sorts of linguistically, religiously and politically disparate groups into newly formed colonies and, soon afterward, new African nations, in which they were suddenly forced to try to get along together in the task of building independent republics. The mistake in this logic isn’t that these things didn’t happen. If one […]

In early May, in a televised address, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, declared martial law in North Kivu and Ituri, two provinces on the country’s eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda, and placed them under military rule. In justifying this draconian measure, Tshisekedi invoked the regular mass killings in the region, which have left more than 1,000 people dead since 2019 and have generally been ascribed to one local militant group: the Allied Democratic Forces. Days later, a delegation from the Ugandan army arrived in Beni to set up a coordination center for a joint offensive with […]

Editor’s Note: This is Andrew Green’s final week authoring our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Africa Watch, although he’ll continue to be a valued contributor and friend of WPR. We’d like to thank Andrew for having done such an amazing job with Africa Watch since taking it over. Tune in next week for an update about the newsletter moving forward. You can subscribe to receive it by email every Friday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. After more than two years and 100 newsletters, I’ll be signing off from Africa Watch. […]