KAMPALA, Uganda—When Maria Ledochowska Nnatabi wears a red beret in her village in eastern Uganda, her neighbors whisper warnings. “My daughter, you’re going to be killed,” they tell her. “Please remove that beret—your life comes first.” She keeps it on anyway. As a 25-year-old youth leader in People Power, a political movement that is shaking up Uganda’s stifled politics, she has decided to stop being afraid. “The thing we have to do as a movement is see how can we get fear out of these people,” she says. Red emerged as the color of political resistance in Uganda in 2017, [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was forced from power in a military coup Tuesday, upending the political situation in Mali and, with the country at the epicenter of a fight against a growing Islamist insurgency, raising alarms about regional security. The coup unfolded rapidly as mutinying soldiers seized weapons from a garrison outside the capital, Bamako, then descended on the city, capturing Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse. Within hours, Keita appeared on state television to dissolve the government and announce his resignation. [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. An emergency cleanup operation has pumped the remaining oil from a Japanese ship that ran aground off Mauritius late last month, but the island nation is just beginning to grapple with the environmental and economic costs of the 1,000 tons of fuel that spilled off its coast. The MV Wakashio, which was en route from Singapore to Brazil, went off course and struck a coral reef about a mile southeast of Mauritius. The ship’s hull began to split open as it was [...]
